Holiday wrap-up

I'm currently sitting here writing with a stomach ache. That's been happening to me a lot lately, but that's for another post. I've been diary free for 7 days but I caved Christmas day and ate all the foods--even that stromboli with cheese I knew I shouldn't of eaten, but boy was it delicious!

It's crazy that the holidays are just about over. At the start of the season I exclaimed that it just felt like Christmas last month, and now this one is over! Is it just me or is Christmas arriving faster and faster each year. Perhaps right now I should start planning for next Christmas. Ha!

I haven't blogged in over a week...or two even though I was being more frequent about it, and fell off the wagon again. Here's a few pictures from the past couple of weeks. 

I hope you all had a lovely Christmas!

♪ It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas....♪

Hello everybody! Miss me? 

No? Not really? 

Who do I think I am? Ha-ha!

I hope everybody enjoyed their Thanksgiving. We had 5 of my in-laws fly in from Texas and stay for a week, and it was really nice. Not going to lie I was stressing leading up to their visit because I had to get the house ready and meal plan. You know how it is when people are visiting your house for the first time. You go all crazy sprucing it up and making it look like nobody lives there. I was also nervous about cooking for 11 people, but turns out when you're already cooking for 6, what's 5 more! 

We had a lot of fun though, and the next day after they left, I certainly missed them. We'll hopefully be seeing our Texas family 6 months from now.  So with Thanksgiving behind us, Christmas 2018 is now upon us. Does anyone else feel like Christmas 2017 was just a few months ago?! Like wow! The years are going faster and faster!

We bought our tree on Saturday, and I bought a few more Christmas decorations yesterday. I like how everything came out. My new tree skirt is now soaking up the water from the bowl in the stand holding up the tree, and it's a bit sideways like the leaning tower of pisa, but that's ok, I'll take care of that later. 

Have a great day!

The most simple baked brie en croute ever!

My 4 year old is currently throwing a tantrum and my 2 year old is looking at her wondering what is up. I figured now is a good time as any to finish sharing a delicious and simple appetizer with you all. I need to mentally detach myself for a minute. 

Two weekends ago I made a simple baked brie with raspberry preserves for a gathering and it was delicious. All you need is a few ingredients and it rates low on the difficulty scale and high on the delivery scale. I fell in love with baked brie when my neighbor made it for one of our gatherings last year.

Ingredients

* Wheel of brie cheese (7-8 ounce size)
* 1 sheet of thawed puff pastry
* Whatever you might want to add such as orange marmalade, raspberry preserves, honey, jelly, or nuts
* 1 egg for brushing the pastry before baking.
* A little bit of flour (about 2 tbs)

Instructions

Step 1: Preheat your oven to 400 degrees. Lay out a piece of parchment paper on your work surface and dust it a little with flour.

Step 2: Lay your thawed puff pastry sheet on the parchment paper and just stretch it out a little bit with your rolling pin. The idea here is to just make it a little thinner and wider.

Step 3: Place brie right in the center and slather your jelly, marmalde, or what have you all over the cheese wheel. I used smuckers raspberry preserve. 

Step 4: Wrap your brie with the puff pastry. All I did was fold each corner over the cheese. It's hard to make it perfect so at the end just close it as best as you can. It will come out looking great however you do it. 

Step 4: Brush the pastry all over with egg, transfer brie on parchment paper over to baking sheet  and pop it in the oven for 35-40 minutes. You want it to be golden brown. 

Step 5: Let the baked brie cool for about 5 minutes and transfer to serving platter. 

There you have it. Easy peasy. I find baked brie is best served with water crackers. You can also add grapes and nuts. Some people even drizzle honey over the puff pastry. With thanksgiving and Christmas around the corner it's a fantastic appetizer to bring to your gatherings.

Have a great Thursday!

A holiday date with my love

My husband and I aren't great about scheduling date nights. With four children there is a lot of hustle and bustle, but we find that we are still good about connecting nonetheless. The older girls have a strict bedtime of 8:30 pm on the weekdays and a little later than that on the weekends. These days after the girls go to sleep I'm stuck on the bed nursing Ava to sleep for about 2 hours, but before she got in the habit, H and I would sometimes watch a movie or television series together and talk. I'd be drinking my passion flower tazo tea and he'd be drinking his earl gray black tea like a couple of old farts. Haha. Ok not like old farts but we have been enjoying tea these days. He doesn't like going to the movies so when we go out it's usually to a nice restaurant, or it might be a shopping trip just taking the baby. Hey, she's usually sleeping so we can just pretend she's not there right? Just kidding. She's totally hating her car seat these days.

This past Friday H had an event to go to for work so it was fun to once again put on a pretty dress, shoes, jewelry and slap on about 50 pounds of makeup. It was also the first time we scheduled a babysitter for our now crowd of 4. $20 an hour people. That's how much the babysitter was. I'll tell you what if I wasn't nursing I probably would have been throwing back the cape cods at the gala to try to feel better about that hole in my pocket book. The babysitter was great though and I kept checking in because my poor Ava pretty much went on a bottle strike. She doesn't like taking a bottle and I've only tried twice before. She hardly ate at all while we were gone. I was torn between staying at the gala or going home, but obviously we came in one car and it would have been hard to leave and come back for H with the kids later. It was pouring that night. Thankfully she fell asleep for about 2 hours and when we came back home around 11:30 pm, she wasn't overly fussy. It doesn't look like I'll be leaving her for longer than 2 hours anymore though until she starts eating solids. H and I still had fun at the gala. We met a few new people and it was fun for me to get out and have some adult conversation. Getting out also helps us to appreciate our children more and we are always eager to hurry back to them.

Have a great Thursday!

Christmas pictures

Raise your hand if you've went to bed really late these past couple of days, you ate too much food, and indulged in too many sweets...

It was worth it though wasn't it?

I love the holidays and once again it feels like it went by too fast. It was nice to spend time with both of our families and watch everybody open presents. I hope all of you had a great Christmas!

Happy Holidays!