The Weekly

The Weekly is a Friday, Sunday... or maybe just about any day, round up. The Weekly is a processing and a record. It is a mix up of currently and around here with a look at the past and the future. 

Loving: baking, standing mixers, pinterest recipes and feeling like I can actually successfully make some/most of them

Challenged by: Gratitude for things that seem like a pain in the butt. Grace for people that cut me off. Grace for people I love including myself.

Learning: to love the process. I found my love for the process with baking recently and now I feel weird on nights that I'm not making/baking something. It's no longer a rush, it's a process and I don't even eat that many of the treats I make, I generally give them away. The enjoyment others get out of them makes it so worth it.

Adventures: I saw CATCHING FIRE with my younger brother, then Saturday Dan and I went to Sea World. 

Reading: Bittersweet by Shauna Niequist. She was a speaker at the conference I went to in Nashville and I finally picked up one of her books. It's lovely, and so necessary to my mindset right now. I have noticed a huge difference in positivity in the past few days since starting to read it. Funny how that happens.

Cooking:  Baked Donuts of all sorts like Ol' Dirty Bastard (plain donut with chocolate glaze, peanut butter swirls and crushed oreos) and Maple Bacon. I might try a chocolate donut with peppermint glaze at some point. Who knows. 

Also in the last week I have made: brownies, chocolate chip cookies, slow cooker creamy chicken, muesli bread, nutella hot chocolate with cinnamon whipped cream, slow cooker french toast, oatmeal chocolate chip pancakes
and tonight I am making slow cooker banana cinnamon oatmeal

Working on: Slowing down with my cooking. I get this way about a lot of things. When I'm in to working out I do it all the time, when I'm into cooking and baking I do it... well, all the time. Whatever I am stoked on I want to do just about all of the time and start feeling a little weird when I can't. I don't want to go out, I don't want to be social, I just want to read/cook/bake/organize/blog/whatever. I think I keep going because I don't want it to run out, or I want to do as much as possible of the thing until I burn out, because I feel like burn out is inevitable. At least with me. I still have more to learn with loving the process for sure.

Celebrating/Moment of gratitude: getting a lot of things done on a Saturday night. For the first time in a while ever in our relationship Dan and I spent the night at my place and had nothing that needed to be done in the morning. It was glorious. I made the poor guy entertain himself while I cleaned my room and put away clothes from the weekend and did laundry, I also made him breakfast for dinner, and then I cleaned a little more. He was also a great sport about going to two different Targets and a Bed Bath and Beyond in one day. The same day we went to Sea World no less. He's definitely a keeper. So basically, this whole weekend was a moment of gratitude... and Friday. Holy canoli, my new boss gave us all our Christmas bonus Friday. I was floored by her generosity. I was then able to buy some more work clothes that I've been eyeing, put some away for Christmas gifts, put some toward my credit card and the majority in savings.
As for the little moments... 

Random thought: It started with thinking about how a cafe in the Oceanside courthouse doesn't take cash. Then I thought maybe they just really had a hard on for the olden days which made me think that maybe they would get wooden teeth if they could which then led me to think of how a mouth full of wooden teeth would smell. 

Emotionally: feeling grateful and adored 

Lovely Links:

I've been allowing my brain free rain with the neurosis, I've been needing to remember this /// My Problems Aren't Your Responsibility
Two blogs/bloggers that get to my heart every post /// Allison Vesterfelt and (the aforementioned) Shauna Niequist

In closing, this week has been wonderful. I've crossed so many things off my mental to do list it's crazy. I'm so grateful for everything this week has brought my way.

xoxo