Occasional hillbillies

Last Sunday night Russ took the kids, Kendall's friend Sarah, and our oldest nephew Ben down to the creek behind our church for a little crawdading fun (that's crawfishing to the layman).

(Alright, neither of those terms are real words. But they should be.)

Crawdading: (verb) the act of catching crawdads (freshwater crustaceans); either with traps, or more commonly, your bare hands - at the risk of multiple fingers and toes.  

(from Jodi's New Country Dictionary)

After catching 120 of the little guys within an hour, they brought them home in buckets and we used our new outdoor crab pot/turkey fryer to cook them and have an outdoor crawdad feed!

Blake wasn't so hot on the "holding a live crawdad" idea.

great $25 garage sale find

Russ and Ben taught the kids and I the fine art of cracking open the shell to get the tail meat, which we dipped in melted butter before chowing down.

It was a lot of fun, though I couldn't help but wonder if we were on a show like Swamp People if city folk would shake their heads at us and be grossed out.

And as you can see I was really bothered by that thought ;)

Still, I feel the need to tell you that last night we ate out at a country club, sitting on the back verandah looking over the golfing greens while enjoying steak, prawns, and BBQ ribs, with creme brulee for dessert.

Delicious!

The Farmstead Inn at Arrowhead Golf Course

So we're not ALL hillbilly. 

What I Wore Wednesday

Hi, Wednesday friends!

Nothing too exciting going on in the clothing department this week... in fact it was such a dud week of outfit cuteness that I added a couple of girlfriends to the lineup!

Meet my sister-in-law Cara, who recently started recreating her clothes, and turned an old pair of bootcut dress slacks into sassy matchstick pants! 

How cute are they, and how cute is she?!!

Her shirt was her father-in-law's, her pants were old, and I believe her belt and sandals were thrifted - and look what a trendy outfit she put together!

Then Kendall (who is now 10 and officially a "girlfriend" ;) joined the sewing bandwagon after receiving a new sewing machine for her birthday and, with a little help from her Grandma, sewed this skirt in a single day yesterday.

ready to enter the 4-H fashion review at the county fair this weekend!

(That's it, I'm practicing while she's asleep so I can join the club too!)

And on to my outfits, which there are only three of...

green tee: Shade Clothing, white tank: yard sale, Old Navy jeans and sandals: thrifted, bracelet: Premier Designs

entire outfit except necklace & sandals: thrifted. (Sandals: Target, necklace: Premier Designs)

top: Romy, skirt: thrifted, belt: Dressbarn, wedges: Target, bracelet: Premier Designs

Pairing the animal print belt with the floral patterned top on this last one was a stretch out of my comfort zone... but I really wanted to wear a skinny belt, and it's the only one I have! I think I liked it :)

I'm linking to Lindsey at The Pleated Poppy, head over for more outfit posts!

She's 10!

*Editors note: After writing the following post, I went to load the pictures off my camera and add them here when I discovered that every single picture from the party yesterday has been DELETED. By the evil new video camera that I describe below as cute and an awesome purchase. Well I take it all back! That camera is from the devil! Why oh why did I loan Kendall the SD card out of my camera to play with in her new toy at the end of her party???

Off to cry a river of tears now... continue on.*

Kendall turned 10 on Saturday... and partied like a rock star. Without her parents, who weren't even invited to join the TWO work party picnics that she went to with her brother! (Thank you Grandma Tracy and Mum and Dad for taking the older kids all day though, it was actually kinda nice ;)

I'm sure you can guess the fun they had.

a quick pic with Grandma and Papa before they went back home and slept for 10 hours straight to recover from a day of fun with my children.

When they came home we gave Kendall a special gift - a new bible (with a little surprise inside), before making mallow magic popcorn (highly addicting) and watching a movie together.

Note: do not let your children pick "Fred: The Movie" for a family movie night unless you want to be so annoyed by the main character that you would consider shooting yourself just to end the misery. How did that kid get a show on Nickelodeon?!

Yesterday was the official birthday par-tay... a girls-only pool party at my folk's place. And of course the sun didn't come out, nor did it get above 72 degrees. However, the will of 7 young girls prevailed and the swim fun went on. As did numerous games of hide and seek, sardines, and "hot potato".

the cake I made and thankfully took a picture of with my cell phone so I could send it to 3 different people. Sometimes, just sometimes, it pays to be a show-off.

Our big gift to Kendall was a cute blue handheld camcorder that also takes still pictures - and oh.my.word was it ever a HUGE success! Yay me, for waiting till Sunday night to buy her gift and finding it on clearance while looking for something completely different!

Of course, if we had given it to her at the beginning of the party we wouldn't have had to plan any entertainment at all, because if you want to know the perfect age for girls to want to video themselves and each other acting completely goofy and laughing their heads off at it, it's 10.

After the party fun was over we headed to Russ's parents for a lovely dinner and a special gift-giving for the big girl. 

A very, very special gift-giving. 

Grandma and Grandpa sure are wonderful!

In fact, I'm wondering how I can get in on that awesome gift action! You better believe I'm going to relearn how to sew so I can get some use out of that puppy too! 

Oh, it's good to be 10.

Not so much to be a picture-taking mama who loses all her party pictures... whaaaaaaa!

Getting bigger...

This weekend Blake held his first snake...

(caught by daddy of course)

Put on his own socks and shoes...

(Which I unfortunately did not notice before we were out and about),

And turned into Dennis the Menace. 

I swear I only turned around for TWO SECONDS after adding the flour to the cookie dough I was making.  But that was all the time Blake needed to get his fingers on that switch and turn the mixer to high.

I'm afraid I did not have a very good reaction. 

(Although that didn't stop me from grabbing the camera.)

And don't let those puppy dog eyes fool you, he was just upset that I wasn't cleaning the mess off him quicker!

Sometimes I cook

I know this may surprise you because I don't normally talk about cooking, and that's because for the most part it's a joyless task in my life. Like laundry and dishes. And clipping small children's fingernails that grow at the rate of bamboo.

But despite this, I've embraced the fact that if I'm going to have to cook, I'm going to cook good food (mainly because I like to eat good food), and have managed to build up quite the repertoire of recipes over the years. 

* note: please do not confuse good food with fancy food, or difficult to make food. I'm talking 10 ingredients MAX here folks. And the less the better.

One of those recipes is my chicken enchliadas... which are pretty amazing if you ask me, and last night I outdid myself when I made them and am here to brag shamelessly about it. 

Of course, I didn't set out to outdo myself, it was accidental. As in, I cooked my chicken and chopped my fresh picked cilantro from my sister's garden and started to assemble everything before discovering that I had no enchilada sauce because, darn it, that can that I could only see the top of in the pantry turned out to be refried beans.

Not to panic, A quick search on allrecipes.com (that only led to a 5 minute sidetrack over to facebook) resulted in an easy 10 minute recipe with ingredients I had on hand... perfect. 

And so I MADE MY OWN ENCHILADA SAUCE, PEOPLE! 

And not only did I make my own sauce, but the spirit of Pioneer Woman came over me and I added heavy cream to make it a cream sauce. Oh, it was muy excellente, mi amigos. 

AND THEN, I cooked my flour tortillas instead of using the pre-cooked kind, and my awesome enchiladas became even awesomer. 

It was a proud moment.

Ready for the oven...

And here's what they looked like when they were done.

Okay, so we dove in and I forgot to take a pic until this was all that was left. Please believe me when I tell you they looked much prettier than this. 

I'm going to make my own enchilada sauce from now on. The taste difference was incredible. Here's the recipe I found. I adjusted it by only putting in 2 tablespoons of chili powder instead of 1/4 cup because I like mild, using regular flour instead of self-rising as reviewers suggested, and I probably added about 1/2 cup of heavy cream.

And here's a link to my chicken enchiladas, because my sister blogged about them a while back!

Happy Friday friends. The best part about my day is that we're going over to friends tonight and I don't have to cook - YEAH! ;)