Lots of Things - but Mostly Bananas

Ahhhh. Happy Wednesday.

My kids are back in school, and I have enjoyed these past three days to the fullest. After having my children home for 17 days in a row, I'd forgotten what I do while they're gone. Christmas prep definitely didn't help the situation, as I spent the week before they got out of school making sure I had all the shopping and wrapping done so I wouldn't have to do any of it once they went on break. So my schedule and routine haven't been "normal" for a long time (whatever "normal" is). 

For this brief moment, I'm caught up. My house is clean, the dishes are washed, and the laundry is done. On top of that, I've exercised, my budget is on track, I'm in a good mood, and dinner is prepped. Heck, I even took a shower today!

I'm not sure If I've ever experienced this, now that I think of it. Not all at once, anyway. I usually have one or two things "under control," but not this many at once! This is not my life! But wow! It's amazing! I'm going to enjoy it while it lasts. I'm sure things will fall apart when my kids are home for "distance learning" on Friday, and then it will get even worse when they are out of school for another whole week starting next Tuesday. 

(What am I going to do with them while they're home for a week? I have no creative parenting left in me).

24 hours later...

Ahhhhh. Happy Thursday. 

I never finished my post yesterday because A) riots and B) I didn't know where I was going with that post anyway. 

I'm not as "on top" of things today as I was yesterday, but I'm still keeping it together for the most part. My house is clean-ish, the dishes are washed, and the laundry is not completely piled up. I have a dinner plan, my budget is still on track, but I haven't done any exercise. 

Now hang on while I slowly decline into Friday...

This morning my kids were rather difficult. Eva woke up on the wrong side of the bed and was cranky from the moment she became conscious. Our conversations today have gone a little bit like this:

Eva: I'm tired.

Me: Why don't you go take a nap?

Eva (yelling at me): I don't want to take a nap! I'm too lazy!

(I'm still waiting for this child's sense of logic to kick in. This same child was crying at the dinner table the other night saying she was hungry... while there was a plate of food in front of her. That same night, she threw a tantrum at the top of the stairs, and when I asked her what was wrong, she said, "No one will carry me upstairs." Heaven, help me!)

The other day my neighbor brought us a case of bananas and two bags of sugar. A different neighbor recently brought us a bag of flour, so obviously the fates wanted me to make banana bread. 

Thus began my first baking catastrophe of 2021. After I dropped Zoe and Daisy off at school this morning, I went to WinCo to get some buttermilk to make banana bread. I had eggs on my grocery list, but we live right by an egg farm, and I try to buy eggs from the egg farm as often as possible, so I didn't buy any from WinCo. The farm opens at 1:00, so I planned to swing by this afternoon. 

When I got home from WinCo, I started prepping the bananas for a quadruple batch of banana bread. After I got the bananas peeled and mashed, I looked at the recipe and remembered that I needed eggs... eggs that I was planning to buy after 1:00... it was 9:00 a.m. I ran outside and checked the chicken coop, just in case there would miraculously be 8 eggs waiting for me. There were, indeed, 8 eggs... 8 eggs that had frozen and exploded and were covered in feathers and poop.

I face palmed a few times and then went to the store for eggs. Then I came home and continued working on the bread. After I got the wet ingredients in the Bosch, I could see I was really pushing my luck by trying to quadruple the recipe. The bowl was pretty much full, and I still needed to add 7 cups of flour. I gritted my teeth and just went for it! 

Y'all... it worked. But just barely. Luckily I'd cut the sugar down by a cup, or I'da had a banana batter volcano on my hands (or on my counter, to be more accurate). If a speck of dust had fallen from the ceiling and landed in that bowl, it would have overflowed. 

I ended up with 6 loaves of banana bread, and after taste testing, I declare them edible. 

I made a goal to become a better baker during COVID, and I'm happy to say, I've much improved. But I still find myself in crises every time I bake, I still try to make way too big of batches of everything (I can't make a single batch of anything - no, never! I must always double at minimum), and I still make a really awful mess whenever I bake. I have to dirty every dish in the house. I can't help it!

After all that, I still had 36 bananas left in the box, so I set aside six to make a triple batch of banana pancakes for dinner tonight, and I put the rest in bags to freeze for smoothies. I already had 10 qts of frozen bananas in the freezer. Now I have 17. Have I ever told you that I hoard frozen fruit? Because I do. 

And that's enough about bananas.

In other news... here are a few things I'm feeling enthusiastic about currently:

Our family room - I'm just really loving having a family room. Sometimes I go down there and just bask in the fact that it exists; that we have this space to spread out a little (I'm in the family room as I type this). 

Using up stuff - For the past week I've been trying really hard to use what we have and not spend a lot of money. I've gone through our freezers and our pantry and made meal plans. I want to use up the stuff we've had around for a while, and if that means we have a dinner of garlic bread, hash browns, and banana smoothies, so be it! 

Books - I'm excited for a new year of reading. I've already finished two books - The Snow Gypsy by Lindsay Ashford and The Midnight Library by Matt Haig. 

My birthday presents -  I got some really fun things for my birthday. My friend Julie made me a quilt, and it goes great in my family room (it's on my lap right now, in fact). My friend Christie gave me three pairs of joggers that are super comfy. My mother-in-law gave me a penguin butler (I know you have so many questions... someday I'll write about the penguin  butler). Plus, lots of other nice things from family and friends. 

Aaaand I just got the low battery notification on my laptop, so this is where the fun ends. Things I'm not enthusiastic about: going upstairs to get my charger. If you've made it this far, I thank you for enduring through this mod podge post.