excited for the weekend

Deric and I are headed off to Sacramento for the weekend! My super cute niece Natalie is getting baptized! I am so excited for her and excited that we get to be apart of it! It also happens to be my darling husbands birthday on Monday. So we are taking off Sunday morning from Sacramento and headed to SAN FRANCISCO!!! Deric has never been and I have been a couple times, but to Derics dismay I have never been over the golden gate bridge or to Alcatraz. So we will be spending Sunday and Monday doing all of the fun things around fisherman's wharf and going over the golden gate bridge! I am just really excited to eat at boudins and go to Ghirardelli square and get some free chocolate! of course spending the weekend with my hubby celebrating his 23rd birthday is going to be amazing as well! I will be taking loads of pictures of our adventure and will post next week!!!!

Quick chicken bake.

2 cups cooked rice

1 cup frozen corn

1 can cream of chicken soup

1/2 cup milk

2 chicken breast sliced

handful of grated cheese (optional)

1/2 stack of Ritz crackers crushed (optional)

cook rice according to package. we use basmanti. its our favorite. I cook it on the stove, its faster and it doesn’t have to be all the way cooked.

mix cream of chicken soup with milk

pre cook your chicken. i use pre cooked pre sliced chicken. you can use left over chicken if you have it. the easiest way to cook chicken is to put it in boiling water for about 5-8 minutes. it doesn’t need to be all the way cooked. slice it.

put the cooked chicken and corn in bottom of baking dish. mine is about 1/2 q-1/4L. its a little bigger than that but it doesn’t have a size on it. weird i know. a smaller baking dish then a 9x13.

pour on top of the chicken and corn your cooked rice.

pour on your cream of chicken soup mixture.

now mix the ground thing together.

 

bake for 30-40 minutes in a 425 degree oven.

top with cheese and Ritz about 5 minutes before pulling out.

scoop out and ENJOY!

we NEVER have left overs of this. and i dirty about 2 dishes making it so clean up is always easy, which is a must after working all day. it definitely hits the spot. and you can always throw in what ever veggies you have on hand or left over chicken from the night before. i can’t get enough of this! i make it almost twice a week. Deric LOVES rice and chicken!

The Perks

There are some really good perks to living in Southern California. Yes the rent is OUTRAGEOUS and traffic is almost ALWAYS horrible.  But its sunny and warm about 340 days out of the year. The beach is a 10 minute drive from our house, Disneyland is 15 minutes away and I have to admit its beautiful here. It is completely different from Washington. I always said I would never live in Southern California because they don’t have real trees. To me palm trees aren’t real trees! you need the pine tree covered mountains and lakes everywhere. But against my better judgment I have been falling in love with the palm trees, the heat and everything to do with southern California.

We don’t go to the beach that often but when we do I am completely in awe of how beautiful and mysterious the ocean is. I don’t go completely in the water because I am too afraid of the animals I can’t see. 

Disneyland is a short drive up I-5. We go to Disneyland about every 3 months it seems. But we go to downtown Disney a lot to look around at the shops and eat at some of the amazing restaurants. I am loving living so close, we have a little mismatched store, rainforest cafe, jazz kitchen, house of blues, and some really nice shops in downtown Disney. definitely a good perk to living here!!!

the three people in front of us got SOAKED. thanks for taking the splashes for us!!!!

 

Southern California is growing on me for sure. But nothing beats the beauty of Washington.

 

 

Goals while we live here.

Go the Beach at least twice a month. More during the summer. I definitely need to soak up the sun down here while I can!

Take pictures of the beauty around southern California. The view from where I work

recap of march + Easter

March was an interesting month and I need to write this down!

The beginning of march was awesome. Nothing exciting just a lot of time spent at home and with the hubby. The good stuff started on Saturday the 20th. Deric and I ran a bunch of errands during the day and then went to the beach because it was so nice outside and we hadn’t been to the beach in a long time. After playing in the ocean for a couple hours and then playing in our pool where the water was warm, we came home to get ready to go out for the night. I was super excited to go hang out at the mall. The Irvine Spectrum mall has an awesome pet shop that I had been to a couple days earlier and saw a dog that I really want. So Deric and I decided to go hang out there for the night. Look at the dogs, eat some dinner and go to a movie! A great date night in theory! As i was getting ready about 7:00 I started getting really bad pains in my left side. I laid down on the bed for a little bit thinking they would go away. After about 10 minutes of constant SHARP pain I told Deric we were not going out and I got into my PJs and laid on the couch.  So you know the point into pain where you start thinking “if this doesn’t get better in 30 minutes I HAVE to go to the Dr”. That is how bad it was. But the whole time I was thinking, this is gonna go away, I am gonna be fine and we can go out. Well no it didn’t. I told Deric he had to call our friend Alden to come over and give me a blessing and that we needed to go to the ER because all the urgent cares and Drs offices were closed. Alden came over and Deric and him gave me a blessing. Which it was amazing because it was the first time that Deric had participated in a blessing. so we left the house around 9 to go the ER. (never go to Kaiser). we got all checked in and around 10:30 we had a room. They put me on fluids and pain meds and told me I could have  CT or I could go home with pain meds and see if it gets better in 24 hours. If not I needed to come back for the ct. we went home. it was 12:30 already and I could barely keep my eyes open. so long story short we came back sunday night around 8, got the CT and the drs told me I had a cyst on my ovaries. we left at 3 am. it was awful.

Monday morning I got an appointment with a doctor to get more tests done about my cyst. well come to find out i had a 2mm cyst which is TINY and that I had other things that Kaiser failed to tell me. I have diverticulitis and gall stones. Diverticulitis means I don’t have enough fiber in my diet and its causing pockets or pouches on the outside of intestines causing me pain. I have completely had to change my diet and can no long eat red meats and I have to limit white meats and bleached rice and wheat. so pretty much i eat veggies non stop and brown rice. It hasn’t been too bad. But I do have to make sure that everything has loads of fiber in it. the best thing I have found is the Yoplait plus blackberry pomegranate yogurt. ohh my its delish! On top of that they found out that my reverse t3 is super high. It means I am stressed and causing my to gain weight uncontrollably it all makes sense now!!!!!

On a better note! Its Easter today and it also is my niece Heidi’s 6th birthday! We had my brother and his family over for Easter dinner and we celebrated Heidi’s birthday. and I guess there were tons of earth quakes that rocked around here today but we didn’t feel a thing. I guess that is good since the girls were up here but that is like the 5th quake I have missed feeling since living here. super bummed about that!

Last weekend Deric and I drove to Sacramento to celebrate Natalie's 8th birthday, Tara’s birthday and my nephew Nathans 6th birthday. all 3 birthdays in 1 family in 1 month. how crazy! March is crazy busy for birthdays in my family. We had a lot of fun. It just happened to be opening season for little league baseball in Natomas Park so we were able to see Nathan in a parade and go to the opening ceremonies. But we didn’t get to go to his opening game because poor guy got really sick. My brother Jon and his family came as well from Washington. It was fun to see everyone together. here are all the pictures to document March and Easter!!! sorry this is so dang long I had to get it somewhere!!!

  oh yeah and we went to mid evil times in February!! totally forgot!

  Jillian got her sucker stuck in uncle Deric’s hair!!!!!

   

Heidi blew out of her candles for the first time BY HER SELF!!!! This is huge!!!