August Challenges

It's already August 1st? Holy Cow!
Where did the summer go?
Alan goes back to work tomorrow, so today is officially the end to our summer. (Well, his summer. I don't have summers. But, either way, it's over).


With a new school year comes a more hectic household. Even though Alan is a teacher, he doesn't leave school at 4pm or so, when the teachers are released. He makes it home between 6:30-7:30pm (I have a hard working hubby). So, when I get home at 5pm from work, I usually get dinner started. I love to cook, but don't normally like to spend my entire evening preparing a meal. 


So, after some g-chatting with my sister-in-law (Alan's sister), Jennifer, we both decided we're going to challenge ourselves to cook weeknight dinners only in our crockpot for the month of August. We realized that we both don't use our slowcookers often enough. 


During my lunch break, Alan and I prepared our first crockpot supper of August: Ziti. I haven't ever cooked pasta in the crockpot before, so we're experimenting with this first recipe. We decided, since there's only two of us, we will probably only have to make two crockpot meals each week. We'll eat the leftovers for lunch and possibly another dinner.  


We eat at church one night a week, have date night on Thursdays, and normally eat with friends on Friday nights. (Yea, that seems like a lot of eating out, but we always come home with leftovers for the next day's lunches, so we're getting multiple meals out of each restaurant visit which makes us feel less guilty about eating out). 


I figured, since we're already challenging ourselves in the kitchen, I would also challenge myself with my camera. I came across this blog post from Sherry at Oh So Lovely and thought it would be fun to participate. I don't take nearly enough pictures of our everyday life and I thought this would be a fun way to change that!

Here's my Day 1: Self Portrait

And, yes, I did get my hair cut (last week actually)! I will share that story tomorrow. Can you say Locks of Love? Oh yea...my hair was pretty long! 


A new school year is pretty much like a new year all together for us. That happens when your lives revolve around the school calendar. That's fine with me because it gives me a chance to start new and make resolutions in the middle of the (calendar) year! Cheers to a new school year! It's been fun summer, we'll see you next year.