A Few Disasters

Remember back to when Hawkins ran away last week? In that post, I mentioned briefly that I fell and hurt my elbow while trying to let him in. It's finally time for the full recap. As you probably remember, I had been sleeping on the couch for the nights he was gone in order to hear him when he came home (I was obviously very positive he was actually coming home). Incidentally earlier in the evening, my dad had come over to help move all the furniture from the walls of the living room because we were scheduled to start painting. Because we have such a big unit with our big screen TV on it, we can only move it away from the wall about 3 feet. Because of that, everything was scrunched together against our couch, including our shag rug.

So anyways, the rug was now smack against the couch, so when I woke up to scratching at the door, I sprung up and started to run around my couch to get to the back door. At this point I'm not exactly sure what happened, but all of a sudden I was literally air born and landing on my left elbow. I was so full of adrenaline that I didn't seem to notice how bad it hurt until about 15 minutes later. The next morning though, I had quite the knot. It's been a week now, and the swelling has gone down significantly, but it still hurts to the touch. Hopefully in another few days I'll be as good as new.

The second disaster is my house, particularly my kitchen. This is a photo of it before painting the kitchen, and the ladder is outta here, but I still have nothing on the counters and my kitchen table is the catch-all for everything else. Stay tuned to see what it becomes!

Home Makeover Part II

This past weekend was spent on home makeover part II. Part I was the "front room" as I like to call it, since we never can really decide what it is, only that it's the room at the front of our house. We painted and finally got around to decorating it in the fall. That was one of Chris's surprises when he came home for Christmas. Luckily, he really liked it.

Part II consists of the living room and kitchen. Because of our open floor plan, the front room, living room and kitchen all run together, making it necessary to paint the entire space one color. You'd be amazed at how much a coat of paint changes the look of the room. The rooms already look much warmer and inviting without those harsh yet dingy white walls. I will post all the before and after pictures once we are done putting everything back and adding a few more decor items. Luckily these rooms were pretty much done decorating-wise, so there won't be very many more additions. I did buy a few things on our trip to the mountains last weekend, and I can't wait to add them to the mix. And a HUGE thanks to my parents, who did all the painting. It wasn't that I didn't want to help, but they have a pretty good two person system, and I don't really have a spot to help. I stayed busy though, cleaning out my refrigerator (I found items that were best by 2006, I really needed to do this) and reorganized my pantry and cleaned that out as well. I also spend time on our pool and laundry and such. Stay tuned to see how everything comes together!

Just monkeying around

During the whole Hawkins ordeal, I decided I needed to do something to keep myself busy while I was at the house waiting and hoping for his return. I didn't have a lot of ingredients for things that popped into my head and I wanted to do something more than just cookies. Then I remembered that my Gramma had given me a kit for Monkey Bread for Christmas. I had thought about making it another time, but it had steps that required a lot of time, and until today I hadn't had the amount of time it required. But given I wanted something that would take a while, I knew this was perfect.

The kit came with most of the ingredients, and the things I needed I had on hand. This is a yeast bread, so I was overjoyed that the box said the dough could be made in the bread machine. I put all the ingredients together and hit dough and I was set. Once the dough came out, you roll it out and cut it into little pieces, form balls and roll them in butter and a cinnamon sugar mix. From there it all goes into a bundt pan and I made a sauce with butter, maple syrup, and more cinnamon sugar mix. As you can see butter and sugar are a huge part of this, definitely not low cal! After you pour the sauce over the pieces, you let it rise for another 30 or 45 minutes before baking.

I will say it right now, I might just be obsessed now. I love how you can just pull apart the pieces. I am going to try to make it from scratch since I'm sure the mix was a little more expensive and I most likely have the ingredients at home in the pantry. Here are a few photos of the finished product. There are various recipes out there, including ones made with refrigerator biscuits which seem much less time consuming. Enjoy!