Of Apples and Llamas

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Last Saturday, Nathan and I took a trip to a local orchard. We were able to pick our own apples, which neither of us had ever done before. Unfortunately, it was late in the season, and the only varieties left were red delicious and golden delicious. We could have gotten other varieties from the store, but we wanted to have the experience of picking them. 

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We also had fun going through their corn maze. It was interesting going through with Nathan. He has a really good sense of direction, and somehow he was able to track every turn we'd made and which paths we had and hadn't been down. I would have been wandering through for quite awhile had I been alone.

We also got to hang out with a llama and a couple of goats. The llama refused to let me pet him, but I was kind of worried he would eat my hand off anyway.

We had lots of fun, and today I got to have fun with some of the apples we'd bought. Neither of us really enjoy eating raw apples that much, so I decided to make some of them into apple crisp. I used this recipe, cutting it in half. It looked easy enough, but halfway through the baking I noticed the apples looked like they we're getting a little dry. I ended up taking it out after 50 minutes (the upper end of the recommended baking time). The apples still weren't particularly soft, but I was worried they would get way too dry if I'd left them in longer.

It wasn't bad though. Nathan gave it a B+ to A-. He said sometimes his mom's apples crisp was really good and sometimes it wasn't, so I was happy with these results for my first attempt. It may have been better with a different kind of apple.

Any tips on making apple crisp?

The Nerd and the Free Spirit

When it comes to the budget, Dave Ramsey says one spouse is the Nerd and the other is the Free Spirit. The nerd enjoys numbers and coming up with the budget, while the free spirit doesn't care about it and feels controlled by it.

It isn't so black and white with Nathan and I. We're both nerds in some ways, but we can also be free spirits. While Nathan may seem like the nerd at first glance since he loves accounting and is working on an MBA, I have kept records of my earnings and spending since I was 11 years old and engage in what Nathan refers to as "stalking" our bank accounts online ("Did you enjoy that Arby's you had for lunch?").

When it comes to creating the budget, Nathan is the nerd. He sets the amounts for each category each month, and he was the one who planned out our debt snowball. Although I offer some input, I remain the "whatever you want" free spirit for the most part. Being the Excel guru that he is, he set up an amazing budget tracking spreadsheet for us with all kinds of drop down menus and formulas.

However, in terms of actually tracking the budget and trying to ensure that we stick with it, I become the nerd. I'm the one who records all the transactions in our Excel spreadsheet and makes sure bills get paid on time. I will give Nathan reports and observations on how we're doing with the budget.

The important thing is that we both know where we want to be financially and we're working together to get there. If we agree on the budget, we shouldn't have any major disagreements over money.

What's for dinner?

"What do you want for dinner?"

"I don't know. What do you want?"

For the first couple months of our marriage, we didn't have the whole eating dinner together thing figured out. In fact, since Nathan was working until 7:00 or even later, sometimes I was too hungry to wait until he got home to eat. Once Nathan got an 8:00-5:00 job and I grew tired of the daily "What's for dinner?" discussion, I decided to try menu planning.

The challenge in menu planning (and part of the reason we had such a difficult time figuring out what to eat for our meals together) is that we don't exactly like the same foods. When I was single, I would often have a meal of just brown rice and a salad. I didn't eat very much meat. Nathan, on the other hand, only likes five kinds of vegetables, and lettuce is not one of them. Rice is fine with sauce, but he doesn't like it dry. As a bachelor, he would cook meals like lasagna or chicken alfredo. I just can't eat anything that heavy on a regular basis. I wanted to cook healthy meals for us, but I found it nearly impossible to find any healthy recipes that Nathan would actually eat. I would look through cookbooks saying, "Nathan won't eat it, Nathan won't eat it..."

The compromise I came up with was to have meat with every almost every dinner but to try to cook it in a way that is flavorful without being super fattening. Also, I make sure to serve it with fruits and vegetables so we don't fill up on just meat.

I plan out what we're going to eat for dinner for a week at a time. I generally just plan the main course rather than the full meal and just make sure we have enough to eat with each meal. Each Friday, I plan what we'll eat for Saturday through Friday of the next week. Then I go grocery shopping.

Here's the menu for this week, the sixth week I've tried menu planning.

Sunday: Barbecue chicken. We ate this with white rice, green beans, and biscuits with pumpkin butter.

Monday: Lemon tilapia. The recipe I'm using is for lemon-chili tilipia, but I'm leaving out the chili powder since Nathan doesn't like anything spicy. (I can always add some to my serving.)

Tuesday: Scrambled eggs with ham and cheese and blueberry muffins.

Wednesday: Leftovers. We're in a Financial Peace University class right now that meets at 6:15 every Wednesday, so dinner has to be quick.

Thursday: Pasta and meatballs. I'm using this recipe but leaving out the cayenne pepper.

Friday: Grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup.

Is it super healthy? Not really, but Nathan is willing to try new things and take "baby steps" towards healthy eating and I try to eat more fruits and vegetables than I do meat.

Anyone have some healthy yet tasty recipes without vegetables?

Finding a New Normal

After all the wedding gifts were unwrapped...

After all of my stuff was moved out of my old apartment...

After we bought a few more things that we needed to be able to live together...

It was time to figure out how to live together!

How do we spend time together when you're both working full time, and one of you is also working on an MBA and multiple computer certifications while the other tackles most of the cooking and chores?  

How do we cook meals when one of us is a "meatitarian" who hates nearly every vegetable and the other doesn't even eat meat on a daily basis?

What do we do when one of us is a total night owl who takes forever to get up in the morning and the other is an early bird who shuts down fast around 10:00 each night?

This is the journey that we're on right now. Were we aware of these traits in each other before we got married? Absolutely, but it's still an adjustment when you aren't used to seeing each other every day. 

How to live together...how to be a wife...that's what I'll be blogging about now.

For anyone still interested in reading about our wedding, I have the pro photos now, but I'm doing all the editing and sorting myself (since I'm a control freak/tight wad/masochist). So, it'll take me awhile to get those posted. I just decided I should go ahead and switch gears to blogging about newlywed life while we're still newlyweds. :/

Honeymooning Part 4: King's Island

And, finally, the fourth and final day of our honeymoon. We spent most of it at King's Island, and since they usually frown upon taking pictures on rides, we don't have a lot to show.

This is Nathan on the Zephyr (the big swings), our second ride of the day. Nathan isn't a big fan of rides, so we started out with the smaller ones. I managed to get him on two coasters: the Backlot Stunt Coaster (formally known as the Italian Job) and Flight Deck (formally known as Top Gun).

We spent a lot of the day at the Boomerang Bay water park. While I find the gigantic water slides much more terrifying than a roller coaster, Nathan loves them. I still went on all but one of them with him. The Awesome Aussie Twister left me with chest pains, but I survived.

Now that King's Island's kids' park is Planet Snoopy, I was really hoping to get my picture taken with the "real" Snoopy, but the only member of the Peanuts gang we saw was Linus.

Snoopy loves me.

 

After leaving the park we stopped at Big Boy for dinner, where we got to pose awkwardly with the statue.

The next morning, we left our motel and headed back home to start the next adventure: living together. It has been a learning experience, but still a lot of fun. I hope to start chronicling our new journey on this blog, so stay tuned if you'd like to hear about it.