Well Hey There!

I'd like to welcome you to the 87th blog I've started! Welcome! 😂

So. At the time of this post I have been married for 9 years and 4 months. My husband is a smart guy and super hard worker. He is in the car industry so he is gone pretty often. The large bulk of house things like cooking, cleaning and laundry all fall on me. That's ok. This is my full-time job. When The Hubs and I got married I was working in a medical office, a career I'd had since I was 17. It wasn't until July 1, 2015 that I became a stay-at-home mom. Well, I take that back. I started photography in 2010 and was still doing that at the time. But I quit my 9-5 and was home a hell of a lot more than I'd been. That was a pretty big adjustment. It wasn't THAT bad, though. McKenna was pretty independent and self-sufficient at that age. We were also in an 1100 square foot apartment then so cleaning wasn't bad. My daily/weekly/monthly upkeep was minimal. I was rocking it, if I may say so myself.

Let's jump ahead a bit to July 5, 2017. We closed on our house. Woo! I more than tripled the square footage of cleaning space. Ok, I can handle this. No big. Well, yeah. About a week before we closed, I found out I was pregnant with numero 2. YAY! We were super excited. We'd waited a long time for her. However, when your kids are 6 years apart, you forget things. Like the exhaustion of being pregnant and having a newborn. Slooooowly things started to slip. I mean, let's be honest. I got lazy. Obviously it wasn't entirely my fault, but it is what it is. Not that I was a gourmet chef to begin with or anything. I had a recipe repertoire of like 5-7 recipes and cooked MAYBE once a week if my family was lucky. But even that started to wane. As did my cleaning. Y'all I was tired!! My sweet, patient husband. He loved me through my funk and gently encouraged me to improve. He was nice about it, but I still balked for a while. I offended. How dare HE tell me what I should do.!

When the baby, Addison, was 8 months old I decided (all on my own) that things really needed to change. We were wasting so much money on fast food it was ridiculous. Addy was on a much more settled schedule so I had a better idea of what my days were going to look like on a more permanent basis. So after all my balking I decided to implement some of the measures The Hubs suggested. I love him, but I hate to admit when he's right. I know what I'm doing. I don't need HIS advice. Or so I thought. Now I have a manageable cleaning schedule and my house gets cleaned WAY more often which also means it gets cleaned better. Yay me!

I also have been cooking more. The request was that I cook every other day. If I cook every day, we throw away too many leftovers. Every other day means leftovers and hot lunch for The Hubs! He appreciates that.

The point of this blog at it's very base is recipe storage. Over the years I have just "pinned" recipes I've liked. Problem with that is some of those blogs have shut down. Like the cinnamon roll casserole we loved? Gone forever. So just accessing them digitally sucks. When I started meal planning in November, I started writing them down in a notebook. I still plan on doing that. I love seeing recipes written by my mom and grandma so I think it's just fun to pass down handwritten recipes. However, I do love the convenience of having it all digitally, too. It's just so easy to pull it up on my phone or tablet. Plus if you get gunk on it, you can just wipe it off. Paper? Not so much. It's also easier to pass recipes along to people. Oh you liked my Taco Spaghetti? Here, let me send you a link to the recipe. My plan is to play catch up at first. I have about 15-20 recipes I've made already that I need to enter. Then after that, if a recipe is good, it'll get added. If it isn't, then it will never be spoken of! I'll go back and add pictures once things are made just for kicks. I may share other random things along the way, but the majority of the content here will be food. Yummy, delicious food.

That was much longer than I anticipated. Especially for a blog likely only I will ever see. But there it is!