Oh, November, how I love you. I think this month is definitely on the same playing field as October in my book. I'm not sure when that happened. November in many of the places we've lived, after all, meant snow. But in our little mountain town where we currently are, that's not necessarily always true. But the day after Thanksgiving... I will be ready for it.

This time change, however.... It used to mean an extra hour of glorious sleep. Now it means that Michael just wakes up an hour earlier. Not. Cool. But we will someday when the sun explodes eventually get back on track, right?

Ok...ok... the cookies!


These are, thus far, Michael's favorite thing to make. It possibly had something to do with sneaking "pieces" out of the dough, or with rolling the dough in the cinnamon-sugar. Not sure which he enjoyed more. Either way, it made baking them that much more enjoyable. Usually he gets about halfway through and then he's done. But he enjoyed making all five (maybe six) dozen of these yummies.

Ingredients:

- 1 C butter, softened
- 1.5 C sugar
- 2 eggs
- 1 tbsp vanilla
- 2.75 C flour
- 2 tsp cream of tarter
- 1 tsp baking soda
- 1 tsp cinnamon
- 1/4 tsp salt
- 1/2 C to 3/4 C Reese's Pieces

for rolling:
- 1/4 C sugar
- 1 tbsp. cinnamon

Directions:

-Preheat your oven to 400 and prepare your cookie sheet with cooking spray or parchment paper.
- Blend together your butter, sugar, eggs, and vanilla. Mix in your dry ingredients (except the Reese's) until well combined into a dough easy enough to handle.
- Fold in your Reese's Pieces. Start with half a cup, and add more if needed as molding/cooking the cookies.
- Place in fridge for up to an hour, or in the freezer for ten to fifteen minutes.
Note: If cooking all at once, keep the dough in the fridge while some are in the oven to keep it from getting too soft.
- Bake for six to eight minutes. Let cool for at least five minutes on the baking sheet before removing to a cooling rack.

The great thing about this recipe? It's easy to cut it in half! If you're making these just for yourself/family, I definitely suggest doing this since it can make anywhere from five to seven dozen depending on how big you make the cookies. I was happy to give lots of ours away. They are so addicting!

I have to admit, the past couple of weeks have been rough. I've kind of been wishing time away, not really investing as much as I should into playing and enjoying Michael. We have our on and off days, but lately it seemed like most of the days had been "off".

I love Michael more than words can express, and it pains me when we have hard days. I wonder if I'm scarring him for life if I put on a TV show rather than run around the house for the hundredth time with him, just so I can sit and have some quiet time. Or if I'm not doing as much as I should because he doesn't know more than five letters and can only really count to two. After all, there are kids who can count to six and are younger than him, and kids who know the alphabet song already. Shouldn't Michael know more?


It seems to be that our society puts a lot of pressure on where Michael should be and what I should be doing to get him there. So on days where I'm worrying about all of that, and then turn on the TV instead of deciding to do a letter-of-the-week craft, I panic, and think I'm somehow stunting him.

When Clark's gone, I admit to getting lazy some of the time. I have so much admiration for parents who do this more often than I do, especially single parents who have to do it all themselves all the time. But ultimately I realize that I just worry too much about how I'm parenting, rather than just parenting. Does that make sense?


So lately a lot more time has been invested in having mommy-son time, and less time on the computer blogging or making cleaning the priority. Be patient with me as I catch up, but I promise some awesome recipes and plenty of change in the weeks to come.

Until and through then, I will be focusing on what matters most-- our little family.

How is it the last week of October already? I'm having a hard time believing it.


Michael and I had a fun time making these cookies and sharing them with two lovely ladies for a dinner get together. They went pretty quickly... as in we all devoured them.

Ingredients:

- 2.5 C all-purpose, unbleached flour
- 1 tsp baking powder
- 1 tsp baking soda
- 2 tsp cinnamon
- 1/2 tsp nutmeg
- 1/2 tsp ground cloves
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 1/2 C butter, softened
- 1 C brown sugar
- 1/2 C sugar
- 1 egg
- 2 tsp vanilla

Frosting:
- 1/4 C softened butter
- 1/4 C softened cream cheese
- 1 to 1.5 C powdered sugar
- 1/2 tsp vanilla
- 1/2 tsp cinnamon

Directions:

- Preheat your oven to 350 and prepare your cookie sheet (spray or parchment paper).
- Cream together your butter and sugars. Add the pumpkin, egg, and vanilla to the mixture, beat until well combined.

- Mix in your dry ingredients. Drop on the cookie sheet with a cookie scoop or around 1 to 2 tablespoons per cookie. If desired, flatten slightly with the bottom of a glass (slightly wet with water).
- Bake for 15 to 20 minutes.

Frosting:

- Cream together the butter and cream cheese.
- Slowly add the powdered sugar (in 1/2 C increments or so) and mix with an electric mixer until thick.
- Add vanilla and cinnamon.
- When cookies are completely cool, spread the frosting on top. Add sprinkles if desired, the definitely make them more seasonally-friendly in my opinion!

These cookies really taste like fall to me.

The past two weeks have been such a blurrrrr! Michael and I haven't been sleeping the best, and it's just made me so scatter brained. We seem to finally be getting back on a regular schedule this week, so fingers crossed that it stays that way! I have so many outstanding recipes to share with you, I'm just bursting to get them in to posts to share.

Dear Michael, You are the sweetest boy I know. You're also the most stubborn... though I can't say much because I'm pretty sure you get it from me. Let's get our sleep back into swing before we "fall back" and have to do this all over again. I love you. Please stop growing.

Dear Weather, I am enjoying you while I can. Please keep cooling off and promise us some snow.

Dear Upcoming Change, BRING IT ON! I may have been a little down about you before, but I definitely think I'm ready. All I have to do is remember to trust God and keep the faith, and all while be as it's supposed to be.

If you didn't, make sure to check out October's Wife of the Month story. It's truly inspirational.

Things to come!

Pumpkin Spice Cookies with Cinnamon Cream Cheese Icing

Michael and Me.

And a special SURPRISE Harry Potter Halloween treat!


P.S. Christmas is EXACTLY two months away! Who's excited?!

The idea for this post came from Ashley over at The Sweet Season.

As promised last month, Jenny is a prime example of someone keeping faith. She and her husband had a call directly from God, and it wasn't until they fully trusted Him that what they wanted to do with their life really decided to fall into place.

Please make sure when you're done reading to follow the link to her and her husband's page and donate to their amazing cause. They are able to continue their work by people supporting them, and after reading their story I can't see a better cause to support.

I won't keep you. Here's Jenny.


My husband and I are like any other married couple. We like to play board games and have date nights in, we like to go on walks and fish with our 5-year old puppy by our side, and we like to be around our friends and family for dinners and get togethers. Married for a year and a half, we are your average couple together and separate. I say this because the only thing different about our lives is how an extraordinary God uses our ordinary selves to do great things.

My husband and I are disaster relief missionaries. If you are like 99% of the people we tell that to, you are thinking, "That's not a thing." My answer to that is always the same: 'Take that up with God, because he called us to it."

On May 17th, 2013 my husband and I gave our lives completely and fully over to the Lord with just $100 in our bank account and not a cent in our savings. We had been on a three year planning stage, with the end result being hitting the mission field full time. We both had a heart for missions, and met doing relief work after Hurricane Katrina, but it was a relief trip to Nashville, Tennessee 3 years prior that sealed our fate.

It was there, after a month-long trip, in a church pew on Sunday that I looked over and saw my husband sitting down, head lowered as the band played around us and I knew that God was speaking to him. Afterwards he told me that he just felt God saying, "This is going to be your life."

Insert my type-A, planning mode self in here. I had a plan to get us out on the road full time by the next year. We would move back to Mississippi, where we met and where our home church was, get jobs and work our tail feathers off to save up the money to pay off our debt and have a nice soft savings plan to fall back on in case, ya know, God got busy or something.

God doesn't do back up plans, or big, cushy savings plans. So, try as we may for three years, we didn't get anywhere. God simply would not Bless it, because we weren't trusting Him.

When we would get a raise, the car would break. Get a tax refund, have a medical problem. As quick as it would come in, it would leave.

Defeated and dejected, we moved back to Maryland and finished the interior of my father-in-laws workshop in the back of his yard and made it into an efficiency apartment. We spent a month looking for jobs until finally Kurt landed a job at a car detail shop. Within just two weeks, they promoted him to manager.

That night we sat in the car in the driveway, looking at our unfinished workshop/home and finally uttered the words we both had been too afraid to say out loud. "Maybe we aren't meant to do this until we retire", thinking back to our trips where we were usually the youngest by a few decades or so.

God took our defeat and turned it around the very next day.

I was cleaning the house, all 200sq feet of it, with the weather on in the background, when a report of a tornado in Grandbury, Texas came across the television. I stood, broom in hand, and listened to the reports, wondering if our time to respond would ever come.

God spoke to me, for the first time in my life, in a voice I could feel not hear.

"Go, and go now." He said.

Hold up. We just moved to Maryland and my husband JUST got promoted to a decent wage. This was our chance to get ahead, save some money, get out of debt, etc... and you want us to give it up and go?

He didn't answer me but put someone on my heart, a dear friend who I met in Nashville on that fateful trip 3 years ago. We had kept in touch on Facebook, so I messaged her and told her what just happened, but then listed the 600 reasons why I could not just go.

She answered, quickly and simply.

"You always answer the call"

That's it. I sat down and prayed and told God that if he wanted us to make this work, it would be up to Him and Him alone. I was giving Him full control.

Kurt came home for lunch break, and I unloaded the news onto him. He sat quietly for a moment, slowly chewing his lunch and thinking.

"Okay" he said, "Let's do it"


Since that day, we have been completely sustained by God alone. When we run into a need, we pray about it. We fall fully into the arms of our creator and he blesses us in return.

We have been able to call many places home since that day. Moore, Oklahoma where an EF-5 tornado sliced through the tight knit town and left them broken. Black Forest, Colorado where a forest fire left the area nothing but pain and ash. Kingsport, Tennessee and Catawba County, North Carolina where flash flooding soiled the memories and fibers of people's homes. And most recently, Boulder County, Colorado where a massive flood changed a community forever.

In these times, we do as God commanded us. We love each person as He loved us first. We show them kindness and compassion as we help them salvage these homes and belongings. We tell them about the man who paid it all, so that they may know love.

Our lives are different in so many ways, but that is only because of the control we give God over it. We are proof that he uses average people for His glory and propels them to do things they never thought possible.

If you would like to follow our journey and see what God is doing in the wake of unimaginable disaster, follow us at Mortonmissions.com.

Michael and I have been struggling with sleep... again. While he seems to have a bedtime set(between 8 and 8:30 these days, he's been waking up between four and five determined to get up. I may be a morning person, but even four in the morning is ROUGH. I had success one morning in telling him we weren't getting up, and we slept until seven... but every other morning it's been by five am AT THE LATEST that we were out of bed. Needless to say I sometimes feel like I'm in a bit of a daze.

Easy dinners are my favorite. When using my crock pot I do have to plan ahead, but I love letting things cook all day and not having to really worry about them. When Mrs. Healthy Ever After posted this recipe, I immediately added it to my to-try-list, and boy am I glad.


It's the best. thing. ever.

AND MICHAEL EVEN ATE THE TURKEY!

Enough said... if you love Thanksgiving food, then you'll love this recipe.

Ingredients:

- 1 box of Uncle Ben's Wild Rice (sans seasoning)/ 3/4 C wild rice
- 1/2 to 1 small butternut squash, cut into cubes (I used half because I didn't want to be overwhelmed by the flavor)
- 1 to 2 lbs turkey tenderloin (I just used 1)
- 1 onion (I used white), cut as you like
- 1/2 tsp dried thyme
- 1 tsp sea salt
- 1/2 tsp pepper
- 3 C chicken stock, low sodium
- 1/4 C dried cranberries
- 2-3 C chopped kale

Directions:

- Put your rice in the crock pot. Top it with your squash, onion, and turkey. Sprinkle with your seasonings (thyme, salt, pepper).
- Pour your chicken stock over it all. Cook on high for three hours or low for six hours, this also depends on how much turkey you use.
- Add your cranberries and kale in the last hour of cooking.


Ready... set... DEVOUR.

Original recipe found at The Fountain Avenue Kitchen.

This pasta is a super easy dish if you haven't figured out your dinner plans. The best thing about it for me was Michael actually ate it! I guess I shouldn't be surprised since it involved pasta and cheese, but he even ate the spinach... and it's not like it's exactly hidden in there.

Ingredients:

- 1 Tbsp olive oil
- 1/2 to 1 small onion, chopped
- 3 cloves garlic, minced
- 1 (14.5 to 15 oz) can diced tomatoes
- 3/4 tsp dried oregano
- 1/2 tsp dried basil
- dash of red pepper flakes
- 2 Tbsp tomato paste
- 2 oz cream cheese
- 1/2 lb penne pasta
- 1 to 2 C spinach
*Optional: 1/4 to 1/2 C parmesan cheese
Salt & Pepper to Taste*

Directions:

- Cook your pasta according to directions on package.
- While waiting for you pasta, heat your oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Add your onion and garlic. Sautee for five minutes or so, until tender and starting to brown.
- Add your tomatoes (with juice), herbs/spices, and tomato paste. Mix and let cook for a couple of minutes.
- Cut your cream cheese into pieces (or scoop it out in sections) and whisk in your tomato mix until nice and creamy. Add around 1/4 of your *optional* parmesan cheese if desires, whisking in to the sauce.
- Add your fresh spinach, gently stirring until it is wilted in to the sauce.
- Last, but not least, add your pasta. (Make sure you've drained it before doing this, of course.) Mix gently so it soaks into the sauce and you don't have any of it flying out of the skillet.


Remove, sprinkle with more parmesan, add some salt and pepper, and serve directly.