Life's Whirlwind Adventures

So I set my goals you can see something about them here. But here's the written down version of what I am trying to do. I am trying to spend some time focused on myself and on the things that I love about life.  I love running and exercising, not for weight loss (happy side effect) but for how I feel afterwards, that feeling of accomplishment and strength.  I love eating healthy food, food that not only fills and sustains you but food that also helps your body work in optimum capacity but that also tastes great!! I love when I find recipes that not only taste good but are in fact good for you!! I love writing and spending time in my imaginary worlds building characters and the world so that people may also come to enjoy them as well. I also like to focus on my job now, my job that is a dream job for me!! So let's start with writing. I vow to spend 60 minutes a day writing, thirty on my blogs and thirty on my novels. I need to get my second novel done and uploaded to Wat...

I hate coming up with meals at the last moment, it frustrates me to no end and usually it ends up with us eating something convenient and not entirely healthy (kraft dinner, frozen nuggets etc).  I am much more relaxed and willing to cook every night if I know what I'm cooking ahead of time and I'm not having to come up with a new meal at the last second. For a few years I've used my chalk board cupboard and written our main meal on each day.  But I was having to come up with new meals each week and sometimes it seemed like I was just repeating the same meals week in and week out.  I needed something more long term, that I could use for my Costco shopping trips and buy all the meat at one go. I decided to try something new this month, if you follow me on Instagram (@Jenn_loves_photos) you would have seen my calendar that I have for my meals for March 23-April 25th.  I sat in my van at Costco this morning working out what meals I was going to have. I am cooking 5 ...

A couple weeks ago I was completely sick of my regular menu items, I needed to change things up and I wanted to try something different.  So I headed out to Pinterest to my Recipes I want to try board and picked out two new recipes.  Bacon Cheeseburger Bombs were the first I tried and they were a huge success you can read about them here .  The second was the Philly Cheesesteak Sloppy Joe's.  O-M-G!! They were so GOOOOD!!! I got the recipe from here .  And I have since moved that pin to the Recipes I have tried board.  It was super easy, at first I thought it was going to be complicated but as I started making the recipe I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was and how few ingredients it actually called for. Not everyone in the family was a fan of the cheese sauce, but everyone loved the meat and buns!! The recipe is here. The only change I'd make is to add a little more spices to it.  I would have liked a little more garlic and ma...

I'm so tired of making the same old meals.  But I have some VERY picky eaters in my house, and not all the picky eaters are the children!! So I like to make things I know they will eat and things that have vegetables "hidden" in them.  Because for some reason vegetables are not at the top of the favourites list. I'm also sick of making the same things with ground beef. There are only so many tacos, spaghetti, lasagna and shepherds pie I can eat in a year, not to mention burgers.  I do enjoy all those things but seriously it's tiresome and to make something new is always exciting. So off to my Pinterest board Recipes I want to try .  There are so many recipes on there and I keep adding to them, I decided I would do two recipes this week from Pinterest and the Bacon Cheeseburger Bombs were my number one pick.  I've now moved that recipe to the Recipes I have tried Pinterest board.  The recipe can be found here if you are interested! I made them sm...

We are preparing to decorate our house for the holiday season and since my Lil Man likes to be involved in all things that I do I had to come up with some crafts that would be easy for him to help with. Where do I go for all things craft, Pinterest of course! So a checked out a few different snowflake crafts.  The one I liked the most was probably the most complicated when trying to put it together.  It was a popsicle stick snowflake that you could paint. They made these huge snowflakes, but like many things on Pinterest, when you start working on them they turn into an EPIC FAIL!! So I had to come up with a new craft that would be easy for Lil man to help with.  And I really liked the idea of snowflakes! That's when I saw the pin about different patterns to cut out snowflakes on paper and figured Lil Man would love to colour some paper then cut out different snow flake patterns. And because I would make him colour the paper before we cut it out, I could draw out the ...

I'm horrible for using chore charts. Translation, I don't use them, I just sort of assign chores at random.  It makes things a bit chaotic, and sometimes things don't get done and if the kids don't know they are supposed to do that chore, then they don't do it. Lil Man loves to help out around the house! He's all about the vacuuming, and sweeping and mopping and doing dishes. Granted none of these are done to a standard that would pass a health inspection but he does the best he can and that counts for something. My hubby and I disagree on this point, I believe that if a child puts in the effort to complete a task and they say its complete then you leave it, making notes in your head to show them next week how to improve that task.  My hubby is of the mindset that if they don't do it the way you want the first time, make them do it again, and if it gets too frustrating then you just do it yourself.  So because I'm me and I think I'm right, (maybe...

Running Ok so I started a bucket list on Pinterest, there isn't much on it yet, but I have been staying off pinterest lately so that I can accomplish more of my goals, but one of the things on my Pinterest board is the Nike Women's Only Marathon (might be half marathon) in San Francisco.   So because this is on my Pinterest Board I thought I should try to find a running program for me to start conditioning my body to.  I am not saying I am going to run any marathon and come in first, but if I can even complete a marathon that would be awesome.  And by completing I do mean within a reasonable time.  So thanks to a couple of girlfriends from Saskatchewan who are also on Pinterest I found a couple really neat running programs.  One is for beginners and that is where I started.   The first program I am going to follow is a 12 week program.  The first week has a two minute walk warm up, with 1 min run and 3 min walk repeat 5 times for a total 22 ...

One of my favorite meals to eat is soup, and it can be a wide variety of soups, but really anything homemade is good by me. I also like stews and chilli. So I have pinned a few new soups on Pinterest and in the interest of keeping my pinterest a useful tool I had picked a recipe to attempt awhile ago.  Cheeseburger soup!!!  Let's be honest I have posted about Hamburger Soup previously, so this was just the next step in burger soups and IT WAS FANTASTIC!!!!! I followed the pin to this website .  It seemed pretty easy and I was in a trying mood I noticed on the recipe that it called for Velveeta, and well I am not a big fan of Velveeta so I used Cream Cheese instead.  It turned out phenomenal!!! And everybody who has tried it loves it and has requested the recipe so I must have done something right.  So aside from adding cream cheese instead of velveeta I also added in some extra veggies like asparagus and broccoli. That day I also made some wild meat soup. ...

This year I was a tornado in my kitchen. I made some family favorite recipes and I tried some new recipes(that became family favorites).  It was a busy few weekends when I got to baking.  Here is a list of things I made for Christmas baking; bread, crescent cream cheese puffs, oatmeal muffins, pumpkin cookies, butter tarts, thimble cookies, rolo snickerdoodles, shortbread cookies, and cheese cake thumbprint cookies. Our family favorites are the shortbread, butter tarts and thimble cookies.  The new favourites are the rolo snickerdoodles, and cheesecake thumbprint cookies.  The pumpkin cookies went over pretty well, but I don't know if I would put them in the favorites category.  The oatmeal muffins, were a breakfast muffin but they weren't very good at all, I may try the recipe one more time, but I will do some things differently for sure.  And the pastry puffs were ok, but I am the only one who likes those and well with trying to lose weight and st...

Oh Dear Pinterest, how you come up with some very interesting ideas for us to try. Chandler came to me before Christmas, on the day we were decorating the house actually and asked if it would be possible for us to fill balloons with water and food colouring and let them freeze.  Being the loving and supportive mom that I am, I said for sure we could. Out I ventured, into the blizzard I might add, to get to the store to buy balloons.  I also bought some other Chirstmas decorating things as well, but balloons were the main reason I went out.  With the way the snow was coming down, I may have been a bit nuts to go out, but my child wanted to be creative so I was all about supporting that. Now filling the balloons was an interesting experiment, we couldn't just fill them from the tap because then they would just be clear balls of ice, so how did we get the balloons to fill with water from a pitcher that had been coloured with food colouring???  It was a bit of a co...

I am so far behind in my blogging, but the my excuse is that the Christmas Season was incredibly busy and things got crazy.  But I did want to share my Christmas decorations with everyone. I am still not really back into the Christmas spirit as it were, I am more grinch than Santa, but I do love decorating the house.  We did it one weekend at the beginning of December after we bought our tree from Costco.  I got into the decorating spirit for one day then the Christmas spirit seemed to go dormant. Truth be told, all the decorations are already down, on one hand this makes me sad on another, I am glad I don't have to do it. This year for Christmas I did more of the window decorations and built up my Christmas Village again. I love my Christmas village and I add a new item each year. Here are some of our Pictures from the Christmas Decorating night!!!

I love a good challenge!!! And a challenge that encourages me to be the best or most honest at things is one I like most!!!  I have thought many times of doing a photo challenge, I have pinned many photo challenges onto my Pinterest boards but I have yet to do one, so I think I will start soon, the blogs won't come out until after I have completed the challenge or have begun it and I am into it for a least a week or more so that I can manage my time more effectively.  Now to choose and pick the topics I want to include in this challenge................ 1. My Family in the morning 2. Remembering my "Last Friday Night" 3. Thanksgiving, what I am thankful for 4. New Recipe I am perfecting 5. Jewelry, Jewelry, jewelry 6. My family at supper 7. Lil Man's Soccer 8. Chandler's Man's Soccer 9. Swimming Lessons 10. Memory Tree 11. Edmonton Bed and Breakfast "Haunted or not" 12. Where I live 13. A Day in my life 14. Movie I recen...

I was on a roll, and I wanted to make sure I stayed that way, so I am working with this positive energy and treating my family to one of the the things I do best, BAKING!!! Not to toot my own horn or anything, but I do make some fabulous baking goods, if you need more proof than just my word for it, ask my neighbours, they would give me an excellent reference for sure!!! So as I was baking supper I decided we needed a dessert as well, so I went back to my Recipes I want to try board on Pinterest and found another recipe to make today, Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Brownies.  The recipe was fairly simple and I had all the ingredients I needed in the house. Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Brownies 1 1/2 cups all purpose flour 1 teaspoon baking powder 1/4 teaspoon salt 6 Tablespoons butter, softened 1/2 cup peanut butter 2/3 cup sugar 2/3 cup packed brown sugar 3 eggs 1 teaspoon vanilla 1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips Preheat oven to 350 degrees and grease an 8 X 8 pa...

Well hello out there in the blogverse!!! It's been all together too long, but I am still around, just being doing some perspective thinking and working to better my life.  Writing is a great pasttime of mine, but unfortunately it doesn't pay the bills so it had to take a hiatus, but now with a little organization in my life I am back to blogging, so let's get on with today's blog. Blogging was not the only internet based activity that got neglected, sadly Pinterest was also abandoned in this quest I have recently gone on.  But today I took some me time and began perusing Pinterest.  I began pinning right away having missed my pinning so much, but happy to have been able to get back to finding all the homes I can dream of, and all the food I have no time to bake, but today I did have time.  I decided that every day I have time to pin things onto my boards, I have time to do at least one activity so I decided to make Pumpkin Breakfast Muffins. It's the simplest re...

Welcome to another Pinterest Project Blog.  I cannot even begin to tell you how much I am in love with that site, but I am guessing you are starting to realize, especially if you are a regular reader of  my blog. I am always looking for new ways to use old decorations, or decorate the house differently for Christmas.  I have a secret desire to have three to five separate themes for decorating my house at Christmas, in fact I kind of feel that way for all seasons.  What prevents me from doing it that now?  Well a few things, $$$ is a big one, sentimental reasons for another and third I am not always that creative, but I try.  While perusing Pinterest I noticed a pin of a person hanging the Ball Ornaments from string in front of their windows.  It peaked my interest then my friend Becky did it and I really liked how it looked so I looked into doing at the house. I love Black Friday sales, and I went to Canadian tire and bought a few supplies.  I...

Have I told you how much I love Pinterest???  I am seriously in love with that site, it has opened up the Internet to me in so many new ways that I am finding it hard to fit all my creative ideas into my days.  Seriously, I want to try everything I pin, but I struggle with finding time to do it all.  But I always find time for new recipes.  While on Pinterest, this Chicken Enchilada recipe kept popping up, it was very popular, pinners were saying it was the best creamy chicken enchilada recipe around.  I never pinned it but I meant to, I just kept saying,"Oh, I'll pin that later," or, "I wonder how hard this recipe is?"  Then the other day I decided to answer one of the questions, I decided to click on the photo and check out the recipe. It is an 8 ingredient recipe with 4 steps to it.  SIMPLE!!! And it is so tasty, if I wasn't on a diet I may have gorged myself on it.  So last night for supper I made the Chicken Enchilada recipe for my family...