Family Meals

I picked up a few new cookbooks at the library a while ago - I love cookbooks and getting new inspirations for meals. One of them was Rachael Ray's "My Year in Meals".  The recipes in the book were a little beyond me - swordfish, anchovies and homemade pasta - but the format was inspiring.  She and her husband John recorded a year's worth of meals in journals, and then turned it into a cookbook. Very cool!

Daniel and Gretchen - and maybe soon Austin - have been experimenting more and more in the kitchen lately.

And so, I've decided to document our family's year in meals, just to see how a year goes. Our favorites, our not-so-favorites, recipes, pictures and more.  Hopefully it will be a fun trip down memory lane for future reading!

I will say, though, this is a very busy season for us. Daniel and Gretchen are both in basketball, so they each have two practices a week, and of course on different days! Austin is on his math team, so he has practice once a week. All three are in scouts, and Gretchen is in dance. Combine that with church, doctor and dentist appointments, and various and sundry other things, and lately meal times have been crazy. But we will work hard to having dinners together as much as possible!

Breakfast - the kids are used to making their own breakfast most mornings. Anything from sausage sandwiches to cold cereal, toast and peanut butter to fruit.  So, for the most part, I will only share our breakfasts if we have something special.

Lunch - our year will mostly be made up of school lunches, or run-of-the-mill sandwiches at home.  Again, I will only share lunches if we make something out-of-the-ordinary.

Dinner - this is where we like to mix it up a bit.  We have our family favorites and we also have new additions we like to try out.  this will be what I share the most.

So, let's see where this path leads us. First step - what shall we have for dinner tonight.......hmmmmmm.

Halloween

We celebrated Mom and James' birthdays today at Mom and Dad's house. We had the kids bring their costumes so we could get some photos together. I didn't have Gretchen's Elsa costume finished, so she wore her second costume instead.

Fall Family Photos

Today we went up to Greenbluff in between soccer games to take some family photos. I had seen a beautiful country lane used as a backdrop in lots of family photos, and I was determined to find it. After driving around the Greenbluff area for a little while, I spotted it. A beautiful gravel lane lined with trees, right next to (or maybe part of) the property belonging to Serena Thompson of Farm Chicks fame. Even though it was a bit of a battle - the kids were not being very cooperative getting changed from soccer clothes to photo shoot clothes - the pictures turned out great!

Sunflower Field

 Every year a local farmer plants several sunflower fields. They are not always in the same place twice in a row - he rotates his sunflower and wheat fields quite often. This particular field was only a few miles down the road from our house. We drove out one evening during Golden Hour to take our annual Sunflower Field Family Photos. It's so fun to see the changes in our family year after year! This year again, my niece was staying with us so we got to include her in the photos.