Sunday Traditions

        In the last couple weeks I've really been trying to make Sundays a day for R&R and family time.  We've had an insanely busy spring/summer/fall this year and were feeling like we hadn't had a weekend just for us, with no obligations or events in months (because we hadn't!)

At the wedding of friends.  One of our many weekend adventures this summer.  Rowan got his fancy clothes all messy at dinner, so we changed into more casual attire for the dancing.

        So after reading this post on one of my favorite blogs, I started making more of an effort to get projects done and the house cleaned during the week, if not by Saturday night in order that we could actually make the Sabbath a day of rest.  In the past, it seems that we were burned out from our week, so Saturday was laze around day, and then Sunday would be the day we frantically tried to get weekend projects done and have the house cleaned to some semblance of order to start the week.

        One of the things I'm starting to do to make Sunday special is to bake some kind of treat for us to have Sunday morning for breakfast/brunch.  I don't normally bake anything during the week other than healthy muffins and very, very rarely, bread.  This Sunday I didn't bake anything the night before, I make a pineapple upside down cake from my Mennonite Community Cookbook for a church potluck we were going to in the afternoon.  It was delicious and everyone there enjoyed it.

       Last Sunday I made this:

Ugh, my camera is so crappy.  We are getting a new one, that's all there is to it!

Lemon pound cake!  I'd never made a pound cake before, and my first attempt turned out nothing short of amazing!  I used this recipe which was easy and quick to make. It was delicious, moist, and had the perfect hint of lemon.  I made a blueberry sauce to go with it out of frozen wild blueberries.  It was heavenly.  Here are some of my other inspirations for future Sundays.

       The other new Sunday tradition we started yesterday was playing a board game and drinking tea before bed instead of watching a TV episode or movie.  Chris actually drank some of his homemade apple wine/cider.  We played snakes a ladders with a board I picked up at a thrift shop a while back.  It was the first time we'd used it and I was pleased to find it had cute little vintage looking illustrations of children doing good things getting rewards at the top of the ladders and ones doing bad things having bad repercussions at the bottoms of the snakes.  For example, the child saving money in her piggy bank at the bottom of the ladder got to buy a toy at the top, and a child who pulled a cat's tail at one of a snake got scratched at the other end.  Neither Chris nor I had played the game since we were children, and it took longer than we thought, but I won!  Maybe he'll win next week when we play Scrabble.