… they won’t let me take their pictures, but until then, they will remain my biggest test subjects around.

Yesterday was a beautiful sunny day and I was trying to figure out the light in our back room. You see, last summer we got out windows tinted. The guy that sold me the tinting claimed it was ever so slightly tinted. Well, he was wrong. I wished within a day that I had gone with the plain UV film with no tinting, but it would not have solved our two biggest problems. One being that the sun was heating up our couches so much that you couldn’t sit on them from 2-6pm for six months of the year. The other being that our AC was running for most of the summer non-stop. Our family room faces West and has huge windows, that are awesome, but provide endless heat in the summer.

And my two biggest complaints about the tinting are that the room with the best light is now the room with the worst light, it is like I have a filter on all the time, not only with my camera but, with my eyes. And on cloudy days, it seems so much darker than it is that I have to often put lights on to cheer me up, not so good for a summer girl who loves the sun.

As I was playing with camera settings trying to get the pictures just right, I realized that my kids are so good about me always sticking a camera in their faces. One day, they won’t want me to take their picture (like A does now) and it will be a sad, sad day for BeachMama.

Here are a few from yesterday.

He was trying so hard to look at the TV playing in the background.

Giving me one of her typical expressions.

Ham it up at the table. We were practicing letters and numbers and he was really tired of me taking pictures.

She has my Grandmother’s nose. And chin.

And last of all, here she is helping me out. I hate making supper lately because she is always screaming and yelling at me, well just like Silver Creek Mom said, “She probably wants to see what you are doing”. And yes, that is all she has wanted. The only problem is that my kitchen sucks. So either she stands at the sink area or the island. When I cook, I put the knives and stuff in the sink as I am going, but if I stick her at the island she won’t be able to see what I am doing. My only other choice is in front of the stove!!

She was washing out the measuring cup with her facecloth.

I was looking to serve something just a little different than usual.  And just having stocked up the freezer with meat at Costco, I had a couple of delicious steaks waiting to play with.  Pioneer Woman posted her Steak Bites recipe a week or so ago and I thought I would give it a shot.

It was Saturday night, so we usually don’t do a big supper, I was thinking we would have some Steak Bites and a glass of wine and that would be it, but Hubby wanted potatoes and carrots too, so it was a full fledged affair.  And truthfully, it took longer to cook the potatoes than it did to make the Steak Bites.

I preped the meat and seasoned the meat (I used Montréal Steak Spice).

Melted and browned the butter.

Added the meat.

Flipped the meat.

And put it on the plate.

It was delicious.  And Hubby loved it because each piece was cooked to perfection.  We will be adding this one to our repetoire for sure.

Thank You PW!!