Lifestyle
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Baby Back Ribs with Coffee-Infused BBQ Sauce
This shop has been compensated by Collective Bias, Inc. and its advertiser. All opinions are mine alone. #MyKCMasterpiece #CollectiveBias With warmer weather arriving, we’ve nearly reached the time when I pack away my slow cooker and the gas grill goes into heavy rotation. I love to barbecue, and we grill year round. When we lived in Chicago, it wasn’t unheard of to shovel a path through the snow to get to the grill, and I’ve been known to hold a flashlight in my teeth as the sun sets early in winter and the patio lighting was negligible. In Wales, I mastered holding an umbrella over the grill so the rain…
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8 Reasons You Need to Go To Hay Festival
Note: This post featured events from the 2016 program. To view/book events for the 2017 Festival running 25 May – 4 June, click here to for current offerings and up-to-date information.* It’s early morning and I woke to the crash of thunder and a crack of lightning. Perfect. The weather is spot on to match my mood, because my hopes to be at Hay Festival this week were dashed by airfare prices, and I love my firstborn just enough to not sell him for passage. (Damn you, British Airways and your blackout periods for using air miles.) The stereotypical wet Welsh weather is falling here while lovely Hay-on-Wye is experiencing lovely weather. It’s been three years since…
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Citrus Roasted Mahi-Mahi
I confess, I do not cook fish as often as I should, despite the fact that three of the four of us love it, and it typically makes an easy (and fast) meal. Salmon, swordfish, and mahi-mahi are my three go-to choices at the fish counter of our favorite market. Leaving the soccer fields yesterday afternoon, I asked the Boy if steak (which was sitting in the refrigerator) would be too heavy before his next match. It was a tournament weekend, and he has been pretty diligent about taking his coaches direction on eating healthier. He gave me a look that replaced the typical response of “duh” and asked for fish, instead,…
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Swimming with Dolphins in Cozumel
I loved our little stay in Cozumel! We did loads of things, like Cozumel scuba diving and we even did something I’ve always wanted to do. There’s nothing like the thrill of knocking something off your bucket list. I was finally able to check off one: swimming with dolphins. While several of our port stops offered a dolphin interaction excursion, we opted for the Royal Dolphin Swim offered by Dolphin Discovery. This was a 60 minute adventure that included a foot push (I’ll get back to that in a minute), a dorsal tow, a handshake, hand target, and the chance to touch these lovely creatures. We met up with the…
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Exploring “Eye of the Collector” at the Perot Museum
My daughter is a bit of a magpie – a collector of things, some shiny, some not. If you open any small purse or pouch in her room, you’ll likely find a collection: plastic butterflies, acorns, pressed flowers, feathers, rubber bouncy balls. (I’m sure there is a fine line between her kind of “collecting” and hoarding, but for the sake of my sanity and the story, we’ll just call it collecting.) The newest special exhibition at the Perot Museum of Nature and Science focuses on the hobby of collecting – and why people (and museums) do it. After all, that’s what a museum does: they conserve and collect the world as we…
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Revisiting Carnival Cruises – 15 years later.
Oh, the stories I could tell about the cruises I took with friends throughout our twenties and early thirties! Starting around 1995 right up until 2001, I cruised on Carnival nearly every year with friends, and did we have a good time! (Such a good time, in fact, that when we showed up on a cruise one year, we found that much of the crew had moved there from the ship we sailed on the year before – including the piano bar musician and our favorite deck waiter – who remembered us from the year before. By name. Let’s just say we had a really great time on all those Carnival cruises. Perhaps because of…
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Soup’s on – Slow Cooker Minestrone
A bowl of soup and a grilled sandwich is probably my all-time favorite comfort food, whether I’m feeling under the weather or burrowing in on a cold day. Recently my hubby came down with a terrible cold and just looked miserable, and I thought that a warm bowl of minestrone soup was just what he needed. I’ve been experimenting with various recipes over the years, and this is the result of my tinkering. I love cooking soup, especially when I can put it together in the morning and let it simmer all day. Other than a quick saute of fresh veggies, this is all cut and dump, if you will. My…
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On The Go Breakfast Egg Muffins
This shop has been compensated by Collective Bias, Inc. and its advertiser. All opinions are mine alone. #QuakerRealMedleys #CollectiveBias Do you know what my biggest struggle has been as the kids have returned to school this week? Waking up and getting EVERYONE moving extra early after a summer of sleeping in! Since birth, my two have been early risers and it took until kindergarten just to get them to sleep until 7am. Something switched in their brains this summer and they both took to sleeping in until 8 or 9 – fantastic until school starts, and with it the 6am wakeup call. I don’t know who is having a more difficult time…
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Home Away from Home: Residence Inn
Recently I drove to Austin with some fellow bloggers for the Disney Social Media Moms Conference “On the Road”. Since the conference officially started at 8:30am, I knew making the four-hour drive from Dallas EARLY that morning would be a deal breaker – nope, there was no way was I going to be up at 4am to make the drive, then do it all again after lunch. This girl needs her beauty sleep! Enter the Residence Inn by Marriott – a family favorite. In addition to the things like free wireless internet, flat-screen HD TVs to veg out in after a day of driving, what I like best is that there are…
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Life is always an adventure at Sea World Texas
My family loves and adventure and can’t be still for long. When the opportunity to attend AdventureCon at SeaWorld in San Antonio arose, we jumped at the chance to attend. Unlike other blogging conferences, this one was a family conference. While I was attending the Saturday conference sessions at the hotel, my family would be treated to experiences of their own with trainers, and have the chance to explore more of SeaWorld and Aquatica. Aquatica was the real draw for the kids – when we visited SeaWorld over spring break earlier this year, the weather wasn’t cooperating and it was too cold for us wimps to brave the water park (we…
