Friday Favorites {7.9.21} -

Happy Friday, y’all! The beginning of our week was pretty busy leaving me little time to recap our fun holiday weekend, so I decided to save it and do a week long review for Friday favorites this week! Let’s jump in!

Last Friday was our last night with just us before picking up the kids on Saturday, so we had a little impromptu date night. Last week was Steven’s first week of third year of fellowship, and his first full week performing additional biliary procedures (they call them advanced procedures and are only done by two third year fellows), so he was after six or seven getting home every night. He called on the way home Friday to ask if I wanted to hit the movies and I immediately said yes. We LOVE going to the movies, and obviously haven’t gotten to go in over a year. We also have a weird affection for the Fast and Furious series despite how cheesy they are, and we wanted to go see the latest one, especially while we didn’t have to pay for a babysitter 😉

On Saturday morning we got up and headed to Abilene to pick up our littles from Gran and Bud. We stopped at the ranch on our way into town to check the longhorns and had to navigate quite a bit of mud from the several inches of rain we’ve had the last week. We were in my Expedition, which doesn’t have four wheel drive, so we parked on the road and walked across the lake dam over to the main field where the cows were. Everyone was accounted for, and we tried to get some good pictures for our Red Bank Instagram. I also got some rough kisses from our girl, Clara!

We walked back and headed into town to meet Gran and Bud at Blue Sky for lunch. Despite their fun week, I think they were actually more excited to see us than I anticipated! We had a quick afternoon visit with Steven’s brother’s family after lunch, and then decided to go the long (very long, like two extra hours long) way home to our favorite BBQ place in Junction to eat. Steven and I got ribs (because they are the best!) and the kids had smoked turkey, and it was a fun little holiday outing and well worth the extra time!

On Sunday morning, we got up and got ready for church. We have had a new tradition over the last several months of having cinnamon rolls on Sunday mornings (Cinnamon Roll Sunday), and I had the bright idea to try red, white, and blue cinnamon rolls for July 4th. I had a friend a while back that said her kids love “tie-dye” cinnamon rolls, where she bakes and ices the cinnamon rolls like normal, but adds a few drops of food coloring in and just swirls it in with a knife to make them look tie dyed. So, cue me on Sunday morning adding WAY TOO MUCH red and blue food coloring to our cinnamon rolls for a festive holiday breakfast. Cinnamon rolls that we need to eat quickly so we can all get ready and get out the door in our nice clothes. Not my smartest move, haha! The kids loved them, but they made a colossal mess. And while I worked hard to convince Steven that there was nothing fundamentally different about them because food coloring only changes the color, I’ll admit the texture of the icing was a little thicker and not as good. And we all went to church with purple hands.

After church, I worked on getting pictures of the kids in their dressy 4th of July wear, and Steven grilled hot dogs for us to have a design your own hot dog adventure- chili, ketchup, mustard, cheese, whatever you want- you got it! The kids loved it, and they were actually really good! Every now and then a hot dog is just really tasty!

After lunch, we took naps and tried to decide if we wanted to venture out again to go watch our city firework display. Since it wasn’t starting until 9:30, we decided to opt out this year, and stayed home and worked on our homemade chicken wing skills. Steven has basically mastered the homemade chicken wing, and I have had the lucky job the last few weeks of being his side kick taste tester. Not a bad job! We’ve smoked them on the Traeger before, but this time we fried them and then tossed them in different seasonings mixed with olive oil and it was definitely a winner! They were so delicious, and it’s so nice that you can choose however many different seasonings you want! Sunday night, I went with Meat Church Honey Bacon BBQ and Lemon Pepper, while Steven went with Chupacabra All Purpose and Blackened seasoning. Our kids went with nuggets 😉 Oh, and we stepped it up with cheese fries instead of plain fries this time!

And we ended the holiday with some pics in our holiday Minnie and Mickey shirts! This was when we were still happy before people in our neighborhood starting getting obnoxious shooting off their own fireworks, haha!

Steven got up and mowed our yard Monday morning while the kids and I played inside and attempted to clean their rooms (does anyone else feel like cleaning kids’ rooms is basically equivalent to brushing your teeth while you eat Oreos??). They pulled out all of Henry’s play ranch equipment and Daddy came in to play with them because that’s his kind of game, haha!

Around lunch time, Livy sidled up to Steven and told him that she needed to go to the ranch and check the cows. Now, Steven doesn’t have to be asked twice to go to the ranch, so we hopped up and got ready quickly and headed 3 hours north to the ranch for a little bit. We took Steven’s truck since it had been so muddy, and we checked cows, rode in the gator, and just had fun in the fresh air for a little bit! We were rolling into a pretty gnarly looking cloud on our way home, but it didn’t storm much until we got really close to home. It was a pretty late night, but worth the fun!

On Tuesday, we were back to our regularly scheduled programming with work. But, we threw in a favorite meal Tuesday night! We have a ton of fresh catfish from our fishing week with Steven’s family, so we fried some up, added some squash and black eyed peas and had a great little Southern meal! I even made homemade tartar sauce because why not?? It was delicious, and we will definitely be frying more up soon!

The rest of our week has been busy- we had a check up for Henry, our Side by Side Bible study welcome brunch, I worked an extra afternoon to cover some overbooking in our office, and Livy started back to summer dance for the July session. We don’t have much planned for the weekend because Steven is on call for advanced procedures, and the VA hospital, so we’re just hanging at home. Amos is still recovering from his eye removal (mainly by obnoxiously banging his cone of shame into everything and everyone possible), and Boudreaux is enjoying his new upgrade to being out and about and sleeping in our room since Amos took his usual spot in the entry way for his recovery. I think now that Boudreaux has had a taste of the high life, he’s not going back. 😉