Crockpot Greek Chicken

I made a new recipe today! I was very excited to try it! Greek chicken!

Since my husband has been working, I have been cooking more and I have been trying to make healthier meals since we all could eat better and I could stand to lose...oh, about 70 pounds of baby weight (note my "baby" is 5 1/2).

I try to prep my crockpot meals the night before in a large freezer bag, so last night I got all of my ingredients together! I combined 3 pieces of chicken breast, 2 TBS of garlic, 3 TBS Greek seasoning, some lemon juice, 2 TBS of chicken bouillon (I use low sodium granules), and 1 1/2 c. water to help dissolve the bouillon. The link to the recipe I improvised on is below.

This morning at 6:30 am I put everything in the crockpot, set it to cook on low for 6 hours and got ready to leave to take kiddo to school and go to work. I asked my husband to please make some rice (I left the kind up to him, although I would have preferred wild rice with this dish, he made white) and some veggies (he chose peas).

The dinner turned out great! We absolutely loved it and although the chicken was done around lunch time, my new crockpot kept it warm without over cooking it and it was nice and moist and tasty at 5:30 when we sat down to dinner thanks to hubby putting the rice in the rice cooker when he got home and heating up the peas after kiddo and I got in the door. Overall, a nice successful dinner!

Tomorrow I think lemon and herb chicken!

http://www.chef-in-training.com/2013/07/slow-cooker-greek-chicken/

New Jobs and New Crockpots

With my husband starting a new job, that means I start a new job. Full time mom and cook and housekeeper. Not that I wasn't doing those things before, but before I had some help. Don't get me wrong, my husband does help put our daughter to bed and he isn't just letting his dishes stay all over the kitchen table after eating but he can't really help me much with anything.

Since my husband started the new job,  I have been cooking again and we felt that this was the perfect time to start eating healthier again.

Monday night I tried a great recipe for parmesan, spinach pasta that we absolutely loved! I made the below recipe and I used spaghetti instead, more spinach and more parmesan along with a TON more garlic!

http://twopeasandtheirpod.com/5-ingredient-spinach-parmesan-pasta/

Tuesday night I made a crockpot meal, which I was really excited about because we had been researching crockpots for weeks trying to find the perfect one. See, I have a crockpot and it still works well, and we just got a pressure cooker for Christmas, but I wanted a programmable crockpot, one that I could set the time to cook then it would switch to the warm setting automatically. I had to look hard because the ones that I found first in stores were all rated decently but the negative comments about them said that the warm setting was hot enough to continue cooking. I couldn't have a meal that takes 4 hours on low to cook in the crockpot for 11 hours and get overdone. So after much research I found two I wanted. One was the highest rated everywhere I looked, the Cuisineart 3-in-16 qt. The other one I found was the WeMo 6 qt wifi enabled crockpot. I ended up going with the Cuisineart because we don't have the WeMo device and I didn't want to purchase it because nothing else in the house uses it. (For those of you who don't know what WeMo is, basically it is a device that can connect your appliances to bluetooth and you can control them from your phones and stuff! Pretty cool...but pretty scary!) Below are the two links I really looked at for the advice on the crockpots.

http://bestreviews.com/best-slow-cookers
http://www.bestproducts.com/appliances/small/g382/best-programmable-slow-cookers/

Tuesday's crockpot meal went wonderfully, a bit dry but honestly I think it had more to do with the amount of liquid and not the warming function because the chicken was cooked perfectly.

Dinner has been a battle for me. I get home about 15 minutes before my husband and he is hungry when he gets home. I also have always battled my weight and since I am a picky eater, I don't always like the "healthy" foods. It will really take some getting used to to be making meals again, especially after working a full day and having to take kiddo to school and pick her up on top of all of that. But the new crockpot is helping me to make things a bit easier. My husband's new job will have a new schedule next week as well after his training period is over so he will be home at the time when I get home and be able to have a side or two made or at least started so it might simplify things even more.

As for my new "job"...not going so well. My daughter is....strong willed...I guess you could say. I have a hard time with her sometimes and find that it is most days a fight to get her to school in time for me to get to work on time. I leave her at morning drop off feeling defeated and frustrated. I sometimes leave with the workers probably thinking I have a screw loose or something too!

We all have to do some adjusting and this last week has been hard. But I have my new crockpot and a new outlook to help me. I am trying to remain positive that this was the right decision for us to have my husband take on another job that is full time and so far from home with me still working full time and our daughter in kindergarten. I guess only time will tell if our new "jobs," will work out as well as the new crockpot.

Life Changes and Cheese Tortellini

My husband starts a new job tomorrow. As it is now, I work full time at a non-profit Monday thru Friday a normal office schedule. I get up early and after I shower and eat and have a little bit of time to myself, I get my daughter up, feed her and get her dressed then my husband takes our daughter either to the bus stop or to school each day. He either picks her up after school at the bus stop or we have her in an after school program. He makes dinner and it is ready when I get home from work because he works from home teaching classes online, being a graduate assistant and taking PhD classes (most of them online but a few on evenings and weekends).

With the new job, my husband will work full time a normal office schedule an hour away and until the end of the college semester he will be taking a PhD class, teaching online and doing his graduate assistant work. I also am committed to my job at this time. This means that in order to make the home run properly, we will have to all get up at about the same time and I have to get the kiddo ready for school while my husband leaves for work, I will have to drive her to before school daycare, go to work, pick her up at after school daycare, make dinner (thankfully we will be getting a programmable crockpot any day now in the mail from Amazon!) and clean the house. On weekends, I will have to do the groceries and any extra cleaning in the morning so we can try to have a bit of family time if my husband's homework load allows.

Knowing this would be a big change for us and a big burden on me, I planned ahead. My husband doesn't like to drive and we both hate it when we get into one of the vehicles and the other person left it without gas. I have been driving the car (that I hate) because it is better on gas mileage unless weather has been poor and my husband has been driving the new truck we just bought to replace my old vehicle but we will be switching out our to his driving further, so I made sure he had a full tank of gas, washed the car, vacuumed it out, and cleaned the inside. I made sure all the laundry in the house was done, we bought him some new clothes that I ironed tonight before making dinner. I got some healthier food at the grocery store so we can eat more wholesome meals and so he had enough food to bring on lunches, made him some Copycat Olive Garden Chicken Gnocchi soup, and decided to be adventurous for dinner tonight and do a cheese tortellini that I could make into soup later with the leftovers.

The tortellini turned out horrible! I made a huge mess in the kitchen and it was just awful!

Now, normally, my husband would get upset if dinner was really bad (I am not a bad cook but sometimes recipes go terribly wrong). Normally, he would pout and huff and puff. But lately we have been really working on our relationship and when the tortellini turned out awful, he not only tried everything to make it work, but he just heated up something else for himself instead of even asking me to. He hugged me and thanked me for my hard work, and even offered to help me clean up the disaster I made in the kitchen.

Although the food was bad and I felt awful, I really felt a connection with my husband. In the past, I would have felt awful about it turning out bad, he would have acted like a child, I would have been angry at this and it would have soured our night. But because he just thanked me for trying and hugged me offering to help me, I felt like all I had done for him to help prepare us for this new life change was appreciated.

A month ago we were on the verge of divorce. For almost nine years, I have felt unappreciated, like my love was taken for granted, like I was just a warm body. I spent hours upon hours arguing with him over the years about how I felt and I never felt any resolve. But when we had a large blow out one night recently, he was quiet, I said my piece and he simply replied "you're right." To which I told him that I felt like this was the first time in nine years he had ever really heard me, and he replied that it probably was.

To many people, the above plate is just a plate full of really awful looking cheese tortellini, too big, over stuffed, folded incorrectly, made with whole wheat flour instead of white flour, too thick (no thanks to the pasta maker my husband got me for Christmas). But to me, it's a life change. It's a symbol that even though we are going through rough times, even though we are going to have to face some challenges in our family to make things better for us, to get ahead; we are going to be okay and in fact, we will be stronger because of it.

Thank you, cheese tortellini! Here's the recipe if anyone is interested!  http://culinaryginger.com/cheese-tortellini/

Oh, and by the way, the soup turned out great though!
http://www.food.com/recipe/olive-garden-style-chicken-and-gnocchi-soup-348802

Death of a Beloved Pet

Our cat was put down recently. It was a sad time for our family. I have had my cats almost all of their lives and although we don’t feel like our animals are like kids to us, we still love them very much.

Billy Bob was born in December of 2003. I was living in an apartment in my hometown and preparing to move to a trailer one February morning when my ex and I drove past a sign that said “free kittens.” We thought that we would stop by and check to see if they still had one and if they would possibly hold one for a month or so until we moved into the trailer. We stopped in and it turned out to be the house of a woman that I had gone to school with. She had a couple kittens left and we chose a white one with a gray spot on his head that was snuggly. She said she would hold him until we moved!

In April of 2004, Billy Bob moved into our new home. He brought so much joy into my life. A few months later, a coworker of mine called me while I was out shopping. She said her neighbor’s kids were outside with signs for free kittens and that they told her that if they were not gone by the time her mom got home from work, she would take them to the pound. She said that there was an adorable black and white one and that the kids swore the kittens were 6 weeks old. She had convinced me that cats were like potato chips, “you can’t have just one.” Since she was allergic to cats, her boyfriend picked the cat up and kept him in the backyard until I could come get him. He was adorable. I named him Presley at first but a few weeks after getting him changed my mind and called him Elvis.

Elvis was so small that Billy Bob would wrestle him to the ground and cover Elvis’ entire body with his. Two weeks later when we took Elvis to the vet, we found out that he was just 6 weeks old (meaning we got him at about 4 weeks). The two were an inseparable pair.

Both cats have been in my life since then. I moved out of my trailer and left my ex and they moved with me an hour and a half away to start a new life. I moved to a few different apartments and they came with me. I moved in with my now husband and they moved with me. At times they were pains, the throwing up, the peeing outside of the litter box, but they were my cats and I had been with them for so long.

Just recently, Billy Bob had a drastic change in weight. He started vomiting daily and the vomit turned to just clear bile. He stopped eating and drinking and got very thin. My husband was feeding him water by the spoonful and making sure he had some wet food all his own. He started looking better and started eating on his own and drinking more frequently. I had planned to take him to the vet but since he was “my cat,” my husband didn’t want to pay for it originally since he didn’t think anything serious was wrong. But suddenly, he stopped eating again and his eyes started getting “sleep” in them. My husband couldn’t see him like that anymore so we set a vet appointment hoping for the best but expecting the worst.

On February 28^th this year, we had an appointment and that would be the last time that we would see my beautiful cat friend. Although there were no fleas in sight on any of the animals (the 2 cats and our dog who had just gotten her shots and got groomed), the vet thought he might have a disease from fleas. We decided to put him down since the cost of testing and hospitalization would run over $1,000. My husband gave me the choice and said he would pay for whatever (a true act of love since he rarely felt this way about animals and spending money on things of such nature) but I chose to put the poor thing down. I stood there petting his sweet head as the vet shaved his leg finding blood blisters and sores that are uncommon in cats. I kissed his head as she felt for his liver and found a shriveled one that meant he had probably had liver disease for a long time and was fighting. Before I knew it, he was gone, he had taken his last breath.

I ordered a wooden box with cat paws on it for his ashes (again my husband told me whatever I wanted I could have). I ordered a clay paw print stone to commemorate him as well. I cried and my husband offered to take our family for ice cream.

Two days ago, when I took Elvis to the vet to make sure he was okay and checked out. While I was there, I received Billy Bob’s remains (as they called them on the phone). It was a bittersweet moment for me. It was closure, but it was his ashes I was picking up. Thankfully, Elvis is healthy and happy, they saw no reason to worry about him.

As my family and I looked back on Billy Bob’s life, my husband made me a memorial video and said that he too was upset about the loss. He never thought he would be but having spent nine years with the cat as a part of his life, he really had to miss him. We will all remember the loving side (and the not so loving side) of Billy Bob; head kisses, snuggles with our daughter, sleeping in the bathtub, licking plastic bags, climbing in bed with us, the chicken costume that he hated at Halloween. I will not be too sad for his death, but I will rejoice in the time I spent with him and the hole he filled in my heart.

New Hair, New Me

What is it about coloring your hair or getting a new haircut that lets us see ourselves as different people?

When I was a kid, I hated being a brunette. I thought my hair was ugly and my eyes were an ugly brown. I thought I was ugly.

When I was probably about thirteen or fourteen, my mom let me use the ever-popular Sun In. I was so into the idea of being blonde that I over did it. The problem was that I have almost black eyebrows. Looking back at old photographs, I did not look good as a blonde (or as blonde as I could get) with such dark, bushy eyebrows (of course I thought I did back then).

As a teenager, my mom let me color my hair a few times, mostly as an older teen though. I went red a few times but since my hair was already brown, the red was more dark auburn. I liked it and always thought it looked great on me, especially when I grew my hair out very long (which never happened as a young child because my mom had a hard time brushing snarls out of my hair and wouldn’t let me keep it long unless I was going to be able to take really good care of it). Of course, looking back at the pictures from then I see now that although it wasn’t awful, it wasn’t the best look for me either.

The one common thing I see in all of those old photos from times when I colored my hair as a teenager and a young adult is that I changed my attitude. I saw myself as something else, something that I wasn’t every day. When I changed my hair color, I changed my clothing style, my facial expressions, everything.

Throughout my adult life, I changed my hair color here and there, tried streaks, highlights, and changed my haircuts here and there as well. But I stopped doing that. Eight and a half years ago, I decided I wanted to be a blonde again. I was tired of the “ugly brown.” However, I did not have the money to pay a professional, so I used the method I had used most of my life and bought a box of blonde hair color. The problem was that I had such dark brown hair that I ended up buying four or five boxes, each time unsatisfied with my hair color. When I finally got as close as I thought I ever could to a blonde color, I realized I still had almost black eyebrows that I was terrified to color. I always thought that if I colored my eyebrows, some would drip into my eyes and I would go blind. That was the last time I ever colored my hair….until now.

Just a few days ago, I took the plunge. About a year after having my daughter, I cut off my long hair and went to a long-short style or a medium length cut which I would keep up every so often. I still didn’t have the money to see my hairdresser as often as I should, maybe once or twice a year do I ever splurge on a haircut. Something was missing though. After fighting with my husband and battling stress at work, I felt it was time for a change. I decided to go back to a similar color that I had long ago, find something fun and flirty, something red and blonde and brown all wrapped into it. I booked the appointment with my hairdresser and waited (it usually takes months to get into her because I need an evening or a weekend appointment because of my job but this time I was able to flex my work hours for an event coming up that I had to work on a Saturday). The day finally came and I went into the salon excited and not a bit nervous. I was ready for the change. I went to work feeling like a million bucks and a totally new person.

Why is it that we women feel this way? Why do we change our hair and suddenly get a renewed sense of self? When we break up with someone or change our careers or have a death in the family, why do we cut our hair or color our hair? Why do we cover up every semblance of our old selves and create a new identity based on our hair?

While watching Ally McBeal on Hulu, I noticed that when two of the characters Billy and Georgia were going through marital problems, Georgia cut her gorgeous, long blonde hair super short. Every time Ally went through a relationship issue, her hair changed as well. More recently, on Superstore, one of the main characters, Amy chopped her hair off and got highlights when her marriage became rocky as well. Why is it we do this? Why is it they showcase this on television shows? Is it because we think we need to reinvent ourselves to get over this pain, this transition?

I don’t know what it is, but I certainly feel better and feel like I look better. I even do my hair in the morning now! Before I would get up and shower and sometimes blow dry my hair, sometimes just let it air dry, maybe put it up in a ponytail but more often than not just leave it down. I have never been one for styling because I can’t ever seem to get it right or don’t have the patience or curls never last anyway; but now I want to curl my hair, I want to put the effort into it looking nice. This might fade as it did when I was 18 and got a really short cut that I had to blow dry every day with mousse while my head was upside-down, causing me to grow my hair out and never consider the same cut again; or when I had a beautiful perm that I had to use curl enhancer on every day and finally just combed it out harshly every day until it got frizzy then used special shampoo to make it smooth out. But until it gets old, I am a new woman. I am a new me…and I like it!

When Co-Workers Become Like Family

When I hired in at the non-profit I work for currently, I was a temporary assistant, just for the heat season (which in Michigan was October-April, even though I hired in in December). Our location was housed in an office of another agency and it was just the two of us, everyone else worked for the other agency. I quickly became good friends with my boss, Marilyn. Her daughter was my age, but she was fun and happy and just an all around good person.

I don’t know when it happened that we became such good friends, but one day when I had been working for her for a few months she invited me to her family’s Easter egg hunt with my kiddo and husband. We just seemed to fit right in.

My agency had three people quit at the same time and I quickly applied for one of the positions because I would be getting a promotion to a job equivalent to my boss’ position in another county and it would be permanent. My boss supported me fully, she even recommended me for the position. I was hired right away!

My new county was different, but I was now working in the administration building. It was a big change, being the boss and being in a new county that I had never worked in or lived in.

I started off rocky with my assistant, I felt like she didn’t like me very much; I couldn’t blame her though, I mean, I was only with the agency three and a half months and was her boss after she had been there for three years; not to mention I was younger than her children. My first week, one of the senior workers quit when she only had twenty days left of her working there. My first client yelled at me. I was supposed to oversee three counties and couldn’t connect in two of them. Things were not going all that well.

Through everything, my former boss, Marilyn kept in touch, we saw each other at meetings and she was always just a phone call away. Soon, I started connecting with my other two senior workers and my assistant. I became friends with them all. Working for the same agency, under the same bosses, we started to be able to connect at work. But it suddenly became more than that.

My former boss, my friend, my confidant, Marilyn received a job offer she could not pass up recently and sadly, she put in her two week notice. Today was her last day and I could not help but feel a twinge of pain as she would no longer be my lunch buddy when we had all staff meetings. I am happy for her, I am excited that she is about to start a new chapter in her life though.

Tonight we had dinner together and it felt so final. She will be in my life still, we have become forever friends in the short year and a half that I have been with the agency, but I feel saddened by our loss.

So this leaves me wondering when my coworkers became like family to me? When did I begin to love this woman and feel like she is one of my best friends? When did my assistant grow on me to the point where I feel her pain when she is having a hard time with things? Where I want to defend her when I think our boss has treated her unfairly? When did my senior workers become close enough to me that they offer to loan me money if I need it or a place to sleep if I have a fight with my spouse? When did I become so connected to these people?

In saying goodbye to Marilyn, who had been with the agency almost nine years, I realized that she too had formed these bonds with her coworkers as well. It must be even harder to have these bonds for nine years and have to say goodbye. How am I going to handle it when it happens? My senior workers will be leaving me in a few short months as their contracts will be up and it seems almost impossible to say goodbye to them now.

I have never had a job for that long and the jobs I have had for any length of time, I never really connected the same as I do where I am at now. I mean, I had friends, and some of them are still my friends on social media; but working where I work and doing the job I do, it gives me a lot of time to talk and be personal and make connections on different levels with people, I just feel like the connections are different. Only one time before did I have such a strong familial bond with a boss or coworker and it pained me to say goodbye but overjoys me when I can speak to her on occasion.

So this leads me to question where do these bonds come from? Why do we attach ourselves to others like this? Why is it we can love our coworkers like family and yet some of our family we barely speak to? What is it with our society that we go to work and spend more time with our work family than we do with our regular families?

In Search of The Mommy Friends

So I find myself a mother of a 5-year-old little girl. I have no friends with kids. Well…let me say I have no real friends with kids that live close. I have one best friend who has two children close to my daughter’s age but she is over an hour away. Then I know a couple of people who have kids close to my daughter’s age but I don’t know that I consider them friends or not and I don’t know how to say “let’s have a play date,” because I am so busy and so are they.

As a mom who works full time with a husband who works a lot too it is really hard to find time for friends. My daughter made friends in dance and preschool that she still sees at her school or on her bus and I know their parents, it’s just hard to connect. My hairdresser has kids that go to my daughter’s school but it’s really hard to find time to ask her to hang out too. Then there are those who she has just met these past few months in kindergarten and I don’t know their parents because I work full time and don’t get time to go to school things much.

Don’t get me wrong, I want mommy friends, I would really love to have them actually. But where do you find the time to connect? When I am off I want to be with my family. I suppose when my daughter gets older, she will do more and then I can superficially connect with these moms, but what about friends?

Even my best friend, it is so hard to talk to her because one of us will text and then the other will take forever to respond because we are doing something.

I just want to have mommy friends, friends who I can complain about my kid to and not feel like an awful person. Friends who I can complain about my husband to and not feel like a bad wife. Friends who are going through the same things at the same times as me.

I connect with people at work but they usually don’t have kids my daughter’s age, most have kids that are adults and they many times do not understand parenting in this day and age. I don’t care what you say, parenting is different now than it was even when I was a kid!

I just want a mommy friend. Is this too much to ask for?