Flip Flop Cabernet Sauvignon

Description on the bottle:  Full bodied, rich Cabernet Sauvignon with blackberry fruit, dark cherries, and a long lingering finish.  Black pepper notes and berry aromas pair well with New York strip steak, spinach ravioli or Portobello mushrooms.  Serve at room temperature now or store away from direct sunlight for up to 3 years after purchase.

 

Sarah says:  On no, bad memories of bad cheap red wine and rushing back at me.  It's so horrible.  Blah, cough, gag.  I can't barely drink it.  The sticker on the bottle says it won the Gold at the 2011 Florida State Fair International Wine Competition.  I don't believe that is possible, it's just not tasty at all.  I would not recommend this, with or without food, it's just not worth it.

 

jon says: definitely not good, but also not the worst. I would drink it again, but I certainly wouldn't buy it again.

 

Overall rating:  Thumbs down.

 

Sarah says:  Other things I wouldn't recommend?  Going up north without mentally preparing for it.  Don't get me wrong, I had a lovely time at the cabin with my family, but I'm a city girl, and it was hard being in the boonies.  First of all, no computer... I seriously want a t-shirt that says "I survived 24 hours without Facebook".  It's a miracle I survived.  All weekend long, I was constantly thinking to myself, "oh, that would have made a funny status." or "I wish I could post that!".  It was bothersome that I couldn't post my daily activities online immediately (I realize that that is probably a sign that I have a problem, but that's not what this post is about).  Also, I understand that the point of vacations is to slow down and relax, but I'm made for the fast pace world that I live in.  I constantly was asking "What is taking so long?" while waiting at restaurants.  I understand that people up north aren't in as big of a hurry, and that should be appealing, but when there are two small kids in tow, speed is everything.

 

I'm not saying I wouldn't go up north again, I would, but I'd prepare for it better.  Probably by drinking more wine to calm me down (but not this wine, something better!)  The good news, the kids loved every second of it, and that really is all that matters.

 

 

 

honeywood part 3

"peaches come from a can they were put there by a man" - presidents of the united states of America


jon says: these peaches come in a bottle and you can drink them! AWESOME!!! honestly peaches aren't my favorite fruit to eat, but scientist have proven that peach juice from a can is delicious. and peach wine is freakin' delightful! this wine might be the best wine I have ever... EVER drank.

why, you might ask? because it doesn't taste like wine!

hold on to your butts, wine comes from grapes. but grapes are sweet and full of flavor, why is it when I taste wine most are bitter and convoluted with all sorts of crazy crap to describe them like "floral aromas" or "semi-dry". what does "semi-dry" even mean? wine is a liquid! this wine is made from peaches and oh my god it tastes like...

PEACHES!!!

I love it! my thumbs can't get any higher!

Honeywood Part II

Sarah says:  I'm still confused by the flavor of this wine, but I'm enjoying it more this time around.  Tonight, since I  knew what to expect, I find myself more able to look past the orange color and peachy flavor, and just drink up!

Overall:  Thumbs higher than yesterday.

Sarah says:  I'm reading what might possible be the saddest book in the entire world.  "Chasing Charlie" by CM Newman, is a freebie I got on my kindle.

Book description:  Get swept away with Vince and Angela in Chasing Charlie, a deep exploration of love and faith that has sold over 80,000 copies and has been the #1 best seller on Kindle's Religious Romance, Christian Inspirational Romance, and overall Christian Fiction lists, as well as the #5 best-selling free book in the Amazon Kindle store.

Vince Glasser, an overworked federal agent and single father with a troubled past, already has enough on his plate when he is diagnosed with terminal cancer. He deals with it the only way he knows how--by fighting the illness with everything he has in him. Along his path toward a certain end, he mends relations with his estranged brother, reexamines his faith, prepares his son to live life without his parents, and finds room for romance with his longtime partner, Angela Hawkins.

Angela finds herself falling in love not only with Vince, but also with his young son, Charlie. In caring for both of them, she sees that despite decades-old mistakes that have left her in a pattern of empty relationships, she can still find redemption and have the family she's always wanted. But a nagging feeling tells her that death isn't the only thing that threatens to tear her new family from her grasp.

Amidst the struggles of a family with an expiration date, between the medicine and the meltdowns, Angela and Vince learn the true meaning of grace. See what other readers are talking about as two lost people find each other - and God - just in time.

Chasing Charlie is currently undergoing professional editing. A first round of revisions went live in May 2013; please expect another round of editing to be completed in July 2013. Please note that editing will be for errors, but not for length. Chasing Charlie is long and will remain that way unless C. M. Newman chooses to submit it for traditional publication. It is currently a self-published work. 

Sarah says:  This sounds like everything I want in a book, but so far is just so darn sad.  A few years ago his ex-wife died, then he survived a gun wound while working, now he has terminal cancer and only has 6 months to live!  And, he has a 6 year old boy!  Geez, poor guy can't get a break.  And this book is long!  I've been reading it for days and I'm only 10% done (per Kindle, I didn't calculate that myself - on a totally unrelated note, I cannot seem to grasp the concept of reading on a Kindle and not being able to see how thick the book is, and thus seeing how much I've read or still have to read).  I'm expecting it to get more uplifting, but probably more sad at the same time.  I will keep you posted.

As sad as the book has been so far, it has one good thing... it's got Vince, and me, thinking about a bucket list.

I've never put too much thought into a bucket list, now is probably a good of a time as any to start one.  I think of a bucket list of being things that I want 100% for me.  I'm sure I mentioned before that pretty much every decision I make in someway or another has my kids best interests in the back of my mind.  I love them dearly, but I'd like to keep them out of this.  So here goes:

• Go hot air ballooning
• Complete a marathon
• Vacation in Hawaii
• Eat at a sit down restaurant by myself
• Sew something useful (ie. more than a button)
• Sit in the audience of a live TV show
• Kiss Jon in the rain
• Fly first class
• Be someone's mentor
• Travel to New York, New York
• Donate blood
• Take a surfing lesson
• Do a color run
• Learn to cook one really good item that I could take to a pot luck
• Go to the symphony
• Read the Bible
• Play paintball
• Go to the airport, pick a flight, and go
• Plant a tree
• Build a bonfire on a beach
• Learn to make a balloon animal
• Make my own wine
• Go on a mission trip
• Give horse back riding another try
• Drink from a coconut
• Order room service
• Buy every flavor of cookies from a Girl Scout at a cookie booth
• Travel to Washington DC, appreciate it this time
• Ride an elephant
• Join a flash mob
• See the Lion King live on Broadway
• Own a Coach purse
• Give a stranger flowers

That's a start.  I feel that most of these are fairly attainable, I didn't want to set myself up for failure.  I don't have a timeline for any of this, so don't you people start pressuring me to get it done!  I'm expecting a lot of it won't happen until my kids are a tad older, but none the less, it's a list of goals, and that feels good.  

Honeywood Honeysuckle Peach

Description on the bottle:  Honeysuckle Peach: a delicious wine produced from top quality peach, honey, nutmeg, cinnamon and cloves added to a fresh, crisp, white table wine.  An extremely complex wine, it all comes together in balance and quality that is unsurpassed.  Enjoy as an aperitif before dinner, or after dinner with dessert.  This is a versatile wine and can be served hot as well as cold.

 

Sarah says:  I'm really not sure how I feel about this wine.  It's good, but it's so strange.  It peach and honey flavors are really strong, which make me feel like I'm not even drinking wine, it's more like a cocktail.  I really feel that I'm drinking it in the wrong season, it would be a good winter wine.  I thought the peach sounded summery, but the honey and the subtle spices, make me feel like it would be a good "warm the body" kind of drink. 

 

Overall rating:  Unsure thumbs, will need to try again!

 

Sarah says:  This bottle also presented me with a little bit of a challenge.  For the first time ever, I broke the cork opening the bottle.  I'm hanging my head in shame right now, I've failed as a wine lover.  Half the cork was in my hand, half the cork was still stuck in the bottle.  I've recently just learned that wine should be kept on its side to keep the cork moist.  I broke that rule by having the bottle standing up.  I paid the price and shall never disobey again.  As a side note, I'm collecting all my corks in a jar (which smells SOOOO  FREAKING STRONG, I'm blown away every time I open the jar to add more).  I have no idea what I'm going to do with those, if anyone has any creative ideas, I'm all ears!  And, yes, I kept both pieces of my broken cork.  I could come in handy, you never know!

 

Speaking of breaking rules, I let Mary break one today.  Don't tell Jon, because he'll freak out!  Today I let little Mary, 4 year old Mary, teeny tiny Mary... jump into the deep end of the pool, without floaties on, without anyone in there to catch her.  Mary is still in the lowest level swimming class, which leads me to believe she shouldn't be doing that.  Mary is two years younger than Liam, and he just started doing it 1 month ago, which leads me to believe she shouldn't be doing that.  The deep end is where the older "cool" kids hang out, which leads me to believe she should be doing that.  BUT - tell Mary she can't do something, and she's going to figure how to do it. 

 

Over the past several weeks Mary has displayed great interest in swimming independently, and we've been letting her give it a go in the shallow end.  But we made it quite clear that there was no deep end for her yet.  But, after watching her for the past several weekends, my confidence has increased.  So, today, I let her show me what she was made of.  And she's made of a lot!  I'm so impressed and proud of her.  My four year old can swim!!  She's totally moving up to the next swim lesson level this fall.  I picked today for a few reasons: 1) Jon wasn't around, I knew he totally wouldn't go for it (I'm the cool parent like that).  2) Because of the crazy hot weather we've been having, our pool is actually a reasonable temperature, so I was willing to jump in if I needed to.  3) She was really begging, and just being so freaking cute about it, I couldn't say no. 

 

She spent the whole rest of the afternoon swimming all over that pool!  She's amazing.  I can't believe a few weeks ago she was in wings, and last month both kids were!!  I don't have a picture, because as amazed as I was with her, and as confident as I am now... my eyes were glued on that pool the entire time.  I wasn't about to take my eyes off her to find the camera.  I'm crazy enough to let her swim, not crazy enough to let her drown. 

 

When was the last time you broke the rules?  How did it turn out?  This wine broke all the rules, the peach, the honey, what is this?!  It's growing on me though, glass # 2, here we go....



Water Part IV

Sarah says:  I realize this is the 4th time I've blogged while drinking water - sort of lame for a wine blog, however, I just can't drink like that all the time without stopping to re-hydrate sometimes.  Things have been so chaotic at work lately that I've found myself forgetting to eat, drink, and go to the bathroom (although not going to the bathroom make sense given how little I've drank).  I generally drink several bottles of water a day - this past week I was lucky if I got half of one in me.  Apparently, sipping takes too much time, time that I just couldn't spare.  So, tonight I drink good old H2O.  Wine is important, water is more important.  Drink up!

Speaking of chaos, Disney World is awesome, but it definitely has an aspect of chaos.  There are loads of people, food, parades, noise, kids, characters, rides... it's nuts.  In my last post I hinted that I'd be providing some tips... here they are!

• Fly.  If you live in Michigan, and are going to Florida, fly there.  We drove.  It wasn't horrible or anything – we invested in a DVD player for the car, and I’ll hold strong that it was the best $100 ever spent, but man oh man, if you can afford it, just fly.  We spent 4 days in a car – that’s 4 days that could have been spent doing much better things.  Despite our increased budget, we didn't fly, we choose to spend our funds on something else….
• Stay on Disney property.  This was my first experience with this, and I would absolutely do it again.  Staying at a Disney resort really does seem to have some perks.  We stayed at Pop Century, which is one of their “budget-resorts”.  Budget smudget, it was awesome.  3 pools, a huge dining area, daily activities for the kids, nightly movies by the pool, fairly typical hotel room set up, it was fine for us!  The only thing I didn't like was there wasn't a coffee pot in our room, and because the resort was so freaking large, I had to walk 5 minutes every morning to get my coffee.  (just kidding, I don’t do anything until I've had at least one cup of coffee, I had to send Jon on a 5 min walk every morning to get me my first cup of coffee, which meant I had to wait  10 min to get that first dose of caffeine, which was difficult for me).  I loved the refillable cups though, once you made it to the dining area, I could fill that cup with as much coffee (or whatever you wanted to drink!), as many times as needed throughout our entire stay.  If you are going in June, it’s super freaking hot out, you’re going to be thirsty, bonus tip: get a refillable cup!
• Get a meal plan.  I have no idea how much a spent on food, it was probably a lot.  But because I purchased a meal plan and paid for it all in advance, it eased the pain.  I’d watch them ring up our lunch, and see the $80 bill flash in the screen, and panic, but then instead of paying that, they’d just swipe our card and wah-lah… food!  Having to pay for each meal would have really drained the fun of eating, and enjoy eating I did.  I wasn't worried about finding the cheapest thing on the menu, because with the meal plan it didn't matter.  You could get the most expensive thing and it still just counts as one meal deducted.  You basically buy a number of meals – we got 40 (which gave us two meals per person per day.  And, the best part if you ask me, with the meal plan you get a dessert with lunch and dinner – generally I wouldn't eat dessert twice a day, but I just couldn't force myself to say no.  The Mickey Mouse cupcake with Oreo ears called to me, often.  Also, I have to say, I was quite impressed with their ability to accommodate Liam’s gluten free diet – something I’m fairly certain we wouldn't have been able to do at a non-Disney place.
• Get a photopass.  Why not?  They take pictures of you all over the park, for free!  Unless you want to purchase the pictures, then of course you have to pay for them… but let them snap away and check out the pictures later.  It’s fun and easy.  You can check out our pictures here: Clay 2013 Photopass Pics
• Check out a map before you go.  I’m generally a big fan of winging it, especially on vacation.  But these parks are gigantic, if you don’t have some sort of a plan of the items you definitely want to do, you’re going to get run down or run over by everything and everyone else!  I would be sad to spend all day at the front of a park, only to find out about something awesome at the back of the park, but not have enough time to do it (even if you were having a great time in the front of the park.)   Also, talk to the people at the resort, most have a really good feel for which attractions get the busiest, so you know if you need to try to get to something early.
• Take advantage of the “magic hours”.  By staying at a Disney resort, they have magic hours on certain days for certain parks.  They open early and stay late for just Disney resort guests.  I originally thought this wasn't that big of a deal, and then we did it.  It’s amazing the difference!  We flew through lines during the magic hours – actually there weren't lines at all – we just went right up to things and got on.  During magic hours Mary and I rode the Little Mermaid ride, met Ariel, rode the Mad Tea Cups, rode the Carousel, and met the White Rabbit – pretty much without stopping once.  We spent the entire rest of the day waiting for the Peter Pan ride.  (ok, I’m slightly exaggerating about the rest of the day, but you get the point!)
• Have fun.  It’s crazy how quickly you fall into the trap of trying to get through as many attractions as quickly as possible.  I specifically remember two moments during our week in FL, where we lost that goal of having fun.  The park had just opened, we were mixed in with a mob of people, most of whom are practically running to get to their first ride.  Running, in 90 degree heat, in the middle of a mob, with two kids in tow:  not fun.  Jon was swerving in an out of people, I was dragging Liam, at one point there were steps, and because taking the ramp would be too far out of the way, Jon just lifts Mary’s stroller by the arms and carries her down (NOT safe!!), and continues to book it full steam ahead.  At some point on that crazy mission, it realized I was not, and more importantly, Liam was not having fun.  Did it really matter if we got to that ride in 2 minutes or 5?  We wanted to get to the ride, but Liam wanted to look at some of the cool Disney buildings and scenery along the way – and we were forcing him to miss it.  Try not to get caught up in that.  The second time was while standing in line to meet some character.  We got kids autograph books, and we became a little crazed with filling them up.  Neither kid expressed interest in this particular character, in fact, I’m fairly certain they literally said they didn't want to meet them, yet we continued to stand in that line.  We just had to get that autograph and picture.  Luckily, at some point, we came to our senses, and got out of line to go do something more fun.  But again, it’s so easy to get caught up in the characters, you could easily spend several days doing that alone.  Decide which characters you want to meet, and stick to that.

All in all, we had a great trip.  We rode a lot of rides, we met a lot of characters (both Disney and non-Disney), we did a lot of swimming, and we made a lot of memories.  You know what we didn't do a lot of?  Drinking wine.  I'll be making up for that soon!

Sequin Part II

Sarah says:  This wine makes me happy, and I'm sad that the bottle is empty.  Similarly, our Disney vacation a few weeks ago made me happy, and I'm sad that it's over.

As many of you may know by now (or maybe not if you are new here!), that Jon, Liam, Mary and I packed up a few weeks ago and went to Disney World.  It was awesome!  The kids had so much fun, Mary was all about meeting her favorite princess and fairy friends, while Liam wanted the rides, the faster the better.  I think we did a pretty good job of pleasing the both of them.  Mary is already planning her next trip, and wants to go back next weekend.  That just makes me giggle, if she is anything like me, she’ll go back in about 15 years. 

Here’s my Disney background:  this was my 4^th trip. 

Trip #1:  I went once as a child, I’m guessing I was around 8?  My parents are probably going to die a little inside if they read this, but I don’t remember much from that trip.  I mostly remember going to the beach one day, and that is mostly because I’ve heard the story told and retold a bazillion times about how we almost died when it starting storming while we were in the ocean.  But going to Disney World…. I’m totally blank.  I will cry if my children tell me they can’t remember the trip when they are adults – one of the main reasons for going on a trip like this is to create memories.  They are going to remember those memories – we paid a lot of money for them!  I’m hopeful that looking at all the pictures will help them remember, I don’t remember seeing many pictures from my childhood trip.

Trip #2:  Hold onto your laptops folks, my nerd status is about to get a whole lot more nerdy.  I don’t talk about this a lot, because it’s on a whole other level of dork.  When I was in high school, I was in an after school group called “RoboHawks”.  The Hawks part was because our school mascot was the Hawks.  The Robo part was because… well… we built a robot.  Yup, I was in the club that built a robot… so nerdy.  And so freaking awesome!!   First of all, math and science, my favorite subjects, rolled into one… win!  Second of all, we built a freaking robot… win!  Third of all, we went to Disney World for a robot competition… win!!  Nerds… surrounded by other nerds… and a bunch of competing robots… it really doesn’t get much better than that.  Here’s my serious moment for a minute.  It’s tough being the girl that is smart, quiet, into band, and in the robot club… but when you find that place where everyone is just like you, and you totally “get” each other, and you finally fit in for the first time ever, it rocks your world.  RoboHawks was that place for me.  I honestly don’t remember a lot about the Disney part of that trip either.  I think we went to Epcot…  I mostly remember the robots.  There are some seriously smart and creative people out there, I hope they all overcame their nerd reputations and have turned into powerful adults in the working world.

Trip #3:  2006, Jon and I went for our 1 year anniversary.  I was pregnant with Liam, and we were on a major budget.  So we did one of those timeshare presentation things for a free pass or two.  We stayed in a dumpy motel, probably 30 min or so from the parks, near a flea market that for some reason we went to more than once.  We pretty much did everything as cheap as possible on that trip – but we were still in the phase where it didn’t matter because we were just happy to be there together.   Apparently, I’m over that phase, because I wouldn’t do that trip again if my life depended on it.  I do remember more of the parks though!  I remember the Back to the Future ride, and I remember some ride on a boat.  I also remember taking a daily nap on that trip, it was wonderful.  There were no naps on trip #4.

Trip #4:  2013, in the seven years since our last trip, our family size has doubled, our budget has increased, and our interests have been drastically shifted.  I’m determined that we will remember this trip.  This time, we stayed at a Disney Resort, we visited 4 (4!!!) of the theme parks, we went to the fireworks, we met characters, we took lots of pictures, we left exhausted and full of memories.  This is the first trip I recall actually meeting characters, and it was quite fun.  I was just as thrilled to meet the princesses as Mary was. 

I have several tips for the "first time as a family Disney travelers" out there, but I will have to save those for another night!  For now, I'm going to finish my wine and start working on saving for our next trip!