It's My Life

This week has been a super crazy one. The Boy has been gone this week. He is on vacation in Michigan.  We had severe weather hit our area Monday night. Before we could recover from that, Tuesday morning we had another threat in our neighborhoods. An armed gunman entered two homes in our area and shot a mother and daughter. Our entire community went into lock-down mode as the police searched for the escaped gunman for hours. Thankfully, The Short Chic and her Summer Activity Director (aka: The Babysitter) were not in our neighborhood during the lock-down. The entire community has remained pins and needles as no arrest has been made. We continue to pray for the health and recovery for the victims. We also try to balance our need for information with the families privacy and the police's ability to do their job.  With all of the craziness in our lives I have not taken a moment to reflect on our Independence Day weekend camping trip.  Once again we visited Wat...

Happy National S'more's Day! How appropriate is it that my family was camping with friends the weekend before National S'more's Day. We love s'mores and camping as often as we do affords us ample opportunities to create the perfect s'more. My perfect s'more has a fully toasted, maybe even slightly charred marshmallow hot enough to melt the chocolate.  Over the course of the summer we have experimented with different wafers, different marshmallows, and different chocolates.  In theory I wanted a Reese's Peanut Butter S'more but I found that traditional Reese's Peanut Butter Cups did not melt the way I like them to.  This past weekend, just in time for National S'mores Day, we found these Reese's Peanut Butter bars that resembles Hershey's Chocolate bars. My immediate hope was that they would melt like a Hershey's Chocolate bar.   My wishes were granted and the Reese's bars did melt in the most perfect way!...

The question at this year's Family Camp-Out was: How many ways can you fix a hot dog on a campfire? We had some fun answering that question! First: The Traditional Roasted Hot Dog There is absolutely nothing wrong with a hot dog cooked on a stick over a fire. The cooker gets to control how cooked the dog gets. I personally prefer mine with a fine coating of burnt!  This is how my daughter prefers her hot dog with a little ketchup and some chips. She is happy as can be! Second: The Campfire Corn-Dog Oh, this was new to us all. We all know corn-dogs are deep fried in oil. But, I wondered, can you cook them on the campfire? We purchased a few of those campfire pie makers and I honestly thought maybe...just maybe you could make corn dogs in them. We used Jiffy Corn Meal Mix, which was easy enough to mix up at the campsite.  I started by cutting up the hot dog. Then adding the corn meal mix.  Then we put the pie iron in the fire, ...