Winners

I've said this in the past, and I'll say it again: I love Pinterest.  There are some big down sides, sure, but overall I've gotten some great ideas and I've had some success with several things.  I've shared some recipes I've made before... Here are some of the ones we've discovered (and liked!) via Pinterest lately:

source

No-bake chocolate chip granola bars.  These were really easy and pretty good, too.  The girls love them, and they also loved helping me make them.  The only thing that bugs me a little bit is that people on Pinterest (and the author herself) has labeled them as "healthy".  Four of the 7 ingredients are brown sugar, butter, Rice Krispies, and chocolate chips.  Not the healthiest foods, in my opinion.. but these bars are still pretty good and I feel okay giving them to my kids to eat.

                                                           

source

This Mongolian Beef recipe tastes great.  Even the kids loved it (they are not particularly picky eaters, but I still consider them liking it a great endorsement).  I also loved it, but that could have been partly due to the fact that I love beef in general, and we only eat it about 1-2 times a month, so it's a treat.  You should definitely try this recipe, though!  I served it over brown rice and it was a real hit.

source

I can't remember if I blogged about this one last time our not.  This tomato-basil parmesan soup is really good.  It's also a crock pot recipe, so it's a great Sunday meal.  Too bad soup season is pretty much over... especially here in the South.  However, I've been known to make soups in the summer so this one might be showing up again in my house during the next 6 months or so.

source

I did a few variations on this spaghetti with sauteed chicken and tomatoes, but we really loved it and it's a great summer meal.  Will definitely be making this more during the summer, especially if our grape tomatoes in the garden do well.

source

Homemade Larabars.  Larabars are energy bars made with "all natural" ingredients, but they are pretty pricey.  I attempted to make my own last week and they turned out pretty well!  This kind only has dates, almonds, peanut butter, and some chocolate chips.  They are certainly not low in calories (did you know that just two dates have 180 calories??) but they really are good energy bars.  There are lots of different "flavors" that I'm looking forward to trying (oatmeal, banana, berry, etc.).  Anyway, you shouldn't write these off until you have tried them.  I've realized that dates are really good and they are great sweeteners (many people use them in place of sugar, so I've heard.... looking forward to trying that out!).

Have you found any good recipes lately?  There are still many, many more that I have found that I'm just waiting to try.... I'll let you know how they are!

Tagged!

My sister-in-law tagged me in a blogger Q&A, so of course I will oblige!  I'm also supposed to make up 11 new questions at the end, and tag a few people to answer those.  Enjoy!

First, I'm supposed to post a picture of myself:
                                 
This was taken last Sunday evening in our back yard.  (Don't I have the cutest little girls??)

And now for the questions:
1. What is your greatest accomplishment in your life this far?
Hmmm.... well I think that I've accomplished a lot in my 27 (almost 28) years so far.  Probably the best things I've done, though, are getting married and having children.  Those are things I had been working towards for a very long time, so I consider them great accomplishments.  The first time I ever held Abby, I knew that I had been born to be a mother, and I try to consider that each day as I go about this job of mine (motherhood)!

2. What are your top 3 pet peeves?
Only three?  Haha. I am sure I've talked about these before.

1. I hate being late, and I also hate when other people are late for things.  I think it's really disrespectful (in certain situations.... I'm not talking about playgroup or other certain social events).

2. When people are negative all the time.  For example: several weeks ago, I went to a great Thursday night meeting at Church.  We had a class on spiritual enlightenment/growth.  It was really good and all the teachers had planned really well.  A few days later I was at a play group and someone asked how the meeting was, since they hadn't been able to go.  One person said, "It was pretty depressing... we were basically told that we aren't spiritual enough".

Over the years, I've come to realize that some people will always find the negative in everything, no matter how positive the situation actually is.  This really bothers me, so I'm listing it as a pet peeve.  However, I have found that this attitude is teaching me a lot, too..... patience, especially.

3. We weren't allowed to say "what?" when I was growing up, only "pardon?"  We've taught our kids to do the same.  So, hearing people say "what?" always makes me cringe a little bit.  Sometimes, I even have to bite my tongue from saying, "Pardon?" for them.  It's pretty bad. (And I think all Siebach siblings/cousins would probably agree with me that they are the same way!!)

3. You're at a dessert buffet with everything sweet and delicious and dessert-y you can imagine.  What do you go for first?


Hmm.... probably cheesecake with fresh raspberries, or strawberry shortcake.  Or some Lindt chocolate truffles. Or... some really good, hot, homemade chocolate chip cookies!  Too many choices.

4. If your life was a reality tv series, what would your theme song be, and why?
Right now, it would definitely be: "You're Gonna Miss This" by Trace Adkins.
You're gonna miss this.
You're gonna want this back.
You're gonna wish these days hadn't gone by so fast.
These are some good times,
So take a good look around.
You may not know it now, but you're gonna miss this.


I do know that I am going to miss these days.  Every night when I kiss my girls good night, I hug them tight and wish that time would stand still.  Sure, I have hard and frustrating days.  I'm tired, and busy, and sometimes I feel overwhelmed.  I wish for a lot of things, I wish for "someday".  But I am so in love with my life as it is right now.  I know that someday I'll wish these days back.  Even as I fight with Ellie at the grocery store (as she is screaming at the top of her lungs), a little voice in the back of my head is telling me, "Treasure this!"  (no, not the screaming.... the two-year-old).  I fully expect to someday be that woman who tells young moms to "treasure these days."  Because I tell myself that all the time!  As much as I sometimes long for the future, I am trying to take full advantage of our present.  I will miss these days.  I love our situation and I feel very content with what we have and where we are in life.  Life can be hard sometimes, and of course I have personal struggles and heartache, but I am also very blessed.  I have experienced some painful things in my life, which I believe have helped me treasure the sweet things so much more.


5. What is your ultimate dream job?
Well I really love working behind the scenes of things.  I think it would be neat to be a personal assistant or an "intern"-type person for someone I really admire a lot (for example, I think it would be neat to work for Sheri Dew, who is the CEO of Deseret Book and a great inspirational speaker).  I also think it would be fun to work for BYU, being in charge of something cool and being important enough that I would get free tickets to attend any campus events I wanted.  Oh, I can think of a lot of jobs I would absolutely love.

6. What is the funniest thing that has ever happened in your life?
I have thought about this one for a few days now and I have to be honest, I can't think of anything!  Sure, funny things have happened to me I am sure, but I can't think of just one that stands out.  I do have an embarrassing moment that's pretty funny now, though - I think I've shared it before here on the blog.  Every time I tell people now they get a good laugh, so I guess it's pretty funny.  I once played "footsies" with the wrong person.  As if that isn't bad enough.... it was with the guy's dad.  And he totally called me out on it ("Are you trying to play footsies with me, Hannah?").  I wanted to die.  I literally almost got up from the table and ran out of the room in tears.  Instead, I just turned bright red and changed the subject.

7. Which celebrity do you think you would/could be best friends with?
Maybe Carrie Underwood?  She seems nice.

8. What is your biggest fear?
Horrible tragedies happening to people close to me, especially my kids.

9. Do you have any scars?  If so, what are they from?
I have an inch long scar on the top of my left hand from a cat scratch when I was 6.  I also have a smaller scar on the top of my right hand, almost on top of my middle knuckle.  I'm pretty sure  it's from a burn (oven) but I don't remember exactly.

10. What would your patronus be?
I don't know what a patronus is..... so I'm not sure what mine would be! (Is that from HP?)

11. What would be the best invention ever?
Teleportation, definitely.

And here are my new questions for people (some repeats):

1. What is a talent that you wish you had?
2. What is your biggest fear?
3. If you could only read one book for the rest of your life, what would it be (besides scriptures)?
4. Let's say you had to live the life of a TV character (past or present).  Who would you be?
5. What is your dream vacation?
6. Do you have any recurring dreams (either exactly the same, or just about a certain person/situation)?  If so, what are they about?
7. What is your biggest fear?
8. What is your dream job?
9. What would you choose to be your last meal?
10. What is the best gift you've ever received?
11. Describe how you would like your life to be in 10 years.

I tag:  Anyone who wants to answer these questions!!  Join in!  But specifically:
Lindsay, Paige, Haley, Abbie, Emma, Molly, Ashley.  No pressure... but just in case you need some blogging inspiration! (and don't feel pressured to make up new questions or tag new people, you can just answer the questions above!)

Thanks, Kate, for the tag!! (And I'm pretty curious how you'd answer those questions above, too!)

Go Gators!

When I was 8 or 9, my mom took my sisters and me to a BYU gymnastics meet.  I loved it and have been wanting to do the same thing with Abby and Ellie.  Fortunately, living in a college town presents many of these fun opportunities to us!

Late Friday afternoon I got a text from one of my friends at Church inviting us to go to the UF gymnastics meet with them.  It was pretty last-minute, but it turned out that it was the last meet of the season and I had been wanting to take the girls sometime this year (UF is ranked #1).  So, we hurried through dinner and rushed out the door!

I was a bit wary about the whole thing, since it started at 7 (bedtime!) and the girls hadn't had any sort of quiet time that day.  But, I was pleasantly surprised.  It turned out that there were 5 or 6 other families from Church there, so we had quite a crowd to sit with and Abby loved sitting with all her little girl friends.  Ellie was happy once someone gave her a bag of popcorn. (It turned out that so many people from Church were there because we were competing against Utah and there are a lot of Utah alumni at Church.  So, we were sitting among many people in red Utah attire.  It was pretty scary). :)

Ellie loved the parallel bars ("monkey bars!") and the floor routines.  She kept dancing in front of her seat each time a new song would start during the routines.  A couple times she said to me, "I wanna try!!" and tried to run out of our row so she could run down to the floor and do a routine.  So cute.  The floor routines were really exciting to watch, and each of the UF girls integrated the "gator chomp" into their routine somehow.  It was a lot of fun.

Abby loved pretty much everything about it.  She seemed enthralled by the girls and quizzed me on the way home about gymnastics. "How old were they?" "Why did their outfits have sparkles?" etc.  I think the whole thing really made her want to do some gymnastics.  I remember having the same dream when I was a little kid... and I actually did take a class once or twice.  Hopefully someday we can put our girls in some fun classes like that.

Here's to another one crossed off my 101 list!!

TOFW Orlando

Last weekend, I had the opportunity to go to "Time Out for Women", which is a conference for women. Basically, it's a chance for women to get away for a night and day and listen to spiritually uplifting speakers.  A couple months ago my mom offered to buy me a ticket to the Orlando conference for my birthday, so I thought about it for a while and asked around at Church to see if anyone else was going.  I also checked out the TOFW website to see if the program would be good (of course, all the programs are good, but some are definitely better than others because there are about 20-30 various speakers throughout the year, but each event gets a seemingly random mix of about 8 of them).

So, I looked online and it seemed to me that Orlando had the best program of all the programs this year (in my opinion).  On Friday night: Sheri Dew, Hilary Weeks, and Virginia Pearce.  On Saturday: Wendy Ulrich, Laurel Christensen, Chris Williams (that link is to a great Mormon Messages video of his experience with forgiveness... you may remember the news story from 2007), and the girls who wrote the cookbook "Our Best Bites".

I felt pretty lucky with a lineup like that, so I got my ticket and hitched a ride to Orlando with a bunch of other girls from Church who were going.

I lucked out on my place to stay overnight, too.  A few months ago I got an email from my long-lost "relative" Michelle. Our husbands are actually related (a few generations back, but hey, same last name!), and they just happened to live in our Provo ward when Garrett and I first got married. Anyway, Michelle and I have kept tabs on each other over the years, and it turned out that she was going to be in Orlando that weekend so we planned to meet up for TOFW and share a hotel room.  We hadn't seen each other in about 5 years (!) so it was great to catch up.

me & Michelle

All in all, it was a fantastic weekend.  The Friday night program was just amazing and I actually can't stop thinking about it.  I keep rereading my notes and trying to remember everything that I heard and learned.  Thankfully, I also had the opportunity to buy the DVD of the conference, so when that comes out in a few weeks I'll get to re-watch some of my favorites and hopefully fill in some more notes.  It really was that good.

Late night dinner on Friday night - Friendly's!!  We were both pretty excited about it... both of us have fond high school memories of eating there, but neither of us had seen one in ages!!  I honestly didn't even know they still existed

The girls from Church who went

It was a great, great weekend.  After the conference was over I met back up with the girls from Church and we hit up the Nordstrom Rack and the Cheesecake Factory.  To top it all off, I came home to a spotlessly clean house.... a newly planted garden.... clean and folded laundry... leftover homemade fried rice in the fridge.... and bathed and HAPPY children.  Garrett was busy!  A perfect end to a perfect weekend.  I'm a lucky girl!

101 Update - #4, Garrett's Birthday Trip!

Whoa, would you believe that I'm still alive??  I can't believe it's been so long since I posted (and it's getting annoying that I'm starting my posts like this over and over again).

I'm still working on my 101 in 1001 list.... I have a feeling that I'm going to have to step it up pretty soon.  I'm about 1/5 of the way through (timewise) but I don't think I've done 1/5 of the things so far.  However, I'm thinking of switching a few of them out for other goals, but I'll update you on that in the next couple weeks.  My priorities have changed a bit, and some of the things that I originally thought I wanted to do just aren't that important to me anymore and I don't feel like doing them (for example, painting my dresser (#32).  It's tucked away in our master bedroom walk-in closet and I just don't care how it looks anymore).

But, I HAVE done some things lately!  Here's an update of two of the things:

64. Frame an updated family picture and hang it up in our house 

I finally did this!  I framed this picture that was taken back when we lived in Virginia.  Sure, it's still a year old, but we are still a family of 4 and we pretty much look the same, so I'm happy with it.  It's definitely better than the one we had before, which was taken when Abby was 5 months old.

And, #4:

4. Plan something awesome for Garrett's 30th birthday (June 2012) 

Done!  And, we already did it!
The first week of March, Garrett took a couple days off and we went with our friends Rob & Haley to Siesta Key, FL for a few days.  Garrett can't take time off in April, May, June, and most of July, and Haley just turned 30 in February, so we combined their birthdays and celebrated them both in March.

We had a great time.  On a Wednesday night, we drove up to Savannah so that we could leave the kids there during our trip.  Thursday morning, Rob & Haley met us in Savannah and we carpooled down to Siesta Key.  It was fun carpooling together and made the drive seem much shorter (in my opinion).  We talked about everything -- politics, the future, our memories, medical school, radiology, our kids, Church, our current lives, education.

We rented a little 2 bedroom condo about a block away from the beach.  It was PERFECT and we got a great last-minute deal.  We arrived in Siesta Key in the afternoon on Thursday, and spent the afternoon/early evening just sitting on the beach talking and watching the sun set over the Gulf (and relishing in the fact that we weren't chasing kids left and right!).  Once the sun was down, we went back to the condo, changed clothes, and went out for a night on the town!  Actually, we aren't that exciting, we just went to a little hole-in-the-wall Mexican place.

Oh, and we played a late night game of Settlers, too:

On Friday, we spent a leisurely morning at the condo getting ready for the day.  Garrett and I went running along the beach together, and Rob & Haley went out for breakfast.  After we all met up, we headed to downtown Siesta Key for some kayaking!  We rented two double kayaks and did a 3.5 mile loop around a big island near the coast.  It was fun, and the best part was that it took us to a remote, white-sand beach that is pretty much only accessible to boaters.  It was so nice and QUIET.  We swam for a bit, but mostly just sat in the sand and talked, napped, and read.

Kayaking worked up quite an appetite, so afterwards we went to a local grill & bar for some fish tacos - really good!  Then we headed.... back to the beach, of course.  Haley and I laid out and relaxed once again, and Rob & Garrett did a little fishing down the beach a bit.

Later that evening, we walked about half a mile from our condo to St. Armand's Circle, which is a downtown-ish area (basically a huge traffic circle with 4 roads off of it) that is full of shops and restaurants.  We did some browsing at the shops, and had a late dinner of brick oven pizza.

On Saturday, we went to the farmer's market in downtown Sarasota.  It was really nice - I LOVE farmer's markets.  And, I have to say... I think Sarasota must be the capital of the world for people with dogs in strollers!!

We got some great fresh food at the market, filling our cooler with fresh veggies and some fresh pasta.  Then we hit up the beach one last time for some more relaxing and sunshine.  Later that afternoon, we drove halfway back to Savannah, stopping here at our house for the night to break up our trip a bit.  We made an awesome dinner with our farmer's market finds, then spent the evening just talking (we also had another couple here, who became good friends with all of us up in Newport News last year and now they live here, only about a mile away from us actually!).

The next morning the six of us had breakfast together, then headed to a local lake on campus to look for some gators.  We found a couple, but nothing big unfortunately.

We headed back for Savannah later that afternoon and got there just in time for dinner.  And, just like I predicted..... Abby started crying the second she saw us walk in the door.  She really didn't want to go home!

On Monday morning, Rob & Garrett did a little more fishing from the Woodbury's neighborhood dock, and Haley & I spent the morning/early afternoon in downtown Savannah, down on River St (and I got to eat some much-needed sushi!).  We finally headed home Monday night after dinner - it was a late night but a great end to a wonderful weekend!

So, Happy (early) Birthday to Garrett, soon to be the big 3-0!  It's so nice to get away together, without our kids, to spend some time reconnecting and relaxing.  We were so glad everything came together, even if it was all pretty last minute.  This is not the first trip we've taken together without the kids, and it certainly won't be the last!  Big thanks to the people who watched our kids this time around!

Oh, and I also can cross off two more from my list - #56, try pistachio ice cream.  I sampled some when we were getting some ice cream at St. Armand's Circle, on our way out of town to start driving home.  It was good, but not good enough for a whole bowl... I settled on my go-to favorite, choc chip cookie dough!

And, #100, take a nap on the beach.  Definitely dozed off a few times.  Loved it.