Domestic Bliss

This is domestic bliss, and it's a welcome sight!

Don't get it twisted--I stay on top of washing/drying laundry...but that tends to be during the kids' sleep times so then clean things tend to get left in baskets and not put away where they belong quite immediately (I have no interest in barging in on a baby's naptime to hang his t-shirts!). Today, though, we got 4 baskets of clean laundry folded, hung, and put away in each family member's closet! Yay! As usual, the kids wanted to help. They were given the responsibility of getting their clothes out of those baskets, into their own respective piles, then carrying their pile to their closets, where I then helped them hang clothes. Awesome big sister she is, KyKy helped JoJo, too, who'd taken all sorts of random things out of the laundry baskets to make a big pile--and didn't care that "his" pile consisted of his clothes + bath towels, Daddy's socks, Mommy's jeans, etc! He's only 1 yr old, he just wanted to make piles! The kids also had fun sitting in the newly-emptied baskets while their daddy lifted them waaaay up in the air!

Another change coming is that while I take care of the kids and I clean and all that, I do very little "real cooking"...until now. See, when Josiah was a smaller baby I was preparing certain foods for Kyleigh due to her allergies, and then spoon-feeding baby food to Josiah--not the perfect scenario to sit down and eat together when you're feeding a baby! I would just eat later (whenever that may be!), and that habit has continued. The kids eat different foods than do Chris & I (a food allergy situation), and Chris has not really been home for regular meals in a loooong time (except the occasional day off, and then we eat 'slacker' meals like taco salad or spaghetti or whatever's easy). Why would I cook a big meal for only myself? Chris likes to cook, so when he has been around he'd make food to last the two of us a couple days and something for the kids, like maybe grilled chicken breasts to store for a couple days, with which I'd just quickly heat up veggies and slice up some fruit and such for their mealtimes. So that's not a whole lot of "real cooking" on my part, eh?! Anyway...all that's changing!

These days, obviously, Josiah can feed himself, and with a new work schedule coming into effect we want to eat dinners as a family--finally! We've looked for recipes that would allow us to do that--to create one meal that every family member can share and enjoy. Removing certain ingredients from our meals is easy in some senses, complicated in others, so this new goal ought to be interesting! Tonight Chris and I tested out a new recipe, and it was yummy! It felt weird to be back in the kitchen reading a recipe and slicing, dicing, chopping ingredients. But it was worth it! I ♥ food!

We got this recipe from Kelly's Korner not too long ago, and figured it was worth a shot. All the ingredients are "approved" for the kiddos, but actually tonight we cooked our dinner very late so the kids ate something previously prepared and Hubby & I were the guinea pigs for this recipe. It was simple with short prep time so it worked for me. (Our view: we used fresh green beans rather than canned, but too much lemon flavor seeps into them to suit our taste...
we'd be willing to make it again w/out all the lemon, but that's just us.) I have a menu lined up for each day this week and all necessary ingredients stocked in the kitchen, so I'm ready to attack dinners head-on! I hope all are as cute as this one was: