Baking Weekend/Girls Weekend

Well this weekend it will just be us girls, Steve is working and Nicholas is with Margaret. We are going to do alot of baking. I am hoping to try out some new recipes. Tammy has a great site where she post recipes. I am most interested in trying her Apple Bread. Her husband has a great love for cheesecakes, so I am excited to try a few of those as well. I think I will also try to make some Breakfast Danish's.
Along with all that baking I am going to be making up some meals for our freezer. It's all well and good to have a menu, but we forgot about looking ahead. We came home and were supposed to have pinto beans and cornbread the other night, but kind of forgot to soak them. Well I soaked them all day yesterday and put them in the crockpot. Steve and I also put all the ingredients in the bread machine and set the timer to have the bread done at 6:00 pm. The only thing I realized is that the water (which according to the recipe) was put in at 110 degrees, however when it starts to make the bread at 3:00 this afternoon it will have cooled to room temp. So I am curious to see if the bread turns out or not. If not, I will whip up a batch of homemade cornbread. I am also going to make the shopping list tonight and take it with me when we leave for Emilia's basketball game tomorrow. We will get the shopping done after the game.

Coolest Christmas Gift Ever ......cont.

Well I just had to leave you hanging didn't I. But the answer that everyone wants to know is a..... Video Camera. I immediatley started filming on Christmas Day. The cooking, the kids playing with the karaoke. I also have had fun shooting little clips of the kids at basketball practice and their first game. I am going to keep filming little clips and I plan on doing a tour of our house. After a while I am going to transfer to a DVD do some editing and will post some short clips of what goes on in the Byrum household. I got alot of other cool gifts.... a great book from my parents which I have read and enjoyed even if it made me bawl like a baby. I got earrings, lotion and body wash, camping dishes, gift cards.....and more. Why is it so hard to remember all the things and from whom you got it from. I think next year, I am going to record it so that the kids can actually send out thank you notes.

This also was the year of the poop. Yep I said it, you heard it poop. From my mother Nicholas got a toy that poops out candy. Vicki Evans gave Emilia the new Barbie with the dog that you feed it it's food and it come out the other end as poop. It also has a poop scooper and garbage bin. At least it is not candy that you eat. Emilia got a Disney vanity which she just loves to death. She will sit in a chair and brush her hair....it is quite cute.

HTML CODE!!! YIKES!!!

Ok, so I got to brag a little bit. When I changed templates to this Ocean background my widgets on the right column were cut off so I had to move them on to the top of my postings. Well through trial and error I was able to go into the html code on the template and mess around with it until it was wide enough to accept the widgets….how cool is that. I am so proud of myself. I love to learn new things and to play around with them until they are just so. Yipee!

Works for Me Wednesday.

Over at Rock in My Dryer, Shannon has asked us to post questions, instead of tips. So here is my question: Has anyone tried those Dry clean at home kit. My husband wears a suit to work everyday. We are trying to become a more frugal household and it would be great to cut out the drycleaning cost. So, do those kits work? Is there a homemade solutions to drycleaning.

Also, his t-shirts keep getting this dingy yellow look to them.....how can we get them to stay white? None of our other laundry does this.

Random things about me.

My friend Suzanne tagged me for a list of Random things about me. Well she came up with 50....we will see if I can get anywhere close.

1. I have 8 bro & sis
2. Most of the people in my family are on their 2nd marriage. (We figure we subconsiously have to have a trial run to get it right)
3. I need glasses (but not bad enough to spend the money)
4. I named my daughter after my step-father and she ended up being born two weeks early on the same day and date as him.
5. When I was growing up I wanted 12 kids.
6. I like to blog, but I love to read blogs.
7. I have a hard time making friends, we haven't had another couple to hang out with since S&J left Augusta.
8. I am trying to convice my mom and dad to move to Augusta.
9. And I want them to actually Live with me.
10. Around 15 years old I mooned another car.
11. I am a few classes away from a two-year degree.
12. I want to become fluent in Spanish.
13. I got into trouble for sneaking out and macking on the boy next door.
14. I love to sing.
15. I get stage-fright. (major)
16. Growing up I thought I wanted a tatoo, until I discovered my fear of needles.
17. My babysitter let me have a puff of her cigarette when I was seven.
18. She got into trouble.
19. She egged and mustard my parents card.
20. The police once literally checked out my rear-end. (A neighbor wrongly accused my parents of abuse)
21. I can have a really hard time finding a good pair of shoes.
22. I have the best pair of jeans I have ever owned.
23. I want to wear calf-lengh boots, but my calfs are too big.
24. I obsessively, secretly dream of winning the lotto, or some amount of cash.
25. I am scared of dying.
26. We are going to DisneyWorld for the first time in Summer '09
27. In high-school I played Jack-in-the beanstalk's mom in a musical.
28. I love to read.
29. I am currently reading Junie B Jones with my daughter.
30. I am trying to read the Book of Mormon by the end of the year.
31. I have only made it to 1Nephi Ch5.
32. I took a Greyhound bus from No. Calif down to LA and across the county to Augusta GA.
33. I was 21 but my mom still packed me a goodie bag with snacks, coloring book and crayons.
34. They came in handy with a screaming child on the bus.
35. Thanks Mom!
36. I like the new "Cereal Straws"
37. My favorite soup is "Baked Potato"
38. I wish I knew how to play the piano.
39. I love to cook or bake.
40. I hate to clean up.
41. I used to be a hard sleeper.
42. Now I have to wear ear plugs to be able to sleep.
43. I have a brother and a nephew named Eric.
44. I have two brothers named James. (Combined Marriage, 1 from each)
45. My name was almost Sharon Aaron.
46. I have a recurring dream/nightmare that all of my teeth are falling out. (at the same time)
47. I hate to fly.
48. I want to go to Medieval Times Restaurant when we are in LA in June.
49. The Atlantic Ocean is way warmer than the Pacific.
50. One more...... In June I will have been in GA for a whole decade. Scary.

Well I made it. Never thought I would. I am going to tag Lauren and Erika

Kitchen Tip Tuesday

It is Kitchen Tip Tuesday once again. The kitchen tip I have is for freezer meals. I have long been interested in freezing meals since both Steve and I work full time. I like to cook freezer meals. Some are all the way cooked or need to be cooked, they are just packaged together. One easy way to be able to do this and not have your pans in the freezer is to put it into silicone pans.

Freeze the meal and you can "peel" the pan right off of it. Then you can put into a gallon sized ziploc. Just be sure to get as much air out as possible. You can then take it out of the freezer - I recommend the morning of the day before you want to eat it. Place it into the pan and defrost in the freezer.

Spending Challenge Week #1 Update

So instead of doing a daily blog about how we are doing I am going to do a weekly update.

So how did we do?

MENU - we were invited out on Tuesday for a New Year's dinner - so that saved us money and we didn't have to cook - yeah! Wednesday we had the missionaries over for dinner and we had the breakfast dinner with an addition of cinamon rolls left over from Christmas. Thursday we had to change plans because I could not find split peas. I asked a employee at the Walmart and I am not sure if she knew what I was talking about and I couldn't find any other employees near by. We will have to try again another day. And I forgot to soak the beans for Friday so we ended up eating leftover waffles and pancakes from the freezer. So we did really good.

MONEY - Steve forgot about it and bought a coke....I reminded him that our agreement was not to spend any money....that it should cost him his $50 that he was "earning" for the two week period, he sounded so disappointed that I let him slide. A friend of ours offered us his old couch and we have agreed to buy it for $50. We deceided it was worth not getting the $50 we were "earning" for the two week period to get it. And after 29 years a co-worker is leaving at my work so we taking her out to lunch. Overall not too bad.