Menu Plan and Updates - Week of November 2nd

Trick or treat!

Last week brought Halloween and trick-or-treating.  Jack was super psyched this year for trick or treat and all but ran from house to house.  He was very polite and in the days leading up to the event he was teaching everyone from Molly to his cars and trucks the proper way to trick-or-treat: "first you knock on the door, and then you say, 'trick-or-treat!' and then they give you some candy for your bucket, and then you say, 'thank you!'"

Molly was an insta-pro trick-or-treater.  She walked right up to houses to collect her candy and walked for over an hour around the neighborhood refusing to ride in the stroller.  Obviously it's not cool for not-yet-2-year-olds to trick-or-treat whilst riding in a stroller like a baby.  Obviously.

The day following Trick-or-Treat was actually Halloween.  Molly rocked her strawberry costume all over town and refused to take it off all day.  

Speaking of not-yet-two... Molly has hit the TEST ALL THE BOUNDARIES stage of toddlerhood and the last 2 weeks have been extremely challenging.  I remember hitting this stage with Jack and was all... where did my sweet baby go?!?!  And yeah, it's even more challenging with Molly because, of course.  So basically, picture anything that involves Molly cooperating.  Okay, now picture her making that task as difficult as humanly possible.  And now repeat that over and over again all. day. long.  By about Noon I'm so exhausted from it all I could cry.  Or run away.  Or hide in the closet.  Or eat all the Halloween candy.  Typically it's that last one that happens ;)  And then she does something super cute because, look at that face!  And I decide I'll keep her after all.  It'sjustaphase.It'sjustaphase.It'sjustaphase...

In better news... shutters are up!

Love it!  The green was just kind of meh.  Green is green, at least it was tolerable, but not something I would choose.  I love the new color scheme.  I actually think it gives our house quite a facelift.

Here's from the other side so the garage is actually included.  My car was in the way of my picture taking.

Much fresher.

And a close up of the door:

It's actually not a great picture because the sun was blazing right onto the door and causing weird reflections, but RED!  The color actually turned out beautifully, I think!  The door looks really great in person.  We ended up doing 2 coats of gray-tinted primer and then 3 coats of Valspar Posh Red exterior paint.  If you're going red USE THE TINTED PRIMER!  Red is notoriously hard to get good coverage with and I feel like our system worked beautifully.  I've seen other people having to use upwards of 7 coats of paint when trying to paint with red.  That's just crazy. This tutorial was really helpful.

We also updated the hardware to an oil rubbed bronze.  No more brass!  The oil rubbed bronze looks awesome with the red, and bonus, it better matches our other accents (house number, mailbox, porch light, etc.), which we replaced a while back.  (Wow, that was 5 1/2 years ago!)

In other, random, news:

We've been nomming on some seriously delicious jalapeno jelly that I made and canned using some of our over abundance of jalapeno peppers.  Jalapenos seem to be the only thing I can grow, but that's not such a bad thing.


Here's what we're eating this week:


Sunday:  Leftovers

Monday:  Chicken and Dumplings

Tuesday:  Turkey Apple Panini with Baked Sweet Potato Fries

Wednesday:  Skillet Ground Beef Stroganoff

Thursday:  Leftovers

Friday & Saturday:  Out