Life Lately + Cheesecake!

Well hey there strangers, how's it going? Here is what has been going on in our life since Thanksgiving.

Christmas was great, we had a wonderful time with our families, and the days we had off from work/school were enough to recharge us and hit the ground running in 2018!

We had a bump in the road over Christmas break, Camden had 2 episodes of seizures out of the blue. After tests were run, he doesn't have any underlying medical conditions and his medicine seems to be helping. So thank you Lord for answered prayers and let's hope no more seizures happen.

(Not a paid advertisement) Camden also has psoriasis, mostly on his scalp and back, but it was starting to spread to his face. My niece Olivia recommended African black soap. We have tried so many creams, ointments, lotions, and steroid medicines over the years that didn't really work and we were about at our wit's end in trying to battle this. I found the soap at Wal-Mart last week and it has really helped! Best $3.46 I ever spent! So if you are in Wal-Mart, it is not stocked with the regular soap (of course not, nothing is ever where you would think it would be in our Wal-Mart) but in the cosmetics and skin care section, near the Burt's Bees products. Thanks for the rec Olivia!

Anna turned 16 in January and though she doesn't have her license yet (we aren't looking forward to the giant hike in insurance premiums and she needs more practice with 3 point turns), she will get it soon. Even though I will be a nervous wreck, it will be nice to have someone else run to the store to grab some milk or she can drive herself to/from school and tennis and I'll be off Mom-Uber duties.

I can't believe it's already time to start registering for 11th grade classes for next year! We went to a meeting last week about taking college classes in high school for college credit (for free! I'm all about free) and Anna will be taking advantage of that. It takes some planning to see if the classes offered will transfer to the college you want to go to and also do you need the class for your intended major. Anna wants to be a dietician and the only math she needs for that course of study in college is statistics. Statistics isn't offered through this community college program for high school students, pre-calculus algebra is. So if she took pre-calc algebra, it would count as a math elective in college and she would still have to take statistics! Anna wants to take as few math classes as possible so she'll stick with AP statistics class in high school and hope she passes the AP test and won't have to take math in college. She enjoys planning for the future, she's the polar opposite of a procrastinator, which is good. I'm surprised she doesn't have a white board in her room with her 10-year plan on it.

Next up: for Valentine's Day, I made a simple cheesecake, not one that needed to be put in a fiddly water bath or that called for a lot of esoteric ingredients. I have a 9" spring form pan but I didn't want to be eating cheesecake for 2 weeks. I bought a 6" springform pan from Walmart.com and I really like it! It's the perfect size for small desserts, next I'm going to make an ice cream cake.

Since I needed a recipe using a 6" pan, a-Google-ing I went and I found a recipe on Urban Bohemian.com. Only 7 ingredients (I threw in some chocolate chips) and it was easy! I didn't have to reduce down a 9" pan recipe and this one turned out perfect and so, SO good! Here's a photo, I'm not a food photographer and I don't use Photoshop to make my photos look better so this unfiltered photo is the real deal:

That about sums it all up!
Have a wonderful weekend everybody, enjoy this nice weather while it lasts.
Until next time,
Melissa