Our Green Cabin

Our home for the weekend

Tim's birthday, which always lands near Labor Day Weekend, usually brings about some kind of Zack family trip. This year we ventured off to a cabin on the lake in Pine Mountain, GA (near Callaway Gardens). Among all the drab earthy colored cabins sat this beauty, and it was ours for the weekend...along with Tim's parents, sister, brother-in-law, and the three crazy kiddos. I think Tim's mom picked it just because it was green. The name of the cabin was "Margarita". The inside was decorated with items from "Margaritaville". Our bathroom included a sign that said "It's 5:00 somewhere". The cabin also came with its own set of ants and rickety stairs, but this did not ruin our weekend.

We fished, played ping-pong, played putt-putt, the kids swam, ate food off of the grill, and celebrated my hubby getting older.

Me fishing with the birthday boy...letting him do all the paddling while I snap a photo :)

He caught one (the only one) fish all weekend...but he had fun trying

To save on some time, we bought a cake that I hacked apart and redecorated (I really should have taken before shots. Imagine cake with giant blue gum paste bow, red piping on the edge and red and blue gum paste dots.) I turned it into this...

Our African Antarctic Penguin

Ok, so I had originally planned on a white icing background. Paul dubbed it the African Antarctic penguin. Isn't he cute? Everything that could have gone wrong with decorating the cake went wrong, but it still turned out pretty good.

Sorry we're not better at taking more pictures. It was a great weekend!

Tim (one year older), Ava (5 yrs old), and Me (not as old as Tim)

The hammock turned into great entertainment for the kiddos.  Joey got a little crushed by his sisters though...he survived :)

Out of boredom came...

a new painting.

An Aunt's Perspective

Maddox David Akin was born last night. I don't have any pictures yet because I was taking pictures on my sister's camera the whole time. So here's one side of the story...

Friday night I got a call around 11:45pm from my sister to tell me that her water broke in the kitchen. I asked her if I needed to come then and she said no, just go to bed and she'll call me if she progresses significantly (I was thinking, "I am in bed silly, why were you not in bed"). I woke up around 8am to my cousin texting me to ask if I'd heard any more news, but I hadn't. I called my sister after a bit and she was having contractions, was laughing at the entertainment provided by her awesome doula, Lindsey, and her husband, Davey, and was making cookies for the nurses. (Davey later laughed about how every time he left the hospital room he could hear the nurses whispering "oh, there's the cookie guy", LOL). So I went about my business making plans to go grocery shopping, etc (my day was planned for excitement, can't you tell?). I talked to Sarah a couple more times, each time labor had progressed more, but she was wanting to hang out at home as long as possible.

I was just about to arrive at a restaurant to eat lunch with Tim when I got the call that they were heading to the hospital. I went ahead and ate lunch, drove home, through a bag of stuff together, and left my husband to entertain himself for the evening. I drove the hour to Atlanta Medical Center (my sister had to pick a hospital in the middle of Atlanta off of one of the worst bottleneck exits). When I got there, my aunt, uncle, cousin, and Davey's mom and dad, brother and sister-in-law were hanging out in the waiting room. Davey came out to get me and as we turned to walk back to the room everyone started putting up a fuss. We realized that they just wanted an update :).

When I got there, Sarah was having some pretty strong contractions but was still walking around, making jokes, eating fruit snacks...etc. There was a birthing pool in the room, but other than that the room looked like a standard hospital room. At different points Lindsey would explain things to me or tell me what to expect. I really enjoyed having her there and seeing her and Davey encouraging and guiding Sarah was really an amazing experience. I was in charge of periodically texting our family with updates. Between Sarah, Davey, and Lindsey, I was entertained the whole time. Lindsey said that it was the most fun she had had in a birthing room. Sarah continued to progress steadily and it looked like we were going to have a baby by dinnertime. She got into the birthing pool and said that it felt amazing...unfortunately it felt so good that it seemed to really slow down her labor. She hung out in the pool for a while; we enjoyed the cool view of Atlanta from her room and watch a thunderstorm come in and out. It was so peaceful it almost seemed like her labor had stopped.

Around 8pm, I went out and had some dinner in the waiting room with everyone, but couldn't stay out there for long. I just felt better being in the room with her. Her labor significantly picked up, and Maddox David arrived at 11:04pm. They hadn't told anyone what the sex was, and I couldn't get close enough to see (I was standing out of the way behind the birthing pool to get a good shot with the camera), so after what seemed like forever (which was probably 20-30 seconds) they said it was a boy! He was 8lbs 7oz, 21'' long. He immediately started nursing. Lindsey videotaped and I took pictures of Davey coming out to everyone and telling them it was a boy. Maddox (I told my sister I was going to call him "M-diggy", she glared) is a beautiful boy. He seemed really peaceful after only one cry. I was really blessed to be a part of the experience.

I got home around 1:30am, and went to bed.

The Gnocchi Fail of 2011

Tim and I like to cook...it's somewhat of a hobby for us. And we're pretty good at it...most of the time. We've (ok, I've) only had one dish we just really couldn't eat (even though Tim tried, God bless him). We also love the food network and have had several successful dishes including homemade bread, Italian sausage with parsley pesto and homemade pasta, homemade sushi...not to mention our Easter menu which featured lamb and Parmesan risotto. (Is your mouth watering yet?)

One of my favorite foods is Gnocchi (sort of sounds like "no-key"; pasta made from potatoes). It is like eating little "heavenly clouds" or "pillows of goodness". We made this about a year ago with great success for the first time, but hadn't made it since because it can be labor intensive. Normally, when it comes to making things with a dough (bread, pasta, pizza, etc), I wait until Tim can do it with me (really because we're both control freaks in the kitchen and he eventually just takes over and does it for me...hehehe. Ok, and he's better at making that kind of stuff). But due to crazy schedules, I ended up making gnocchi on a week night before having to run off to a church meeting. And since Tim wasn't home from work yet, I was on my own.

The great thing about gnocchi is you can make a big batch and freeze it for a quick meal later. Knowing this I tripled the recipe. A normal gnocchi recipe begins with 1 kilo (2.2 pounds) of potatoes, so I had ~6 pounds of potatoes to make my gnocchi. Tons of leftovers for future meals. When I went to mix in the flour, I kept adding flour, and more flour, and more flour...but my dough was still SOOO STICKY. Unfortunately, I ran out of time after combining all the ingredients and told Tim that we could finish it after I got back from church (I had made box pasta so we could have something to eat).

When I got home from church it was already late, but we set out to finish rolling out and cutting the gnocchi. Tim pulled off a piece of the STICKY dough and kept adding flour to it. After adding a TON more flour than the whole recipe called for he finally got a dough that he could at least work with. We decided to cook some and see if it was ok, before adding our entire flour store to the mix. It came out ok, but was REALLY dense and heavy. Not exactly fluffy pillows of goodness. Since it was so late I decided to freeze the ones we had formed, and refrigerate the rest of my ginormous batch of gnocchi dough. When I told Tim that I had tripled the recipe I think his eyes popped out of his head, and then he just laughed at me.

I wasn't able to get back to the dough until a few days later. When I pulled out the still incredibly sticky gnocchi dough, I noticed a change. The dough had formed a thick GRAY colored layer on top, and had taken on a very "off" smell. I thought it better not to take a risk so I dumped the entire mixing bowl of dough away. So sad. But at least I had some that were frozen. This was several weeks ago.

Tonight I pulled the gnocchi out of the freezer to make dinner. Since there wasn't a lot of it I boiled some pasta too. I was excited to have my dense gnocchi (hey, it's a little better than no gnocchi), but when I had Tim taste one, he made a face. My heart dropped. "What's wrong with it?" I asked him. He replied "it tastes like freezer". Sure enough, I had forgotten to remove the gnocchi from the cookie sheet and put it in a container after they were frozen. We ate a little of it anyway since the sauce I made covered up the freezer taste. They also looked weird from being stuck to the cookie sheet and they had to be the ugliest, least uniform gnocchi I have ever seen.

Poor little ugly gnocchi

I did some research tonight on how to make gnocchi, and found out that I had done pretty much everything wrong. One big giant gnocchi fail. Maybe this week I will go to one of my favorite restaurants and eat some gnocchi to make myself feel better.

What gnocchi should actually look like - image courtesy of Google Images

Charleston, Roommates, and Anniversary

We normally go away on 4th of July weekend for our anniversary. This year we decided to forego the anniversary trip to go to Charleston and visit Tim's college roommates, Austin (who lives in Charleston), and Ben who was returning from the Eukraine after more than two years in the Peace Corps. I lovingly call all four roommates my "Welch Boys" (Welch Place was the name of the apartment complex we all lived in during college...moment of silence for the awesome times in Welch Place). We soaked up a lot of sun on the beach, ate a lot of good food, and hung out at Austin's new bachelor pad.

Tim and Austin eating amazing food from the farmer's market.  Lemon crepes and Vietnamese tacos...so good!

Tim and me by the water at Red's Ice House

Taking pics of Austin while waiting for a table.  You can't beat the food and prices at Red's.

Up to no good, I'm sure.

We went to Starbucks to do some...eckhem...work.  Tim, Austin, and Ben (love the face)  :)

My Welch Boys with their man bags

We of course did NOT miss fireworks. We sat on the beach with drinks and cigars in hand while watching a handful of firework shows pop up around us and listening to a group of VERY LOUD (and probably intoxicated) people sing American pride songs.

Even though we gave up our anniversary weekend, this did not stop my sweet husband from waking up early on our anniversary and walking (our car was blocked in) down to the store to buy me a dozen roses and Dunkin Donuts (does he know the way to my heart or what?).

Happy 3rd Anniversary my love!