The Best Chocolate Chip Cookies Ever. EVER.

I've done it.

I've finally done it.

I've found THE BEST CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIE RECIPE IN THE WORLD!!!

This is a very big deal to me. I am kind of a chocolate chip cookie snob. For my taste, at least... I realize that some people like crunchy, hard chocolate chip cookies... but I do not. Yuck. And in case you have never tried, baking a soft and chewy chocolate chip cookie is difficult. Much more difficult than I ever imagined. Especially since I am apparently very picky about my cookies. I don't want just soft, fluffy cookies. I'm not looking for crispy edges with chewy centers (which seems to be the most common result with "chewy" cookie recipes). I want them to be chewy. All the way through. And not flat, but not too "puffy"... because that creates a soft cookie, not a chewy one. And by chewy I do not mean under baked, where the cookie falls apart when you pick it up because the middle is essentially still dough...

See... cookie snob. They say admitting you have a problem is the first step.

But seriously... how hard can it be to create this cookie??

I started out on my quest about 4 years ago. I was craving chocolate chip cookies and decided that as a mom of a toddler (Read was not quite 2) I needed to know how to bake a good chocolate chip cookie. So rather than running to the store and buying some, I looked up a recipe and promptly made a huge mess in my kitchen.

And failed. Miserably.

Did you know that baking soda expires? And if it is expired, that your cookies will be all runny and flat and horrible looking (and horrible tasting, quite frankly). Well, that is what I learned that night. And my cookies looked something like this.

Gross, right?!?

 



My sweet husband still ate them. And has since admitted that they were, in fact, horrible. But our household does not believe in throwing food away, especially any kind of baked goods. Besides, they still had chocolate in them so they couldn't be ALL bad...

I was even more determined after that epic fail, so I did some cookie research and quickly discovered that I really did not know ANYTHING about baking. There was actually some skill involved, and fresh, quality ingredients DID make a difference. So I acquired some baking soda that wasn't 2 years old and tried again. And again, and again, and again... I baked several batches of cookies within a couple weeks, experimenting with different recipes. And none of them were what I wanted. :(

I had to take a break from my quest for the perfect cookie, because quite frankly we were tired of eating crappy cookies. They got better, but they were still... blech. And because of our no-cookie-left-behind policy, we were going through a lot of milk since dunking them was the only way to make them not taste like a chocolate chip hockey puck.

Every once in a while I'd come across a new recipe and try it out, but I was always disappointed with the results. It was so discouraging. My baking skills improved in the cake/cupcake/banana bread/other delicious desserts arena, but cookies... especially the coveted chewy chocolate chip variety... still eluded me.

Enter Pinterest.

Oh Pinterest, glorious Pinterest... how did we stay-at-home moms survive before you?? ;) There are so many tips and tricks to be found on Pinterest, it is no wonder that I finally found my recipe there.

I really wasn't expecting much. Perhaps I had grown a little cynical in my quest for the perfect cookie. But finally, I have found it!! They are SO soft and chewy, and are actually even better today after they have had time to cool and set than they were straight out of the oven.

 



So good. Make them right now. And make sure your baking soda is fresh. ;) (Seriously though, a new box costs like 1 dollar. If it's been open more than a month, throw it away!)

 

The Best Chocolate Chip Cookies Ever

 

Found here, via Pinterest

 

 

Ingredients:

 3/4 c. unsalted butter, softened
3/4 c. brown sugar
1/4 c. granulated sugar
1 egg
2 tsp. vanilla extract
2 c. all purpose flour
2 tsp. cornstarch
1 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
1 c. bittersweet chocolate chips

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Lightly spray cookie sheet with non-stick spray or line with parchment paper.

2. Cream together butter and sugars until fluffy and light in color. Add egg and vanilla and blend in.

3. Mix in flour, cornstarch, baking soda and salt. Stir in chocolate chips.

4. Using a standard-sized cookie scoop or tablespoon, drop dough onto prepared baking sheet. Bake for 8-10 minutes, until barely golden brown around the edges. (The tops will not brown, but do NOT cook longer than ten minutes.)

5. Let cool, on the sheet, on a wire rack for five minutes. Remove from baking sheet and let cool completely. Makes approximately 3 dozen. Try not to eat them all.

 

 

***A few notes... Yes, cornstarch. I know, weird. Just do it. Also, I didn't have unsalted butter on hand and the store is like, 3 minutes away... way too much effort. I used salted and they are delicious. I also refrigerated the dough for a couple hours before baking... during my vast cookie research I learned that this helps them to not spread out as much, making a thicker, chewier cookie, and gives the flavors in the dough time to combine. Then I rolled the dough into balls and placed about 2 inches apart on the cookie sheet. They won't spread much.

 

 

Happy baking! You're welcome. ;)

Hormones are the devil

***Disclaimer*** This post is pretty (very) personal… if you are a dude and don’t want to read about my female hormonal fluctuations (and then some), you should just stop reading now. Consider yourself warned.

I am not a huge fan of hormones. And I bet that if you asked Ben (or any husband of any wife, for that matter), he’d say he’s not a big fan either. They make me a little crazy at times… you know, like once a month or so. I get really emotional. Like REALLY emotional. I usually have at least 1 day where I just feel like crying for no reason at all. I don’t really do the bitchy PMS thing so much… I’m more of the sad pathetic weepy girl.

Pregnancy hormones and I get along okay though. Clear, glowing skin? Nails that don’t break? Hair that no longer falls out and covers my bathroom floor?? Yes please!! I’ve gotten off pretty easy with the negative side effects of pregnancy… I’m one of those lucky women who actually enjoys being pregnant. Even emotionally, I feel much more stable and even keeled during pregnancy… none of these crazy month-to-month fluctuations.

All this to say… my body is very sensitive to hormones. I learned this in my early 20’s when I tried various forms of hormonal birth control. No bueno. Depression, weight gain, mood swings… it took years for me to make the connection but ever since I have avoided altering my body’s natural hormones in any way.

But what do I do when it is my own body that is creating the hormonal chaos?

This is where I found myself this summer. Breastfeeding causes some very strong, feel good hormones. And a lot of times these hormones also prevent your monthly cycle from starting back up after pregnancy. This wasn’t the case with me, however… mine started when Stellan was about 4 months old. Very sporadic and unpredictable, but it was there. Yay hormones. (Hopefully you sense the sarcasm.)

So when I decided to wean, and it went easier and faster than I had planned on, I had a huge hormone drop. My body wasn’t sure what to do. Physically I was fine; I was excited about the prospect of getting back in shape and losing the rest of the baby weight. (Which I’m still a little upset that I even have to do… with Read all the weight magically disappeared while I was breastfeeding. Boo for turning 30.) But, as I said in my last post (here), I was a disaster emotionally.

And I haven’t even told you the whole story yet.

“But wait… there’s more!!” (said in a cheesy game show announcer voice)

A few weeks after Stellan was completely weaned, I got a positive pregnancy test.

*GASP*

I know you all just gasped, because we didn’t tell anyone. Well, Ben told 1 person because he is terrible at keeping secrets, but I wanted to wait until I knew for sure. It was a faint positive, and just didn’t feel right. So I took another test that night. Another faint positive. Then I went to the store and bought a different brand of tests. Another faint line… but even fainter this time.

I took a 4^th test.

Then a 5^th.

I took 5 tests in 4 days. And the line got fainter with each test, until the 5^th when it didn’t show up at all.

Ben and I do want to have another baby, so those 4 days were strange for me. I was excited about the prospect of being pregnant again, but I also just didn’t feel sure that I was for some reason so I didn’t allow myself to think it was real quite yet. It was an odd self-protective mechanism. Which ended up coming in handy when I finally got a negative result, since that is what I had been expecting. Part of me kicks myself for being so anxious to test, because if I would have waited then I would’ve just thought my period was 4 days late, rather than putting Ben and I through so many emotions over those 4 days.

But, nevertheless, I DID get a positive. Or 4 of them, I guess. Which meant that I did have some of that lovely hCG pregnancy hormone in me, even if it didn’t stick around very long. They call this a chemical pregnancy, which is essentially an early miscarriage at 4 weeks. An embryo is formed but doesn’t fully implant, so it’s not a “real” pregnancy. Apparently this actually happens quite frequently but many women don’t even know it since they don’t take a pregnancy test and just assume their period is a few days late.

Honestly, I don’t think of it as a miscarriage. It wasn’t that hard on me, emotionally, since I was waiting for a good strong positive before I declared myself to be pregnant. I thought of the faint line as a “maybe” that ended up turning into a no. But all along I knew something wasn’t right. I hadn’t let myself get emotionally attached. That part of things was probably harder on Ben than it was on me.

But the hormones… again with the hormones. It was a rollercoaster. They dropped, then they spiked, then they dropped again… Oy. It was a lot for my body to take in just a couple months.

I’m doing a lot better now… it’s been over a month since all that happened, and about 2 months since Stellan has been completely weaned. I still have “off” days, but I feel like the fog has lifted. Hopefully my body is settling back down into a normal routine, and Ben will only have to deal with a crazy emotionally charged wife once a month again. ;)

There’s a lot more that could be said about those couple months, but I feel like I’ve written enough for now. And I feel like I got off pretty easy… postpartum depression is a very serious issue that many women experience on a much greater scale than I had to. So I am definitely not an expert, but I’m thankful that I went through it because I now have a greater appreciation for what they go through.

If you think you could be depressed, postpartum or not, please talk to someone. It’s the last thing in the world that you feel like doing at the time, but it does help. My story probably would’ve been very different had I not turned into a hermit crab over the summer. I pretty much didn’t leave the house unless absolutely necessary, and all of my relationships suffered because of it.

So to my friends and family, I’m sorry if it felt like I was ignoring you and didn’t want to see you. I didn’t, but it had nothing to do with you. I hope you can understand.

If you want to read more about postpartum depression related to weaning, here are some sites I found to be helpful:

http://joannagoddard.blogspot.com/2012/02/motherhood-depression-and-weaning.html

http://www.askmoxie.org/2007/08/qa-ppd-after-we.html

Thanks for reading! I promise something more light-hearted soon. ;)

Summertime Sadness

I feel like I just sat down to try and write a 30 page term paper on a topic that I know nothing about. Where do I start?? What should I say? The really tricky thing is that I can’t do any research… since I am writing about myself. You’d think it’d be easy.

So I’m just gonna start rambling, with no particular structure or storyline and hopefully you can make some sense of it all. I wish you the best of luck. ;)

For the past few months, I’ve felt… off. Not myself. Out of sorts. So much so, that I began questioning who I was to begin with. I knew I wasn’t feeling like “me”, but what does that even mean? Who was the “me” I was trying to feel like? Since I didn’t feel “normal”, what exactly does “normal” Autumn look like? It is strange to feel so detached from yourself… to know that something has changed, but what?

It was like having a bad day that lasted for months. The kind of bad day that only goes away after a good night’s sleep… where you wake up the next morning and have no idea why you were so grumpy because it’s just gone.

Except it wouldn’t go away.

And at the time, I didn’t even really want it to. I just wanted to stay home and be sad. I didn’t want to be around anyone because I didn’t want to pretend to be happy and fine, and I most certainly didn’t want to talk about how I was really feeling. Not because I was trying to hide it… I just didn’t understand it myself. I barely even talked to Ben about it, because I really didn’t know what to say. Obviously he knew something was wrong too, but neither of us knew why because nothing had really changed in our lives.

I just felt sad.

And I just wanted to be alone.

I went through the daily routines of being a mom & wife… breakfast, lunch, dinner… dishes, laundry, cleaning… That was all I could really focus on. And I could barely focus on that… I didn’t feel like cooking or cleaning most of the time so I got by on the bare minimums. The boys didn’t really seem to notice, and I didn’t feel any differently toward them. I was just less enthusiastic, less playful… They weren’t annoying me or making it any worse, but I looked forward to nap time and bed time so I could be alone again.

I watched a lot (A LOT) of Friends.

I love them.

 

Every episode, in fact.

I’d watch at least 2-3 a day, during nap time mostly. Or after the boys were in bed, if Ben was working late or at the gym or something. Ben even watched with me on (rare) occasion. (He pretends not to like it, but he always ends up laughing. Watching him laugh at Friends almost brings me more joy than watching Friends myself. Almost.) I was pretty much always thinking about when I could watch the next episode.

 

It was kind of sad really. But it got me out of my gloom and I felt happy during those 22 minutes. I felt a little bit like “me” again. At least until real life beckoned and I had to turn off the laptop and get out of bed.

So one day I was really, really down. And something in my brain finally said, “hey Autumn… you are depressed.” Like, actually depressed. (It was probably obvious to you, reading this story, but it was new information to me at the time.) I was constantly in a bad mood, had zero motivation, dealing with anxiety issues, didn’t want to be around people… Ben had suggested more exercise might help but quite frankly I just didn’t even feel like trying. Something was seriously wrong.

So I suddenly got super introspective, trying to pinpoint when I started feeling this way and what changed around that time, and it kind of hit me.

Like, smack-me-in-the-head-why-didn’t-I-think-of-this-sooner hit me.

I immediately got on my handy dandy iPhone and started googling. (side note: I am typing this in a Word document right now to upload to blogger later… and there are squiggly red lines under “iPhone” and “googling.” No, I don’t mean “siphoned” or “goggling”… C’mon Microsoft Word, get with the program!!)

Is this suspense just killing you?? Did you cheat and skip ahead? Don’t do that, I’m trying to tell a story here people. Patience.

After a few google searches and bouncing from website to website, I finally felt like I understood, and felt a huge sense of relief. I immediately sent a text message to Ben that said:

“I think I may be going through a form of postpartum depression related to weaning.”

I had never heard of such a thing. But the more I read, the more it made sense. I didn’t experience any sort of depression after either of my boys were born, quite the opposite really. I love being a mommy, and really actually do love the baby stage. Yes, I get exhausted from the sleepless nights and get tired of smelling like spit up… but I love the first year of that little person being totally dependent on me. So postpartum depression had never even entered my mind before.

3 weeks old. Me in my robe, him clinging to me like a baby koala. Perfection.



But here I was, with a 1 year old, totally depressed. And as I looked back, trying to figure out when my mood changed, it was very close to when I started weaning. Stellan was exclusively breastfed until he started eating solids… we supplemented with formula only a few times when I didn’t have enough milk stored up and he spent a night away from me. And even when he was eating solids, he really didn’t slow down with the nursing that much… the kid likes his calories.

Spaghetti at 10 months.

 

Cake. Enough said.

 

So when his 1^st birthday came and went, I decided it was time to start cutting back. I started off slow, cutting out the middle-of-the-day feedings and giving him whole milk instead. Which he loved. From a sippy cup. Since I am blessed to get to stay home full-time with my boys, he really didn’t spend that much time away from me his first year… which meant he didn’t drink out of a bottle very often. He went straight to a sippy cup with no problems.

It was so easy.

He didn’t even seem to care.

So we quickly went down to just 1-2 feedings a day… bed time and if he woke up in the middle of the night (which he did regularly). I thought to myself, “I bet the middle of the night feeding is going to be the toughest to wean him from…” Then one night he just didn’t wake up. He slept for 11 hours. And then he did it the next night. And the next night. And…

You get the idea.

So then he was down to bed time only. Once a day. It took 2 weeks to do what I was planning on slowly doing over a couple months. I was excited, but also shocked… it hadn’t been this easy with Read. Ben even put him to bed a few times and he didn’t even fuss about not nursing.

It was TOO easy.

Then the boys went to stay with my parents for a couple nights. I knew Stellan would be fine, and he was. And when they came home, we just didn’t start nursing again. He really didn’t even care.

It was over. Just like that.

It took a little more than a month. And I probably could’ve done it even faster, but I had intended on taking it slow and stretching it out over a few months. It was definitely harder on me than it was on Stellan, from an emotional standpoint (physically I had no problems since I didn’t just stop cold turkey. Hooray for painless weaning!). I loved that one-on-one cuddle time. But it was also nice to have my body back.

Or so I thought.

Stay tuned for Part 2... (or else this would've been a REALLY long post...) ;)

4 months...

Wow.

Until I logged into blogger the other day, I really had no idea that it had been 4 months (FOUR!!) since I had written anything. I knew I wasn't going to be amazing at this blogging thing, but geez! I guess it's a good thing I only have like 5 followers. ;)

Honestly though, I just haven't had much to say. Or, more accurately, I've had lots to say but didn't know how to say it. And really just didn't feel like talking about it. More on that later...

But...

(this should be obvious since I am here, writing again...)

Things have been stirring in my heart lately. Things I want (& need!) to say, to no one in particular and to everyone at the same time.

So the blog returns. :)

And hey, by the way... Do you like it?? I spent hours... HOURS... on Saturday (much to the dismay of my husband, who was watching college football in his robe so I'm not sure why he was annoyed...) messing around on the internet trying to figure out this whole blog layout/design/html magic thing. (Yes, it is magic.) And even though it was ...cough cough... 16 years ago ...cough cough... the html class I took my freshman year still proves to be extremely helpful. Unlike calculus. Don't get me wrong, I liked calculus... math was always the first homework that I did because it was the easiest for me... but what was the point, really?

But back to the blog. I still have more to do but it is feeling a lot more like me now. Which is important to me, because isn't that why you're here? I certainly haven't found a "niche" in the blog world so the only people who would care to read this are my family, friends, acquaintances... People who may want to know a little more about me.

Or maybe you're just bored and curious. Whatever, I'll take it.

Oh! Before I forget, considering my previous post about being an aunt... I have a new niece! Ilsa Josephine Frances Pilo was born today! She is #5 for Shane (Ben's brother) and Karen, and joins Mahari, Caleb, Nora, and Timon. Congrats to the whole family, I can't wait to meet her!

8 lbs. 5 oz. of pure muscle. ;)

I do have some posts in the works, but for now I mainly just wanted to say hello.

Hello!

Stay tuned for more soon...

She's crafty

So I kind of have a thing for matching... it's a bit OCD really. So today I finally did a project I've been wanting to do for a while cause it's been driving me crazy. Stellan's room is the only room in the house that I'm actually happy with, the rest are a work in progress (and will be for quite some time). But there was one thing in his room that didn't really go with the rest of it. And you'll totally laugh at me, but it had to be fixed. :)


Yes... his baby wipes container. His room is blue/green/yellow, and this was the closest thing I could find to matching, but the brown & beige has always kinda bothered me, and the green is totally not the right color (see... OCD). So I pulled out the leftover scrapbook paper that I used to decorate the letters above his crib, and of course you can't do crafts without Mod Podge. (I LOVE Mod Podge... every time I think of a project to do, my first thought is "I wonder if Mod Podge will work...")

This isn't a tutorial, so here are some pictures of the end result. :)

I didn't have enough of the blue to do the whole thing, so I did the sides with yellow and front/back with blue.

SO much better!

The color scheme.

In it's place. :)

I'm still amazed how well the paper matches the fabric of all his bedding... the paper was bought 4 years after the bedding (it was Read's too) and I didn't even have a sample of the fabric when I found the paper. This is the diaper stacker that hangs off the end of the changing table.



So there ya go. :) Yes, I know I'm silly and weird but this was my major accomplishment for the day, and I'm pretty proud of it. :)

-Autumn