How we roll...

Yum.

Li made me breakfast in bed.
(After he'd already gone to an early morning work meeting, and I was back asleep after running.)

Your nap advice and uberkind comments on my triathlon post made me sing and dance inside.

And when I went outside to water the garden I found this.

I don't know where it came from or who it was intended for, but I liked it.

Oh, and dinner is already in the crockpot! (Recipe to follow. Someday. Soonish.)

Don't worry, Carter is having a good day too. Look what he did while I was putting said dinner in the crockpot...

I wrote this post a long time ago but finally got the pictures to upload!

I have mixed thoughts on our triathlon this weekend.

I was hoping to finish in around an hour and a half and our time was one hour and thirty five minutes. So in that respect I feel really good about it.


I was also super proud of our run time. We did 3 miles in 27 minutes. Probably not impressive to some of you speed demons out there, but I'm a 10 minute mile girl. I would've been happy with that time even if I hadn't done the swim and bike first.


I feel good about our bike time because I was riding my beach cruiser. I would match my pedal speed to the girls passing me on road bikes and they would FLY out of sight. Basically I was working twice as hard as any of them. The bike portion is what caused me to come in dead last in my age division. But I figure someone has to be last, it might as well be the girl with the whitewall tires.


The biggest disappointment to me was the swim. When we first started training it took me something like 15 minutes to do it. But I practiced and got it down to somewhere around 10. On race day I had too many nerves and couldn't make myself slow my breathing down. It took me 14 minutes. Which was a major bummer to me.


But ultimately we didn't do the race to win. It was meant to be a fun project for Li and I to do together. And, it was!!


I think we are going to start painting now. But we are both interested in trying it again someday with a couple of road bikes.

Question

When did your babies quit taking two naps?

Lookie

what the UPS man just brought us!!

Now if only Carter's dad would get home to assemble it and change his poopy diaper.

7 habits

Does anyone have a copy of
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
I could borrow?

Destruction

We had a busy weekend.
We watched my mom take a sledgehammer to her stair rail. (Apparently she's always hated it.)
And we helped campaign for student council. (Click here for all the random trivia you can stand, and remember to vote for Amanda!)

Results

I made the white chocolate soup and I thought it was delicious!

I used:

• 1 can of coconut milk (We buy it at Lin's and always have a bunch to make curry.)

• 1/2 of the coconut can full of mango nectar (that was what sounded best to me at Wal-Mart, but as I was making it I remembered that our Walgreen's has passion fruit juice...maybe next time.)

• about 200g of white chocolate (I don't have a scale so I estimated based on what the package contained.)

We decided that coconut milk must have a really low boiling point because it was popping all over my hand but it still felt cold. Because of this I stirred it the whole time it was heating up. The whole project took me about 10 minutes start to finish and I LOVED it. It was really rich and yummy.


We also made the mouse pads last night and I think they turned out pretty cute. We had a hard time getting the spring part back on and Li had to come down and help us! Mine are still waiting for Li to finish. :)

Anyone interested in attending my school of photography? :)

Parties and Plumerias

The making mouse pads party is scheduled

for this Thursday at 6:30pm at my house.
Bring a couple of traps and anything else you want to decorate them with.
(We can probably share too, I have a bunch of ReStore paint that I'm itching to bust out.)
Please come!
I'm actually really scared of mouse traps and am super glad somebody will be there to help me through it!

I just did a google image search for mouse trap to find a picture to go with this post. NOT A GOOD IDEA. Ew. Instead here are some plumerias in an attempt to wipe those nasty images out of my mind.

Cinderella dressed in yella

So I'm trying to clean today, and my little munchkin is having a BLAST messing everything up AT LEAST twice as fast as I can clean it. It takes me a full five minutes to realize I am getting NO WHERE, but when I finally see what's going on we resort to this solution.

And since Squishy weighs something like 24lbs. this doubles as a pretty great workout.

No mice here

I wanna make some of these.

Lowe's

Anybody want to get together and make some with me?

ReStore

I love cheap things.
For some reason I just like things better if I know they didn't cost very much.
Almost every day I find myself adding up how much my outfit cost.

Like today...
jeans - $6 D.I.
shoes - $3 Goodwill
shirt - can't remember for the life of me and it's driving me crazy
earrings - free from my great grandma when she passed away

Anyway, the point is I love to find a deal. So imagine my joy today when I finally made it to the Habitat for Humanity ReStore. A thrift store for home improvement!

I am now the proud owner of this almost full gallon bucket of beautiful paint in just the color I'd been looking for. And it only set me back $7. I was giddy through the whole store!

Oh and I also found scout shirts for Li and me at D.I. We saved $40 over buying them at the scout store!

Happy day!!

White Chocolate

Design*Sponge

I'm planning the menu for this week and I'm dying to try this recipe. I've never made a dessert soup before. It sounds so interesting.

White Chocolate Soup

400g (1 can) coconut milk

200g Passionfruit nectar/juice

200g White chocolate

1 stalk of lemongrass (optional)

Break the chocolate into 2cm pieces and place in a bowl large enough to contain the liquid. Mix the coconut milk and passionfruit nectar in a small saucepan, and heat. (If you are using lemongrass, allow it to steep some in the hot coconut milk mixture). Pour the hot liquid over the white chocolate pieces and allow to sit for 3-4 minutes before stirring.

Serve warm.

The Explanation

I haven't blogged for a long time. This is partly because I've been reading the Book of Mormon. I almost didn't do my annual read it in a month plan; I decided to do it the night before. I'm so glad I did! Every year I'm amazed at how it is a totally different experience. This year was one of the best. Early on this verse caught my attention: 2 Nephi 27:23

For behold, I am God; and I am a God of miracles; and I will show unto the world that I am the same yesterday, today, and forever; and I work not among the children of men save it be according to their faith.

This was POWERFUL to me. My God can do miracles and he does them according to my faith. Pretty much the whole book took on this theme, so all month long I was reading a book about a God who loves his children and how I can have enough faith to get the miracles I need. Awesome. If you haven't tried the 17 pages a day plan (or 0 for 3 days and 50 after that is how I usually end up doing it) I highly recommend it. It isn't nearly as hard as you might think.

Reading has been taking a lot of my time, but also I'm not sure what I want to blog about. I could blog for hours about Carter and our daily dance parties. But I'm not sure how big my audience would be; I'm not even sure I'd want to read it. I have a few ideas of new things to blog about, but in the meantime here's what we've been up to.

Carter is our squishy baby and the love of our lives. He has two teeth, crawls all over the place and eats everything he can get in his mouth. His favorite foods are veggies and paper. He lost a little bit of weight between his last two trips to the doctor and is down to the 89th percentile for weight. He loves people and flirts with every girl he meets. He spends most of the day wandering around saying, "Oh Wow," to everything he sees.

Li, Carter and I planted a garden. (Carter mostly crawled around with socks on his hands, sticking his face in the dirt so he could eat it.) We found lettuce and onions sprouts this morning and got really excited. Li and I are "racing" in the SHAC triathlon tomorrow. Then we are heading north for General Conference. Carter and I will keep going up to Idaho to play with the Kanes for a week or so and Li will come back to work.