Mom, can you believe your babies below are 50 years old?!  How the hell did that happen?  What’s weird is that for some reason I thought this morning about how old my step-son is going to be – and next year he will be THIRTY years old.  What the what?!

How did time go by so fast?  I have no idea.  Hannah still always remembers my age as 37.  I got carded buying beer for Jacob’s father-in-law at Walmart yesterday.  Probably because I was buying Busch beer – ha!

We had a great weekend.  Saturday was Jacob’s grandpas 45th wedding anniversary – well, it would have been.  He told us it was the first time in 45 years he didn’t wake up, lean over and wish his bride happy anniversary.  We wanted to get him out of the house so we took him to a BBQ restaurant.  There was a 30 minute wait, but it was so nice out (well, 48 degrees!) that we didn’t mind waiting outside for our table.  Thanks Hannah for this pic – my green eyes were really green on St. Patrick’s Day!

I thought what better way to celebrate my (our!) birthday than a giveaway!

Guys.  Jessica’s new cookbook, The Pretty Dish is pretty amazing.  I immediately flagged about a dozen things right off the bat I knew I was going to make.  I did make them a bit more weight watcher friendly, but I don’t think she would mind. 😀  One lucky reader will win a copy of her new cookbook.

Here is one of the dishes I made – it’s her butternut squash queso.  O.M.G.  I am going to post my adjustments tomorrow to make it more weight watcher friendly – first up was subbing Bolthouse Farms plant milk for the 1.5 cups of half and half – that saved about 470 calories and 48 grams of fat in the whole recipe right there.  

I loved the slight sweetness of the butternut squash with the spicy jalapeno – but I did use real deal extra sharp Cabot cheese though – don’t skimp on the cheese when you make this!

Someone will win my three favorite seasonings from Trader Joe’s – so good!!

And Jacob’s Dad gave me this non-stick veggie grill pan that we used last night to grill veggies and its amazing.  We did zucchini, mushrooms and red cabbage and nothing stuck to the pan and it was a super easy clean up.  So happy grilling season is upon us!  I’ll be posting my chicken recipe later this week too – it was amazing.

My sister and I took the day off today so we could spend part of it together.  We are meeting in Schaumburg, lunching somewhere, shopping and then Hannah and I are getting mani/pedis this afternoon.  

I am starting this year with a 21 day mediation – you can check it out here.  I saw it last week and thought how ironic that it started on my birthday!  I am looking forward to shedding the emotional weight as well as the physical weight, and thought this would be a good place to start.

So to enter – there will be three random winners – the first name picked will be the winner of the cookbook, the second winner the Trader Joe seasonings and the third the grill basket.

No rafflecopters, no tagging three friends to enter – lets keep it simple – just tell me what state you live in!

Happy Monday my friends – make it a great day!