Another beautiful autumn Monday in Utah! I will never get over looking out our bedroom window in the morning to see the whole of the valley lit up, either with twinkling city lights because it's still dark, or with golds and pinks from the sun rising over the mountains.
It has been an eventful week. We've had a trunk-or-treat, I visited my grandma on her birthday, our house is nearing completion, and I'm making fruit oatmeal--a random tidbit, but we just finished heaping bowls of orange steel cut oats for breakfast, so it's on the mind. A month or so ago, my mom told me that she had been making steel cut oats in her pressure cooker with a whole apple thrown in. Not a cut up apple, just an apple, sitting in the oatmeal, pressure cooking away with cinnamon sugar. At the end of the cook, the apple is soft and mashable, so you remove the core and voila, apple-cinnamon oatmeal for breakfast. I gave it a try, and wow! Just as simple as making normal oatmeal, but all of a sudden you've included a fruit. Boom, I'm in my 30s. During peach season, I did the same thing, throwing peaches from my parents' tree in whole with a batch of pressure-cooked steel-cut oats. I didn't even bother peeling the peach; by the time it had been through the pressure cooker, the peel was so soft and mashable that you couldn't even tell it was there. Plus, fiber! And, not having to peel a peach!
This morning I noticed a bag full of untouched, oversized clementines in our fridge. Because oranges are already pretty soft, I decided to throw one in with a batch of steel-cut oatmeal in the rice cooker. My favorite method for cooking any variety of oatmeal is in the rice cooker. I just press the "white rice" setting, dump in 2 parts water to 1 part oats, and now throw in a peeled orange and some cinnamon sugar, and let the rice cooker take care of breakfast while the kids wake up and make their way downstairs. 10/10 situation, would recommend. I ended up adding a few drops of almond extract in with they orangey oats because we were out of vanilla, and it was a hit. If you want to give this a try but are intimidated, just ask gemini or ChatGPT to help you out and they will walk you through it (pressure cookers intimidate me so that's what I do).
And now for some pictures and captions describing the highlights of our week:
^^Lagoon! We went right at opening on Saturday so we could be in and out before the scary stuff comes out at noon. We should have been going all fall, it was such a great time.
^^I missed taking a picture with my Grandma Roper on her 98th birthday, but I snapped this selfie on a stop by the lake on my drive home. I learn so many practical life lessons when I visit with my grandmother. This time I walked away with the following wisdom:
1. Don't decorate our new home quickly. Take my time. Live there and think about where I want to put something up on the wall, but don't rush the process. (I needed to hear that.)
2. Buy my flowers and bulbs at a garden center. You get what you pay for with plants, and the quality at a garden center is so much better than at a big box store.
3. Ask for priesthood blessings often.
4. Put a tension or curtain rod somewhere in our unfinished basement in our next home, and hang all my off-season clothes there so I don't have to take everything on and off a hanger to store it in a box each year. Brilliant!
^^The cabinets are in at our house! All the cabinets in our home are this stain. It's a tract-home community so we don't get to choose any of our finishes, but I think I like them. The floor and cabinets are a little cool-toned for my taste (I don't love gray in my wood floors). But what I do like about them, particularly the cabinets, is they toe the line between warm-toned and cool-toned. The cabinets are a color I'm not sure I've seen before, and is difficult to describe even. I like that. "The best colors are the ones that can't be described" is a tidbit I learned from my go-to interior design podcast, Dear Alice. The cabinets almost have a white oak look to them, with some definite gray undertones, and perhaps a subtle hit of pink in certain lighting. Again, gray isn't my favorite, but because it's like a gray-tan hybrid, they can read warm or cool. I think that will give them more longevity as cabinetry trends come and go. I'll definitely change out the hardware at some point, but I'm going to take my grandma's advice and go slow with design changes. The countertops will be white with veining that is very similar in color to the cabinets. Hopefully the counters will go in this week!
^^We are having a quintessential Halloween this year. Jack wanted to be a knight, so he is wearing the costume that Jared's mom handmade for him to wear one Halloween when he was a kid. Alice wanted to be a ballerina, which she already had the costume for. I'm grateful for a low-lift year in the costumes department, as we're once again in the midst of packing up for a move.
^^Our first trunk-or-treat we've participated in! This was for a joint ward Halloween party. I told Jared, "I'm signing up for the chili cookoff, but I won't be decorating a trunk. If you want to sign up to do a trunk, go for it." A trunk seems like something that would be right up Jared's alley, which is why I phrased it like that. In typical man fashion, he heard: "Jared, you have to sign up to decorate a trunk. Do it. Now."😂
So the day of the trunk decorating, when he seemed a bit frazzled about it, I said, "Jared you don't have to do a trunk. It's optional. You didn't have to sign up." And he was like, "WHAT." His trunk theme was "Halloween decorations I took from our house and placed into our trunk"😂 The juxtaposition against the other trunks, which were all elaborate and themed to try and win the "best trunk" contest, was pretty funny. But at the same time, I love being able to give a classic, pared-down vibe to our costumes and trunk, even/especially being surrounded by really creative family Halloween costumes. Everyone had a blast at the party. We didn't win any awards, but we were able to walk literally across the street to our house whenever we needed to grab something, which is a major award in itself after spending a decade living far away from our church buildings.
^^They hired a cotton-candy spinner for the party. She had flavors like "pink pineapple coconut" and "pumpkin spice." I got passion fruit. What a fun world we're living in. (I went dressed as a witch. Jared found a faux beard in our costume box and went as "random wizard guy" or "Radagast," depending who asked.)
We'll finish with this picture of my morningtime sweeties. I never know when they wake up if it's going to be a morning of conflict or a morning of sweet sibling breakfast-making and playtime. This morning was a good one. We grabbed a box of Jack's old 3t clothes out over the weekend, and Alice is loving dressing up as little Jack. After this picture Alice said: "Let's go play a-gevver (together) Jack."❤️
