Friday, January 19, 2018

Who Will Hold My Cards?

Instead of New Years resolutions, I pick a word to focus on each year.  If you’d have asked me over Christmas break, I would have told you Simplify and Discipline where frontrunners for 2018.  Then EMBRACE found me and with it came the understanding that I need to foster new attitudes and a willingness to wrap my arms around certain things I’ve been able to push aside heretofore.  A simple example is cooking.  If you know me well, you know the boys and I used to eat out 5 nights a week.  Eating out is fun and easy and social and I take the task of finding new restaurants as a welcome challenge.  Short and sweet--eating out pushes all the good buttons for me.  But that’s not the case for my boys.  The hubster and the kiddo grew so sick of eating out last year that dinner became a source of contention for us.  As such, one of the areas in my life I’m embracing this year is cooking dinner.  The new rule in Buehlerland is that we’ll eat at home Monday through Saturday (when possible to do so).  Whew!  Talk about in for a penny, in for a pound, huh?

I’m nineteen days into embracing dinner (that’s seventeen home cooked meals if you’re counting) and one of the things I’ve grown to love most about my time in the kitchen is pulling out old recipes and seeing the handwriting of friends as well as that of my mom, my mother-in-law, and my grandma.  These cards are precious to me and they make me wonder--who will hold my cards one day?  My daughter-in-law?  My grandchildren?  And then it dawned on me that unless I start writing down my recipes, all I’ll be able to share with the next generation is a flash drive and my Pinterest password.

It took me ten minutes and twelve dollars to create my recipe cards and you can bet I’ll be filling them out as the boys and I decide on our ‘keepers' in the coming year.