Sloppy Joe Pie

I love trying out new recipes, especially simple ones like these. I threw this together last night. It was very quick and easy to make and very yummy. It's only six ingredients: Beef, Onion, BBQ sauce Biscuits, Corn & cheese.

Check out the full recipe here:
Equilibrium blog

If only Paige would've eaten some. She did surprise us the other night and ate most of a turkey cheeseburger! She's getting a little better with trying new foods. The trick is to just put a little bit of food on her plate, and only one thing at a time. I think she gets overwhelmed if there's too much variety to pick from. Last night she wasn't very hungry at all. She had a few bites of corn and a banana for dinner. She must've ate well at daycare during the day.

Getting There

Finally, it seems like things are getting done and we’re getting a little more settled in each day. It’s amazing how smoothly things seemed to have gone for us in AZ. We sold our house in 2 months, sold our car in one day. Sold many of our belongings very easily on craigslist and made some good cash for them. And then we moved here and it seems like there was one roadblock after another. As much as we tried to get things organized in advance of moving here, it still took awhile to get things like Dish and Cable set up. Then there was the car situation. My car that was being transported from Phoenix arrived a week after their guaranteed arrival date and many many frustrating conversations with that company. While waiting for my car to arrive the AZ registration expired on it, so it was top priority to get it registered once I had it here. But first we had to get our drivers licenses and insurance. The day we went for our licenses we waited about 2 hours and then their computer crashed and they told us to come back the next day. After we got that straightened out, the next day, I went to get it registered. But the title I got from the bank was incomplete, so they told me to call the bank and come back when I got a new title or letter from the bank. Why couldn’t anything just go easily so we could cross it off our list?

This week seems to be going a bit smoother. We finally have 2 cars! We drove out to Pittsburgh on Saturday to pick it up since the dealerships out here didn’t care enough to make us a good deal.

I did get what I needed from the bank, so I went back and was able to get the car registered. Today I dropped the car off for inspection and emissions testing (something we didn’t have to do in AZ). It passed! Today we also went and opened checking and savings accounts. That took about an hour to do, but it felt good to cross off the list! There’s not much else that we need to run around and get done on lunch breaks or in the early morning. We need new cell phones. We get crazy looks when we give out our phone number with a 480 area code. It’s such a small town that they don’t even expect us to say an area code since everyone has the same one!

I’m thinking about getting an iphone. I’m not usually big into getting the last technology and gadgets (that’s usually Justin), but I think an iphone will be tons of fun. Will it be worth the extra $30 monthly fee? We’ll see.

July - a look back

I was just browsing through some old pictures. Here are some pictures of Paige from July 06, July 07 and July 08!

July 2006 - 2 months old

July 2007 - 14 months old

July 2008 - 26 months old

Shoes

Paige loves her shoes. Grandma and Pop visited this weekend and bought her dolly a pair of shoes. I'll let the pictures tell the story...

Oven/Stove Safety

A little while back, I posted how Paige had managed to open the oven door. Of course, we couldn't just always keep her out of the kitchen, so we bought an oven door safety lock. It's cheap and effective. Here are some reviews on the lock.

In our new place, the oven/stove is gas and not electric. Also, the knobs for the stove are right above the oven door and not on the top back like they were in the old house. These are pretty much just at eye level for Paige! The other night, I was sitting in the living room and thought I smelled gas. Someone (probably Paige) had turned one of the knobs just enough on the lowest setting to turn the burner on so that gas would be coming out at a slow rate. Luckily I had smelled it and we turned it off and aired out the house. Immediately we went to the computer to find locks for the burner knobs. We came across these online.


The reviews were mixed. Sounded like it could be a hassle when cooking. The actual stove knob fits inside these plastic cases. After reading several reviews, we decided to take the advice of one of the reviewers online and just remove our knobs all together!
I don't know why we hadn't thought of this ourselves! Without the knobs, the gas can not be turned on. They slip on quickly enough when we do have the stove in use that it's no big deal.

Wisconsin Trip

We had a great time on our long weekend to Wisconsin. It was nice to spend some quality time with Paige again too. We've lost a little of that since the move. Here's Paige driving Great Grandpa's tractor.

Paige being cute. She was doing a lot of that. She was so well behaved the entire trip. We messed up her naps pretty badly, but she was still a trooper.

Here she is chewing grass just like great grandpa.

Great Grandpa's cows. Surprisingly she wasn't all that frightened of them. We never actually touched them, so I think that helped that we were sort of at a distance. She would "moo" to them.

Paige checking herself out in the mirror.





















Grandpa, Mommy, Daddy & Paige. We're at the dog park that is being donated to by Aunt Judy's memorial fund. It's a huge beautiful park where dogs can run free. Hopefully they will be able to get some nice exercise equipment or other fun stuff for the dogs in memory of Judy.

















Riding on Grandpa. If you click to enlarge the picture, you'll notice she's chewing on grass again. Once she learned that from grandpa, she was doing it all weekend!





















Four generations

















Here's a picture of her playing at the Milwaukee airport. Not many airports have such a nice, or any at all area for kids to play while we wait. It was nice to not have to chase her around the terminal for 2 hours!

Heading to Wisconsin

We're going to Wisconsin tonight and staying the weekend getting back in town very late on Monday night. I'm not really looking forward to flying again based on my most recent experience just a few short weeks ago. But I think this is going to be a really nice trip for us. We can take a break from thinking about unpacking and getting the house looking decent for a few days. Paige will get to meet some Aunts, Uncles, second cousins and even a great-grandfather that she has never met! She'll also get to see cows and I can't wait to see her reaction when she gets to be up close and in person. I'm thinking she might be a little frightened, we'll see. We're not planning on taking a laptop either...taking a break from that too! So I'll post with some pictures when we get back on Tuesday.

Have a great weekend.