The eight hours of glorious sleep was short lived. She did it only that one night. Back to waking up about 4 times during an 11 hour night. This is an improvement, so we are not complaining, but it sure is nice to know that she can sleep for eight hours. Her crying spells are much, much less as well. That is HUGE improvement. The earplugs only come out once every couple days now. 
I do believe little Z is in the midst of a growth spurt. She is eating a ton of solid food. For a while there, we couldn’t figure out why she was carrying on so much, until… we just kept giving her more and more food. No more little tablespoon serving sizes of food. We are into the 1/2 cup size these days. Her latest new food is black beans. We mixed that with a little brown rice and yogurt. She thought it was okay. It is certainly cleaning out her intestinal track.
Last week, we made a roasted chicken. Ya know, it is super cheap, and makes the house smell amazing, and it tastes so good!!! The only downside it is takes a really long time to cook it. It was so simple, too! Just rubbed the skin with a little olive oil, filled the cavity with a little orange and garlic (we were out of lemons). Put it in a 375 degree oven for a few hours. It turned out so good! We even made the giblets into gravy that turned out super great, too!
So, right now, I am making a chicken soup with the chicken bones from that dinner. The broth is simmering now. Then I will add the leftover pieces of chicken and some barley in after it is all strained. This should turn out really good! Homemade Chicken and Barley soup. Maybe we will have to make some grilled cheese sandwiches to go with it.
In other news, our current local and long distance telephone company, Working Assets, decided that they are no longer going to provide local service any longer. So, after only about 3 months, we have to switch back to Qwest. It seems that Qwest has improved their available packages since we were a customer. So, now we will be saving about $30 a month! In addition to that, we finally decided that we don’t need all that digital cable tv either. So, we turned in the cable box and remote (one less remote that Zoey can chew on) and we are on basic cable. We will have to do with only 99 channels. 
Another $30 saved. So far, the only thing I miss is the cable box clock.
November 11th, 2004 at 2:55 pm
I have some great recipes for broiled butterflied chicken. If you have heavy kitchen shears it’s dead easy: just cut the backbone out of the chicken and press down to break the breast bone so it lays flat. It cooks up pretty fast that way, and you still get to take advantage of the thriftiness of buying whole chickens instead of cut-up.