power cooking, baby stuff, etc

hello all.
so today my mom and i did what my friend candis told me is officially called "power cooking" it was awesome and i'm so glad we did it. what we did is spend the entire day cooking. now, that really doesn't sound awesome... but let me put it into perspective for you. we planned out a menu of easy-to-make foods that freeze well... we had 10 different recipes on our menu and were cooking for 3 families. basically the idea is to spend one entire day cooking with someone else and then having meals all ready to go (just pop them in the oven for half an hour or so) for a few weeks. awesome, right? correct. after buying beef, chicken, veggies, well- ALL the ingredients for 10 different recipes to last 3 families a few weeks, we spend a grand total of about $105. not bad. we ended up preparing/cooking/cleaning for about 5 hours. at the end of it all, there were 30 meals prepared. all for $105! that's less than $4 PER MEAL. each meal is for 2-3 people. that's less that $2 per person, per meal. that's really awesome. here was our menu: king ranch chicken, beef vegetable soup, chicken tortilla bake, chicken fried rice (more of a refrigerator item, actually), swiss steak, chicken enchilada soup, chili, taco meat, chicken and dumplings, and enchiladas. so we made enough of one meal for 6-8 people every half hour. really not bad at all. so now my freezer is stocked up with food i plan to last me the month. i actually ended up with 12 meals, since our family includes a child who eats real food (my brother's son is only 4 months old, and my parents just have the two of them). i plan on actually cooking about once or twice a week, eating out once a week, and then heading to my freezer the other days. i'm freaking pumped about that. we all split the price of the groceries so it only cost our family $35.anyway, i totally recommend this idea to any of you- especially if you have kids. have someone else keep the kids for a day (scott kept lincoln all day) and get together with family or friends and power cook! spend a few hours cooking and be pretty much set for a month. it will save you sooo much time in the long run. plus, my mom and i had a really good time together. it all went so smoothly because we were working on different dishes at the same time and both cleaning up as we went and we got to have some good quality time together. i never just spend time with my mom. someone's always around- usually lincoln. well, lincoln wasn't there and my dad was busy all day so it was just my mom and me all day. and we didn't even bicker ONCE. how freaking amazing is that?!
anyway, it was fun and exhausting and i'm glad we did it. it is kind of our new thing and we are going to try to get together every few weeks and do it. good stuff.
so i'm just about 4 1/2 months pregnant which is freaky because it means i'm about halfway through with this pregnancy already! i can't believe this is going by so quickly. of course, when i sit down and think about the fact that i still have to wait almost 3 weeks before we find out the sex, it seems to be crawling by. i'm sure that once we know the answer to that question, nothing else will crawl by (except maybe the last 2 weeks when i'm miserably huge and just ready to get the thing out of me!). i now feel the baby move pretty much every day. i usually have to lie down in bed on my back for a little bit and sure enough it'll start rolling around in there. it's already a tough little booger! anytime i press on my belly, it kicks back- hard. the thing sure feels tougher than something that only weighs 7.5 ounces. lolthe more i think about it, the more i think i want a girl. i mean, i know it will equal drama in the teen years, but i think it would be wonderful to have a daughter. especially after spending so much time with my mom. i would love a girl to be close with like that. plus, the clothes are freakin cute. AND, our quest for a boy name is back at square one. scott likes the most ridiculous names and i like traditional names and we just can't seem to agree at all. AT ALL. we've had a girl's name picked out since lincoln was born and geeze i don't know, i kind of just want a girl. but then again, i don't really care. i sure do love the boy i've got and it would be wonderful to have another. i really don't care. i really really don't.
tonight my cousin asked me what was new with me. i really don't think anything is new! haha, the only things i do are work, hang out with lincoln all day, watch LOST, and look more and more pregnant every day. i'm just not exciting. i will come up with something exciting just for the sake of being able to blog about it! ha, kidding. but i do need some excitement.
oh, well, birthiversary is coming up soon and i'm pretty pumped about that! if you don't know what birthiversary is, it's the weekend between our anniversary and my birthday (they are 7 days apart). we do something big as a combined celebration instead of celebrating both separately. but don't worry, i still get two presents :)
ok, that's all. more later!