Is It Naptime Yet

I guess I’m in a blogging mood, mostly because I only have a short amount of time with nothing to do and the things I need to do will take more time than 15 minutes.

Tonight I’m making fish for dinner. Wild Alaskan Salmon to be specific. We use Wild Alaskan Salmon because it’s better for the environment than Farmed Atlantic Salmon. It use to be very hard to find Wild Alaskan, but now it’s a little more available if you know where to look. We buy ours at Costco and it’s marinated and packaged in 6 oz steaks. Two steaks are perfect for our family. They use to only have non marinated in the Atlantic, but now Costco carries non marinated Wild Alaskan, but it’s around $2 more a pound and that makes a big difference when you’re already paying 5 something a pound.

We like it and it works for us.

We eat  fresh Salmon around twice a month and if we have more seafood it’s usually canned salmon or canned tuna, in salmon burgers or tuna casserole, and we have fish no more than once a week. I’m very conscious of mercury content and when nursing we ate it maybe once a month.

With the fish I’m making butternut squash. I love butternut squash. I bake it, instead of microwaving it, what I did growing up. Baked butternut squash is so much better than microwaved, even if it’s not the most flavorful squash, but if it is, it’s heavenly. Well, maybe heavenly is a bit of an overstatement, but a baked, flavorful butternut squash is delicious. I don’t like other squashes. They just don’t compare, so I never but acorn or spaghetti, I’ve yet to try banana squash. They just aren’t as good in my book, but I do make them when Jon buys them, I just don’t like it when he buys them.

Lastly were having sauteed summer squash and zucchini. I bought enough zucchini to saute with the summer squash and later this week I plan on making zucchini bread, I just need to finish the cherry chocolate bread that Sam brought me today. I love zucchini bread, it’s my favorite “bread” that’s really a cake in disguise.

I guess I just had a desire to blog about the one balanced meal I plan on making this week.

Well, I make more than one balanced meal a week, but this one is of my favorite foods.

There’s the timer. I believe the fish is finished.

I did a few games with some words this afternoon with Lilah and then we did a small spelling test that used four of the eighteen words we were reading.

I think she did rather well, especially since she got all four correct.

The purpose is so they learn spelling in a fun way and it’s not as tedious as a normal spelling test that a child would have in school. It’s suppose to be short and if we do it two to three times a week she should be learning how to spell eight to twelve words, more if we decide to do six or eight words in one ‘test’. It’s also to instill confidence in her spelling abilities.

She checks the words herself and once a problem arises we discuss what she did wrong and how to correct it.

I think she’s doing pretty well for no formal schooling.

I think the girls are preparing themselves for changing from daylight savings time back to standard.

We’ve put them to bed at the same time, with the same naps, and they’ve been waking up around 8 or 8:30 am, or an hour later than normal. This is really odd for Eden to being doing this. She usually wakes up bright and early at 7 or even 6:30 am, but for whatever reason has been sleeping in and then does not want to take a nap.

Take right now for example. She’s still in her room making noises and asking when she can come out.

Sigh.

On Sunday Eden skipped a nap, but that was also due to me wanting to put the girls to bed early so they would wake up at 7:30 am to get ready for dance at 9 am since they slept in till 8 on Sunday too. (Eden didn’t take a nap Saturday due to making too much noise and I guess being excited about going to Chuck E’ Cheese that night. She also woke up at 8:30 on Saturday. See a pattern here?)

I’m not ready for both my girls to be awake all day long. Lilah’s not ready for Eden to be awake.

When we let Eden stay awake on Sunday she was so upset that the TV was off and she was missing her PBS kids. Once we told her PBS kids was not on on Sunday she was fine.  (Since Lilah normally sleeps later she doesn’t watch any, if much, TV in the morning, while Eden usually wakes up and does, if she’s not playing. So Lilah’s TV time is during Eden’s nap.)

I had a hard time when Lilah stopped taking her nap. The afternoon would be my time to nap, read, watch TV, and especially eat snacks I didn’t like to share with the girls. (I admit I’m a closet sugar eater and I regulate my girls sugar intake in hopes that they will be better at managing their sweet tooth’s. )

Lilah also has an afternoon snack, so Eden will need an afternoon snack, and that means one more person to share my yogurt with.

I want my alone time.

Why can’t they both take naps at my command?

This past Sunday I canned four quarts of peaches.  We’ve had the peaches in our room and it was smelling rather peachy, but I guess not peachy enough.

I had a few bumps and I’m not posting pictures because they don’t look too appetizing, though I’m sure they’ll taste fine in a pie or cobbler.

First bump: I don’t think they were as ripe as they needed to be. Plus, since they were so green when I bought them, the texture of the peaches was off. I’ve had this happen before where a peach should be so good, but the texture is just a little strange.
So they peaches I canned were a little stringy, but they still tasted just fine, just a little different than the kind from the store.

Second bump: I filled the jars too full and they didn’t seal the first time and I had an overflow of juice and peaches when I opened them to reseal ’em. I then had to remove some peaches and seal them again. Luckily, they did seal the second time, just rather low, so maybe they would have been fine had they set. I don’t know. I think next year I’m going to fill them a little lower and see how that works.

Other than that I had made just enough syrup and had just enough peaches for four jars, except what I removed and ate, which made me happy. (I didn’t want a lot of excess syrup or not enough because that would have taken time to make another batch. )

Once I get a pastry cutter, and a deeper pie plate, I’m going to make a peach or apple pie. I just hope my first attempt at pie crust works out well.

Pie crusts intimidate me,  so any tips are welcomed.