Happy Sunday.

Nutella stuffed peanut butter cookies.

I quit sugar for 33 days.

Then I fell of the wagon with a vengeance.

I went on a big old bender.

Specifically, a Nutella fueled bender.

It started with Nutella stuffed snickerdoodles.  Those were a super gross fail.

Then it ended with these.

These evil, beautiful, delicious, taunting, makes me want to cuss, they are so dang good, Nutella stuffed peanut butter temptresses.

No rocket surgery here.

I just dug my favorite peanut butter cookie recipe out of the recipe box, and introduced it to my vicey-est vice, Nutella.  A lot a lot a lot of Nutella.

Enjoy.

 Ingredients:

1/2 cup butter at room temperature
1 cup peanut butter
1/2 cup packed light brown sugar
3/4 cup sugar
1 egg
1 tablespoon milk
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 1/4 cup flour
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
Nutella for stuffing
White sugar for rolling

Cream together butter and peanut butter.  Add both sugars and beat together until fluffy.  Add in egg, milk, vanilla and mix until smooth.  Sift together flour, baking powder and soda, then add slowly to wet ingredients.  Mix until combined.
Place in fridge for thirty minutes.

When dough is chilled, using a cookie scoop, roll each ball of dough in white sugar before placing on a cookie sheet.  Don't have a cookie scoop?  Stop what you are doing right now and order one.  After living my whole life without one, I am pretty sure that I physically cannot make cookies without one.  If you like cookies to look all janky, and for your life to be way harder, don't get one.  But if you like pretty, uniform cookies, faster and with less mess, treat yo'self.

Speaking of treats, I recently treated myself to a silicone baking mat after wondering what the big deal with them was.  I mean how great could they really be?
I GET IT.  I get the big deal.  The cookies bake evenly, and slide off easier.  Everything about it is awesome. Except for the fact that I only have one.  Now I have to wait for it to cool between batches.
Sigh... pesky rich people problems.   It might be time to treat myself to a few more.

Back to the cookies...

Press your thumb into each cookie making space for the Nutella.

Lots of Nutella.

A big old spoonful of Nutella.

If you think that you have too much Nutella, you don't.  

Remember these are Nutella STUFFED cookies.  Not Nutella sparse cookies.

You need it.  You will like it.

Treat yo'self.

This is what the happy little Nutella mountains should look like.

Space the cookies out pretty far as well.

You will be using a heck of a lot of dough, and it tends to spread out quite a bit.

Next, take an additional sugar rolled, cookie scooped ball of dough, flatten it out slightly between your hands, then press it on top of the Nutella mountain.  Smash down the lot of them.

Bake at 350º for 11-14 minutes.  (My oven runs an exact 13 minutes.)
They won't look totally done.  Take them out anyway.  Trust me on this one.  You want them to be soft and chewy.  Let them chill out on the cookie sheet for five minutes before carefully transferring them to a wire cooling rack.

Then eat.  And eat.  Repeat.  Then get them the heck out of your house, because they are evil and addictive.  Plus, cookies shared, are the best kind of cookies.

Makes 18 big, beautiful, magical, willpower destroying, cookies.

The gift of frozen time.

Dichotomy is one one my favorite words.  Especially as defined here:

division into two mutually exclusive, opposed, or contradictory groups: a dichotomy between thought and action.


Perhaps the nerdy English lover in me, or perhaps how it seemingly, perfectly, describes my life.

I am torn between wanting to get through this emotional and tiring season of parenting, and grappling with the desire to soak in every single moment, without squandering even a second.

Time is a thief.  I want it to only steal away the memories of the tough times.  Lovingly leaving me the sweet and beautiful moments.  If only I could control it.

The silliness, the smallness, the friendship, the singing, the love, the beauty that is our little family...
That is what I am holding on to.  Through the training, the sleepless nights, the tears.  Because all of it, the happy and the sad, it is all, incredibly, wholly, absolutely, worth it.

Drew gave us the ability to freeze time.  She captured so perfectly what I want to hold in my heart, today and for all the days to come.  When time tries to thieve these moments, dim these memories, we will press play and be back in our little campground by the stream.  Where everything stands still.  Everything but who we are as a family.

Drew, thank you for this gift.  There are no words or actions that could adequately convey how thankful we are to have you in our lives.  Thank you for being a part of our beautiful story.

January photo challenge... complete!

So...
I totally broke up with Twitter for Instagram.
Because let's face it, pictures are pretty and words are, how do I say it... NOISY.

My life is noisy.  I wanted less info.  More pretty.  I like pretty.
Plus I like taking pictures with my phone.  A lot a lot a lot.  Enough to make my poor big camera all sad and abandoned.  Doesn't help that it is still fighting with my computer.

But back to Instagram...

When I saw this little photo challenge come through my feed I thought it would be fun.  An interesting way to start the new year.  Some structure to the picture a day 365 (or 366 this year) plan that I start every year, then eventually, often quickly, quit.

Some days I absolutely loved it.  Thinking of different ways to interpret the daily prompt.  Other days I groaned as things like mailboxes, on day four, filled my feed.  Really?  Mailboxes?  Lots of mailboxes?  The paranoid part of me did not want to snap a pic of mine, because who knows what murderer is one step away from a Dateline story as soon as they know where I live.  Because all he was waiting for was a pic of my mailbox to carry out his evil plan.

Then there was the inside of your fridge day.  Ugh...  Until I found kindred food friends who had things chilling, like my beloved almond milk, Cholula, and Sriracha.  Less murdery.  More hungry.

I am fairly certain that I have never actually done something for 31 days straight.  It might be a small accomplishment, but for this A.D.D. quitter, it is a big deal.  As for the February challenge, I make no promises.  But this happy January grid is off to be printed and maybe even put in a little scrapbook.

Unless I quit before that project even starts...


********
Edited to add a little how to for the above collage.  A little overly complicated how to.  Because I rig stuff.  I know just enough about a lot of things to get by.  But not enough of one thing, to make it easy.  This would be easy in Photoshop if I knew Photoshop.  But I don't.

So here you go:

I knew I wanted it to be square, so I mapped it out on a piece of paper.
To break it down, I knew I needed nine 4x4 boxes.  I spread out the white boxes strategically.

Then each day I added the text to the photos with the Phonto app.

I made the 4x4 collages with the PicFrame app.

Then I uploaded the nine 4x4 collages to Picnik (R.I.P).

Next, I sent it back to myself, added the January 2012 text with Phonto (totally hate all of the Picnik fonts).

Then I sent it off to be printed as a 12x12.

So you have it.  My seemingly way too many step process to make a big old collage.  Good luck!

Feel like jumping in and snapping your way through February?
I am going to be using the fun prompts thought up by my friends Erin and April.
Join me!

Check one off the bucket list.

I am a kid of the 1970's.
Many of my favorite childhood memories are wrapped up in adventures ventured in my parent's blue VW bubble top camper van.

 Jiffy Pop on the stove, curling up with dozens of books under my Winnie the Pooh sleeping bag, up in the loft,

our dog Daisy, campfires, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, Dinty Moore stew, the orange canvas Coleman tent, swimming, hiking...

Memories are made camping and road tripping.
Happy, magical memories.

So once in a while I troll Craigslist, checking out prices on VW buses.  Dreaming of owning our own.  Knowing that we had two too many kids to make it a reality, and the fact that I know ZERO about fixing cars.  But I still kept dreaming.

My bucket list has many realistic and a slightly few crazy things on it.

One is to own a VW bus.

Now I can check it off.

 I headed off to VW Surfari, wrote a check, and picked up my dream.
He showed me all of it's features, how everything worked, how tricky the ignition was, how different it was to drive than a normal car, then sent me on my way.

Nervously trembling, I drove off.

Stalled even.

But the windows were down, the sun was shining and I was driving what I thought was once an impossibility.

I was the proud new owner of a gorgeous red VW camper.

(For twenty four glorious hours.)

For this glorious shoot with DrewB.
More to come.
(I KNOW!!!!!!!!!)