Been a long time since we last posted, so I'll update about late spring and early summer.
Us, Family, and Little Yager Bears
We brilliantly decided that we should start treating ourselves to a massage every 3 months. After our last appointment in March, we felt SO good afterwards, we thought, "Hey, HEB is right here...why don't we get some Nada Moo??" And in typical Yager fashion, we overdo everything, hence five pints of Nada Moo (dairy-free, oil-free ice cream). Yummy!
We've enjoyed laying out in the sun hoping to get a tan this year. Sweet Ethel jumps at the opportunity to cuddle with Mommy. If there is ever a purchase you're considering for your back yard, a four-point mounted hammock is definitely one of them. Worth every penny.
Behind-the-scenes photo of the making of the
Adoption Announcement sign. Marked off the spaces for each word before painting.
And...done! Just needed to hang it in the spot where the photo was to be taken.
For Easter we hosted a pancake lunch for our family. Banana pancakes with blueberries, banana butter, and fruit preserves...so sweet and delicious! Pictured above is Lisa (Michael's mom) in the back left, Jeannine (Michael's grandmother) in the front left, and Alice (Christine's grandmother) on the right.
It was also special because BJ and Michael's nieces, Trinity and Grace, stopped by on their way home to Abilene. The family photo was photo-bombed by Ginger.
Trinity hugging BJ. Trinity and Grace enjoyed playing some frisbee with Uncle Michael. Drove the dogs nuts running back and forth trying to steal it from them!
Grace loves our cats, especially Fred.
One random Saturday, I planned a surprise date for Michael. It was so much fun! We woke up and I surprised him with a new breakfast we had never tried before: gluten-free, vegan French toast. Oh. My. Goodness. Super filling and total comfort food. Topped with fresh fruit compote and a light dusting of powdered sugar.
Then I drove him to our local farmer's market that is setup downtown on Saturday mornings. We bought some fresh tomatoes and homemade jelly. Next, I drove him to a prayer garden/park at a local church near our house. It's a hidden gem in the city that is hardly ever occupied. There are so many trees, shaded benches and sidewalks - it's a perfect place for a quiet picnic.
Eating our picnic lunch together...with matching shoes (Altra brand).
For the picnic lunch, I made egg-less salad sandwiches, and kale and beet salad (not pictured).
For dessert, I made chocolate pudding with homemade Nilla cookies and fresh banana slices. Having taken this dessert to social gatherings, I can promise you that vegan and meat-eaters alike find this truly decadent.
We started a new family tradition this year: dewberry picking. I can't believe I grew up never knowing that there were fresh wild blackberry-tasting fruit available for the picking in our area! Our friends Robert and Maradee invited us to some private land to pick dewberries. That's how we filled most of this 16-cup container. BUT, we enjoyed ourselves so much, that we thought we should try searching around our house and neighborhood too, just in case. And what do you know? We have several dewberry bushes growing in our neighborhood!
With the huge bounty we collected, I made several dewberry cobblers (pictured with homemade banana vanilla "ice cream").
I also made dewberry fruit preserves (chunky jam). We like the whole bits of fruit in our jam. Pictured here on top of homemade mango ice cream.
The month of May is always very busy in our family because it contains Mother's Day, Michael's and Meemaw's (Alice's) birthday, and our wedding anniversary. It's a birthday tradition in our family that the other spouse makes a birthday meal for the birthday spouse. For Michael's birthday this year, he requested that I make sweet potato and spinach lasagna. This meal is so tasty and filling and is one of our favorites, even though it's a little more time-intensive than other dishes we make.
And for his birthday dessert, he requested: Chocolate chip cookie cake, Nada Moo vanilla ice cream, with hot fudge and chopped peanuts. I made the cookie cake on a large jelly roll pan, and melted baker's chocolate with some honey and almond milk for the hot fudge. It's so decadent, we made ourselves sick eating so much of it! (Now that the tummy ache is gone, it was worth it, lol.)
For our 7th wedding anniversary...I had to travel to a conference in San Antonio for work to speak the next morning. Michael also had a work meeting the next morning. But we made lemonade with our lemons and Michael traveled in our personal car with our dogs, and I drove a work vehicle to San Antonio so we could celebrate our anniversary with dinner and quality time together. We stayed at a Drury Inn (special place in our hearts after our desperate need for shelter on our
road trip to New Mexico), which is a pet-friendly hotel. After checking in, we took our dogs with us and went for a walk at a nearby park that had a beautiful pond and Korean memorial structure.
After dropping the dogs off at the hotel, we went out for dinner at
Vegeria. The whole restaurant is vegan and gluten-free, so the only thing to look out for is oil and higher-fat ingredients. Since this was a special treat, we didn't worry too much about splurging this one time. I ordered some sweet potato enchiladas with poblano corn rice.
Michael ordered the "Road Trip Burger" with poblano corn rice.
We get super giddy when we get to eat out at a restaurant that serves plant-based food!
Delicious!
We splurged on dessert as well. We really had no choice in the matter - the restaurant was running a sale of "buy 2 get 1 free"...there were two of us, so we were already going to order two desserts...it would have been wasteful to not get the third free (hee hee). Pictured here is a peanut butter cupcake (was our favorite of the three).
We also got a double chocolate chip cookie (second favorite) and a slice of peanut butter cheesecake. The cheesecake was surprisingly our least favorite because it was just too rich. They clearly put coconut or some other kind of oil in the filling, along with peanut butter, and it had an obvious oily taste, whereas we would have preferred just a peanut butter taste.
Michael scraping every crumb from the cupcake wrapper. :)
Confession: we're obsessed with Whole Foods. We keep hoping they will build one in B/CS, but until then, we're stuck having to visit them when we travel to bigger cities. It's always fun to visit a Whole Foods because every store is unique. They usually have a wonderful prepared foods section that lists all ingredients clearly and has many vegan and oil-free dishes (usually where I choose to eat when I travel).
Ginger and Abby in the hotel, worn out from the excitement of the day. It's always fun to travel with them!
Our sweet friends, Allen and Julie, sent us our first baby gift for our Little Yager Bears. It's a "vegetable bed" with soft-stuffed vegetable characters - so adorable! :)
Pet Children
Ginger is a piglet and will take any and every opportunity to eat food, even measly crumbs in an empty cat food bag. She's always entertaining us!
"The Force is stroooong with you." - Dog Sidious
Ginger loves her Daddy
Ginger managed to get herself under the blanket
Such a sweet memory I'll cherish
This is how Ginger greets us most mornings when we come out from our bedroom. She is ready for loving!
We ordered some pet food online and decided to wrap Ginger up with the packaging material when it arrived.
Sweet face!
Pooped puppy enjoying the porch fan.
Close sisters
Hershey gets desperate for petting sometimes and will cling to my leg like a little kid!
Garden Update
Michael has been hard at work in the garden this spring. After planting all of those fruit trees over the winter, his next goal was to prepare three vegetable garden beds. I love the white vinyl fencing he used!
He sprouted all of the vegetable plants from seeds this year (except for the banana and bell pepper plants - he bought those as transplants).
It was his hope that the dogs would stay out of the vegetable beds...but they are rascals and did not (Ginger especially seems attracted to the organic fertilizer that Michael uses). So, we decided to build a fence around the vegetable beds. Michael designed the whole thing himself and attached it to the side fence.
His wood shop...a.k.a. the back porch
He clamped the pickets into place before screwing them in
Finished screwing all pickets into place. Next was building and attaching the gate.
He carefully leveled and attached the gate so it opens and closes easily - much harder to do than originally thought!
Next was to build the arbor. He designed the curvatures himself.
First part completed (horizontal arbor beams)
All finished after adding the perpendicular cross beams
I think it turned out beautifully! We'll let it dry for a few months (and enjoy the natural wood look) and then paint it white.
Because he built the three vegetable beds where you previously saw, that meant he had to relocate the moisture wicking bed to the other side of the yard. He also fixed the drainage system so it has spigots instead of an open plastic tube.
And he's planting sweet potatoes in it! So excited to yield these this fall!
The corn is a beast! I'll remind you that these started from a seed this year, not a transplant.
Pattypan squash growing nicely...
And blowing up overnight. We've already picked two of them!
With gardening, it's important to keep fresh mulch on top so the plants retain moisture and are protected from the heat. So in typical Yager fashion, enough is never enough...so we ordered a dump truck full of mulch and had it dumped on our driveway.
Ta-da! We've worked hard wheelbarrowing it to the various beds that need more mulch and this pile is already greatly reduced to where we can pull our car in and out of the garage easily.
We've also enjoyed yielding several things from the vegetable bed already: chives, banana peppers, and radishes.
The banana pepper plants went crazy and are majorly producing. This is what I harvested in one evening, which was only about 20% of the total still growing!
