Mexican Birthday

Erik's birthday is Thursday. Since he is on a diet I am not making him a big yummy cake or fancy dessert I've decided to make his favorite type of food (Mexican) every day of the week. Here is the menu:

Monday: beef enchiladas (these are from my Cook's country cookbook). These enchiladas are made with steak that simmers in a homemade taco sauce for 2 hours. It is unbelievable
Tuesday: Chicken enchiladas and homemade guacamole
Wednesday: Taco chicken (just chicken breasts with taco seasoning) and spanish rice
Thursday: Mexican beef pizza (I make pizza dough and put taco meat, peppers, cheese on top and bake it)
Friday: Cheese quesadillas and fresh salsa

Hopefully Erik will like this gift rather than a cake. I want a cake but I guess it isn't my birthday.

On Saturday Jenna had a sleepover and had 3 friends over. One of the friends had her kindle and I gave her the password for our wireless internet. Jenna said they were up until 3am (3am???) playing with the kindle. Yikes?!?

This made me realize we are behind the times. While we don't allow our kids to play electronics in bed, other kids will bring electronics over and we don't want them getting on the internet unsupervised. We have no internet filtering.  We haven't needed it. So after some research we found OpenDNS. This is a really easy way to filter content and it works. Hopefully we can stay a step ahead and protect our kids.

Books I am/have read recently

1. The Once and Future King by T.H. White. Our book club finished the book. Dan summed it up nicely when he said it was just like college, I'm glad I did it but don't want to do it again. That is exactly how I feel. I liked the ending and thought it brought the whole book together.
2. The Mortal Instruments - City of Bones by Cassandra Clare. This book is teeny bopper like Twilight. There are more books in the series but I'm gearing up for the beginning of March when Words of Radiance (Brandon Sanderson) comes out so I won't be reading them.
3. Cinder by Marissa Meyer. This is a fun twist on the Cinderella story since Cinder is a cyborg. It is the first book in a 3 book series
4. The Gripping Hand by Pournelle and Niven. This book is getting really good too. It had a slow start but I'm really enjoying it now. 

No bullets

For President's day we celebrated by going to the very American La Quinta Inn with Missy, Dave, and Amanda. We swam in the pool, went to a Mexican restaurant (obviously) on Friday. Then on Saturday Missy and I took the kids to Skyzone. It was a blast! We jumped for an hour and I did a few somersaults in the air (38 yrs old? who cares?). Erik, Dave, and Amanda went shooting. Then we all met up at Fathead's Brewery for lunch.

On the way Erik texted me "I bought something, no bullets so its okay". WHAT? I really thought he bought a gun. Turns out he spent 35 cents on the targets. GAH!

This was a nice break for us since both Missy and I have had a busy time at work lately. In fact, I wrote this little ditty to describe how I feel as a full time online faculty:

This needs to be sung to Snoop Dogg’s Gin and Juice:

With so much drama in the DDV
It's kind of hard being Gina-d-o-double g
but I somehow, some way
keep comin up with funky good code like every single day

May I kick a little something for the G's (yeah)
and write a few posts as I breeze through
two in the morning and the partys still jumpin 
cause my grading ain't done....

I wear pajamas all day grading my threads
And students keep calling til six in the mornin (six in the mornin)
So what you want to do scripts?
I got a calendar full of calls and my homeboys do too
So turn off the lights and close the doors
But (but what) we still love our jobs yeah!

Red velvet heart cake Grandma made for our small group

 For Valentines day Erik bought me roses. He buys me roses every year and these were particularly beautiful. My mother-in-law made a heart shaped red velvet cake for our small group and it was delicious.

The BEAUTIFUL roses Erik got me for Valentines day

 You may have seen the goldiblox commercial getting girls interested in engineering. Sarah got one from our friend Tricia as a late birthday gift. Sarah loves it and has been playing with it quite a bit.

Sarah playing with GoldiBlox

This is finals week for me so maybe I will start rapping again next session...

We live north of the wall

It is cold. The kids have had a lot of snow days and this winter has been brutal. One good thing is that we have a wood stove. It really is the center of our family now. We always sit by the fire - every night. I actually enjoy sitting by the fire with a cup of hot cocoa. It almost makes me like winter....almost.

Napping by the fire

 Sarah had her Daisy Scout Tea Party with her troop. She is enjoying Girl scouts and so is Jenna. I like that they have made some friends in the troop. It's a lot of work from the leaders perspective though.

Sarah's Daisy Scout Tea Party

 I tried to get a few pictures of Matthew playing soccer. He is running around a lot though and the camera on my phone is not fantastic. He loves "locker" and is excited to go every week.

Soccer shot #1

Soccer shot #2

My job has become crazy busy. I'm in meetings all day and at night I grade and work with my students. I feel like I have 3 full time jobs: curriculum design, full time professor, and mom. I'm not sure I'm doing any of them well.

Tomorrow is Valentines Day but I did not buy Erik any chocolate like I usually do. His goal is to weigh less than 200 lbs and he has been doing a great job of not eating sweets. He is much slimmer too. I'm not ready to give up sweets yet. No such goals for me! I want candy for Valentines :)

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