flourish

flourish, intransitive verb: to be in a state of activity or production

Now that the pregnancy and newborn phases are over, and I have my energy back (for the most part), I can once again focus on things that bring me joy. Aside, of course, from my family. While I was pregnant it was simply enough to make it through each day. Not so after the baby was a couple of months old and we were getting into the groove of things with the three of us.

Between baby classes and playdates, we were keeping rather busy, but I still felt like something was missing. Those of you with jobs outside the home probably know the feeling of accomplishing a task and being able to stand back and say "I did that," and to feel good about it. Parenting doesn't really work that way, and neither does taking care of the house. For every load of laundry folded and put away, made bed (ha!), and washed face, there's a new load of dirty clothes, sheets with spit up all over them, and lunch, snack or dinner to wipe up not ten minutes later.

I'm always trying to get my husband to eat breakfast, and a healthy breakfast at that. I'd see him grabbing muffins or pastries from a coffee shop, and if you've ever seen the nutrition information on such products, you know they're not the healthiest. On a whim, I picked up a box of muffin mix at the grocery store and made them at home. They turned out okay, but I wanted to try my hand at making some muffins from scratch. Three different recipes and three different batches of muffins later, I had a found a healthy muffin recipe that I liked (it's on the side of the Bob's Oat Bran package). I ended up baking about five dozen muffins in three weeks. After that I opened up the Joy of Cooking and started picking recipes to try one by one, and I started posting the pictures of each finished product on Facebook. So far I've made angel food cake, velvet spice cake, banana cake, chocolate mousse cake, black bottom cupcakes, cranberry bread, all the pancakes recipes in JoC, and loads of muffins.

You could say I've flourished in the Kitchen. Pun intended.