Family Alive

Snuggly Saturday Morning
Alright, I’m snuggled on the couch while Analise is watching Dora the Explorer. We’ve rediscovered Saturday morning cartoons lately, and our favorites (in order) are The Backyardigans and Go, Diego, Go! Dora isn’t quite as much fun as Diego… better adventures and more Spanish with Diego. Analise is so funny – the Backyardigan animals dance a lot, and she loves to dance when she sees them get started.

Brian and Analise went out for their own morning adventure and walked to McDonalds to find our breakfast of Egg McMuffins and Sausage McGriddles. The weekend’s starting out well!

Dinner and Dogs
Dinner last night – Chicken Capri from the recipe on yesterday’s blog – was excellent. I served it with pasta, which probably isn’t in the South Beach Diet list of side dishes but it worked well. I used 6 chicken breasts, an entire container of ricotta (1 3/4 c), and a can of stewed italian tomatoes that I cut up. It was cheesy and tomato-ey, and the chicken was very tasty from the sautee’ing. I give it 2 thumbs up!
We have a lot of dogs in our neighborhood. I remember the first night we moved into this house, hearing a lot of barking during the night, and thinking that this was something you could never know about a house/neighborhood until you actually spent a night there. Last night, though, the neighbor’s dog barked incessantly starting at about 5am. Ag. It was so annoying. Bark, bark, bark, bark, bark…silence (and you’re thinking it might be over)…. Bark, bark, bark. Ag.

Boo!
I forgot to blog this past week about our neighborhood tradition called Boo’ing. Our next-door-neighbor had told us in early October that there was a tradition that someone would drop a basket of treats off on your door (they “boo’ed” you), and then you had 24 hours to do it to someone else. So on Saturday before we left for Clemson we got boo’ed with a GREAT package. It was a huge plastic bowl filled with candy corn, a ceramic pumpkin bowl of chocolate halloween candy, a pumpkin potholder, a hand towel, some Ghost Peeps (which, by the way, should not be called “Peeps” but “Boos”, shouldn’t they???), and a little toy for Analise. It was quite a treat! So I sent Brian out get some treats to boo one of our neighbors. It wasn’t quite as good a selection as Brian wasn’t sure what to get, and we ended up spending about $12 ($5 more than I thought we’d spend). So we boo’d our neighbors on our way out of town the next day. I’m sure they knew it was us, because they were all in their dining room eating when Brian dropped it off on their porch. We were supposed to put a sign up on our door saying that we’d been boo’ed already, but we sort of didn’t get around to it. All week long, we kept saying that we needed to print off the sign and post it. Then on Sunday evening, the night before Halloween, we got boo’ed again! Whoops! We decided we’d “re-boo” the basket to our neighbor across the street:) All in all, it was kind of fun. But then I just found out that our sweet neighbor who told me all about this, who’d had her basket ready since September, never got boo’ed at all! I felt so bad. I might have to drop off a treat on her doorstep sometime soon, though.

Halloween
Brian posted the pics, but I had a few things I wanted to recount. The first that he forgot to mention was that Analise won us a cake during the cakewalk at the festival we went to! Sweet! We didn’t buy any candy for trick-or-treaters since I had a huge bag leftover from vacation bible school this summer. I left a large bowl on the front porch, thinking kids would take SOME (you know, a reasonable 3-5 pieces each) while we were gone. When we got home from the festival, the huge bowl was nearly empty, and it was only 7pm and still lots of kids out! I managed to find another bag of chocolate in the cupboard, and sorted through Analise’s stash for the stuff we didn’t want:) We just had enough! I can’t believe they took all our candy while we were gone! Brian wasn’t surprised, though.

Have a good weekend!