I felt guilty until...

I'll get to the guilty part in a minute... First off, we are putting our house on the real estate market here soon....yes again. Some of you are cheering (ohio) and some of you are jeering (virginia). We're gonna give it one last shot, so we'll see what happens.

So what does that have to do with this blog post, well I'm glad you asked. We're getting the house in order and that means that we've got a short list of things to accomplish around the house to get it ready for showings. One of the items on our list is to clean out closets and dormer spaces throughout the house. Everyone worth their weight in HGTV/TLC salt knows that clean/empty closets are always a positive when showing a house and being that this is the third time now that we've put the house on the market, we've done this a few times now. We always joke that our house kind of takes a breath of fresh air in relief when we put the house on the market because we purge pounds and pounds of weight from it's structure each time.

The first closet we tackled this morning was a shared closet in the office/sewing room. Both Melissa and I work out of this space so the closet is shared space as well, so we both had items to de-clutter and dispose of. We took care of that task in about 30 minutes and I decided to move to my closet next. I sorted and sifted and ended up with two piles. Pile one, a bunch of shirts that now fit after losing some weight since Christmas...woohoo, and pile two, stuff that is going to Goodwill. After finishing my closet I told Melissa that I kind of felt guilty about how many articles of clothing I had. It is an area of weakness for me, so while it felt good to give a lot away, I also felt guilty for just having way to much in this area.

Then Melissa decides we should do her closet next, but the difference is that Melissa keeps a lot of her clothes in boxes upstairs in closets and dormers, so we made our way upstairs and this is what we came downstairs with to sort through...

I count about 11 boxes/bins total. I never knew she had this cache of fashion tucked away. I was proud of her though. Just like me, she was able to reclaim some clothes that now fit due to slimming down and made a great pile to donate...

All together we filled up 3 contractor sized plastic bags and will take them to our local Goodwill. There's some good stuff in there too! Here is what Melissa widdled the 11 bins down to...

So after all of this I feel blessed that we have extra clothes and extra food in the pantry and extra money and extra I could go on and on forever. But I don't feel guilty anymore because Melissa had way more clothes than me just laying around :)

-jay

heat map

This is called year view on iCal. They describe the colors as a heat map. I suppose it is a quick way to look at your year and see if a date is open, which days, weeks or seasons of life will be busier than others. 2011 was a big year for us as a family, mostly because our life was changed in infinitely amazing ways related to having our first daughter Charlotte, maybe you've heard of her.

I've got a little bit of rain man in me so it is fun for me to look back over this heat map and remember what some of those red days were and how I was traveling or working all day long. The orange days were a little less busy, yellow was just one or two things and white means I had exactly nothing on my calendar for that day. Now before you go and judging me, this is a shared calendar so it includes more than just work related appointments. Like that yellow week of July 17th for instance. That was our first big family vacation! It's fun to think about last year. What we accomplished, what we experienced, the trips we took and on and on. Which leads me to this...

This is 2012's heat map. Not so hot yet, but it will be...but in a good way. Red days mean I'm living life and white days mean I'm resting. I'm excited to see how this year fills up. Not just for busy-sake, but for the sake of living. I will turn 30 this year (and so will Melissa). We always joke about how we'll never grow up and how we'll be old and still acting like the 15 year olds we were when we first met. Life is way to short to not enjoy it. Charlotte will turn one this year and I can't even describe how excited I am so see how she grows and changes over the next 12 months.

So look back over 2011. What did you accomplish? How many red days did you have? How many white days did you have? Were you present with your family and friends? Did you make your days count?

My dad has a phrase, like all dads do I guess. But one of his phrases says, "Every day is a holiday and every meal is a feast." I hope you have that kind of a year. Sure, have red days, but make sure you carve out some white days too.

-jay

pin-ter-est

So the other day I’m heading to our local grocery store with Charlotte and like many other times Melissa needs me to pick up a few things. This time around it’s ingredients for a recipe that she found on you guessed it...Pinterest. Nowadays when Melissa is looking for a new recipe she doesn’t head to recipes.com or even food network’s site...no she heads first and foremost to Pinterest. The place to go to discover, compare and in this case, the place to go in order to find something to do on a Saturday night. Let me tell you what I mean.

So I pick up the ingredients. A little butter, light corn syrup, brown sugar and a few more odds and ends. Couple this with the fresh apples we picked last weekend and you’ve got a wife who is interested in making carmel covered apples. And not just the regular kind mind you. Melissa wants to first slice the apples insert toothpicks and make carmel apple slices, because, “everything is better when it’s miniature.” After consulting with both of our mom’s she doesn’t receive a good report. Her mom tells her to call my mom, so not a whole lot of help there. My mom says first of all, “carmel is very difficult to make.” And secondly, if you accomplish in heating it to exactly 248 degrees, “you probably won’t be able to get it stick to the apple flesh” due to something about pectin. But one thing I love about Melissa is that she’s not afraid to try and she always wants to prove people wrong (I hope Charlotte inherits some of that). So what would have been a fairly relaxing and lazy Saturday night at the Hess house suddenly turned into Willy Wonka’s candy shop.

Melissa bathed Charlotte and I put her down for the night, but before I went upstairs to put Charlotte down Melissa let me know that we needed to make the carmel apple slices tonight because tomorrow was going to be busy. Now I could have declined this candy making apple extravaganza completely, but I have to admit that after we shared a delicious carmel apple in Seattle a few months ago I was interested to see if we could really replicate something so delicious in our very own home. So I melted some butter, Melissa measured the brown sugar and corn syrup and I began to stir over medium until it boiled. While I stirred, Melissa cut apples and pierced the slices with toothpicks. Remember, “everything is better when it’s miniature.”

I stirred for a long time and that’s when Melissa broke out the white wine and man she hit it hard...just kidding, but the photo is funny. We slowly got the temperature up to 248. I kind of felt like Marty from Back to the Future trying to get the car up to 88mph while trying to produce the 1.21 gigawatts necessary to to make things happen. Eventually it boiled we added some sweet condensed milk and eventually some vanilla and voila, carmel.

Now for the moment of truth. Would it stick to the apple flesh? Come back next week to find out

Just kidding!!!

It did stick! Pretty well at least. It definitely stuck better to the skin than the flesh, but I think we were pretty pleased with the results. We chopped up some peanuts and sprinkled the slices with the nuts and some mini m&m’s.

Overall it was a pretty fun project. We both got a little bit of hot carmel on our hands but survived and what would have been a dull night sitting on the couch was a fun moment where once again, as much as I make fun of Pinterest, it has some great content and has produced some great food, home decor and general humor in my life. So the next time Melissa starts talking about the next big idea she found and wants to try I’ll probably respond by saying, “Yes, that sounds ‘pinteresting’ to me."

-jay

jay & charlotte

Melissa is back at school. She went into school the last week of the school-year back in June, but except for that she hasn’t been to work since March 11th. She is ready to be back and I’m excited for her. She loves what she does, the people she works with and is definitely in her sweet spot teaching fifth graders. It was a gift to have Melissa home for essentially the first six months of Charlotte’s life and we are gonna try as best as we can to score the same timing for our next child.

Fall means Melissa is back to school, but is also means that my traveling schedule will pick up a bit. Melissa had some teacher in service days last week and I was out of town for work so it was Charlotte’s first time spending a few days at one of our best friends house. We’re excited that our friends were on board about watching Charlotte. They have two kids of their own and were gracious enough to take on one more. We are so happy that we did the whole sleep training thing because now when our friend needs to put Charlotte down for a nap, it’s not a big long drawn out process. Charlotte spent three days there last week, but this whole week, I’m not traveling, so Charlotte is all mine.

It hasn’t been just Charlotte and me for an extended period of time since June when Melissa went into work for the last week of school. She is a whole different baby than she was back in June. I know I’m biased, but I think she is a pretty easy baby. I’m looking forward to this week and getting to spend time with her. Yesterday we took a trip to the doctor (for me), ran to the post office and played a lot. I also scored some free Chick-fil-A for Wednesday morning so that will be our first of many dates that I plan to take her on (even though she can’t partake of the heavenly chicken just yet). I’m sure we’ll go on lots of walks and read lots of books and have a great week.

All her bottles are washed, I’ve got her clothes out and ready to go, diaper bag stocked, just waiting for my little lady to wake up from her nap so we can start the day.

-jay