(Part of) My Week in Pictures

I’m finally getting around to showing you part of my “feeding the soccer team” week. Here’s basically what happened:  I took pictures of the first day…then I pretty much forgot to take any the rest of the time. My brain was preoccupied with getting everything done. Usually I’d think “OH I should have gotten a picture of the salad bar” after we’d cleaned it up. 

This week has been absolutely busy…and absolutely wonderful. I have LOVED cooking for the team. They were all so sweet about how great the food was and how much they appreciated it. That, of course, made it all the better. (It’s no fun cooking for people who don’t appreciate it, right?)

I woke up Thursday morning knowing that I had only two days left. No problem. Then the head coach called Matt and said that he’d just found out that other arrangements had been made on campus for the girls. However, could I fix a meal Sunday night instead?

I was disappointed for about half a second…then I felt a tremendous relief that I was off the hook for the next two days. Suddenly I went from motivated to dead weight. We barely got through school before I fell asleep in my chair. The kids fixed themselves leftovers while I remained brain dead. Funny how you can go and go and go…and then once you give yourself permission to stop…you STOP. And stop I did. 

Okay here are a few highlights from early in the week:

I tried to capture what the van looked like filled with all the groceries. It’s very hard to see this, but every piece of floor and all the seats were covered. It’s a very good thing my kids weren’t with me or they would have had to stay behind at Walmart.

On the menu for Sunday night was BBQ pork sandwiches (yes the menu here says BBQ beef, but the pork was cheaper so I went with it), corn on the cob, baby carrots, apple crisp and homemade ice cream:

Sunday afternoon I put the boys to work outside shucking corn for dinner. Shannen washed them all for me while I worked on making apple crisp. See there in the background is the ice cream maker going. Just be glad you can’t hear it running while you’re reading this or I’d have to yell over the noise.

Here’s me peeling bunches of apples for the apple crisp. The boys and I had picked these apples at a friend’s house a few days before. Doesn’t get much better than that.

Here’s the corn all ready to start cooking. Yep, that’s a lot of corn.

I don’t know if I mentioned it or not, but I had another girl staying with me for a few days while she waited for the college dorms to open. She was a big help the first few days of cooking these meals. In this picture, you see Amanda and Shannen getting ready to put a batch of cookies in the oven. The cookies were for Monday night, but I thought getting them done ahead would be a good idea. 

Here’s the pork all finished cooking in one of the crock pots (we had two going). Matt took on the job of de-boning it and shredding it. Oh my word was it good! (Um, if I do say so myself.)

Ah the great dessert table! Here are two big apple crisps ready to go and the double batch of giant chocolate chip cookies ready for Monday night.

This first meal was served at the park so we loaded everything into our van and into Amanda’s car. Somehow we had room for the boys this time.

Here’s everyone eating at the park. Good times.

And then came the dishes.

I tried to capture the fullness of the messy dishes. Somehow these pictures look too clean to show how messy my kitchen was. But if you look closely you’ll see that in each picture the pile of dishes in the drain is a DIFFERENT pile of dishes, which shows how many of them there were to wash.

Round one…clean.

Round two…clean with several big pots left.

Ahhhhhhh…all done.

And that was day one. I’m sorry I only have that first day for you to see. Most of the other days the meals were served in our church fellowship hall. Matt asked the girls on the team to wash all the dishes after those meals and wow was that nice for me!! (And probably a team building experience or something like that.)

I’ll be serving one last meal on Sunday, so if I have a half a brain, I’ll try to remember to take some pictures of it for you.