What Up?

Have you ever felt that telling someone you'll be doing something is the surest way to ensure you won't do it? I think I've got this accountability thing backwards. I'm pretty sure I told everyone they could expect updates by checking this blog right before I stopped blogging.
So the last three months in a nutshell:
Vacation.
Baby.
Studying.
Socializing. (Shocker)
Baking.
It seems like all the single males in our family have gotten or will be married by the end of the summer. All at various locations stateside and over seas. Congrats! Then of course was my high school reunion...I still don't feel grown up enough to have graduated 10 years ago. Whoa. How random all this goes down the summer I give birth. Really, if I were prone to conspiracy theories this would be begging for some explanation. Luckily I'm not that paranoid. :)
Our newest addition, Marcus, is definitely not at fault for my lack of attention to...well, anything really. I'm convinced he is the easiest newborn ever. He is completely agreeable, amazingly portable (and not just because he's tiny *sigh*), and absolutely adored by his big brother. Even as I'm typing this I feel the sudden urge to pinch myself. Of course there was a serious adjustment period for me. The transition from meeting one child's needs to meeting two children's needs was terrifying. I had a couple rough days after mom left but it was all in my head, as usual. I do realize how much I love sleeping longer than two hour intervals. Luckily Marcus is already sleeping six hours a night. Of course there is a lot more to our newly expanded family dynamics than that but this was supposed to be a quick update since I logged on and promptly lost myself in food blogs for, ahem, too long.
During all this change we've been building our food storage which in turn is leading up to Bryan building something for us to store all the buckets now populating various parts of our house. Another random coincidence all these orders went out and were delivered right at baby time. Since food has been on my mind so much I decided to finally take the plunge and actually do what we've been casually tossing about the past year. We're eliminating processed foods from our diets. There, its out there. I'm now waiting for the urge to go and buy every box of macaroni and cheese on the shelves of my local market...nothing yet...I'll keep you posted.
Now I'm definitely not planning to go cold turkey. I still have an amazing stockpile of pasta from one of my coupon trips and I'm not going to buy bushels of tomatoes to produce my own sauces. I'll be using up what we have and not getting more. Except the tomato sauce. That will have to do until I can get a bumper crop of my own tomatoes grown which is not looking promising for this season at our community garden.
(Ah, but we laughed. Right?)
Anyhoo, I've known making the switch would be better for us but I lacked the confidence I could manage to produce home cooked everything while juggling my boys, school, and my daytime charge who returns next week. The good news is I forgot how much I loved to cook. Ok, the fact I forgot that isn't the good news. The good part is that I  LOVE to cook and making dinner has actually been more of a chore because I've been using processed stuff. As I've started to do less and less prepackaged goods I've had more and more fun. I know, everything about me is counter-intuitive. Derek asked for macaroni and cheese and I made it from scratch in time for dinner without even breaking a sweat. And it tasted waaay better than Kraft, thank you very much.
My big stumbling block has been baking. I have tried three batches of  fresh ground whole wheat bread and still have not had a success. Since I fancy myself a better than average cook and I'm terribly over dramatic, the less the perfect outcome of any dish is devastating. There are simply no words for complete failure.
So the past week I've put on my absolutely adorable apron and got busy getting flour on my nose. And baking. So far I've managed to produce delicious banana bread, chewy bagels (another Derek request), and light and fluffy crescent rolls. The last has even convinced Bryan, who is was a devotee to bread from a tube.
Okay, so one paragraph on new baby and like five on food. I have issues. Pictures will follow...I mean of the food, of course :)