Haven’t blogged a lot lately, probably because I’ve been sitting around doing nothing. Not exactly! This is holiday week – Christmas Eve, Christmas, New Year’s Eve, my Birthday, New Year’s Day and our anniversary.

To summarize, our normal activities were off for the last couple of weeks, but we got new front windows, re-financed our house (woohoo for low interest rates!), had Brett’s parents come visit, had several playdates and visited with friends in from out of town. Oh yeah, and all the holiday stuff. Fortunately, Brett had two four-day weekends for us to enjoy a lot of family time.

I tried out a couple new recipes for Christmas dinner: bacon-wrapped pork tenderloin and from-scratch green bean casserole. Only a couple tweaks to the recipes – I marinaded the pork in Dijon and apple juice for a little bit before cooking, would do even longer next time. For the green beans, I put those delectable fried onions on top instead of panko.

I also did some ranch mashed potatoes and rolls from a tube. It was a tasty meal. I didn’t want to get too crazy since we’d thrown a curveball and introduced my in-laws to tamales the night before (which they liked).

Now we have to get motivated to take all the Christmas decorations down. We seem to be rampantly blowing fuses in our Christmas tree; each day a new branch or section is completely out. Eh, we’ll deal with that next year.