Archive for the ‘Funny or Light-hearted’ Category
Valentines Day
What does Valentines Day mean to you? To me it is a time to celebrate love… but not just the love I have for my wife, but for my little son as well. Tonight we decided not to do anything fancy – the nice restaurants are a madhouse and we can’t ask anyone else to watch Caleb since they are all also celebrating Valentines so where did we go? Bird Dog BBQ! It’s one of those places where you order at the counter, sit down on plastic chairs, eat off of styrofoam plates, pull off wads of napkins paper towels, and drown your meat in barbecue sauce! Why go through the stress of waiting for hours at a nice place when you can get good ‘ol American bbq? Anyway we had a total blast and enjoyed every moment of it.
I didn’t have my camera so my phone had to suffice…
But we loved it, Caleb loved it, and we went home excited and in love with each other.
…. Then Caleb threw up. Not a lot, in fact the little pile is still behind me as I write this post but we calmed him down, stripped him naked to the bare buns and daddy and Caleb got in the tub together and took a bath. Now, if you ask me, that is what love is all about. Sure, its wonderful to have rose petals on a bed and candle-light dinners, a walk together holding hands and moments spent cuddling on the couch by a roaring fire. But those are the icing on the cake. Love means taking care of each other. Sticking by each other through life’s ups and downs, and most importantly picking partially digested beans out of your 14 month old’s hair 
This is love. I love it. Every moment.
Quinoa… Times a Hundred
Ok so before anyone totally laughs at me for writing a cooking post I gotta say that from the beginning I’ve loved to cook. It’s one of my simple joys to experiment and make new things up. Sometimes it works, sometimes it’s less than tasty… sometimes, well, it gets a little crazy. Such as the first time I made up a recipe – I was 9. My mother was on errands and I was stuck in a travel trailer for an hour by myself because we were on our way to Colorado having just sold our house but having a couple weeks left before we moved out to this beautiful state we were borrowing a friend’s trailer to live in. I decided that I had to make cookies. I wanted to surprise my family with a yummy treat. So I gathered all my courage and my ingredients and started mixing. Yes, a little flower, a little sugar, a little butter, a little milk, some baking soda (yes I knew not to use powder for cookies) and then the most important part… BLUE food coloring. You see, I was obsessed with blue. Everything had to be blue. I whipped up the blue goop and turned to get a cookie sheet and knocked the bowl onto the floor. I wasn’t going to let a silly mistake mess up my masterpiece so I scooped it all off the floor and made my cookies. I baked them and they came out looking something like cookies. However, I had neglected one small detail – we had a dog. *Warning: the following might be gross for some people* She was a sweet dog, a very obedient dog, and a beautiful dog. But she was also a hairy dog – and it was the season for her to be shedding. And yes, you guessed it. One bite of my beautiful blue cookies would result in dozens of dog hairs being wedged between your teeth, stuck to your tongue, and tickling the back of your throat. Needless to say, I didn’t make cookies unsupervised again for a long… long time.
Fast forward to today. I can cook. Not the best in the world but I know my way around a kitchen very well. I can bake, stir fry, and follow any recipe (most of the time lol). Anyway, tonight I had to share the story of what I made tonight. If anyone doesn’t know, Quinoa is an amazing grain. Although it’s not truly a grain, read about it at Wikipedia here. It is a complete protein with high fiber content. It is gluten free, has tons of vitamins and minerals, basically it’s a guilt free way to get carbs!
Quinoa naturally has a slight earthy flavor that some do not care for but personally I enjoy the taste. It can be ground into flour and made into amazing pizza crust (see Melissa’s recipe here). Tonight I decided to experiment. I took a small serving of quinoa and cooked it in water but added vanilla and a small portion of cinnamon stick. Once it was cooked I sprinkled with sugar and mixed in some butter and almond milk…. it was simply AMAZING! There was no usual quinoa flavor and it was like eating rice pudding but so much healthier!
I failed to take pictures not thinking it would be worthy of a blog post but the next time I will and will post them! The essential recipe is as follows:
1 cup quinoa
2 cups water
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 cinnamon stick
Dash of salt
Bring the water to a boil and add the quinoa. Add the vanilla, cinnamon stick and salt (if desired). Reduce heat to low and simmer covered until the water is gone. (Quinoa cooks about as quickly as white rice – probably 20-25 minutes)
Serve hot with butter, sugar, and milk (or even better, vanilla almond milk!)
It’s amazing, so yummy and pretty close to guilt-free! And at least it’s not blue!
A Day Off…
So today I took a day off. I had worked 7 days straight and had been “on-call” at work for 5 of them. If any of you have ever worked a customer service role, you may understand what I mean when I say that I took over 300 calls and emails in 3 of those five days and had to personally solve a large percentage of them. I work in IT as a help desk technician and most problems aren’t just simple 1 minute phone calls either.
One thing I have difficulty with at times is the ability to multi-task. (I’ll try to explain this with as little “geek speak” as I can – I promise!) In the course of a single hour, I can literally take 2 or 3 dozen calls (we call them tickets) all about something completely different than the previous calls. It means that I have to continually switch gears in my mind often mid-stream on solving another problem. Imagine having 3 different problems all in various stages of solving and as you get about half-way through each one, another few come in and you have to leave those first couple and fix the new ones as quickly as possible and then remember where you left off on the previous problems. Then you get a few more minutes into those before another half-dozen calls come in and you start the process all over again. Yeah, that was my week. Then I volunteered to work the weekend to help with an upgrade of hardware at one of our centers and although it went very smoothly, my brain decided it was done – in fact at one point earlier in the week I believe I saw it get up and run screaming out of my office, down the hallway and out the back door to who knows where. It finally returned later that day… I think…
Anyway, back to my day off. I decided that Melissa and I were in need of some quality time together today and use some vacation time to take the day off. It was amazing. It’s proof like I spoke about in my previous post “Connected or Disconnected” that reconnecting does not require anything elaborate or expensive. We asked my mom if she’d come over and watch Caleb for a few hours while we got out of the house together and just hung out. It wasn’t anything spectacular (other than Melissa looked AMAZING because she got all fixed up and was stunning! Excuse me while I wipe the drool off my beard ) We got a cheap lunch at Whole Foods, went on to look for a new purse for her at Ross, went to Sunflower market to get a couple things, went to Starbucks to get a couple drinks, picked up a laptop from another blogger who was having trouble with it to help her out, and finally to Wal-Mart to return a duplicate gift and get Melissa some makeup.
You wouldn’t think it was a date, but for us it kinda was. It was special to just be together doing something that for us is relaxing and enjoyable. I loved every moment and cherished the time together without Caleb although we both missed him and loved coming back home to his grins and giggles.
There is nothing like being a parent. You can never get enough of your children and yet you need time away too just to reconnect and remember what being married is all about. It’s not always sunshine and roses and candle lit dinners but even a trip to Wal-Mart can be fun when you’re together. So I urge fellow parents out there – get out of the house together this week, just the two of you. If you can find a babysitter do it and even if you just go to your favorite coffee shop and get hot tea (the cheapest date you can get at a coffee shop!) just sit and chat or play one of the many board games they have there… or bring your own…. or go to Wal-Mart and buy your wife a tube of lipstick… I promise she’ll love it!
Christmas Morning with the Franks
Before I begin this post, I wanted to say that in response to my last one, the surprise was taking Melissa to see Trans-Siberian Orchestra on the 23rd. We had an incredible time! If you’ve never been, make an effort to go some time, it is the experience of a lifetime!
After a wonderful time spending Christmas Eve with Melissa‘s family we came home, opened our jammies (which is a tradition in our family – to give each other a new set of jammies on Christmas Eve) and read the Christmas story from Luke Chapter 2 to Caleb before putting him to bed.
We got up bright and early at 7:30am to get Caleb up and fed so we could get going with our Christmas morning presents. Without going into details of all that we received, we shall just leave it as we had a fun time opening everything! My wife is so sweet and really got me some wonderful gifts – but the purpose of this story is to tell you about one gift that I gave her in particular. Many of you may already be familiar with The Pioneer Woman who has an enormously popular blog and has written a cookbook and many other things. Well, my darling wife had asked for the cookbook called “Pioneer Woman Cooks” for Christmas and being the loving and wonderful husband that I am (wink) I of course got it for her Santa got it for her. The following pictures tell the remainder of my story.
Opening the cookbook for the first time
Caleb playing with some new toys while mommy reads the cookbook
"Um... Mom? Why'd you stop playing with me?"
"Mom... Mom...Mom...Mommy....Mommy...Mommy..."
"...Mommy?"
"Um... AHEM... Little Person down here!"
"Uh Dad? Mom's ignoring me!"
"Ooooh! A book for me?"
"BAH! This doesn't teach me how to make cinnamon rolls!"
At Last, what he really wanted
"Not again..."
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.
.
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In all fairness that entire sequence lasted about 2 minutes and Caleb was happily playing the entire time. I just couldn’t resist the opportunity for some great captions!
All in all, we had a wonderful Christmas and I will be posting more fun photos shortly. Have a great evening everyone!
A Christmas Surprise
Today I’m taking my wife on a date. Parents of young children need to catch this idea. No matter how busy life gets with parenting and school, and activities and all the other numerous things we fill our lives with, we can never forget to date one another. I believe one of the leading causes to the breakdown of the family unit is that after kids, parents start to ignore each other and begin to make their kids the central focus of their lives. This is important as our kids demand much time and energy – but we must never forget that our spouse must come before our children or we risk not only hurting our marriage but even hurting our children as they look to us to properly model healthy relationships.
Remember when you were first dating your significant other? How you’d make every effort to impress him or her and how you were always finding creative ways to spend time together?
Picture of us when we were dating.
Why don’t we do that now? For us men, it’s so easy to fall into the trap of feeling like we’ve “won” our wive’s hearts and now it’s time to focus on providing for her and our family. That is a deadly snare. Yes providing for our family is important but in a poll conducted a couple years ago the pollsters asked women what they would prefer – A husband who was hardly around but provided a significant income and huge financial stability and the ability to buy and do many things, or would they rather live at a lower income level not getting as many financial freedoms but have a husband who is home with them more often and willing to spend his time with the family and with her. What do you think the result of that poll was? Over 75% of the women responded they’d rather have the later. Security is very important to women, but what is even more important is a present husband and father.
And today, I’m going to be that. I’ve been planing a special day for Melissa and I for a couple weeks now. Nothing huge, but just some time before Christmas for us to spend some quality time together. Since she of course reads this blog I can only reveal that it will involve a little drive, food, and a fair amount of walking. But it will be a blast. Hopefully the gorgeous weather we are having will hold and although it’s cold it’s clear and beautiful.
Have you dated your spouse in the last month? Leave a comment with your reply and or thoughts on the topic. Have a wonderful day all of you!
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On Becoming Daddy
Colorado Springs, Colorado