An Eventful Weekend

Ron decided that we would have a family day at Incredible Pizza in Urbandale on Saturday.  We were slow to get started and didn't get there until 2 or so.  We paid $130 for the five of us.  That covered an all you can eat buffet (we had both lunch and dinner, plus snacks) and four twenty dollar swipe cards for arcade games.  We did go carts, bumper cars, mini golf, mini bowling, lots of arcade-style games, and some preschool games/rides.  It was lots of fun.  The food was decent.  We were there until after nine.  It was worth the cost.  Ron had to talk me into it.  I hate those kinds of places--too much noise, flashing lights, etc and I feel like we are just throwing money into a hole.  But the kids were surprisingly good and had a blast (that part was not a surprise).

Sunday was our first monthly freezer meal swap.  My friend Kim has been looking to do this for about a year or more.  We finally got it done and it was so simple the way she set it up.  There are various ways to go about doing a freezer meal swap.  Some groups decide on menus, purchase the ingredients, divvy the cost, and come together to cook for an afternoon in someone's home.  They make several family sized meals and divvy these out to the various families involved.  Other groups assign types of meals to each family and each family brings enough of that meal for the other families to take home.

Our swap was the simplest variety.  Each family brought in as many family sized servings as they wanted.  We then took turns picking out as many items as we brought to take home.  There were so many yummy items to choose from--mac and cheese, manicotti, tilapia, pulled pork, meatballs, just to name a few.  All of the items are freezer friendly and now we each have a few home cooked meals in our freezer for those short evenings we all have.  So much better than the tv dinner style frozen meals.  New foods for the family too!  I brought home a pan of homemade mac and cheese and one of manicotti.  I didn't have time to prepare more due to our impromptu trip on Saturday.  I did save some of the pulled pork I brought in my own freezer though.  I'm excited to make this a monthly tradition.

In other news, both older boys had great conference reports from their teachers.  Both have made great strides in reading and math.  Colby needs to talk less (he gets that from me...) and Braedon could use some flash card work on math facts.  I just love their teachers this year.  I feel like the boys are making great progress and the personalities of their teachers match with those of my boys, makes for a good year.

I'm hoping to get past this writer's block.  I'm a bit frustrated with some stuff at work that involves my kiddos and for confidentiality purposes I can't blog about it.  So whenever I try to think of something preschool-related to post I can't get past that stuff.  I have a post about ADD bouncing around (appropriately) in my head as well as some other reading and baking related posts.  I will try to post a bit more frequently, but I can't make any promises...

As a reward for reading to the bottom of this disjointed post, I'm posting here the pulled pork recipe I got off allrecipes.com (love that site!).

Pulled Pork
Need--pork roast, root beer, bbq sauce, buns
1.  In the crock pot place the pork (I had a large tenderloin I cut into manageable pieces and cooked 4 lb at a time) and 2-3 cups of root beer.  Cook on low for ten hours.  Cool.
2.  Pull apart pork.  Mix in a bottle of bbq sauce.
3.  This is where I placed it into freezer baggies (approximately 8 servings per bag to go with the pkg of buns I bought) and labeled.
4.  The morning prior to serving, move the meat to the fridge to thaw.  Warm and serve on buns.  Yum!