Productive Day

Whew! I'm exhausted tonight... I spend a good part of the day cooking - I started at about 10 AM and finished at about 2:30... but You won't believe my freezer at this point!! I might not have to cook for 2 weeks!!

I made Oriental Chicken with Mushrooms, Chicken Cacciatore, Teriyaki Chicken Burgers, Crab Stuffed Mushrooms, and Turkey Burgers with spinach. I got about 2 portions out of each for John, and 5 for me... so I've got 22 meals made... and I'll eat about 2 a day... Amazing! I'd gladly share my recipies with you on all of these - just ask if you're interested. I modified them a little from what the cookbook said, but they look great! I got the recipies for today from the book Eating Well after Weight Loss Surgery - next time I'll take a crack at my other book, Recipies for Life After Weight-Loss Surgery.

After I finished cooking - I set out to do some scrapbooking...

This is my scrapbooking corner - I set it up in our extra (empty) room. I don't know where I'll move my craft area to once this room becomes the nursery... but we'll cross that bridge when we get there.

This is the cover of my weight loss surgery scrapbook - I absolutely love it! I can't decided though on if I'm going to take the protective cover off of it or not... It seems like to get it off I'm going to have to cut it - so I've got to be really sure of my decision before taking action.

Here is the first page I finished - I did it a week or so ago - but it's just a cover page for the scrapbook. It was my attempt at playing with my cricut machine. I really love that machine... but I've got to save some money and buy some other cartridges.

This is the start of the actual book - or at least the start of making pages - I haven't quite got my format down for what will come before the letters, but since John's letter was long - I knew that I wouldn't have to come up with much else to put on the page. He really likes the way this one turned out...

This is the page for John's parents - their letter was also really long - so I didn't have to embellish it to much. Their letter is really funny and sweet at the same time, but I had to do some serious formatting to get it all on one page.

Up next will be my parent's pages, but their letters are somewhat shorter - so I spent an hour looking for pictures to put on their pages with their letters... I'm still not sure if I'm happy with the pictures for my Mom's page - so I'm going to continue to look. I found a perfect shot for my Dad's though - or at least unless I find something else. I'll continue to take pictures of the pages as I finish them - but of course looking at a photo won't do the book justice!

John and I took the dogs on a walk at about 5:30, and walked a good long time with them. I think we walked for about 40 - 45 minutes - but it's hard to tell because there was some drama before the walking actually started. We have one creepy neighbor across the street that has some crazy dogs... well the dog must have heard our girls' collars and came bolting at the fence and popped through a board and came out barking. Everyone is fine and the neighbor fixed their fence, but both dogs seem sort of mean... one is a pitbull and the other is a mutt of some kind.

After returning from our walk - John asked if I had frozen all the food that we'd cooked earlier in the day, and of course I had... so after all of that - we had to cook dinner! It was okay because he'd planned on making himself some chili to add to his stock in the freezer, but we didn't have one of the ingredients he needed - so we had the meat... and he just made some regular burgers. We ate them with low-carb pita serving as the bun... and they were pretty good. I got tickled though because my patty was about 2 ounces, and my bun was only 1/4 of a pita... and I was full!! I just thought that was hilarious! The great thing is that I have 3 more "buns" and tons of patties in the freezer for various meals... so I'm all set!