Hey!

It was brought to my attention that I haven't blogged in awhile. The funny thing is that I feel like I'm so caught up because I read what everyone else writes. But I haven't put anything here in over a month, and well, that's just sad!

January kind of flew by, and I'm not even really sure what happened after Lilah's party. I think I was suffering some sort of Post Traumatic Party Disorder. I decided I needed to do more stuff for myself for a while, because I was burnt out of doing for others. But I'm feeling much better now, so I'll try to catch you up.

I decided that in order to rediscover myself, I needed to get back on the reading wagon. I own close to four hundred billion books, and I think it's time I start weeding down the collection. So I set a goal to read a book a month. I figured if I couldn't read 12 books this year, then I should probably get my library card revoked. Not that I ever use it, anyway, but you get my point.

I've also been trying to weed out my cookbooks and recipes. I want things I make to be accessible. I can't tell you how many times I end up reprinting a recipe because I can't find the random sheet of paper I know I used last time. It's time consuming, but the end result is going to be totally worth it.

Part of the cookbook/recipe weed out finds me making new recipes. I enjoy being able to chunk some things. But I also enjoy being able to add recipes into the queue. My parents came to visit for Valentine's day this past weekend, so Friday night I made plans to cook dinner (since there was 3+ inches of snow predicted) and tried Beef Bourguinon for the first time. Holy moly - was it good! For our side dishes we had roasted sweet potatoes and onions over baby spinach with an orange bacon dressing and homemade focaccia bread. I must say that it was probably the best meal I've cooked in a really, really long time. But it took 4 hours, so I'm not likely going to be making that once a week. :-)

I'm sure there is a lot of Lilah stuff I need to talk about, but it seems like none of it is really big enough stuff to say. She loves seeing "kitties" and "peeps." She has a lot of words that she says, but not all of them are super clear. She says "bye bye," "juice," "cheese," "bite," "please" (sometimes), "Sydney," "kitties," "peeps," "babies," and I'm pretty sure this weekend she called my dad "Papa." My mom just gets called "Mama." LOL

I took her out to Falls Park on a walk last week when it was nice and sunny one day, and she LOVED the waterfall. She grabbed hold of the guardrail and pulled herself as close and as tall as she could (given that I was wearing her) and just squealed. I was both very excited and scared to death - I don't want her to end up some sort of crazy water sport person! What if she drowns? And yes, I DO go there. I can hardly stand to think of the future sometimes for the doom I imagine.

Anyway - we checked out the ducks, and she was excited to see them from a distance. As we were walking back to the bridge, we passed a man wearing a red baseball cap who was working at a laptop. "DADA!" she cried, and I was both sad and amused - Poor girl associates hats and computers with daddy so much that from a distance, that man was definitely her daddy :-)

She's still very sweet and very happy to see people. She loves waving and giving her "squishy" face to strangers. She hasn't really experienced that classic "stranger anxiety," and I know that the age goes to 18 months where they can deal with it, but we're really hoping she doesn't. She's just a very friendly little girl.

And I promise from now on that I am going to try and do better than an update every 30 days. :-)