Hot Chocolate & Christmas Books

You guys! The sunrise was just so awesome this morning! This was from the stoplight of Monroe & Callaway, right next to the Cracker Barrel entrance road, and it was so beautiful, I rolled down the window and held my arm over as far as possible, to take a photo without getting any of the edges of the car in the photo. And it’s beautiful!

And then as I got off the interstate one exit over at Thomasville Road, it was still gorgeous! I love when the clouds are all piece-y and poofy like this.

Emmie asked about Ms. Q as we were unloading from the car, and then as we walked towards the building, she saw her walking up, and RAN over to her, squealing the whole way. (By the way, I know it was cold, but she chose not to wear the jacket, and it’s not worth fighting her, considering we’re only outside for like, 30 seconds.)

What a silly, cheesy baby peanut!

Lunch today was last night’s leftovers (mostly a huge bowl of rice and beans, but only two taquitos), and another episode of “This Is Us,” on Hulu on my phone.

Jeff has actually been out of work and home sick since Tuesday, and he’s not gotten any better. He went back to the doctor again today, and they ran more tests for flu & mono, but went ahead and prescribed steriods, antibiotics and prescription cough meds in the meantime. Hoping and praying ALLLL of this can help get him better! And until he is better, I’m spraying the house nightly with Lysol, and Emerson and I are both keeping our distance with minimal hugs and zero kisses. (He’s been posted up in the recliner basically the whole time, and he’s even added a semi-permanent tv tray for ease, and I’m mostly not-too-annoyed with the set-up 😉 )

When I got to school, Emmie was running around on the playground with her friends, and she was just the happiest little nugget!

So once again, after-work-traffic felt crazy slow and congested, but I finally made it to daycare, and then we finally made it back home. And then I got sorta “brave” for our dinner tonight. Carbonara is one of the dishes I would see on Food Network shows all the time, and just thought it looked amazing. On our cruise last year, I finally tried it for the first time, and LOVED it. (Bowl on the left below, on the right was some roasted chicken which was also delicious. I ate about half of both meals {you can order whatever you want on a cruise!}, and was stuffed.)

So then earlier this year, I listened to “My Kitchen Year” by Ruth Reichl, (who has been a restaurant critique for the New York Times, and the editor of Gourmet magazine), about the year she spent cooking after the magazine folded. She shared her simple recipe for carbonara (it’s literally only like 5 or 6 ingredients), and it sounded sooo good. And now that I’m subscribed to the New York Times cooking section, I recently saw their recipe for carbonara, and I’ve been dying to have it again.

So I got brave and decided to make it myself! I’ve actually had this on our weekly menu like, two or three other times recently, but plans changed & meals get bumped, or the bacon gets used when you spontaneously make pumpkin waffles for the family for breakfast for dinner. So long story long, I read over Ruth Reichl’s recipe and the NYT recipe, and kind of used both, to make carbonara myself for the first time tonight! Buuuut honestly, it wasn’t as good as a restaurant or the cruise. It was decent, but I didn’t blow myself away…

After dinner, we played a little, and then she hunted for Sheppy. She checked the bookshelf first, but he wasn’t there with Harry Potter again… And then she found him almost immediately, on the other side of the room, hiding in the tea pots!

And then we had a little special treat time and read some books. We haven’t been doing any of the giant advent calendar activities (which I’m actually totally OK with and not holding myself to strict rules to keep up with it), but tonight we let Emmie splurge and drink some warm-ish “hot” chocolate. We sat in the cozy chair by the Christmas tree to read some Christmas books together (which was one of the activities we’ve missed these first few days), and it was so nice and cozy! (I poured half of hers into a different cup, and only gave her half, and she only drank about half of that.)

She was so incredibly sweet and precious drinking her special drink. She kept confusing hot chocolate with hot coffee, or maybe she was just pretending she was drinking hot coffee. She was really funny about it, but she was such a big girl, holding her big girl mug and drinking her hot cocoa!

And then after reading three Christmas books, and drinking only about 1/4 cup of hot cocoa, she actually went to bed pretty easily for me. Then I washed all of the dishes, and cleaned the kitchen, and put on a kettle of water to make hot tea. So now that the blog post for the day is finished, we’re going to watch either “Klaus” on Netflix, or an episode of “The Movies That Made us,” also on Netflix. We watched the first episode of that last night, and it was really interesting! So, night friends, enjoy your Friday night!