5 Posts for the Price of 1

I'm still here. Dang blog. Had I been a good little blogger the last few weeks I would have posted no fewer than 5 times! Unfortunately, I'm a not a good little blogger...here they are anyway:

Food Swap

I had a post planned two weeks ago-and it never happened. I was going to show you what my kitchen looks like on Tuesdays:

Pretty bad, huh?

Since January I've been doing a food swap with another family in our ward. I take her family of 6 (with no food allergies) dinner Tuesday night, and she brings us food on Wednesday nights. (It seems a minor miracle to NOT have food allergies here where we live-is it that way everywhere now or is there something wrong here?)

Let's just say Wednesday is awesome and Tuesday kind of sucks.

Having a warm meal delivered to your door is perfectly delightful; coming up with recipes that are new and exciting and worthy to be shared with friends once a week is stressful. Not to mention the preparation and clean up.

That's a lot of dishes!

Preparing homemade baked manicotti for last week's swap gave me an idea for another post...

My Food Processor Finally Comes Out of the Closet (and box)

Long ago, when we lived in Small Town, Mexico, I went through a freezer meal obsession. I purchased a food processor and had it sent to New Orleans where they were supposed to stick it on a boat that was coming down to Small Town. Instead, the new guy in the mail room just sent it down in the mail and we ended up having to pay about twice what I paid for it in customs (grrrr).

I never even opened it up until last week when I was making sauce for the manicotti (ground beef and pepperoni ground up together-interesting).

New things scare me. I remember when I first got an ipod-it sat in a drawer for 6 months before I opened it.

It worked great. Today I made pesto with fresh basil out of my garden. How domestic am I?

On to the next would-be post...

7 Kids=Chaos

My friend had her 4th baby last week. Her 3 other kids, ages 8, 5 and 19 months, came and stayed with us for a couple of nights. These kids are great kids (believe me you, I don't offer to do extended babysitting very often), and I was EXHAUSTED! Like falling asleep on the couch at 9 pm with my clothes on exhausted.

Here are a couple of shots of my house...

Next post...

Pedro, Always the Charmer

I hope this was due to the fact that my friend had her baby last week, but I can't really be certain...

Pedro came up to me the other night and put his hand on my stomach and asked if I had a baby in there because my stomach, according to him, "is big".

Time to lay off on the Blue Bell ice cream.

And last but not least...

Bishop Guapo

Guapo was called to be the new bishop of our ward last Sunday. That makes me a "bishop's wife", which to me conjures up images of someone MUCH older (and slightly nicer) than I am. Oh well. So, I've been spending a lot of time coming to grips with what that means for our family for the next 5 or 6 YEARS. I need to simplify things as much as I can around here in order to remain sane (note to self: this does not mean neglecting my blog).


(For those of you who aren't LDS, our church doesn't have a paid clergy-every position in our congregation is fulfilled by a "regular" person in our 300 member ward. A bishop is the person in charge of the ward and it's kind of like taking on a part-time job in addition to going to his regular job. It will require anywhere from 15-30 hours a week of service. A bishop doesn't have a set "term" but it is normally around 5 years-our last bishop was in for just over 6 years)

He'll do a great job. And don't worry-I'll never again refer to him as Bishop Gaupo on my blog.

He's still just Gaupo to me.

Oozing with Enthusiasm

I didn't mention Juan Carlos (8 yrs) the other day-he has no hair issues at this time (or girl issues, thank goodness).

But, I must say-the child lights up like 100W bulb when he's excited. People always comment on this aspect of his personality (and physiology). It's like his face actually lights up-like one of those glow worm toys. If you know him-you know exactly what I'm talking about. You can't help but smile when you see him like that.

Saturday was his first soccer game. He had fun playing last year and improved a lot-but he never scored during a game. Saturday he was fast, he always seemed to be near the ball, and he SCORED TWO GOALS!

The best part of that was watching him run down the field after he scored with a huge grin on his glowing face (it's also the best part because I didn't get a picture of him scoring an actual goal).

Remember how I said Julio hasn't gotten hurt yet playing football (and I very clearly knocked on wood)? Well, he got a helmet to the knee in the first five minutes of his game on Saturday and sat the game out. He's ok now. It was probably for the best-the smallest kid on the other team was bigger than him (Julio's one of the biggest on his team). A lot of big, tough boys. I was perfectly fine having him on the sideline with a bruise. :)


Fall is crazy-but it's fun watching the kiddos!

My Boys and Their Hair

Hi there! Remember me? That's ok if you don't, I don't blame you. I've been on a relaxing, unannounced blogcation. We're all fine here-I have no excuse besides having 4 active children and not a real good grip on keeping everything and everyone under control.

But, the annoying thing about the blog is that it never stops bothering me. I tried at least 4 or 5 times to declare myself a non-blogger but it never quite takes. So, here I am, for how long-who knows? I could go AWOL again at any moment.

I hope you all had a great summer. Didn't it go fast?

Julio (almost 11) finally wore us down and is now playing tackle football. I spend most of his games flinching as I wait for him to be knocked silly. His team is on the smallish size-so even though he's just under 80 lbs he's the 5th biggest on his team. Because of this, he always has to play on the line against boys that honestly look twice his size. He's remained unscathed so far (knocking on wood...)

But this post is about hair. Julio's got some awesome hair-thick, wavy, dark brown hair that apparently the 5th grade girls love. He came home the first day of school and told me, with a sly little smile on his face, that at one point during the day no fewer than 8 girls surrounded him and asked him to "flip" his hair like Justin Beiber does (which "flip" he has perfected-I've seen him practicing in front of the bathroom mirror).

By the next day it must have gotten old because he came home asking Guapo to take him to get a buzz. The reason? He needed to make himself "less attractive to the girls". Of course when Guapo called his bluff and grabbed the car keys he changed his mind in a jiffy.

Oh how that one's going to give us problems...

Remember Pedro? He's 4 1/2 now if you can believe it. He goes to the same preschool as he did last year-his teacher adores him there. I'm grateful for that everyday because I can see how a person could go either way with him. He's still quite the handful.

Remember his beautiful curly baby hair?

It lasted for quite a while, but recently I had noticed that it was looking pretty nappy. He was finally ready for a big boy cut. :(

Here he is all proud of his new do:

After the cut, he told me, "I like myself like this!"

I'm glad Julio and Pedro don't have self-confidence issues... :)

Have a great weekend. Hopefully I'll be back next week.