Cookies Galore!

I love baking.

I don't always love cooking, but baking seems to be more my thing.  I love that in baking as long as you follow directions and measure carefully, it turns out!  Well, at least with the cupcakes and cookies I have made that is the case!  That may be a rookie statement, but for now I believe it!

Currently, I am on a cookie baking kick.  I made a lot of different cookies recently for hangouts with friends, so I thought I would share the ones I have made so far.

1. Chocolate Chip Cookies

I have never made chocolate chip cookies with any recipe other than this one.  My mom always made her chocolate chip cookies with the recipe on the back of the chocolate chips bag and it never fails!  Gotta love a classic chocolate chip cookie.

2. Cinnamon Sugar Butter Cookies

Yet another yummy cookie.  My dough would not go into a ball shape so I generously sprinkled the cinnamon sugar mixture on top.  Still good!  I also like my cookies super soft, so I often under cook them because who likes a hard cookie?  Turned out great!

3. Oatmeal Cookies

A friend's quote on these cookies, "These are the types of cookies you pass down the recipe to your kids!"  Guess where I found it?  On the back of Kroger brand Old Fashioned Oats.  I did add some chocolate chips to the recipe, but they were very good and gone immediately.

This is not the link I followed, but it is exactly the same with the exception that I used Old Fashioned oats and it turned out delicious.

4. Double Chocolate Chunk Cookies

I love chocolate and these cookies are chocolate plus some more chocolate!  I did not have any chocolate chunks so just used semi-sweet chocolate chips.  Some comments on the recipe suggested trying other varieties of chocolate chips which all sounded amazing.  Next time, I want to try them with mint chocolate chips or raspberry chips.  Yummmmm.

Learning from Others: Part 3

This is the final part to what we have been learning from others so far!

Have a vision for where you are going.

This has maybe helped us more than anything else when we have different ideas about a decision that needs to be made.  Having a common goal for where we are going allows us to take our individual opinions and set them up against this vision.

We ask: does this fit in line with our vision?  Most of the time it is pretty clear and definitely points out selfish motives right away.

Again, the family that helped train us for marriage had their own family vision and encouraged us to develop our's.  My husband wrote two drastically different visions and how our lives would play out in the next 15 years as a result.

One was if we just kept going along the path most people take and the other was a much more "going against the grain" vision.  It became very clear which one was best suited!

Even on our honeymoon this was helpful for talking through things that came up.  It gave us a common ground that we had already agreed upon to begin talking through things.

Since we are two selfish individuals trying to come together as one family, I am not sure how our conversations would go about hard topics.  We would not have a clear purpose for our marriage and would probably just try to constantly win arguments.

Don't get me wrong, I am still selfish and constantly just want to win.  This vision just helps me recognize that faster and try to move out of my self-centered mindset.

This is the main factor that has helped keep fights calm and feelings from getting too hurt. A vision gets you from just focusing on yourself and becoming more of an individual and rather, unites.

It has been fun adapting our vision and seeing how it affects our marriage so far!  Thank you to the families who impacted us in this area.  They get all of the credit!


Other posts in this series:
Learning to Learn From Other People
Learning from Others: Part 1
Learning from Others: Part 2

Pita Bread Pizza

A poor quality pic stitch picture of our dinner tonight!

This was quick, easy, and cheap!  Finally I am learning every night does not need to be gourmet.

 I found this recipe at $5 Dinners.   I have made two dinners from this site and both have been amazing!

I only made two slight changes.  Instead of cutting the pita bread in half, we left them whole to have a thicker crust pizza.  Second, we cooked them using our wonderful pizza cooker.  Basically it cooks the same as a conventional oven, but is way more fun.

The pizzas we made were:

• Pepperoni with homemade pizza sauce
• Barbecue Chicken
• Honey Mustard Chicken 

I had some shredded cooked chicken in the freezer, so this was super fast and fun to experiment with different possibilities. 

Learning from Others: Part 2

This one may be my favorite thing I have learned so far: the role of community.

I love this one initially because it keeps me from saying and doing really dumb things :)

I was told during our engagement that community to support you and know all your dirt is important.  This does amazing things for avoiding feeling isolated, weird, and confused.  We don't have a really great grasp on this yet, but we are learning!

Part of how I have learned this lesson is through simply hanging out with married people who are ahead of me.  This is a story I have heard from at least three different women in different friend circles, "I really wished he would do (insert whatever), but he didn't, so I nagged and complained, then told all my friends about.  What I learned was it is better to pray about it.  He ends up growing into an even better version of himself than my nagging could have ever accomplished."

This is what I love about good friends and good community.  I am not very smart when I get frustrated and mad.  My go-to would be to nag or gossip about it.  Having these different wives tell me their experiences gave me a complete gift.  If I am frustrated and after bringing it up nothing happens, leave God to work it out.

Those women are saving me a lot of pain and emotional breakdowns!

This is just one example of how just being around people who are vulnerable and honest has helped our marriage so far, and I can't take any credit for it.

We are definitely still figuring out what this whole community thing means.  What does it look like to have friends who know what you as a couple are struggling with?  Even more importantly for us right now, who are those people?

This is an area I am highly passionate about and can't wait to learn more about.

So far I know community is vital for marriage and has helped tremendously.  Now, comes really figuring it out!


Other posts in this series:
Learning to Learn From Other People
Learning from Others: Part 1
Learning from Others: Part 3

Learning from Others: Part 1

As I said in my last post, learning from other married couples has been super helpful in our marriage so far.  While it is difficult, and I don't always want to admit people are right, they kind of are!

The first area we gained a lot of counsel in was the lovely subject of money.

To start, both of our parents were wise with money.  This gave us a common norm which at least allowed us to be liked minded.

Another aspect that greatly helped us were our financial standings going into marriage.  Neither one of us had school loans or any credit card debt.  Definitely a blessing!  My husband did have a car payment while we were dating, but was paid off before we were even engaged.  The choices for him were: save up for a down payment, buy an engagement ring, or pay off his car.  He is definitely more wise than me and chose to pay off his car first so we would have less stress in the long run.  We ended up still getting married quickly, and I got a beautiful ring which came with no financial strain!

So that is the beginning of what helped us.

#1- Being 100% debt free.

This of course came from our parents' model of staying debt free and also from our friends who worked to also be debt free.

The next two pieces of advice we can take no credit for, and have nothing to do with previous wise decision making.

#2- Live off of one income.

This is a tough one.  My husband works at a church, which implies a church income.  We aren't poor, we aren't starving, but we also aren't living without some sacrifices.  Our vision behind this one came from a handful of friends who were already married and tried this out.  Some did this for the first year of marriage and saved the other spouse's income.  In the second year of marriage, they then felt incredibly blessed to have such freedom in finances and they had a pretty nice down payment for a house!

Our vision was slightly different.  Since we are looking to start a family early, we knew getting locked into a hefty mortgage or higher standard of living would fail miserably once my income was taken away.  I want to stay home with our kids, so learning to live off of one income makes it normal for our marriage.  In the mean time, we are saving a lot more with the money I bring in, and we are learning be to disciplined.  Hooray!

#3- Live below your means.

This is the culmination of the first two.  Again, this was not our idea :)  We trained under a family during our engagement and this was a reoccurring theme.  We learned by living below your means you  are significantly less likely to enter into debt.  A sudden car problem, medical bill, or leaky faucet won't tip the scale.  We decided what this meant for us by creating a budget and seeing what we could afford.  Next, we made decisions which would keep us under that budgeted amount.  Yes, we could afford a nicer apartment, but we love our's and we can always afford the rent.

So how are we doing with it?

We are still debt free and living off of one income.  We are currently struggling to keep our grocery bill below our budgeted amount, but that is why I am learning to coupon and shop wisely!  We have not had any fights over money, though I do get a little stressed sometimes :)  I am the more frugal out of the two of us, so I can get a little high strung over nothing

That is at least where we are so far!

What decisions have you made with money that set you up for greater success later?

Other posts in this series:
Learning to Learn From Other People
Learning from Others: Part 2
Learning from Others: Part 3

Learning to Learn From Other People

Sums up why my mom made me learn to drive in a graveyard.  She was wise.

I have always considered myself a person who must learn things the hard way, even if someone advises me in the correct way to go about something.  There are tons of excuses I could share that would maybe justify my actions, but really when I don't listen to people that are much wiser than me, I'm just a stubborn fool.

Mostly these sensible, unappreciated people were my parents.  Whether it was learning to drive, studying for school, or dating, the situations resulted in a humbling, apologetic, "Okay...  you were right."

Now that I am married, I should maybe grow up a little and stop holding onto my pride.

My next few posts are devoted to the lessons I am trying to avoid learning the hard way and rather actually listen to people!  David (Shook) and I were proactive in our engagement to learn as much as we could about marriage.  We wanted to prepare and start it off well, but as someone  told me, "Nothing prepares you for marriage like marriage."

While we couldn't anticipate a lot of it, soaking up the advice given to us from other married couples has been A-M-A-Z-I-N-G.  I attribute our lack of bickering, blow up fights, and all together confusion to people way smarter than us.

Stay tuned for the super practical and foundational ideas that were given to us.


Other posts in this series:
Learning from Others: Part 1
Learning from Others: Part 2
Learning from Others: Part 3