I am lucky brad puts up with me most of the time. It has never been a secret that I am not the tidiest person. And while I swear that I have not become any MORE of a slob since … Continue reading
Cork Board Jewelry Organizer
Category Archives: Love & Marriage
Recycling Wedding Crafts Into Everyday Crafts
2011 was (and still is) an amazing year for me and my family. The highlights? It was my parent’s 35th wedding anniversary! My sister graduated from University of Delaware! My dad turned 60! My brother and sister in law found … Continue reading
The Annual Pumpkin Carving
“At Publix. Going to buy a pumpkin to carve tonight”
“Mind if I join?”
That’s how it all started. So romantic, right? A couple of texts, and then Brad came over and we were on our first date.
Brad and I started off extremely passive. Our friend Sarah can tell you how we drove her crazy with our texting before we started dating. She’d be out with me and I’d be texting Brad the whole time. Then she’d be somewhere with Brad and he’d be texting me the whole time. But we never all hung out together. And Brad and I had never hung out outside of work. As much as Sarah tried. We just had our texting affair.
Until those two texts.
His mom was in town for the week, and I think he at least waited until she went to bed to come over and carve pumpkins with me. I bought the pumpkins, he brought the carving materials. Which turned out to be a couple of steak knives and a pirate hat. We made it work.
And that was kind of it for us. He even braved downtown Orlando Halloween and came out with us the next night when I painted myself and our friend Sarah green.
Best. Halloween. Ever.
Oh, and Sarah was very happy the texting affair was over.
So every year since, we’ve carved pumpkins on October 30th for our first date anniversary. It’s usually the day that we realize Halloween is coming up, we are way behind and we should probably have a pumpkin.
And of course once we got Gibson, she got her own pumpkin every year, too.
We’ve gotten pumpkins from grocery stores, farmer’s markets, fancy pumpkin farms, and city corner pumpkin patches with Pony rides. In Florida, New York, and California. In four different apartments. And last night we basically stumbled off of a flight from Elmira to LAX and carved pumpkins on half an hour of sleep. Whatever the situation, we carve our pumpkins.
Five pumpkins strong and counting. xoxo
HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!
This little piggy
If this picture from our wedding isn’t an indicator of the pig influence in my life, here is another.
My husband loves pigs. He works at a restaurant (Ford’s Filling Station, check it out) that is decorated with pigs. They get in 3 or 4 huge pigs every week and hold pig dinners for groups who want to try everything from pig brain and eyeballs to crispy pig tails. they specialize in using every part of the animal, from snout to tail.
When Brad first started working at Fords, he started posting pictures of his every day activities on Facebook. This included a lot of dead piggy pictures. Brad cutting up piggies, all the cuts of piggies, hanging sausages…
He started getting messages from friends back east just making sure I was safe living with and being married to such a butcher. I started pushing my social media knowledge on him and asked him to censor the pictures he displayed for everyone. Case in point, he butchered an entire pig the other day and very proudly showed me a picture of a pile of cuts of pig meat with the triumphant head sitting right on top.
“I didn’t put this one on Facebook, Kels.”
Sigh. Of. Relief.
I am extremely proud of him and his piggie loving ways. They gross me out every now and then, mostly when he makes me try eyeballs or bone marrow or yet another chicken liver invention. But the man knows pork. And I reap the benefits of all of those pictures that are not posted to Facebook.
But Brad left me here in Maryland last night so he could get up to Ithaca before this afternoon, which happens to be the only appointment he could get with his favorite tattoo artist while we were home.
He is getting a pig tattooed on his arm.
Love
Having a little trouble with the blog a day challenge. Only because yesterday I was recovering from a bit of a hangover and trying to rally for leah and dans big day.
And today I was most definitely struggling again, but the photo shoot I discovered today on my cell phone makes all of this hangover worth it… At 2 am at the Pikesville hilton, we were still rocking hard. Obviously.
Happy wedding leah and dan!!! Love you both!
Soaking Addicts Anonymous
I had my very first request for a blog post from a fan :). Thanks, Dan, for making me feel famous.
He was right though, I left you all hanging. I told you about Brad and all of his kitchen rules and then all I gave you was a story about keeping your hands clean. People have heard about wet hand, dry hand. You need the chef’s wife inside kitchen rules. The ones nobody even knows exist.
So here is kitchen rule #2.
Never Leave a Dish in the Sink with Water In It
I call this soaking. Brad calls this gross.
I think I developed this habit to justify not doing my dishes right away. You fill a used pot with water and all that food and sauce still stuck in there get to slowly dissolve so dishes are so easy to clean whenever you get to them! Genius!
Especially when it comes to bowls of oatmeal. You don’t soak that bowl with a teeny bit of oatmeal left on it? It sticks like cement. You need a Brillo Pad to get that stuff off.
Shoulda soaked that bowl.
I seriously never noticed (or thought it was a big deal) that I did this until about a year ago when I was once again making fun of Brad for how he put dishes in the dishwasher. Bowls and glasses everywhere. In every direction. We could barely fit a days worth of dishes in there and there was no way they were ever going to get clean. It was my dad in me coming out when I asked him, once again, to put the big white bowls on the bottom shelf. All facing the same way. Pretty, pretty please.
“Alright fine. I will do that if you promise not to leave pots in the sink with water in them.”
WHAT?!?!?
This, my friends, is one of the secrets to marriage, right? Compromise. I get the bowls, he gets the water in the pots. And I don’t even really leave water in pots. That’s crazy. Who does that?
One point for Kels.
“Deal.”
Except the next couple of weeks I stopped myself from filling up pots, pans, bowls and dishes like 767868755 times. Turns out, I had a serious soaking problem.
Brad realized how hard this was for me and even cut me a little slack. Apparently it is ok to leave dishes in the sink (for a short period of time), as long as there is no water in them. But it turned out he doubly won this compromise because every time I’d fill up the stupid pot with water, I would realize what I was doing and then just wash it to get it out of my sight.
Stupid Pot Soaking Addiction.
I have to tell you all, I have not completely broken the habit. I actually chose to tell you about this rule next because the night I had a request for another kitchen rule, I was making burgers for Brad who had worked another 14 hour day. As I was frying up some bacon, I caught this little guy in the sink…
So Brad is doing much better with my kitchen rule than I am with his. But he’s a professional. I would expect nothing less from him. Brad invented the kitchen rules. I’m still a rookie in this game.
THE KEY OF KELS 
