Back to School

Everyone was pretty grumpy last night anticipating going back to school today.  I just woke up my oldest who has to leave for school first.  I have one more glorious day off, but everyone else has to face reality today.

I just spent the last hour lazing around in bed reviewing my blog posts and photos from last year on my iPad.  It turns out that we had basically the same day on 1/1/12 as we did yesterday with just a few slight variations.  I hadn't remembered until I read last year's blog post.  I guess we really are creatures of habit.

This year, I made monkey bread (vs. last year's popovers).  

(Recipe at the end of the post.)

No fresh squeezed o.j.  We haven't started receiving our Christmas oranges yet.  I muddled through with a mimosa (or two) with store-bought grapefruit juice.

After that, we left the kids at home (turns out at least 3/4 of them went back to sleep) to search for our 2013 datebook.  This year, like last year, we bought a family one, but I also bought a little Moleskine-sized one for my purse.  I live and breathe by my Outlook calendar, but I'm thinking that this year I might like to have something more personal and portable and tangible.

Then we went to the movies to see "Lincoln" (vs. last year's "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo".  Can't believe that was a whole year ago!) 

Then we came home and sat by our Christmas tree and spent the next several hours doing some hard core planning for 2013.  Neither of us are really planners by nature, but I have to say it feels really good once it's done.  We enjoyed doing our mini trips so much last year that we planned a bunch more for this year.  We have weekends planned (and hotels booked!) for January, February, March, May, June, and October.  I have the school vacations, camp dates, feis dates, high school open house dates all written down in my new calendar.  Of course, there's still all the every day stuff, but it feels good to have the big things blocked off.  

We even have a January date night planned.  Woo hoo.

Best of luck to you as you get back into your post holiday routine this week.

Here's my easy monkey bread recipe:

Ingredients:

3 tubes refrigerator biscuits

2 t cinnamon

1 1/2 cup sugar (approx)

1 stick butter

Preheat oven to 350.  Grease a bundt pan or 9 x 13 baking dish.  In a small bowl, mix 1 t cinnamon with 1/2 C sugar.  Cut each biscuit into four equal parts.  Roll those into balls and roll them in the cinnamon sugar.  Put all the balls into the baking dish.

Put any remaining cinnamon sugar into a 1C measuring cup.  Add the remaining 1 t of cinnamon and enough sugar to fill the cup.  Melt the stick of butter, stir in the cinnamon sugar mixture.  Spread that over the dough balls.

Bake for about 30 minutes.

Enjoy!

Comments

[fern]

I like the large planning in the beginning of the year! We don't do that now, but I think we'll start! Sounds very relieving!

I did want to say that my son was very excited for me to make your easy monkey bread this morning for breakfast. Turned on the oven to preheat and went downstairs(our main fridge is in our basement, yes) to get the tubes of dough, which I had purchased yesterday for this exact purpose. Unfortunately, my husband put the groceries away for me and mistakenly put the tubes in the freezer! Came upstairs with the tubes and butter in hand, turned off the preheating oven, and told my 7 year old that it's cereal for breakfast, or wait an hour or two for monkey bread! He's napping until breakfast.

Have a fantastic day!