By Nicole

What a long and wonderful weekend.  Complete with snowmen and sledding, sleeping in (kind of) and doing whatever we want.  As usual, on long, uncommitted weekends, I find myself in the kitchen.  It's just where I end up.  I am constantly behind on dishes and irritated about the clutter on my countertops, but I realized this weekend that it is mostly my own doing.  Remember when I canned all those pickles and the applesauce ?  Well, that was on top of cooking dinners, making lunches and at least one other kitchen project... oh yeah, freezer jam that flopped.  Let's all pretend that I meant to make freezer sauce... because that's what it turned out to be. This weekend, my kitchen project was to make stock.  What sparked the idea was an antiquated vintage cookbook series that Jason just had to buy at Goodwill a few weeks ago.  It had a whole section about how to make stock.  At first I rolled my eyes and mumbled ab...

I did it.  I skipped a day.  It was an intentional decision, brought about by my hope to have a less encumbered year.  While I have loved blogging everyday, and I am actually proud that I developed this habit, the perceived "need" to blog daily has sometimes often interfered with quality family time over the last few months.  Since I want to spend the year living towards an unencumbered perspective, I decided that extra focus on my family is much more important in the long run than my ramblings being sent into cyberspace each day.  So I made a conscious decision to snuggle with my oldest son when he needed it the most and to sit next to, and actually watch a show with, the hubby instead of tapping away on my laptop, absorbed in whatever I had chosen to type up that day.  It wasn't easy.  There were quite a few times that I would begin to compose in my head.  Fragmented paragraphs have been written and lost somewhere betwe...