Survived the week!

Some weeks, I think I deserve an award just for making it through with all three of us mostly healthy and the house intact. Just a few of the things we had going on besides the normal activities and a monster that has not slept past 5 a.m. in over a week:

• Chinese New Year
• my mother's birthday
• my husband's birthday
• lunch with my mother and in laws and husband to celebrate FIL, mother and hubby's b-day
• call on the way home from lunch that we need to rush to the school to sign a permission slip for the field trip the Post Office that they are leaving on in 15 minutes!
• Pancake Tuesday/Mardi Gras
• Ash Wednesday
• Valentine's Day
• no school Friday
• taking my son to visit my mom since she hasn't seen him since Christmas (and she only lives 3 miles away! but it is either raining or he got sick every time we planned something)
• at least six hours trying to figure out what I did to screw up www.thatrecipe.com so now it won't choose the right pictures or text when I try to share posts on FB or Google +. I hate SEO right now.

I think that is it. I also had every intention of getting my hair done and maybe the taxes too, but I decided I was too overloaded, so those plans got pushed to next week. Oh wait, there was one more major event:

Yesterday at the grocery store my husband  threw in a box of marble cake mix. I took it out and told him I would make it from scratch. He said I needed to do it soon because of the start of Spring Training. I smiled and realized we have just started a new family tradition. My great aunt and uncle were huge San Francisco Giants fans and both are now watching from the premium seats in heaven. My uncle loved marble cake so when they were newlyweds my aunt went learned how to make one just for him. Their daughter-in-law made one for their 50th wedding anniversary and they were both touched. So now I think I will make a marble cake every year for the start of Spring Training. Next year, I might add a few drops of orange food coloring to the vanilla part and amp up the chocolate color so it is orange and black.

I didn't have a recipe so I hit Pinterest. I am not a big pinner, most of my stuff is recipes from That Recipe, but feel free to follow me if you are so inclined. I ended up going with Martha Stewart's recipe because I wanted a slam dunk (oops mixed my sports metaphors there) grand slam and it made a loaf pan size instead of something larger. It is delicious if the fact that my husband ate three slices is any indication. I wouldn't know because I gave up sweets for Lent. So, if that's the case, can someone tell me why everything I have pinned lately to my Recipes to Try board are all sweets? And I desperately want to try them ALL: caramel cake, chocolate chip cookie dough truffles, homemade magic shell and so much more. Sigh, only six more weeks - and hopefully a few pounds less by then.

And another gripe about Pinterest. Do people actually check links before repinning? I found at least five dead links when trying to find the marble cake recipe. It is as bad as Facebook, blindly repost without fact checking. Maybe I am just too choosy, or I still don't really "get" the whole obsession with pinning.