Easy, Delicious Peanut Butter Dip

I love Peanut Butter.  No, I mean I really, really love it. One might say I have a teensy weensy obsession with it.  Apparently the addiction is contagious in my house. We put it in our oatmeal, sometimes in cereal (hey, don’t judge..you know you’re weird too), on toast, rice cakes, ice cream, heck I even cook a chicken dish with it.  I must confess that I have fed my kids peanut butter straight from the jar without a second thought.

But the cold, hard fact is that you can’t exactly pass off peanut butter as the healthiest of snacks.  So I came up with a little dip that satisfies both my need for a peanut butter fix and my desire to feed my kids well.

So super easy.

3 Ingredients (yep, we clearly shop at Costco):

You can use any version of these items (i.e. it doesn’t have to be natural peanut butter or greek yogurt) but this specific combo happens to be a proven winner.

Just scoop some PB and Yogurt and add the cinnamon.

Mix it up and voila!

We most commonly dip sliced apples in it but the possibilities are endless!

For Jack I have to cut the apples into tiny pieces and put the dip on each one, otherwise he will simply use the apple slice as a spoon and never actually eat the apple!

If you try this with something other than apples let me know how yummy it turned out!!

***BTW – if you are so inclined, get fancy with it like my stepmom Jenean and add other ingredients (she added some sliced almonds for crunch and a little bit of cocoa).

My Unintended Birthday Present

It was my birthday this past weekend.  I will proudly, with no qualms tell you that I am now 31!  And then ashamedly admit my lie and confess that I’m actually 36. Sigh.

Moving on.

My Mother in Law had the ‘big kids’ for the weekend so Jared and I, with just Luke in tow, felt FREEEEEEEEEEE!

We took advantage of the time and finished a couple of house projects, ate out (more than once) for my birthday and cleaned the house knowing gleefully that it would actually stay clean at least until Sunday night.  (I realize I’m dangerously close to putting you all to sleep as I detail our weekend.  Wow, I really am old…would you even believe me if I told you that paragliding and learning to surf are on my life’s bucket list?)

Anywho, back to cleaning.  As I was moving stuff around to vacuum I noticed something as I picked up my boots.

A little present.  Who knows how long they had been in there.  I just giggled and my heart skipped a beat thinking about how much I love those little buggers.

Truth is, had the kids been home while I was vacuuming I can pretty much guarantee that I would have been doing 3 or 4 things at once and this little discovery wouldn’t have had the same affect.  As much as I miss my kids when they’re gone I know it’s good to get a little distance because it gives a little perspective.

Today, back to being knee deep in reality, I am truly enjoying being with them.  I’m engaging with them (ahem, except while writing this post…) and just having fun.  WIth the right attitude, these kids of mine just might help me to stay young instead of making me feel old.  Happy birthday to me!

Grace needs grace

It’s one of those days.  I’m tired. It makes me vulnerable and I swear Grace can sense it.

She’s disobedient.  Acts like she doesn’t hear a word I’m saying and when she finally responds she’s as flip as a full blown teenager.

But she’s 4.

My new punishment of choice is to send her to her room.  Not for any reason other than it gets her out of my hair for a little while and I can relax my shoulders and not hear my own voice scolding over and over and over…

I know, I know.  She can PLAY in her room so what kind of punishment is that?  Well let me just lay it out there – I don’t care!  I just need a break for 10 minutes and I know she doesn’t like to be isolated so it still counts as punishment in my book.  She is just such a rascal sometimes!!!

And then I remember.  Grace needs grace.  I recently read this blog post from Beautifully Rooted and it hit me square between the eyes.  See, when I was pregnant with Grace I had to sit down with Jared at one point and ask him to forgive me in advance for what my hormones were about to do to my behavior.

“Please be patient with me and know that as it’s coming out of my mouth I literally can’t stop it!”  On top of being controlled emotionally by the crazy maniacal hormones I would then feel guilty for being such a jerk.  So I was asking him for grace. I expected it, after all I was growing our baby so this was his portion of the job as far as I was concerned.  By the way, not in a million years would I want to trade places and deal with me as a pregnant wife – just sayin’.

Well there was some trial and error but he finally got it.  And I knew it…because he would just be silent when I had one of my spells.  He would be calm and loving and man oh man, I’m so grateful for it.  By the second pregnancy I just had to remind him and with the third he stepped right into the role with ease.  He was, in short, a gracious husband.

So here I stand in a fit of fury this morning as Grace defiantly disobeys me and I just want to stomp my foot (um, like a 4 year old?) to command attention or make my voice as mean as possible to get through to her but then I close my eyes and I am humbled…she is a child.

It’s not just the fact that she’s tall for her age but my daughter is bright and sometimes (I dare say) wise and you would never guess that she is only 4.  So I remind myself that while it’s important to discipline and hold her to a high standard, she is still a child and can’t always control her emotions.  Just as I couldn’t control mine as I grew her in my belly.

Instead, love them the most when they are the most unloveable.  Our pastor recently said this in a series on raising children.  Wow.  And discipline, when done with grace, is love.

In those moments of ‘childlike’ behavior, I need to be grateful that she is still my little girl.  Who, incidentally, has been giving me these looks from the get go.

Given that it literally, physically hurts me sometimes to watch her grow you’d think I wouldn’t be so anxious for her to act like an adult.  Sheesh.

So today I’m tired, my fuse is short and boy can she sense it so I pray –  God give me grace.

Mango Cucumber Salad

I’m still an old fashioned ‘pinner’. In my spare time (chuckle) I tear pictures and recipes out of magazines and ‘paste’ them in a pretty little notebook.  Recently I tore a page out of Real Simple that gave a bunch of yummy ideas of what to do with a mango. This amazing little salad was one of them.

There was no recipe per se but it just said to mix the following ingredients (I’m listing the amount of each that I used):

2 mangos

1 avocado

1 large cucumber

1/3 red onion

1 jalepeno

juice of 1 lime

Salt and Pepper to taste

See that pretty little jalapeno?

That’s from our garden.  Eventually I’ll be able to supply the cucumber and onion for this dish but I’m afraid I’ll have to move somewhere tropical to grow the rest (tempting).

My avocado was very ripe so it almost acted like a dressing after I stirred everything together.

This was so yummy!  Awesome summer dish.  If it were up to me this alone would have been dinner but that doesn’t fly in my household so I paired it with a light pasta dish.

Delish.

And just like that…

The boy eats solids.  Two nights ago we finally fed Luke his first solids and he ate like a champ!  I don’t know why I doubted, perhaps because Jack had this reaction when we first started solids:

He shuddered.  He retched.  He gagged, for pretty much the first year of solids. We would feed him just the tiniest bites of any given food but his hyper sensitive gag reflex would always win.  Even to this day if he eats too big of a bite we get to hear the lovely retching…poor dude.

But not Luke!

Thanks Dad, I’ve been wondering when you were going to give me the good stuff!  (Good stuff being ‘sweet potatoes’)

Since it was going so well both kids even took turns feeding him.

There was not a drop left in the jar.

So proud of you little guy, you’re getting so big (sniff sniff).