For the "cook" at your house

I'm easing back in to this stay at home thing. Honey said he felt bad for messing with my routine by scheduling Bubba to have dental work done and as a result being home all day my first day of no working. I told him it was fine. I don't remember what my routine used to be anyway. And to prove it, I've been to Walmart every day this week.

I may not remember what my routine was, but I know FOR SURE it was not going to Walmart every day.

I'm sounding a bit dramatic, aren't I. It's not like I worked for 20 years and now I'm retired. It was just two months. Here's the deal. It would be one thing if I said, "Hey family! I'm going back to work full time, and because of that our lives are going to change just a little bit. You're gonna have to pull your weight around here and pitch in a little."

Instead I said, "Hey family! I'm gonna do this thing for 8 weeks and we're gonna do all the extra stuff we always do, and the expectations I have about you helping around the house will actually probably go down because I just won't have the energy at the end of the day to be the chore supervisor or the rule enforcer. We'll be lucky to get your homework done. But it's OK, because it's only for 8 weeks. Anything that we don't get to, we'll just put on hold and I'll do it in May."

You reap what you sow. And I think I'll be spending the next few weeks digging out from under all the stuff we put off until May. Yesterday I started a list...it ain't pretty. I might not finish my May to-do list until August.

On the bright side, I had some time open up on my schedule. While I was at Walmart I bought enough groceries to get us well in to next week. So, the time I would have spent going to Walmart, I can spend doing...whatever the next thing is on my list.

See? Jenni got her groove back.

My family loves salad in the summer. Tonight Bubba and Honey had baseball practice so I threw together one of our family favorites. We copied it from one of our favorite local resturants. There it's called Caribbean Way Salad.

1 bag lettuce

8 slices precooked bacon, warmed according to directions & chopped

1 package pregrilled chicken, cold

1 cup (or so)grated cheese

1 small can mandarin oranges, well drained

1 small can pineapple tidbits, well drained

1 tomato, chopped

1 cucumber, chopped

Throw it all together and you've got a salad.

This is after the girls and I ate. In the past we've used various other meats like ham, turkey, or sandwich meat, whatever is leftover. The salad at the resturant is served with slices of avacado. Don't put the fruit in until you are ready to eat. I think it might be impossible to get all the juice out of it and not make the salad slushy if it sits for very long. We like ranch or thousand island dressing.

Here's to being back home.