Last weekend our District Convention finally arrived!
That means prep work for 3 days falls on 1 day, the Thursday before. At least for us, and most of you I'm sure.
Our convention is in San Francisco, and we drove back-and-forth instead of staying at a hotel. I tried to make the days go smoother by having all of our lunches and breakfasts for the most part, ready on Thursday. All clothes ironed and ready, shoes out (check out these cute shoes I got for Noah on
Amazon...)
I got a couple of rotisserie chickens from the grocery store and pulled all the meat off, used some for a pasta salad and some for chicken sandwiches. Here's the pasta salad I made and I recommend it. It's pretty tasty and the hardest part of it is boiling the water for the pasta. It's from
Allrecipes. SUPER EASY...
Sesame Pasta Chicken Salad
Ingredients
* 1/4 cup sesame seeds
* 1 (16 ounce) package bow tie pasta
* 1/2 cup vegetable oil
* 1/3 cup light soy sauce
* 1/3 cup rice vinegar
* 1 teaspoon sesame oil
* 3 tablespoons white sugar
* 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
* 1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper
* 3 cups shredded, cooked chicken breast meat
* 1/3 cup chopped fresh cilantro
* 1/3 cup chopped green onion
Directions
1. Heat a skillet over medium-high heat. Add sesame seeds, and cook stirring frequently until lightly toasted. Remove from heat, and set aside.
2. Bring a large pot of lightly salted water to a boil. Add pasta, and cook for 8 to 10 minutes, or until al dente. Drain pasta, and rinse under cold water until cool. Transfer to a large bowl.
3. In a jar with a tight-fitting lid, combine vegetable oil, soy sauce, vinegar, sesame oil, sugar, sesame seeds, ginger, and pepper. Shake well.
4. Pour sesame dressing over pasta, and toss to coat evenly. Gently mix in chicken, cilantro, and green onions.
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So a couple of ideas...
Packing - My cousin Tawnya was telling me about a family that had their daughter carry her own backpack with all her diapers, wipes, etc. from the time she was a toddler. I thought, what a great idea! This doesn't
always work, but I wanted to give it a try for the convention. See, we end up hauling our own meeting materials, our food and eating utensils, our kid's books and writing materials, pull-ups, wipes, etc. What a pain! So I packed up the kids with their own books, crayons, etc., Olivia carried her own pull-ups and wipes. They get excited to carry
their own bags. After going through the whole convention I can say that for the most part they carried their bags gladly. The exceptions were when they were sleeping, and when we were carrying them. But it really worked for us and I'll be trying it again in the future.
Eating out - If you are staying in a hotel for the convention and thus eating out every night, you might try looking for discounts on meals. One good place for discounts is
Restaurant.com. You can get $10, $25, and $50 gift certificates (an example would be $10 off a $25 purchase, $25 off a $50 purchase, etc) for a starting price of $4, $10 & $20 respectively. Then I search for a discount code (right now the discount is 80% using the discount code SUMMER). So if you're keeping track, the price of a $10 off $25 gift certificate will cost .80, a $25 off $50 certificate will cost $2, etc. I find restaurants and if I've never heard of and check for reviews (yelp, etc). Pay attention to restrictions, sometimes restaurant.com certificates will restrict days (usually holidays, sometimes they can't be used on Friday & Saturday!) and times they can be used (sometimes only for lunch, or only for dinner), and you can't use more than 1 at a table, so you and your buds can't both use one. In that case I recommend getting a higher value certificate and splitting the cost and savings.
Later I'm going to try to post a tutorial on modifying an adult tie for a little boy.
Anyway, it's all worth it! Enjoy yours!
