Hello Weekend!

/ playing equals learning / morning at the beach / baby, kitty, and milky / banana pizza for breakfast

I have so many recipes I want to share with you but it will just have to wait a teeny bit longer. I feel like I'm living in perpetual vacation while at the same time working non-stop. It mostly has to do with the beach and the fact that we have a maid. That's the vacation part. The work part is everything else. 


It's funny how the career I'm going after, being a writer, happened because of my kids. I only really started writing online because I wanted to connect with other moms and because I wanted to document our family's life through recipes and pictures and stories about parenting. So really my kids are to blame for the dream job that I now have. 


Most likely when I go back to California I'll go back to working outside of my home and back into the classroom, teaching undergrads, a job I also love but not a career I want long term. Needless to say I'm soaking in every minute of my vacation type life in paradise where I get to play and I get to write.

Christian and I are very similar in that we are planners. He with his Moleskin Planner and me with my iCal. We have planning sessions. We make lists. We wake up thinking about what needs to get done and we go to bed talking about what we want our dream house to look like in 20 years, down to the color of our eco-friendly toilets. Planning for the future is good but it's also a little dangerous, if you're not careful planning ahead can rob you of the present.

I was making a bucket list of things I want - living close to the beach, living somewhere warm, living in a house I liked, living close to family, a job I loved, a flexible work schedule for both Christian and I, eating healthy, feeling fit, happy kids, and straight teeth. These are all long term things that ... I. HAVE. RIGHT. NOW (minus the straight teeth). Sometimes when I want something really bad I fail to see that most likely I already have it. Maybe not in the way I imagine it but I have it none-the-less.

Every day I get to exercise, hang out with my kids on some beautiful beach, write, live in a clean house, eat nourishing food, teach my kids something new. Every day I get to hang out with my Christian whenever I want because he gets to be flexible with his time. After the kids go to bed I like to sit by Christian and talk about our day and our finds. He shows me surf videos and talks about his project and I show him things like this and talk about my projects. Then we work a little bit more and then we go to the kids' room and kill mosquitoes that have gotten into their mosquito nets. Seriously, it's our night time ritual.

Do you know what I don't get to do? I don't get to write recipes every day. I don't get to do all the things I feel I need to be doing to have a "successful" blog. I don't get to pitch stories to magazines and I don't get to work on that cookbook proposal I keep telling myself I need to start on. It's a matter of time and a matter of priorities but mostly a matter of just plain impossibilities. You can't do it all. Don't even try. I try kind of a lot and I fail. Then I throw everything up in the air and I quit trying and things get done. Not everything, but somethings. All this to say that I've been super busy with



// Interviewing Tyler Florence and hopefully not making him feel bad about his oops moment.
// Guest posting on Moovision 
// Writing for Inhabitots where  I share a beet recipe and where I share a life recipe for giving memorable non-store-bought gifts.

I've also been busy teaching Enzo how to swim and 


// deciding if I should try to make my own chocolate bark
// reading foodie gift guides like this one and this one
// finding new cookie recipes to make, so many to choose from
// concocting my own tiny sandwiches and my own crackers
// reading lovely mommy blogs like this and feeling the urge to have a home birth, one exactly like this one.
// But because I'm not planning on getting pregnant any time soon I instead consume my time with trying to figure out what I can put on top of this vanilla and clove panna cotta. The recipe calls for honeyed persimmons but I don't have any persimmons in season right now. What should I use instead?

xoxo
Happy Weekend.