::heart::
2009 came and went. Let’s take a look at my short list from last year, shall we? What about my 09 resoultuions, you ask? Well, I think this is what I want to do this year:
- Knit more things for me. Hmm… I think I completely fail in this. I don’t think I knit much this year.
- Cook more. I definitely cooked more this year! Especially now we moved and have more room!
- Start that Autume Rose sweater!!!! NOPE. Didn’t do that.
- Finish the Aspen Top Down Sweater. NOPE. That is still sitting in the cubby.
- Try Thrummed Knitting. NOPE. But I got a pattern for it! Baby steps…
I guess I didn’t do so well this past year by sticking to my goals. So WHAT did I do this year?
On the knitting front – 
Not bad for not knitting much, huh?
I picked up sewing – 
Not pictured is the portable crib sheets I made for day care crib. I’ll post some stats once I am able to take a picture at day care. Also, I am almost done with a wet bag (to store used cloth diaper while out and about) for day care, but our Little Lady wasn’t cooperating yesterday to let it be a FO for 2009.
Some other things that happened in 2009 -
- We moved to our bigger apartment.
- My friendship with few of my fellow “bitches” have really thrived. I think they are my BBF (Best Bitches Forever).
- We now have a JennAir dishwasher! It is A-MAZING!
- I now have a Nikon D5000! I’v been wanting a DSLR camera for couple of years now, but I can never bring myself to spend that kind of money. David surprised me with it for Christmas/Birthday! I LOOOVE it. You can definitely tell the quality of the pictures!
- Lots of new additions in my family – both my cousins are now married to the love of their lives, and of course, the biggest news for my immediate family:
As for the year 2010, I would like to accomplish the following -
- Be a good mama to our Little Lady. She certainly tests my patience, but that’s why David and I are such a good team, since he has way more patience than anyone I know.
- Create more! Whether it be knitting, sewing or photography.
- Cook more. Now we are back to the bigger apartment, I have more room to make yummy things.
And to start this year off on the right foot, I’ve decided to join Money Saving Mom and Life as Mom:
Time frame – month of January. Taken directly from the challenge post -
Here are some guidelines to help you think about this challenge and how you can grow in kitchen management this month:
- Reduce grocery spending. We’re talking about reducinggrocery spending this month, not eliminating it. Set a goal that is lower than your regular food budget and shoot for not exceeding it.
- Take stock. Take an afternoon and empty your pantry, freezer, and refrigerator. Ditch what’s gone bad and make a list of what’s left. Knowing what you have will make you less likely to buy more.
- Use what you have. Check your pantry before you meal plan or head off to the store. Develop meals based on what you have rather than buying new.
So our goals for this month -
- Only spend $100 this month on grocery. We usually do a big grocery trip about every 6 weeks, and send about $300, and that’s not including the trips for fresh produce, milk and eggs that we get in between. This is an ambitious goal, but it would be awesome if we can achieve it.
- Use up stuff in the freezer. A lot of times, we would get great deals on meats, I break them up and put them away and forgot about them. And it’s not just meats, we get frozen dinners and forgot about them in the freezer in the garage! So this goal will help us not waste th good deals we get! A deal is not a deal when it ends up in the trash!
- Be creative. I sometimes rely on recipes too much and therefore gets bog down on making it! I guess the engineer in me isn’t so good in this case. This goal will help me speed up the meal making a the end of the day.
This doesn’t mean we won’t eat out at all. But with this challenge, I hope to reduce the impulse stops at Wendy’s, and convince David to bring lunch to work, instead of buying lunch everyday.
With that, I’m going to go make a list of things I have to do.
Happy New Year. I hope you all have a peaceful, healthy and fun 2010!
Time flies when I’m having fun! OR more appropriately, when I have a child that needs her mama!
Week 7 sent me to my postpartum check up. I am happy to report that I got a clean bill of health and able to go back to work. And, I don’t have to see an OB for another year! I gotta say, going to the doctor’s every week was a bit much for me. I mean, I understand the importance of it, but to have to drag my tired butt out of bed earlier so I can get to work earlier and then able to leave work earlier to go to my doctors every week… Well, I was just getting a bit tired of it.
Afterwards, we stopped by Schick to drop off a dress shirt for David, and to show off our Little Lady. I think every single person that saw her said, “Look at all that hair!!!!” or some variation of that.
I think that’s all the excitement we had that week. Although I forgot to mention that I had a SnB Holiday Gathering the weekend before at my house! Now how do I forget that!? I made dumplings and turkey and cranberry raviolis as main course, and everyone brought something to share. And yes, I had forgotten to take a picture of all the food and friends! But I do have a photo of the decorated mantle though:
Week 8 brought us Christmas. And right before that – a practice drop off our Little Lady to day care. Yeah, I can’ believe it either! I’m going back to work in two weeks!!!! The drop off was a bit chaotic, because I forgot the registration form and her health records. On top of that, I forgot to pack extra clothes for her, and she had a boo boo and needs changing… yeah… it was a mess.
The plan was David would drop me off at the DMV so I can renew my license. In the mean time, David would run home to get her an outfit and extra clothes for the day care to have as back up. Well, there was NO ONE, I repeat, NO ONE, at the DMV! It was around noon time! Granted, it’s one of those license only place, but still!!! So I was in and out within five minutes. I called David to see where he’s at. Turned out due to right before the holiday and the last minute shopping, he didn’t get too far at all because of traffic! And there was no way he was gonna be back at day care before 1pm. We ended up going the opposite direction and run to KMart and got her a super cute outfit, which was perfect for Santa pictures.
After we picked up our Little Lady, we braved the mall to get her Santa pictures. It wasn’t actually too bad, surprisingly. We even got a parking spot near the door! Little Lady was so exhausted at this point she was sound asleep. I guess too much commotion with the clothes changing and being in a strange place with all strangers. So when it was her turn to take a photo with Santa, she was completely asleep! She only stirred slightly when we took her out of the car seat and again when I hand her over to Santa. And here we were worrying she’s gonna have a crying picture with Santa! HA!
The next day, WifeMomKnitter came by to hang out for a little while. Little Lady gave her a big smile, although I didn’t capture that. Instead, I got these:
So cute!
Oh, and I built my first ever gingerbread house on Christmas Eve:
It certainly isn’t the best thing I’ve ever made, but it was fun:
(Note to self: Next year, wait till the icing dry a little before put on the candies)
And this is what became of the snowman:
Yup. He was yummy.
And I leave you this week with these:
From our family to yours.
This week brings us to our Little Lady’s second pediatrician appointment, aka. one month check up. I know, not exactly one month since she’s already 6 weeks old! But she did so well the last time, she didn’t need another check up at week 4.
Since we already going to be in the area, I scheduled my dental cleaning right before her appointment at 8am. When we were finally seen (it wasn’t too long of a wait at the pediatricians since our appt was 9 and we were seen around 9:15), Dr. Jeff was impressed that I had already had my dental cleaning done.
So here is the stats for our little lady -
- Date: December 11, 2009 @ 9:30am
- Weigh: 8 lbs 10 oz, 50 percentile
- Height: 21 1/4 in, 40 percentile
- Shots: 2nd dose of Hep. B
We had a little concern for our Little Lady few days before check up, because she was crying all the time and seems to be always hungry. She was definitely in one of her growth spurts, but the first time around, she wasn’t as bad. We were worried that I wasn’t producing enough milk for her. Few of David’s coworkers had said that it’s because she’s already month and half old, and it’s time to mix some baby cereal with the breastmilk to fill her up. Hmmm… From what I read and understood, babies are not supposed to have solid foods till way later! Like 6 months! Needless to say, I rejected that idea after David told me what he learned. But I did tell him we’ll ask Dr. Jeff. Well, after expressing our concern, this is what Dr. Jeff said, “Well, the average weigh gain is about one pound per month. She’s gained two pounds, I think I’ll let you keep her for a little awhile.” Well, that settles it.
So yeah, our Little Lady is growing like a weed!
That’s her usual pose after feeding – wiggling around like a fish. And to prove to you she’s getting so big:
See! She’s riding Mick like a pony already! Alright, MAYBE David is holding her up… 
And mama is playing Susie Homemaker, with our little lady hanging out!
Yup. She’s just hanging out in the wrap. She loves that thing once she’s in it. She will sleep like 3 or 4 hours in the thing! Although the trick is getting her in it!
Since I got my hands back with the usage of the wrap, I decided to try out something I’ve been wanting to do for the past year: Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day!
I first heard about them through Gale. All of us went to Ann and Mike’s Holiday Party and she brought a loaf of bread. Then she told us she didn’t knead it and it really take like 2 minutes to put together. I was curious. I love bread, but I really hate paying a lot of money for a good loaf of bread because I can’t eat it all myself, and it gets rock hard the next day and gets thrown away. I checked the book out from the library this past summer, but we were moving so I didn’t get to bake anything from it. Finally, couple of weeks ago, I bite the bullet and bought the books. Of course, baking bread require good equipment, so David and I went up to William Sonoma and bought a baking stone. (William Sonoma has a lifetime guarantee on baking stones. If it breaks, just bring it to any William Sonoma, no questions asked!) But of course, our lovely european oven is small and the stone sticks out an inch because of the way the racks are set up!!! DOH! But no fear, the engineer is thinking! And here is my new contraption for baking breads in our extra small oven:
I took the racks out and put in a pizza stand, and put the stone on top! HA! And I even purchased a thermometer to make sure the oven temp. To my surprise, our oven is RIGHT ON TARGET! Most of home ovens varies up to 75 degrees, and mine is right on! I guess I can’t really make fun of my extra small oven anymore. (It turned out the oven we got costs like 1000 bucks retail – I looked it up on google. Who knew?)
It took me a minute to get the bread out and shape it. Rest, then stick it in the oven for half an hour, out comes this:
Nice hard crust on the outside, soft and chewy on the inside – just how I like my bread! Although, I have to say, this first batch of dough didn’t rise much when baked. I later noticed a hole on my saran wrap for my makeshift container. So I fixed it buy purchasing real food storage containers:
One is regular boule dough from the original book, and the other container has gluten free boule dough from the second book.
Besides baking bread, I had been cooking up a storm. But no photos!!! I know!!!! Weird, huh? I made these awesome cheese filled chicken, based on this recipe, but instead of blue cheese, pecan and scallions, I stuffed it with asiago, Mexican blend and Parmesan cheese, and I wrap each breast with two slices of bacon. It is YUMMY! Even David, who DOES NOT like chicken, comment how good it is and that I can make it again, which I did, but added cream cheese to the mix as well. (cream cheese was a good addition, in case you want to make it)
I’ve also saw the maple cookies recipe while going through my long list of blogs, and couldn’t resist trying them out. And let me tell ya, they are AMAZING!
I didn’t have Grade B maple syrup, so I used what I had on hand, which is VT Grade A. I also skipped the walnuts, since Paul is allergic to them, and I just dislike nuts (or fruit) in my cookies. The cookies has just a little crunch on the outside by the edge, and soft and chewy with every bite. SOOO GOOOOOOD!
So on the knitting front, I got nothing. But! I’ve sewn a diaper!!! LOOKIE!!
Christmas Ooga Booga!!! Ooga Boogas are just little monsters. Samantha from Little Comet Tail was looking for pattern testers and since I needed some more diapers, I volunteered for the new born size. And they are quite fun to sew actually!
Oh, all the talk of food… Our little lady is hungry NOW. Time to go!
AKA Week 4! I can’t believe that a month ago, I was in the hospital getting this kid out! Where did the time go?
Isn’t she cute? Hanging out with Mickey… well, more like Daddy is training Mick not to be afraid of the little thing that makes noise! Yes, my 130 lb dog is afraid of our little lady.
And it only took me a month to get my act together to get the announcement out…
Happy One Month, Little Lady.
PS. I had this post drafted since the one month date, but didn’t get to post till 10 days later… yeah… What the heck was I doing???? Oh Yeah, the little lady likes my attention! And that preggo brain? It never went away! DOH!
This year, we are thankful for the healthy little lady that’s brightening our lives each and every day since she arrived to our family.
Happy Thanksgiving.
(not pictured: Pumpkin Soup)
This past week took our little lady to lots of outings!
FakeKnitter’s House Warming Party
(photo courtesy of fakeknitter)
Out for a walk with the fam on a beautiful day
A trip to SnB
(Sweater courtesy of Archiknist and blanket courtesy of WifeMomKnitter)
To pick up our turkey at Gozzi’s:
I think that’s all… I say we had a pretty busy week!
