Brandy Ink

The Best Salsa Ever

A few months ago, I got really sick. It was just a flu bug but it knocked me on my butt and really scared me. I took it as a wake-up call from my body. GET HEALTHY! And so, for the past few months, that's exactly what I've been doing and boy am I having fun eating healthy.

My daughters planted a herb garden a few weeks ago and now I've been trying all sorts of recipes just to find uses for the fresh herbs. Pictured above is probably the best darn salsa around. It makes my mouth water just thinking about it.

2 mangos

2 red peppers

1/2 red onion

1 jalepeno pepper

juice of 1 lime

1 cup cilantro

1 tsp chilli powder

1 tsp cumin

Chop everything up, throw in the spices, mix, and you're good to go! I think it tastes even better if you make it a day ahead. That way, the spices have time to soak in. So yummy!

What do you get when you ask a two-year-old to smile?

 

Here's my favorite niece. Well, my only neice, but she's still my favorite. I asked her to smile for the photos, but she didn't know how. She gave it a really good effort, and I was laughing my head off because she thought she was smiling but really, she looked like she was in pain. So cute!

Love this Commercial!

Polka-Dots

Do your kids ever get stuffed animals that you kinda fall in love with? It doesn't usually happen around here, but seriously, Polka-Dots (pictured above), is pretty friggin' cute. I just checked out the website of where Polka-Dots was made, and the Bon-Bon Collection is pretty friggin' cute too. I'm thinking I should live vicariously through my daughter Keiryn and order her up a few. You know, so I can snuggle them when she's not looking.

Thank god for kids!

The Garden

My friend Beth is the best. She's like part of the family. We call her Super Beff. After my husband passed away, she stepped into our lives and picked up the pieces. She cooked. She cleaned. She looked after my girls. She did the every day tasks that at-the-time, seemed like way too much for me to handle. My kids started calling her Super Beff. Because really, she was SUPER, like superman. And the "Beff" part came because they couldn't pronounce the "th" in her name because they were so little. Since then, the name Super Beff just kinda stuck and we still call her that, almost five years later.

Part of the reason we call her Super Beff is because she comes when we call. Kinda like this: "Beff, we need you to help us plant a garden because we have no idea what we're doing." And in like five minutes, she meets us at the greenhouse, spends a hundred dollars (of our money - which isn't really that super) and gets us all the things we need. Done. Like. Dinner.

Then, she comes over and spends a few hours planting with the girls.

Here's Super Beff showing them how it's done... cause you know, even though she's SUPER, she's also someone that likes it done the Super Beff way :)

They ended up planting tomatoes, baby tomatoes, lettuce...

Cilantro, mint, peppermint, chives, parsley, basil...

Strawberries...

And I think that's about it.

It was a super fun day. Kienna (my 10 year old) has promised that she'll look after the garden for the summer and if she keeps the plants alive through the summer, she asked if she could buy an ipod touch (with her own money) as a reward. She is determined to prove how responsible she is. Good for you Kienna, and good luck! It will be interesting to see how many of these plants survive the summer... I hope Kienna's green thumb isn't similar to her mother's or we could be in trouble!

Thanks Super Beff! We love you!

 

Andy Warhol Month

I love seeing what the students come up with in art class. Their creativity and talent makes me smile. We studied Andy Warhol this month and the kids created all sorts of cool stuff. The self-portraits they did which were inspired by Andy Warhol's Marilyn Monroe turned out absolutely amazing. I'm so proud of them all. I'm having them made into neck ties for them. The students are suppose to give them to their dads for Father's Day gifts, but once they saw how cool they were gonna be, they all got really selfish in a hurry and wanted to keep them for themselves. I can't say I blame them! Check it out... here's a sneak peak of what they will look like...
Awesome right? And then we have Sophie's version of Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans:

I love these. The students got to pick their own soup flavors and she picked the people in her family as names. Isn't that sweet? And she did a bang-up job on the coloring. Great job Sophie!

Thank you to all my students this month for being better than awesome. I love my job.

The Wake up Call

"Sometimes, the worst things in life open our eyes to the good things we weren't paying attention to before."

Today was a good reminder of what I have begun to take for granted. Grady. We've been together for two and a half years now and we're engaged to be married. I love him to death, but like everyone, we have our ups and downs and it isn't always peaches and cream around here. I get crabby, he gets crabby, and we both get tired. It took a day like today to remind me how much I really do love him and how lucky I am that he's in our life. It's not that I'd forgotten that, but you know, every once in a while we need a good reality check.

Grady arrived at my shop this morning... he was suppose to be working.... when I looked over and saw him, my heart sunk. I could tell that something was wrong. He looked green. My heart started pounding and my post-traumatic stress immediately kicked in... is he having a heart attack? Was he in an accident? Did something happen to my kids? Who's dead? A million thoughts raced through my mind until he finally said, "I think I'm going to throw up" and then I knew, he must have one of those flippin' killer migraines that he gets every so often. After he emptied his stomach into my toilet, I rushed him up to the emergency room.

They rated his headache as a two out of five (one being the worst). So, pretty severe. I felt so bad for him... I actually cried as I sat there and watched him scream out in pain, clench his fists and announce that his face and hands were numb. He looked so scared. I couldn't help but worry as I watched him curl up in the fetal position and rock back and forth after they shot him up with a variety of meds. He couldn't open his eyes. He was shaking. He was talking but wasn't making any sense. He didn't know where he was. It's hard for me to describe, but he was in so much pain, it was truly hard for me to even watch. I felt sick to my stomach. I felt helpless.

Because of all the pain he was in, and because this migraine felt different from all the others... I sort of panicked a bit and started thinking that maybe it was something more serious than a migraine... and then I started having these awful flashbacks of what it felt like to lose Chris. I started imagining my life without Grady. Would my girls ever recover? Would I ever recover? And OMG, I love him so much. I just couldn't take it if I lost him.

Thank goodness there was nothing wrong with him except that he had a bad migraine. Like, I mean, his vitals were fine and all that. So that's good. And I'm not glad he got a headache or anything, but, it sure did remind me of how wonderful my life is and how damn lucky I am to have him in my life. Just feeling that glimpse of pain creep up to the surface today, was enough to make me love him even more. I really can't imagine my life without him.

Thank goodness you're okay babe. I love you.

Photo by Natalie Santano