Let's Look January link-up

 

Hello again! Sometimes I forget about link-up blog posts and I post twice in one day. In case you're interested, I thought I'd join in with Shay from the Mix and Match Mama blog and her best friend Erica from A Little Bit of Everything for this monthly link-up. 

(If it were about anything else, I would have considered missing out this one time, but it's about coffee and you all know how much I love a good cup of coffee.) 

I don't have a "bar" for this, but I do have an area that is for coffee and hot chocolate that I just cleaned this morning. I won't say I changed the area for this post, but know that this blog post definitely inspired me to spruce up the area and to clean out the "coffee cabinet". I don't have a picture of the inside of that cabinet, but it's where we store the coffee grinder, the sugar and cream, extra to-go cups (mine) and bags of coffee.

I have loved coffee ever since I was a little girl. My mom would give me little sips of her coffee all the time and she did the same to all my boys when they were young. (And they all love coffee today.) My husband was never a coffee drinker until he started working on the tech team at our old church, and now he's an avid coffee lover. We consider ourselves coffee snobs and we only drink the good stuff. We buy the whole beans and grind them ourselves and we've been haning out in coffee shops since before it was something trendy. Our old favorite was Gloria Jeans in Germantown, about fifteen minutes down the road from where we live right now.

I don't drink coffee because I need it, I drink it because I love it so much. There is NOTHING quite like that first cup every morning and I always look forward to waking up to drink some. 

I have always loved waking up early to drink the first cup of the day, since my boys were little bitty. It would always put me in the worst mood if that didn't happen or if they came down and said all the words before I'd consumed my first cup of the day. Back then, it was a matter of me needing coffee to function. 

We got a new coffee pot for Christmas last year, a combo deal because we all drink it around here. This is a Keurig that has both a pot and a single brew spot. My in-love's loved it so much that they wanted one as well, so we each bought one, wrapped it and exchanged them as gifts that year! We still love it today—Todd and Graham get all of what's in the pot each morning and I prefer the k-cup side. (I buy Kirkland brand k-cups at Costco in the full strength and it's my favorite.)

I bought this cute sign today at Hobby Lobby for half off and I think it's perfect in this spot. I'd been wanting something right there and have been thinking of redoing this area for weeks now. Like I said earlier, I am easily inspired by blogs. 

When it's cold outside, this area also includes hot chocolate. Sometimes I have marshmallows and whipped cream for this, but right now all I have are Swiss Miss packets. We are fancy like that, but we love that stuff. I love to have a cup after dinner at night. Noah had some this afternoon when I got back home and we all have our mugs that we love the most. (His is a Snoopy Christmas mug.)

I keep extra k-cups in the cabinet below this picture above and the coffee cabinet sits above the coffee pot. I keep all things coffee/hot chocolate/chocolate milk related inside that cabinet, because it's also near the mugs and glasses we use. Honestly, something I think it'd be nice to have that cabinet for other kitchen things, but I can never recommend having a coffee cabinet enough. When my family moved us into this house as a surprise (I'll share a link to that post another day), I'm pretty sure one of my sisters came up with that idea and it's brilliant. It's so convenient having a whole cabinet reserved for that.

Back to my coffee drinking—sometimes I switch it up and drink chai tea instead of coffee, which I love almost as much as coffee. I always seem to forget about it, though, so today I pulled out the box that I bought from Trader Joe's and it's back there behind the packets of hot chocolate. Drew shares my love of tea and helps me drink it. 

I very rarely go to Starbucks for coffee, because I don't care for their coffee that much. I make the best cup of coffee, in my humble opinion, and I have mastered drinks like frappes and/or hot seasonal drinks. I'll share about those another time, but if I do happen to go there, I go for a venti chai tea latte. (Yup, venti.)

How do you take yours? 

I am an E3. I use 2 and a half teaspoons of sugar and 1 teaspoon of nondairy powdered creamer. 

Well, that was a fun meaningless post to write. Thanks for reading! Love to all. 

P.s. If you're reading and commenting from and on Facebook, let me see your coffee area! I know a lot of you have cute spots for this.