Books to read in 2014

Last year, with all the hubbub of becoming a new mom my reading severely suffered. I started the year by not even getting close to finishing A Casual Vacancy, which previous to Dax being born would have taken me five days at most, and ended with me having only read one or two books I hadn't read before. I reread The Hunger Games, and Sisterhood Everlasting. I know I read more than three books last year but I can't for the life of me remember what I read. I don't like that. This year I decided to make a list of books to try and read all of them and when I get to the end read more.

 I have 11 books, I've already started the Walt Disney Biography and it feels great. I'd forgotten how nice it is to read a new book! If anyone has any suggestions based on what I have listed please tell me!

Walt Disney: An American Original

Johnathan Strange and Mr. Norrell

How to be a Hepburn in a Hilton World

The Spectacular Now

The Aviators Wife

Where'd You Go Bernadette

Z: a Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

The Darcy's of Pemberly (I have possibly read this but I love Pride and Prejudice based fiction so much I don't mind if I read it again.)

The Chaperone

The Art Forger

Divergent

Also, as I finish books I might write a blog post to review the book. A friend of mine, Jaimie, did this and I thought it was pretty cool so I'm going to try it out.

Tater Tot Casserole

Whenever I find a new recipe on Pintrest I'm pretty excited when I have all of the ingredients. When I found the tater tot casserole last night I decided to look because I had literally just bought some tater tots. After looking at the recipe I found I had all the ingredients and it looked really easy so i decided to try and make it tonight.

Like I said its a really easy recipe. Nothing too fancy but the end result as pretty good!

The original recipe is here. But I'll type it out for you as well.

Ingredients:

1 lb Ground Beef

1 Diced Onion(I learned I can't dice an onion so next time I'll use dried onions.)

1 can cream of mushroom or celery soup

1/4 cup sour cream or milk

1 Cup grated cheddar cheese

1 bag frozen tater tots

Pre-heat oven to 375. Brown ground beef in a skillet. Add onion when the meat is almost done. When browned remove beef from heat and add soup and sour cream/milk. Try it and season to taste. Pour mix into a 8 or 9 inch square glass pan. Top with cheese and put as many tater tots as you can fit in one layer on top. Bake for 30 minutes. Let cool and enjoy!

Some things that I noticed were:

~I could have cooked it longer. I like really crispy tots and 30 minutes was just barely crispy.

~I had to use mozzarella cheese because I forgot our cheese grater broke. It tasted fine with the different cheese but I think cheddar would have been better. 

~Obviously this recipe is pretty basic so next time I have a few ideas to spice it up a little!

It was an easy, fast recipe and I think it's going to become a regular for our house!

You've had a birthday, Shout Hooray!

Its about a week and a half late but Dax turned one on the third and got to celebrate a lot! On his actual birthday I made him pancakes with fruit for breakfast. Also he got a drum with different shaking instruments from Ryan and I.

Then after Ryan got home from work his family came over. We didn't do much more on his actual birthday because the party was planned for Saturday.
The big party was supposed to have both sides of our family but a lot of my family was sick so the party was done in two parts. On the day after Dax birthday his Gram and Grump Dean and Aunt Lea had pizza with us, played games, and had cake and ice cream. It was pretty fun having them for the week-end even though the original plan was altered. We also got to open presents from Ryan's Aunt Margaret which I had wanted to open since we got the package before Christmas.

This past Saturday, My family came down and we had Dax's birthday part two. We did pretty much the same thing as the other party but we had more people! Dax probably didn't really care what was going on but he seemed to enjoy his visitors both times.

Here are some pictures of mainly the second weekend because Ryan took the pictures on his phone the first weekend.