Spring!

Spring has certainly arrived! We are having gorgeous weather during the day and nice cool nights. The only thing we need more of is rain, but all in all I am seriously enjoying this weather that has me wanting to be outside and to bring the outside in.

I am starting a garden at a friend's house; we have four raised beds (even one that we made from scratch). We also have raspberries, blackberries, squash, zucchini, cucumber, and radishes outside of the beds. In the beds we planted, sweet onions, leeks, green onions, beans, brussels sprouts, tomatoes, red pepper, jalapeno, nasturtiums, basil, okra, rainbow carrots, danver carrots, and probably some more things that I forgot. We plan on planting corn in rows on the outside of the fence, as well as pumpkins, and sunflowers. Closer to the house we plan on planting many salad greens and a large variety of herbs. I am so excited that I finally get to have a real garden...I just pray that things do grow and ofcourse for rain.

Bringing the color indoors, I got all of these flowers for free at work during employee appreciation week. I just love flowers. I think if I had a lot of money I would probably buy a bouquet once a week at the tailgate market. They just make the home so much more cheery, don't they.

Some herbs at my house...all free herbs that were dying from my workplace. I am trying to bring them back, but I'm afraid that the basil might not make it.

This flowering bush that I get to look at out of my window everyday. With temperatures just over 80 degrees recently it finally bloomed.

Spring has also brought a need/want for spring cleaning, so after cleaning my house a bit, I helped a friend clean their house as well. I think the cat had other plans.

I have a lot more plans for cleaning/organizing at my house, while I have this Spring fever momentum. Sometime soon I will do a corners of my house post to share bits and pieces of organization. For now, I'm off to cook some dinner for myself.

Peace,

Yasmin

A week of meals

Today I thought I would share what a week of meals can look like at my house. It's not really a weeks worth, but it does cover the four or so days that I have the kids and honestly I usually try to use up the leftovers when they aren't here, so that I don't have an enormous amount of waste. So, without further ado:

Paleo style meatloaf with a homemade tomato sauce on top. I put lots of veggies in this one, basically whatever I had on hand and the meats were ground beef and spicy Italian sausage.

Split Pea Soup with spinach asiago bread.

Hamburgers/veggie burgers (for my son), served with herbed potato salad.

Pasta with the spinach asiago bread served with a salad on the side.

I try to take my lunch to work everyday, and so I don't mind if I make too big a batch of something. The meatloaf was great, because I made some sides so that I could have a slightly different meal a few days in a row. I do try to see what I have in my fridge on Saturday or Sunday so that I can plan out our meals for the week in advance. This takes out the indecision on school days when we are rushing to get home from work or pick up a kid from here and there or go to a track meet or go to soccer practice. Yes, life is busy isn't it. I leave you with one more picture to show you what can happen when you have a no screen time on school nights household. Lovely isn't it...almost harmonious building of a puzzle. Have a lovely night my friends.

Peace, Yasmin

Birthday Boy

 Hello friends,

 This little guy had a birthday this past week on the 8th. He had a big birthday where he turned double digits, oh my!

His favorite Mexican restaurant for a seafood quesadilla.

Favorite meal #2; Mushroom, broccoli, cheddar quiche.

Favorite meal #3; Spinach and Mushroom lasagna.

Lemon pound cake for dessert, yum.

I really could not believe that he turned ten, where did the time go? As I started to reminisce about his childhood so far and what an awesome, caring, sensitive, creative guy he is...I saw something on the tele about a mom dropping her kid off at college and she started sobbing and then I was sobbing, ridiculous I know. Honestly, I don't have much time left until my older daughter is off to college and so I need to remember to cherish these moments with her...even when she turns into a moody teenage monster. 

Ok, enough reminiscing. A little bit about his birthday week. I only had the kids Sunday through Wednesday that week, so I decided that we should celebrate every night that he was with me with his favorite meals. He quite enjoyed having pretty much a week of birthday celebrations and my mom came over one of the nights so that we could do birthday presents. I don't quite have my act together at the moment, so no homemade gift for him this year, but he did get a lot of shark themed gifts and also some art supplies. We also got the book Firefly Hollow to read together and so far it is a pretty good one.

So, I know it has been a ridiculously long time since I last blogged, well let me tell you what is going on. My computer died quite some time ago, and so I just have my Ipad Mini to be able to do any blogging and let me tell you, what a pain in the you know what that is. It takes an aggravatingly long time to upload pictures and to get them situated exactly the way I want them to. So how is it that I am blogging right now you ask?, I recently got reacquainted with my library and of course they have computers. I will try to visit on a weekly to biweekly basis so that I can try to keep the blog updated, who knows maybe I can visit more than that. The time between my son getting off the bus and my daughter needing to be picked up from school is a great time for me to get to the library and jump on the computer while my son does his homework. Now I just need to dig out my phone so that I don't have to e-mail photos from my phone and then download them onto this computer...another pain. Till next time my friends,

Peace,

Yasmin