The Sandwich-Hater’s Lunch: Black Bean Salad

Posted on August 29, 2013 by Catherine @ A Two Storey Home

As you likely know by now, I am a sandwich-hater down to my bones. I hadn’t posted on the topic or shared a sandwich-less lunch recipe in a while, but my my sister’s excellent guest post last week inspired me. After a week on vacation eating a lot of heavy foods (hello, bacon every morning), I have been craving fresh, raw, whole foods. Beans, rather than meat, have sounded like the most delicious foods in the world this week! I made a big batch of this super easy black bean salad on Sunday night, and I’ve been working my way through it for lunches:

Black Bean Salad
2 cans black beans, drained and rinsed
2 tomatoes, diced
2 bell peppers, diced
1 c corn (I used frozen)
Italian dressing to taste

Mix all ingredients in a bowl. Done.

Friends, it’s really delicious. Also, has anyone had Popcorners (pictured above)? We buy some whenever we go to our wholesale club, and it’s a miracle if the 18-serving bag lasts a week. I like to tell myself that Andrew is eating more than his share, but in reality I think I am the culprit. Last Sunday we took a risk and bought two bags and agreed that no matter when we finished the first, we could not open the second until a week had passed since purchase. This will prevent us from the entirely possible scenario of eating 36 servings of popcorn chips in one week. Hah!

Have a great Thursday!

What’s been in your lunch box this week?
Have you tried Popcorners??

Jamaica Part 1: Food and Relaxation

Posted on August 26, 2013 by Catherine @ A Two Storey Home

Jamaica was all we’d hoped it would be–a great mix of adventure and relaxation. This morning I will focus on the food and relaxation aspects of our vacation, and tomorrow I’ll dive into the adventure and activity aspects. Overall, I think Andrew and I both did better in terms of being active and not stuffing our faces than we did on our honeymoon. 😀

First, I must say that Sandals handled Andrew’s food intolerances incredibly well. During our check-in process Saturday (which included a damp towel to cool off, a glass of island punch, and a comfy couch,) the sous-chef met with us and talked about what he could eat and how the food is prepared. Anyone with a food allergy or intolerance knows that it can make you nervous to go somewhere like this and have no control over how the food is prepared; it put our minds at ease to have the chef take the initiative to speak with us and let us know that he is on top of things. In addition to the plethora of naturally gluten-free foods, they provided a GF bread basket upon request at dinner as well as a GF pizza crust at the beach-side pizzeria! Point one of a million for Sandals.

After checking in, we settled into our room and enjoyed our complimentary fruit and cheese plates on our balcony.

We ate our weight in fresh fruit this week. It was a-mazing.

The resort has five or six restaurants, with a few different breakfast options. We decided to park ourselves at the breakfast buffet each day, partly because we didn’t go to an all-inclusive resort to eat like birds, and partly because this was the view from the restaurant:

No big deal.

Fresh fruit galore!

After breakfast most days we hit the beach. The resort where we stayed sat on the mainland but had its own private island just offshore, with boats taking guests back and forth throughout the day. We spent most of our sun time on the island.

I have a feeling that being on the island all day is what kept us from being total gluttons. While there was a bar as well as a husband who heard, “No, thank you, I’m fine for right now,” as, “Please bring me a pina colada ASAP,” the island restaurant served a much lighter lunch buffet. Our lunches typically looked like this:

Salad, jerk chicken, and a few frozen beverages 🙂

Dinners provided more of the face-stuffing opportunities. Each restaurant created a signature drink, which the server brought to the table upon your arrival. (Would you like this pineapple-garnished blend of delicious fruit juices and rum that I’ve already made and have for you right here? Yes. Yes, I think I would.)

I failed to take any entree photos, but our dinners included dishes like Caribbean lobster, coconut-encrusted trout, garlic tiger shrimp, and filet mignon. Yep.

Desserts included beauties like this:

Mango mousse and strawberry cheesecake

Between meals we filled our time with a lot of this:

And this:

Pulling the lounge chairs into the shallow water? Yes, please.

…And enjoyed views like these:

<Sigh.>

We didn’t, however, spend 100% of our time eating and otherwise doing nothing. Tomorrow I will tell you all about our active adventures and how we worked out more than once during our vacation. 🙂

I hope you have a great Monday!

Have you ever been to Jamaica? A Sandals resort? What’d you think?

Trampolines, a Brave Birthday, and Family

Posted on August 12, 2013 by Catherine @ A Two Storey Home

Happy Monday, everyone! We had a full weekend in North Carolina celebrating our niece Lauren’s 4th birthday. My dad, aunt, and uncle drove up from Georgia for the weekend, and my mom and brother drove down from Richmond Saturday. I know there will come a time that the entire family can’t gather for the nieces’ parties, but for now I love the tradition. 🙂

We drove down early Friday evening and met my sister, brother-in-law, nieces and friend Jeanine at Defy Gravity–Raleigh’s indoor trampoline gym. If you have never been to a place like this, find the one closest to you and go. Today. Jumping in a room full of trampolines makes you feel like a kid… and also gives you a fantastic workout!

Unfortunately, it’s nearly impossible to get a non-blurry, mid-jump iphone photo. 😉

Saturday morning, before the party prepping picked up for the day, my aunt Ann and I went for a run through the Capital Area Greenway–a beautiful park with lots of trails (paved and unpaved) and wildlife.

I took these photos as the end of the run, but I wish I’d run with my phone to capture some of the beauty of this place. We ran around a lake, jumped across streams, high-stepped over roots, and ran within feet of a bunch of deer, who were obviously accustomed to having people around. It was fantastic!

After the run, it was party prep time. I’ve mentioned this before (see Kendall’s birthday party back in March), but Whitney and Jeanine go all out for birthdays. Lauren’s party was “Brave” themed (the movie, not the adjective ;-)). Here are a few of the details:

Plus the Highland Games in the backyard:

Beanbag toss (board painted by Jeanine), log toss, and archery

Everyone had a great time at the party, and we were all pretty wiped out afterwards! For the rest of the evening we relaxed, made tacos for dinner, and just enjoyed time with family. Most of the crew hit the road early Sunday morning, but Andrew and I hung around to have brunch with the birthday girl (her actual birthday was Sunday.) Finally, with full bellies, we said goodbye and drove back home.

The first thing we did when we arrived home was crawl into bed and take a 45-minute power nap; between the travel and the excitement of the weekend, neither one of us were going to be functional without a nap :). Afterwards we made a trip to the grocery store, and when we arrived back home, Andrew mowed the grass, and I started dinner: salmon, roasted acorn squash, and a brown rice/quinoa mixture (we had about 1/2 c left of each that we needed to use!)

Delicious.

What was the highlight of your weekend?
Have you ever been to an indoor trampoline gym? What did you think??

Post Food Poisoning Meals

Posted on August 8, 2013 by Catherine @ A Two Storey Home

It’s been a week of funny dinners around the Storey house. On Sunday night after a dinner out, Andrew got a bad case of the pukes that lasted through the night. We decided it was food poisoning based on the timing and the fact that I never caught it. He was pretty miserable.

On Monday he was still in pretty bad shape–managing to muscle down plain toast, chicken and rice soup, and Gatorade–and on Tuesday he was ready for a real, but bland dinner. Here’s what I came up with:

Skillet Chicken
Steamed Green Beans
Brown Rice

We cooked the chicken tenderloins in a skillet with a little bit of olive oil, salt, and pepper. The green beans (from the garden) spent some time in the ~~vegetable sauna~~ steamer, and we made the rice in the rice cooker with chicken broth. Really easy to make and surprisingly good, despite the lack of creativity (a little bit of salt makes a big difference!) Most importantly, Andrew’s recovering stomach approved. 🙂

Last night, however, we had a dinner issue. When I went to the grocery store Monday, not knowing what Andrew would feel up to eating, I bought two boxes of Applegate Farms chicken nuggets–one gluten-free for him, one regular (because I am sympathetic; if he had to eat chicken nuggets, I guess I would too… you know, to support him ;-)) He didn’t want them Monday, but when I came home last night, he was working his way through a plate of nuggets.

“Those are the gluten-free nuggets, right?”

(A slight look of panic on his face) “There were two kinds?”

“Yes, I bought one GF and one regular so that you could have the whole GF box to yourself…”

“I didn’t check! You said you bought GF chicken nuggets so I just grabbed a box out of the freezer!”

We went to the freezer to check, and, sure enough, he had broken into the NON gluten-free box. He said he’d eaten four before I walked in, which may seem like a lot, but considering he had eight additional nuggets on his plate, I’m glad I walked in when I did. I was nervous all night about what effect the gluten might have on him, but it seems that it was a small enough amount to not upset his stomach beyond the “off” feeling he already had. (If he’d eaten all 12 nuggets though… seriously, who eats 12 chicken nuggets?) Crisis averted, lessons learned. Andrew continues to be on the mend!

If you have a food intolerance, have you ever accidentally eaten something you weren’t supposed to? What happened?

When was the last time you had the upchucks? What foods can you tolerate/do you recommend during the recovery?

The Day I Ate Almost No Produce

Posted on August 5, 2013 by Catherine @ A Two Storey Home

Oh, Monday; you have arrived again. I am definitely dragging a little bit today!

As I mentioned yesterday, on Saturday morning we spent some time in the garden. Sadly, we picked and sliced our first cantaloupe before it was fully ripe.

So sad.

We also, sadly, had to pull out the cucumber plants. After doing research, we determined they had some kind of mildew that had infected the entire plant. Not a particularly satisfying day in the garden.

As I also wrote yesterday, we then hiked the Buttermilk Trail. Allow me to backtrack, though. If I were to name this particular Saturday, it would be, “The Day I Ate Almost No Produce.” It wasn’t intentional, but at the end of the day I looked back and thought, I ate horribly today. Hah! In this case, I define “eating horribly” as lacking nutrient-dense foods, like fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. Here’s what the day looked like in terms of food:

Breakfast: 2 Gluten-free pancakes with honey, 2 scrambled eggs
Breakfast afterthought: Peach (Oh, I guess I should eat some fruit…)
Lunch: 3-4 oz leftover steak, GF cupcake
Dinner: 1/2 chicken burrito, an obscene amount of chips and salsa, 1 frozen margarita

We woke up late and had a later-than-usual breakfast. When lunchtime rolled around, I wasn’t especially hungry (but yes, hungry enough to eat a cupcake… just not hungry enough to muscle down carrots ;-)). I didn’t pack any snacks for the hike which never happens, but I was so full from a late breakfast and lunch that I didn’t think about it. Fast-forward a few hours and five miles into the hike. I. Was. Starving. It was hot and humid, and Andrew said, “I want a margarita.” I agreed, and we decided to drive straight to Nacho Mamas for an early dinner (like 5:30 PM) as soon as we arrived back at the car.

What do you do when you have been exercising for hours with no snacks and someone puts a basket of chips and salsa in front of you? You eat the entire basket almost before the waitress can take your drink order, of course.

The veggies were there; I just didn’t touch them.

Before our dinners arrived, the two of us finished almost two baskets of chips and salsa (at least salsa is made up of veggies and I ate a lot of it?) plus our delicious frozen beverages (Andrew had two!) As I finally cut into my burrito, the fullness started to set in, and it set in fast and hard. After eating half, I put the silverware down, sat back from the table, and said, “Oh, I ate way too much.” I didn’t feel particularly well for a few hours after that.

Aside from overeating in one sitting at dinner, I didn’t eat too much food throughout the day; I just didn’t eat particularly well. At the end of the day I thought, I’m not going to eat “perfectly” every day, and that’s okay. I’m human. My Sunday contained a few more vegetables. 😉

When you don’t have a “perfectly healthy” eating day, cut yourself some slack. We’re only human!

Have you ever let yourself get too hungry and then overeaten?
How do you squeeze more produce into your day?

Perfectly Seasoned Oven-Roasted Potatoes

Posted on July 25, 2013 by Catherine @ A Two Storey Home

I love potatoes in most any form. When I send Andrew a text mid-afternoon that says, “Thoughts on dinner?” and he replies, “Whatever is fine,” there is a very strong chance he’ll be eating potatoes that night. Yesterday, to jazz up our go-to oven roasted potatoes with salt, pepper, and olive oil, I created what turned out to be a really delicious seasoning mix. If you are a fellow lover of potatoes, give this a try:

Perfectly Seasoned Oven-Roasted Potatoes

-5-6 small red potatoes
-1 tbsp olive oil
– 1 1/2 tsp onion powder
-1 tsp garlic powder
-1 tsp garlic salt
-1/2 tsp smoked paprika
-1/4 tsp cayenne pepper
-1/4 tsp pepper

1. Preheat oven to 350. Begin boiling a large pot of water. 2. Slice potatoes into small chunks. 3. Boil potatoes for 5 minutes, drain, then transfer to a bowl. 4. While potatoes are boiling, combine all the spices and mix well. 5. Add olive oil and spice mixture to the potatoes, and stir, making sure all the potatoes are coated. 6. Spread potatoes on an aluminum foil-lined baking pan, and place in oven for about 30 minutes, flipping potatoes with a spatula halfway through.

Oh man, they were good! Boiling them first ensures that they are soft, and putting them in the oven makes the exterior crispy. I could eat these every day! They did have a little kick, so if you don’t like spicy food, make sure to reduce the amount of cayenne pepper (or eliminate it completely.)

In addition to the potatoes we had steamed broccoli and baked chicken breasts, marinated in raspberry-walnut vinaigrette (which explains the pinkish color. :)) With all the goods coming out of the garden, we have been eating a lot of salad; last night I needed something that wasn’t raw, and the steamed broccoli hit the spot.

Enjoy!

Independence Day, Yoga, and Laughter

Posted on July 6, 2013 by Catherine @ A Two Storey Home

Thanks to everyone–in real life and the blog world–for your kind words about my grandmother the last few days. It’s been great to have what I know reaffirmed through so many: Grandma Tudor was a hell of a woman. For those who didn’t know her, you’ll get to hear more about her in the coming weeks; don’t worry. 🙂

It has been a stressful week. I leave tomorrow for a mission trip with the middle school youth at church, which I am so looking forward to, but there has been a lot to do related to the trip this week. On Wednesday morning, hospice let us know that my grandmother was in her final 24-48 hours. I think the anticipation of her death was, in some ways, worse than her actual passing. I felt like, I am sad, but I can’t start grieving yet because I have too many other things that I need to do that will be much harder to do when I am actually grieving!

As Andrew walked through the door Wednesday evening, he made a playful jab about an email I’d sent him earlier in the day. I immediately burst into tears and said, “I’m stressed, and I’m sad… can you not pick on me??” (What can I say? I am good at articulating how I feel and what I need… even if I word it the way a 6-year old might. ;-))

After dinner that night we went to our yoga class. I’d been looking forward to it as a stress reliever, but I didn’t anticipate all the ways in which it would help. We set up our mats in the middle of the room; some people were already sitting or lying down, meditating. The instructor entered the room and began setting up at the front of the class, but had not started the music yet, so the room was very quiet. As I walked to the closet in the back of the room to get straps and blocks for Andrew and me, I heard a strange noise through the quiet of the room:

fsshh fsshh fsshh fsshh…

I turned around to scan the room. Everyone was perfectly still… except my dear husband, who looked like he was trying to make snow angels on the floor, his socks making the fsshh noise as they moved back and forth. I think from his position, he couldn’t tell how loud or obvious the motion was.

I hurried back over to our mats and whispered,

Andrew! Stop! What are you doing?

The floor is so slippery! They just redid it, and it’s SO slippery!

That’s great… but stop…you’re being a lot louder than you think!

Then we did our best to stifle our laughter. What is it about laughing when you aren’t supposed to that makes it so hard to stop laughing? The harder we tried to stop, the harder we laughed, and laughing is great stress relief. 🙂

(But seriously, we are the worst yogis. Let me apologize now if you ever happen to be in the same class as us.)

On Thursday, after the news about my grandmother arrived and I spent some time crying and talking to family, we decided it would be nice to get out of the house rather than spend the day moping.

We harvested some veggies:

…ate lunch at Burger Bach, by which neither of us were wildly impressed. We were lured in by the gluten-free bun option and grass-fed beef. The burgers come with side salads, which is nice, and you purchase fries and dipping sauces separately. We were turned off by the fact that a small fry comes with one sauce, and if you wanted to try multiple sauces, you have to pay extra–that includes ketchup. Come on… just put the bottle of ketchup on the table; people will still try the other kinds. Also, the cooking options were “pink or no pink.” Well, I don’t want it to be pink, but I also don’t want it charred, which is how my burger arrived. To be fair, I was having a bad day, but don’t be lazy; a “medium-well” option won’t kill you.

After lunch we went to Maymont to see the goats (I’ve mentioned this before, but I really love goats. I regularly petition Andrew to let us get one as a pet.)

Because it was so hot, they had all the animals inside, so unfortunately, I didn’t get to pet them. Still cute. 🙂

That night we had dinner on the river and watched fireworks with our good friends Amanda and Diron.

We love these guys. 🙂

While waiting for fireworks, we laughed about the insane flash on the iphone camera:

😀

It was a great end to a tough day. 🙂

What did you do for Independence Day?

Eating Well on a Budget

Posted on June 25, 2013 by Catherine @ A Two Storey Home

Last week over coffee, my friend Amy and I discussed the difficulty of eating well (and healthily) on a budget. I confessed that Andrew and I really don’t have a budget for food; with his allergies, there are some items (gluten and dairy free) that we have to buy, regardless of the price. Plus, we consider the money we spend on organic produce an investment–we are hoping for lower healthcare costs down the road as a result of taking good care of ourselves now! After all, it was Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine himself, who said, “Let food be thy medicine.” That, however, is a post for another day. Today I want to talk about eating well on a budget.

While Andrew and I do not have an official budget for food, we also don’t go crazy at the grocery store. Here are some ways we keep down the cost of what we consume:

Buy in bulk, when possible. We always have large containers of brown rice and quinoa that we refill with bags purchased at a wholesale club. We also buy large bottles of olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and other items that will last a while.
Look for sales. If our cereals of choice are on a good sale, we might buy five boxes (It is not uncommon for us to have ten boxes of cereal in our pantry at any given time. :)) Be flexible–if you were planning to have chicken breasts for dinner, but discover at the store that the pork tenderloins are on sale, it’s okay to change plans! Or…
Buy meat when it’s on sale and freeze it.
Look for in-season produce. It’s cheaper and tastes better.
Buy frozen produce. It’s generally cheaper, has more nutrients than canned (and often fresh) produce, and works well in most recipes. We always have a large bag of organic broccoli in the freezer that we can steam for a quick, healthy side dish.
Shop around. We know, in general, which stores have which foods for the least money. There are some items we always buy at Trader Joe’s, some we always buy at Kroger, and, surprisingly, a few items that are always cheapest at Martin’s.
Limit the number of packaged “treats” that you buy. Generally, this is the stuff that ups the grocery bill, not the bananas that cost $0.20 each.
Grow your own food. Sure, there were some upfront costs to starting our garden, but there’s a lot of produce that I don’t have to buy this summer!

Dinner last night was definitely a budget-friendly meal:

All grilled: marinated chicken, corn on the cob, zucchini and yellow squash.

Cost: We purchased a 3.5 lb organic “griller pack” that included 4 chicken legs and 2 split chicken breasts on sale for $8.75. We bought 4 ears of corn for a total of $1.33. The squash came from our garden, but Kroger currently has them on sale for $0.69/pound. Let’s say we bought 3 pounds for $2.07. Assuming you have salt, pepper, butter (for the corn,) olive oil and vinegar (to marinate the chicken) on hand, the total cost of this dinner is $12.15. The cost per serving obviously depends on the people who are eating–this would probably make 7 meals for me and 3 for Andrew ;-)–together, we will likely get 5 servings out of this, bringing the cost to $2.43 per serving. If you factor in the cost of the items you had on hand (which I am not going to do,) I bet it’s still well under $3 per serving.

That’s a lot of food for $12.15!

Eating well doesn’t have to mean breaking the bank. Look for sales, buy produce that’s in season–or better yet, grow your own–and you can eat very delicious, healthy meals on a budget.

Do you have any tips for saving money at the grocery store?

Squash, Tennis, and Homemade GF Cookies

Posted on June 21, 2013 by Catherine @ A Two Storey Home

Something tells me I will need to find an abundance of new squash recipes soon…and that something is that our zucchini and yellow squash are growing faster than the weeds surrounding them! Yesterday we harvested (and ate) three, and we have three more that are ready to be picked today.

Aren’t they beautiful? 😀 It is unbelievable how fast zucchini grow. This particular one increased its size by almost 1/3 literally overnight. We checked on it yesterday morning and thought, “Whoa! Where did that come from?!”

For dinner, we kept the squash prep simple–sliced, tossed with olive oil, salt, pepper, and dried thyme, and roasted in the oven.

…Plus baked pork chops and brown rice noodles with garlic and basil. As I mentioned in a previous post, I don’t love squash, but this was actually very tasty! Again, I am fairly certain food tastes better when it’s homegrown. It’s not too late to buy a few vegetable plants! 😀 You can grow them in pots, and you wont regret it.

After dinner we went to a local public school to play tennis. My quad is still giving me trouble from our softball game ten days ago–fifteen or twenty minutes into my runs, it starts feeling really tight and achy. I was happy to do a non-running cardio workout!

My husband has skills.

We played for just over an hour, and as we were driving home, Andrew reminded me of my promise to bake him something. Wednesday afternoon I’d baked a few desserts for a meeting at church, and when Andrew got home the house smelled like cookies, but there was nothing he could eat, so I promised to bake him something gluten-free and delicious on Thursday.

There’s a decent selection of gluten-free all-purpose flours and baking mixes these days, but the best stuff we have come across is Arrowhead Mills GF all-purpose flour. The first few times I baked with it, I double checked the box to make sure the flour was GF after tasting how good the final product was. More than once I did that! We have even served GF baked goods made from this brand to our friends without them being able to tell they were GF. That’s the true test. 🙂 Anyway, these chocolate chip cookies, made using Arrowhead Mills GF all-purpose flour, did not disappoint. I’d need to do a side-by-side taste test, but I think I prefer these to regular chocolate chip cookies. We may have eaten seven between the two of us (it’s okay… we eat our veggies too :-D)

Now, I’m off to pick some more squash before they grow too large to eat!

What’s your favorite squash recipe? Do you have a gluten-free flour that you really love?

Father’s Day, a Retirement Party, and a Wedding

Posted on June 17, 2013 by Catherine @ A Two Storey Home

Andrew and I kicked off our weekend with a date night Friday at the Mellow Mushroom–a new-to-Richmond pizza restaurant. We had learned they make gluten-free, dairy-free pizza, so Andrew was excited to try it (as excited as you can be about GF, DF pizza. 😉 Don’t tell Andrew I said that… I always tell him his pizza tastes delicious.)

Overall, the food was really good! Andrew ordered their version of a supreme pizza, minus the ground beef that usually comes on it, and I had a cheese pizza with Roma tomatoes. My only complaint is that I received a rather pitiful amount of tomato, as you can see in the photo above. One thin tomato slice per pizza slice? Come on, Mellow Mushroom… you can do better than that! We both definitely enjoyed our meals though… and had plenty of leftovers!

On Saturday morning I went for my first run since hurting my quad during softball. I kept it to an easy 30 minutes, and my legs felt good other than being a little achy from not running a lot lately. Success! I am going to take a break from our softball game this week, then hopefully play again next week (with a thorough warm-up and stretching.)

Saturday late morning/early afternoon, we worked in the yard (ah, the joys of home ownership. :)) I weeded the garden bed around the perimeter of the back yard, Andrew mowed the lawn, and we cleaned up the vegetable garden a bit.

(Also, I think it might be time for me to buy a new camera. All my photos have been blurry, regardless of the setting, lighting, etc. Something is “off,” and I don’t think it’s just user errors.)

…And we picked and ate our first green bean 😀

That evening went to our good friend Erin’s wedding. Everything was wonderful–Erin looked absolutely beautiful, and both she and Nick seemed so happy. It was a joy to celebrate with them!

(I may have borrowed this photo from Facebook…)

Additionally, we were able to visit with friends who came in town for the wedding. We don’t get to see them as often as we’d like, and it’s always great to catch up!

Sunday morning we went to church to hear our pastor’s final sermon before retirement. John has served our congregation for 16 years! It was a bittersweet day, full of emotion as John’s wife, Julie, escorted him out of the sanctuary at the conclusion of each service. After the final service, we had a reception/farewell party in our fellowship hall. The committee in charge of decorations went all out! They created a “tailgate” theme and used the school colors from John and Julie’s alma maters: Randolph-Macon, UVA, and Duke.

For Father’s Day, Andrew and I were limited to phone calls with our dads–mine lives near Atlanta, and Andrew’s dad was at the Cape. In honor of my dad, (Papa Walt, as he has been renamed since the addition of my nieces, the next generation,) I resurrected this photo gem to post on Facebook:

This was taken at the preschool party for my 4th birthday. Andrew pointed out that I still make that face, minus the green marker on my nose. 😉 Papa Walt is the best dad a girl could ask for; I love you, and I’m so proud of you, Daddy!

Sunday afternoon, after an accidental nap on the couch, Andrew and I went to the hardware store, purchased supplies, and built a more permanent cage for our strawberry plants.

We bent 2-ft tall chicken wire to make a box, secured the top with small wire pieces, and added a rope handle so we can lift the whole thing off. Take that, birds. I am 83% sure that our neighbors think we are nuts. 😀

And now, off to tackle Monday!

What was the highlight of your weekend?

A Two Storey Home

Where Marriage and Healthy Living Meet

Tag Archives: gluten-free