Good weekend

It was, actually. We got a ton done on the house -- I've unpacked all my books and found places for almost all of them, and we bought and put together the new desk (our last one was an OD display and was falling apart from all the moving) and the library/office is looking so cozy! Once I get my loveseat in there and art on the walls I'm never going to want to leave that room! I need to build floating shelves above the loveseat for my antique books so Spencer can't get to them, and get a filing cabinet for our bills and house stuff and my writing so I can get back to submitting things to journals and filing my rejection slips.

Somehow it felt like a really long weekend. I still didn't want it to end, but at least I felt like I sucked all the marrow out of the time I had. At the end of the day there were still things I wish I had done (like finishing the laundry) but I still feel like I've made progress.

I think Spencer is teething. He had a horrible night last night -- Christen was up all night with his screaming. He's also figured out how to turn over from his back to belly this weekend, but he can't figure out how to scoot away from the crib walls so he gets stuck on his side against the bars. And for all my worrying that the swaddle was going to prevent him from learning -- he does it in his swaddle.

So this week's menu:

• Monday: stuffed pork chops w/ spinach, sun-dried tomatoes and goat cheese and fried okra (using up the last of the fresh okra from last week before it gets slimy)
• Tuesday: General Tso's chicken with white rice and snow peas (we nixed it from last week's menu)
• Wednesday: Beef Stroganoff and a side salad
• Thursday: Kikkoman stir-fry w/ brown rice
• Friday: brown sugar bacon-wrapped shrimp with vegetable skewers

I've decided to not plan the weekends because we usually eat out at least one night, and the other night we can have leftovers from the week. That's what we did last night -- I broke up the meatloaf into mac & cheese for me, and sauteed the leftoever pork tenderloins in medallions for Christen. He's supposed to take the pasta from Thursday for lunch today and then we are leftover-free for the week and I only had one pork chop that got thrown out. Amazing. I know that won't happen all the time, but I'm also trying to make smaller meals so we don't feel compelled to eat seconds and thirds to eat things up. For tonight I only bought two pork chops, and I asked the veggie lady at Publix to split squash packages for me so I only had 2 each of zucchini and summer squash. Beef stroganoff is a big meal, but I have no problem bringing that to work every day for a few days to eat it up -- delish! I don't mind buying larger packages and breaking them up at home, but it seems that nothing is on sale like that lately, so why bother. I have a smaller fridge anyhow, so I can't pack it particularly full.