January Re-Set

We had a very slow, lazy morning today, and it was lovely. I actually got out of bed around 8:30, hung out with the girls a bit, and then fell back asleep on the couch for a while.

They watched “Cinderella III” while I took my morning nap, and then by the time I woke up it was after noon, and the girls were starving for lunch. I made sandwiches for them, and then a snack plate for me. I had turkey, pepperoni, cottage cheese with everything seasoning, boiled eggs with kewpie mayo & chili crisp, cantaloupe, and a few cheese crisp things that were going stale. Plus my favorite blackberry lemonade flavored water mix-in-powder. Luckily it’s sugar free, so I can still drink this even while doing low-carb. Jeff had his favorite peanut butter & syrup mixture he eats with bread and/or crackers, and is something he’s done since he was a teenager.

After lunch, we finally got busy doing some chores around the house. Well, Jeff and I were working, but the girls were outside playing “wild girls,” as they have been so often lately. Jeff and I got the Christmas tree un-decorated, and then taken down, and all boxed up. Then we moved back to Addison’s room to put ALLLL the Christmas decor in the top of the closet where we store it. I told him I wanted everything taken care of in one business day, and we accomplished that!

I even put that side of the room back together again too, and it’s looking so nice and neat over there now, especially with the late-afternoon winter sunshine streaming in the windows. Addie wanted to be my little model when I was snapping the photos.

I love the January re-set of getting things all back in order after taking the Christmas tree down. Especially when it’s done on a nice sunny afternoon, on a day we can really enjoy getting it all put together again.

This little girl just wanted to climb up and snuggle with Mama for a quick snack, and we watched Daddy put the keyboard stand and everything back together on the other side of the room. And of course Pennie was standing guard, hoping we’d give her a treat…

Emerson then helped me put together this little corner of the room, and straighten up all of our extra piles of books we’ve been collecting lately.

While I was working in the kitchen, Addison was “playing” the keyboard, and Emerson was dancing around next to her!

For dinner, I made a little “recipe” I found on TikTok that I’ve been wanting to try. This one girl makes tons of sweet potato bowls, in a bunch of different varieties. This is pretty much the “basic” one (with roasted sweet potato, ground beef, avocado & cottage cheese, topped with a tiny drizzle of hot honey) which I wanted to try first, but then there are also other varieties to make it like a taco bowl, Greek bowl, cheeseburger bowl (big mac style), bbq chicken, and I’m sure there are others. I actually used ground turkey tonight, with two diced vidalia onions, and seasoned it up with salt & pepper, onion powder, garlic powder, plus curry powder and some schawarma-style seasoning that Bo gave me from his trip to Israel a while back.

And this was sooooo good. I loved literally everything about this meal. I ended up getting another scoop of cottage cheese to round everything out, since that first scoop was so tiny. Emerson was brave and I made her a little bowl with teeny tiny portions of everything. She loved the meat & cottage cheese, but not the sweet potato nor avocado. And Jeff and Addie were back into the peanut butter tonight for dinner.

I purposefully made way more sweet potatoes than I needed tonight, so that I could meal-prep some leftovers to take to work for lunch the next two days. Should be delicious still! Oh and I ate the last tiny bit of meat with one more tiny bit of cottage cheese to clean everything up.

 

Emmie and I are getting closer and closer to finishing up Harry Potter, but we’re still just not quite there yet.

After spending over half of their day playing outside, and the other half playing inside (with just about 30-ish minutes of forced chores, spread out over the whole day), they were exhausted and very much ready for sleep.

One of the other projects I’ve been working to clean up is the very end here of my kitchen counter. It always turns into a drop-zone just totally stacked and covered with so much junk. Usually, there’s a giant IKEA cutting board on the end here, and it serves as a base for all the things. But I love actually using that cutting board, and everything needed to be cleaned up, so I got the pile completely gone, and I’ve been working on cleaning up and reinvigorating my cutting board. It needed a deep scrub, which I’ve done, and now I need to get out my food-grade mineral oil and re-oil it, so it’s re-hydrated. So now though, I’ve got my box of tea, plus some oranges, a new cookbook I got for Christmas, and a cute thrifted wooden bowl of apples.

Today was a nice, slow day, but I’m proud of us for being productive and getting some things done around the house too. It was exactly the kind of day I was in need of. And now luckily this means we only have a four-day work week we have to get through!