Crock pot coconut curry chicken w/ lime

That's a long name and a whole lot of "C's." I've recently rekindled my love with the crock pot. I love how I can just throw everything in there and then forget about it until dinner time. It's awesome. I try to use it at least 3 times a week. And the husband has been loving it as well, he even told me, with a giant grin on his face..."I LOVE when you cook with the crock pot." So, with that positive re-enforcement, my crock pot and I have become the best of friends.
And this recipe totally won my husband and myself over. So if you're a coconut milk lover and curry lover, you'll be a lover of this.

Ingredients

• 3 boneless, skinless chicken breasts
• 1 can coconut milk
• 1 cup vegetable or chicken broth
• 1 tsp ground cumin
• 1 1/2 tsp ground coriander
• 3 tsp curry powder
• 3 tbs soy sauce (I use low sodium)
• 2 tbs sugar
• 1 1/2 tsp salt
• the zest of one lime
• Lime cut into wedges
• cilantro

Combine coconut milk, broth, cumin, coriander, curry powder, soy sauce, sugar, salt and lime zest in your crock pot. Whisk until smooth. Add (raw) chicken breasts, cover and cook on low for 4-5 hrs. 

Once your chicken is tender enough to shred, have at it and shred into whatever size pieces you prefer. Dump back into the crock pot and mix it around in your delicious sauce. Serve over rice of your choice, top with cilantro and fresh lime juice.

*Updated suggestion: Add cubed pieces of potato or the last 30 minutes of cooking, pinch about a half cup of the sauce from the crock pot and add a few tablespoons of flour and whisk together until all clumps are gone. Do one of these to help thicken the sauce a bit. 

My little fish

Mr. E loves the water. And lucky for him, we have 2 pools, a splash pad, and beach surrounding us in less than miles distance. After spending almost every day down at the pool, I finally decided I HAD to get him some floaties. All of his little buddies can either swim or have some sort of flotation device on them, while he had none. He screamed bloody murder for the first 5 minutes when I put them on, but once he got that out of his system he adjusted and loved them. After one day of me helping him swim with the floaties, he decided he was ready to go out on his own. With me still supervising, he leaped from the pool step and off he went. He kicked those little legs, swallowed a small amount of water, and never turned back...to me, his mom. He's just growing up so fast and becoming so independent. He would actually get mad at me if I tried to help him, even if I was trying to save him from swallowing mass amounts of water. Whatever, I'm just the mom that always gets in the way :)

Check out those little legs kick. Love it.

Don't worry, as soon as I noticed him struggling to keep his body vertical, I jumped in and saved him :)

And he loves to say "cheeeeeese" for the camera. But because he still can't really talk, he just says, "Deeeeeeeeeeeeeee."

4th of July

Now that we're half way through summer, thank goodness, I should probably post a picture or 2 of what we've been up to.
We've finally settled into our new area and are enjoying ourselves out here...quite a lot actually. Minus this disgusting humidity and heat that comes along with it, it's been great. We've made some really good friends and enjoy our park dates with them. The beach has been a little non-existent because of the bad weather we've been having. It seems every Saturday, it's cloudy, windy, and rainy. Which makes for a bad beach day. living 2 minutes from the beach, you'd think we were there almost every day, where in fact, we've been once in the past month and a half.
Our 4th of July was filled with friends, food and fireworks. We started off our morning at the beach, where it was partly sunny, partly cloudy, partly rainy. We had a few friends from the ward meet us there and turned out to be a lot of fun. Until, I got (bird) pooped on, and Conryd went swimming with his phone. That was totally awesome.

 After the beach we headed home for a few hours until we had to leave for our friend's pot luck party. I decided to make these cute little desserts my Aunt Carol made for my baby shower.

I think they're cute and show beautifully, and they're so easy which is a total bonus.
If I haven't said it before, my friends in the ward are awesome. They're all super down to earth, nice, and easy to talk to. I'm really enjoying actually getting to know people we go to church with. Complete opposite of our Utah ward.  It was great to have uninterrupted conversations, all of our kids were consumed with the mass amounts of toys this family has :) It was crowded, loud and wonderful. The plan was to go out with a few families to light fireworks but Mr.E hadn't napped and needed to go to bed. But before we sent him to bed, I insisted that our friends that live in our building, let us come up to their place to watch a few minutes of the city firework show. They live on the 21st level, and have a great view overlooking the golf course where the show takes place. They were so kind to let us bombard them and take over their balcony :) Don't worry, they watched with us, along with their son, Mr. E's BFF. The firework show was okay, but didn't really AMAZE any of us. But because we were so high we could see 5 or 6 different firework shows from all over. Some as far as 30-40 minutes away. Perks of living at the penthouse level.

As for now, not much is going on. We go to the park almost every day. Have play dates almost every day. Go to the pool a few times a week. And play with cars...all day, every day.

This little guy now likes the swings. He's hated them since the day he was born. He's a changed man.

The tour

I've finally snapped a few pictures from around our area. They're not great, they're all taken from the car window and they might be a bit boring. I really don't travel much further than a mile from our place to get anyways  which is great for my gas tank. I cannot figure out NESW for the life of me and I'm still getting used to having the ocean to the East and not to the West. My geographical bearings are so off, no matter how hard I try. If you'd like to stick around, I will attempt to give you the grand tour of our new home.
Here goes:

This is our "view." We look into a retirement building, and to the left of us just over those hedges, is the park where we spend a lot of our time.

This is our building. If you are a non-resident of our building, you have to have your car valet. One awesome thing about the valet is, if you have a crapload of stuff and can't carry it all yourself, you can drop it off to them and they will bring it up for you. It's pretty sweet. Especially when you have a car full of Ikea crap.

This is our pool. If we're not at the park or Target, we're here. And I love that everyone here works because that means it's empty all day, every (week)day.

This is our lobby. We have a security/front desk man to the right. You have to check in with them before you can come up and they have to call us every time to make sure we authorize it. It's kind of a pain after a while but I do like the safety of it.

Now that you've seen our place, let's take you to the beach. Literally a few yards after exiting our building, you enter onto the causeway..what the crap is a causeway, I still have no idea. I just call it a giant bridge. So you're driving on the causeway for about 30 seconds and now you're driving over a boat canal, and you can now see the ocean. I'm not even being a little sarcastic when I say the beach is a stones throw away. It takes all of 2 minutes to get there. Once you exit the causeway, you've now hit Sunny Isles. Sunny Isles is a few miles strip long of housing and hotels that run parallel with the coast. If we can afford it, we want to move there and hopefully, if not live on the beach, be right across the street. If you keep heading south on this street (Collins Ave) it will take you all the way down to South Beach/Miami beach (I think). I'm still trying to figure out where everything is.

(Sunny Isles/Collins Ave)

Downtown Miami, it's at least 30min from us. Not close at all.

So there you have it, a quick tour of our current living situation. I'd take you around the rest of our town, but it's not quite as exciting. It's just a bunch of palm trees, apartment buildings, and shops. If you really want to get into it, which I don't know who would? but you can google maps and street view it. Thanks for sticking around, peace out.

Our new home

Jealous?

It's beautiful, right? Sometimes I can't believe I only live 2 minutes from this. The beaches here are nothing like the beaches back home. I'm sorry to say, but the beach here kicks CA beaches butt. I think I've converted :) The ocean is blue, blue, blue and the sand is almost white. It's like egg shell white ha. The water is still a little chilly, but definitely bearable.
When we first stepped on to sand, Mr. E was not a fan. Once he saw his daddy walking on it, he got in to it and loved it. By the end of the day he was pouring buckets of it on himself.

A very short clip of Mr. E at the beach the other day

If any of you want to come visit, you've got a place to stay :)

Oh, I also re-painted this table I found on Craigslist for $80. And I'm quite happy with the results.

Before

After

Baby boy turned 2!

My little, tiny, squishy baby, is now two years old! I cannot believe my baby is no longer a baby. He's this stubborn, sweet, non-talking, always on the go, car loving, couch climbing, always jumping, toddler boy. This boy knows how to make me smile from ear to ear and and laugh my head off. He's not much of a cuddle-r, but when he does, it makes the world stop and I melt just a little bit.
His birthday was soooo- low key, almost non existent. It fell on Easter, so I guess that helped with making it feel like it was a special day. Our day started off with a small Easter egg hunt, getting ready for church and going, going to the park with a few new church friends, and coming home to tacos and cake. I don't think this kid had any idea what was going on, but he did enjoy his frosting :)

Woke up to this...

Moved onto the Easter eggs, he was pretty stoked for his "Cars" basket

Got ready for church

(few hours passed) blew out some candles and had some cake

Happy birthday, sweet baby boy! Mommy and daddy love you so much and know you'll do great things in life. 

Bye, Utah.

March 19 was our official goodbye to our home for the last 5 years. It was a very bittersweet leaving, but because our flight was so early and I was so stressed, it didn't really phase me too much the day we left. I was more relieved to have the whole ordeal put behind me and to move forward with our life. Our life...at the beach :)

Mr. E did really well with our flights. I always stress myself out over flying with him, when he's never given me any reason to stress out about. He's a great little traveler and has never given me a hard time...knock on wood.
Our first flight left at 7am, which meant we had to be at the airport by 6, which meant we had to leave the house at 5, which meant waking up at 4. Ouch. Mr. E. passed out within seconds of take off, and only woke up for the final descent, which was awesome. Then we had to rush to our connecting flight which was going to be a wonderful 4 hr flight. The first half of the flight he was a little difficult. He just wanted to run around when we weren't allowed to. The stewardess had to keep getting on her intercom to tell "everyone" that they needed to stay in their seats while the fasten seat belt sign was illuminated. Whoops. The last part of the flight, Mr.E passed out until we landed. After we landed we made our through the airport, to the baggage claim, and to the hubbster/dad. Ev was pretty stoked to see him. Everyone said that he'd probably ignore him and want nothing to do with him, but his reaction was the EXACT opposite. I loved seeing my two boys reunite. It was one of the sweetest moments I've seen.
Our journey home wasn't long and when we arrived, it felt very weird. I had only seen a short 30 second video clip of our place and that was it. It was empty, minus our bags of clothes and boxes of kitchen crap. I hated the feeling of not knowing where I was and coming "home" to a non-homey feeling...home. But we're getting settled and it's started to feel like home to me now :)

The last bit of our flight, we were both ready to be on the ground and reunited as a family

"Re-united and it feels so good..."

And just a little sneak peak of what's down the street from us (2 minutes drive, less than a mile away). High risers, we live in one (not one of these ones), they're everywhere! These are all lining the coast, so you can't see the beach unless you park and walk, which kind of sucks, unless you live in one of these very expensive high risers. One day maybe :) This is Collins Ave. It runs parallel with the beach and is one of the main roads. There's tons of food places, shopping and resorts that run all long this street for miles and miles and miles and miles.