Make Ahead Meal Exchange

I thought this was a good time to talk about our Make Ahead Meal (MAM) Exchange group.  If you haven't heard of MAMs, this is how they work:

• You gather a group of people who have similar meal needs as your family and whose cooking you think you'll enjoy.  Our group has 6 families currently participating.  We've talked about expanding a bit and have all agreed that about 8 would be our max, if we do add families.
• Once a month, you cook a large batch of whatever dish you choose, providing some for each family in the exchange.  You can decide the number of servings based upon the size of the families.  For our exchange, we make 4 servings for each family.  Counting our own families, this means making 24 servings of the dish that we're providing for the month.
• Package each dish in 1-family-size packaging (aluminum pan, gallon-size freezer bag, etc.) and freeze ahead of the exchange date.  Write on the packaging the name of the dish, date of freezing and basic cooking instructions.
• Choose a date to gather and make the swap.  We have picked the third Saturday of every month to swap meals.  We each bring 5 of the dish we made, along with the recipes, and trade with everyone else, coming home with 5 different meals in addition to the one we made ourselves.
• If we're unable to be there on a particular date, we make arrangements either with the host to drop off our meals ahead of time and pick ours up later, or to have another member of the group take our meals and pick ours up for us.

It's brilliant.  You just do one round of cooking per month and end up with 6 meals ready to thaw and cook, vastly cutting down on meal prep time for the nights you use those meals.  I've been thinking about doing more of this for our own family, doubling or tripling meals and freezing some for later use.  It's great saving labor and having things ready to go without having to put as much planning into it myself, plus I've gotten to try some really great dishes that the other women have made.  And I've been able to enjoy getting together and having some social time with them when we exchange.

Cookie & Candy Exchange

Tomorrow night is the annual Cookie & Candy Exchange for the women from my Sunday School class at church.  Many of us aren't regular attenders of the class anymore as it was a Young Marrieds class that's been going for some time and has evolved over time, as our schedules have evolved over time.  But we still get together for this and other events, and some of us ladies meet twice a month for prayer time.

This is such a nice highlight of the Christmas season.  Each of us makes half a dozen cookies or candies for each of the other women attending.  We bring them along with a non-sweet dish to share at the exchange, where we sit and eat and talk and just have a nice relaxing time in the midst of a busy season.  At the end, we leave with 9 or 10 (sometimes more) different types of holiday sweets to enjoy over the next few weeks, having only had to make a few batches of one kind ourselves!  Brilliant.  I love whoever came up with the idea of exchanges in the first place.  And that reminds me that I haven't blogged about Make Ahead Meals yet.  Next post!

This year for the Cookie & Candy Exchange, I'm making Praline Cookies with Brown Sugar Frosting.  I'll bet you wish you had the recipe for that, huh?  Here you go!  Praline Cookies and Brown Sugar Frosting.  I'm pretty much making the cookies as is, except I added more maple flavoring for a stronger maple taste.  Also, last year when I made some of these for the holidays, I used a whole pecan half on the top, but I found myself eating the cookies in a way to try to get a bite of pecan with the cookie.  This year, I'm coarsely chopping the pecans and sprinkling them across the top so that there's pecan in every bite.

I definitely recommend making them with the Brown Sugar Frosting drizzled over the top.  If you prefer your cookies on the less sweet side, you may want to skip the frosting.  Me?  They're cookies!  I like them sweet, and the frosting adds the perfect finishing touch.  The recipe says to cook the frosting in an iron skillet.  I just used a regular nonstick saucepan, and it worked fine.  I added about half a teaspoon of maple flavoring to the frosting.

This year's frosting ended up with a little different taste and darker color.  I think I must have used light brown sugar last year, and this year I went with the recipe's dark brown sugar.  I actually liked last year's better, so I'll be using light brown sugar when I make these again in the future.  I boiled it for a minute or two on the stove, then waited for it to thicken a little before starting to drizzle.  Apparently I waited a little too long, because it was solidifying while I still had a lot of cookies left to cover!  I had to work quickly, so it's a bit globby on some.  But I can't complain - these taste pretty good!

One of These Things is Not Like the Other

I have two jars of light mayonnaise in my refrigerator at the moment.  One is Best Foods Light Mayonnaise:

The other is Fred Meyer "Lite" Mayonnaise:

15 more calories and 1.5 grams of fat more in the Fred Meyer version than in the Best Foods version.  I don't know if the use of "lite" means "not as healthy as light but better than our regular version and we'll sell more this way," but if so, that seems more than a little deceptive.

I also have 2 light ranch salad dressings on hand.  Wishbone Light Ranch is 40 calories for 2 tablespoons, while Kraft Light Ranch is 80 calories.  That's a pretty big disparity.

I was never that careful a label reader before I started to track my calories a few months ago with Lose It.  I'd check packages sometimes for desserts or frozen meals or things like that, but I wouldn't necessarily pick up a bottle of salad dressing or a jar of mayonnaise to see how many calories and fat grams it contained or how it compared with other similar dressings/condiments.  I'm becoming much more aware that I need to check labels and not just assume that they're all roughly equivalent to one another.  That sometimes results in me paying a little more for the healthier version, but I think that's worth it.  It's a tradeoff I'm willing to make to lose the remaining extra pounds that I've carried for years.

Have I Turned a Little Grinchy?

I'm not sure why, but I just don't feel all that Christmasy this year.  I've been looking forward to this season with anticipation, but now that it's here, it doesn't feel like Christmastime.

Our tree has been decorated for the better part of a week, we hung up stockings a few nights ago, the outdoor decorations went out in full force yesterday, other decorations have been put up around the house (with some more to come), and I've been buying gifts for weeks, nay, months.  And over Thanksgiving weekend, we watched Elf and White Christmas.  Not to mention all the Christmas music we've been listening to.  So why am I not feeling it?

It seems like I'm not experiencing the sentimental/emotional side of it.  It's not that I'm busier this year than in past years.  In fact, if anything, I'm less busy than in most recent years.  And I don't think the opposite is true, that I need to be busier to feel like it's Christmas (heavens, no, not that!).  I just feel oddly disconnected somehow.

Nothing bad is happening (knock on wood), and we've had other years where the Christmas season was full of stress and emotional upheaval and we still felt like Christmas was happening.  Intellectually I get that it is, and I know that it's only 2 1/2 weeks until Christmas Eve.

Not sure what's going on, but I'd like to feel Christmas a little more this year.

Gift Giving, Part Deux

Part of my problem with wanting to buy gifts early for Christmas is that I really like to give the gifts.  So if I start buying Christmas gifts in, say, June or July, that's a really long time for me to wait to give the gift.  It's been my goal to start Christmas shopping around that time each year so that we can spread out the spending over a longer period of time and more easily absorb it into our regular budget.  I've managed to do some early Christmas shopping in the last couple of years, but not to stay on track with starting early and continuing at a regular pace.  It still helps, but I'd like to be more organized about it.

The other problem with buying gifts early is that it's hard to figure out what to get for some people, and for others such as Rachel, what if she doesn't still want the Purple Unicorn Pillow Pet by the time Christmas rolls around?  Or what if she requests it as a gift from Mom & Dad and decides she wants Santa to get her something else, when Santa has already bought the Pillow Pet and stowed it away?

So you see my dilemma.

Still, in 2011, I pledge to start Christmas shopping for the easy people no later than June and to buy a few things every month thereafter.  I can also probably start putting away stocking stuffers early since stockings can get expensive, too, if you buy everything for them all at once.

My other thought was that I could start a line item in Quicken for Christmas spending and start diverting some money from checking each month into that line item.  That way, I could shop later in the year if I need more time to come up with ideas, but the money's already "spent" in our budget and accounted for.

I Need to Get Paid for This

I just spent the last hour and a half not exercising and going to bed on time.  Instead, I was grading math tests for Rachel's teacher.  "Why?" you ask.  (Just humor me and pretend you were asking.)  Because I checked off a box on a form at the beginning of the school year to say that I was available to grade papers and do projects at home to help out.

Normally, there's a longer turnaround time on grading things and I'm able to spread it out a bit.  I think the snow days last week must have made for a time crunch, because she sent the papers home today and they needed to be returned tomorrow.  I wasn't sure if she needed them to come back with Rachel in the morning or if I could bring them back at the end of the school day when picking her up, but I figured I'd better just get them done and sent back in case she needed them earlier in the day.

So now I'm again having a night where I won't get as much sleep as I really need, which is a bummer considering how much I was dragging today.  I tried to nap when Ben went down early, but I just couldn't fall asleep for some reason.  I think the time I spent resting helped because I felt better later in the day than I did for the first few hours.  But I'm low on energy right now and bummed about going to bed late.

("And why are you blogging instead of getting yourself to bed?" you're now thinking.  Because it's the last day of NaBloPoMo and, although I've missed a couple of days, I've made up the posts, and I wanted to finish well.)

Today was also another rough day with Rachel.  She got in trouble with her teacher, too, which is unusual.  Normally her behavior is school is pretty good even when she's misbehaving at home, but today involved eye-rolling and not wanting to do what she was asked.  And it just got worse when she was at home.  I think she's being negatively influenced by some of the kids she likes to play with during recess time.  Thankfully they're not in her class, but she keeps gravitating to them during play time, and I truly believe she's picking up their disrespectful attitudes and actions.  I'm praying that she'll start choosing to spend her time with kids who are more positive influences, and that she will be a positive influence herself, rather than getting dragged down.  We're also talking with her often and just working on reinforcing what we expect of her and what disobedience and nastiness will bring in terms of consequences, and praying with her and not just for her.

I didn't worry about the plumbing today.  There's just too much going on to let that weigh heavily on me on an ongoing basis.  I can't take that kind of stress, so I'm choosing not to worry and stress over it.

On the bright side, I downloaded a bunch of new Christmas music to iTunes, ranging in price from $5.99 for a CD down to free!  Yay, free!  We got over 200 new songs in the past few days for about $23 plus tax, and I'm ordering another CD for $6.99 that will give us another 14 or so songs.  Good stuff.  Check out Amazon's MP3 store - their MP3 albums are frequently cheaper than their CDs, and often cheaper than the same album on iTunes.

And I bought a candy thermometer today.  I've wanted one whenever I use a recipe that calls for cooking something to a particular temperature since that's a much more precise way to make candy and other confections than doing the water test.  Plus it's got guidelines for temperatures for deep-frying, which means that I can start finding that perfect fried chicken recipe (which I'll be using when I reach maintenance mode on Lose It, no doubt).  My plan is to make pralines for the first time this week so that I can take them to a family Christmas party.  I'm also making kalua pig, so at least I'll have to bring if my pralines don't turn out, but I think they'll be fine if I just follow the instructions and tips given by reviewers.  If you want to make them yourself, the recipe is here.  I'd suggest you read the first couple of reviewers' comments before embarking on making them as they have some helpful tips to make sure the pralines turn out as desired.

Always Stuff Going On

Not only is our leak still happening, now it's become a faster drip. We've got a laundry basket catching it, but we have water dripping through a knot in the subfloor, so I'm not sure if we should even keep using that bathroom until the leak is repaired for good.


Called it into American Home Shield and they're sending back out the same plumbers. I called the plumbing company and spoke to the head guy, David. He said "Yeah, Benny said he thought you needed repiping." I said "Really? He didn't say anything to me about that" and David laughed a little and said "Well, either way, you're not paying for it." Like that was the point. How about the fact that Benny felt there was another problem that he hadn't taken care of and hadn't bothered to tell me "If this doesn't fix the problem, you may need repiping"? Or how about the fact that he could have decided on the second visit that repiping was the way to go, and gotten it done, instead of having us continue to live with the drip and require a third visit to (hopefully) fix things?


Not happy about that. I hope that the third time's the charm. Otherwise, I will tell AHS that they will be sending out different plumbers and that they need to take care of the service call fee. I'd rather not have to do that and just want it fixed. I hate this kind of stuff.


Also, our heater is holding steady this morning at 64. Ooh! Just checked it and it's now 65. Hopefully it's heading to its setting of 68. 65's a little too chilly for my taste, and I really don't want to have to deal with heater repair or replacement, too.

Spinach (and Allrecipes) to the Rescue!

We had an hour before we were about to sit down and eat our Thanksgiving meal when we realized that we didn't have the green beans for the green bean casserole.  Gilda really had her heart set on having it, so Corey went in search of a nearby business that would have green beans so that he could run and pick them up and the casserole could be made.  The down side of staying in a sort-of-middle-of-nowhere rental is that there are no major businesses, and the small businesses close on holidays.  No green bean casserole.

Plan B:  Corey was determined that we were having bacon, darnitall.  So I went to my trusty Allrecipes.com and started to look for a recipe.  I had brought a bag of fresh spinach to use in salad the next day, but I had some other salad greens, so I wondered what kind of salad I could find that used spinach and bacon.

Voila!  Wilted Spinach Salad.  This is not a lowcal dish by any means, but it sure was tasty and I think it made a pretty good substitution for the casserole.  It's basically just spinach, hardboiled eggs, green onions and crumbled bacon with a dressing made up bacon drippings, eggs, sugar and vinegar.  The original recipe called for white vinegar and red wine vinegar.  The rental's pantry had rice vinegar, so I used that, and boy was it good!  I think I'll have to pick up some rice vinegar to add to my vinegar collection in the kitchen.

Thanks again, Allrecipes!

Home Sweet Home

Just got back from 3 nights away at a rental house with a bunch of family for Thanksgiving.  It was nice getting away for a mini-vacation and spending time with loved ones.  We played some board games, watched movies, got in some free step for exercise, ate some tasty meals and enjoyed conversation with one another.  I had a good time, but I must say...

it's nice to be home again!  No matter how great the vacation, there's something comforting about being back in your own space.  And that was most apparent in Ben.  He did well on the trip, but by today, he was ready to be home again.  He didn't want to do pictures at the end before we all cleared out.  He was all about a teary "Bye bye! Bye bye!"  He was happy on the trip home, I think because he realized that's where we were headed.  He seemed to recognize things as we got within a few miles of our house, and when he was put into his crib, he just stood up and kept squealing and jumping and looking at different things in his room, then squealing some more.  He is definitely a boy who is all about the familiar and comforting.

We got some things put away but not all.  I love it when we're able to get everything put back in its place and the laundry to the laundry room and clean clothes put away on the same day that we get back from a trip.  We didn't get to that point today, but I intend to tomorrow.  Plus, James got our Christmas tree out of storage and assembled it for me so that I didn't have to do it tonight and be up later.  I promised Rachel I'd get it done after she went to bed so it will be ready for us to start decorating tomorrow.  I know she's excited for that, and I've been waiting for this, too!  I love having the trip up and decorated, and I want to be able to enjoy it for as much of the Christmas season as possible.

So tomorrow is about church, lunch, possibly a little shopping (we need a new bathmat for the kids' bathroom since we left ours at the rental house, and Family Christian Store is having an excellent sale and I've been finding some gift ideas I want to pick up there), putting away our stuff from the vacation, and decorating.  And exercising.  Sounds busy, but hopefully I'll be able to get those things done without feeling rushed and while enjoying myself.

It doesn't seem like we should already be getting back to normal school and work routines the day after tomorrow.  I wonder if that's because we had so much snow on Sunday and Monday that I ended up picking up James from work after a few hours and Rachel from school almost 3 hours early on Monday, then they cancelled school on Tuesday and Wednesday due to continued iciness.  So it was nearly a weeklong vacation for all of us.  Still, only 3 more weeks of school and Rachel has 2 weeks off.  It will be nice to be able to have some relaxed mornings, but I'll be working on ways to keep her and Ben entertained.  The nice thing is that James has a few days off each of those weeks, so I'll really only have 3-4 days per week to fill.

Clearly my mind is full and I need to let it wind down.  Maybe I'm getting used to blogging daily and have a hard time when I don't write long posts and get my thoughts out each day.  Or maybe I'm just in crank-it-back-into-gear mode from returning.

At any rate, I shall enjoy sleeping in my own bed tonight, and especially with my own pillow.

Some Things Are The Same Whether Man Or Beast

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

Thought this was appropriate for a big travel weekend :)

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

Blogging from my phone again. We've been out of town for three days at a rental home with family, and it's been really nice spending time together. And now that we've celebrated Thanksgiving, I'm pumped to be in the Christmas season! I wish we'd been able to get the Christmas tree set up before we left town so that we could start decorating tomorrow after getting back home. But hopefully we'll still be able to at least get it set up and maybe lit tomorrow, even if we don't decorate until another day.

Regardless, I'm excited for this season and ready for it to be here!

Tardiness

I hate tardiness. I hate being the tardy one and I do my best to be on time for things. Barring that, if someone is expecting me and I know that I'm going to be late, I try to reach them so that I can let them know that I'm on my way but am not going to be there on time.

To me, tardiness - whether in the workplace when someone is late for a meeting, or home when you're waiting for a babysitter to arrive, or when you're meeting up with others for a road trip - tardiness says to me that your time is more important than mine and that you do not respect me. If it comes with an apology, that helps, but it really should be prefaced by communication, especially if you're able to let me know before the expected time comes and goes. And if it comes with neither a forewarning nor an apology, you've pretty much sealed my opinion of you as rude.

I think that's why I go crazy when Rachel's dawdling results in another late school arrival. I don't like being that person and hate when the departure time hinges on a willful 6-year-old choosing to get ready to go. Although Rachel was not the reason for today's tardiness, thank goodness.

Updates

I'm happy to report that we've had pretty good days with Rachel since my post last week about the truly rotten one we'd had.  We've had minor behavior issues and some frustration, but we've been able to get a handle on her and get her redirected without too much drama and consequences.  I'm keeping a close eye on how much sugar she takes in from junk food, since there seems to be a pretty direct correlation between her sugar intake and obnoxious, hyperactive behavior that leads to all sorts of wrong decisions on her part and a seeming inability to make the right ones.  I know that countless studies have proven that sugar does not directly have an effect on behavior, but there are theories that certain things in sugary foods and the consumption of them in environments like birthday parties *can* cause hyperactivity.  All I know is that when Rachel has had candy, cupcakes, etc., we see a response to it.  And until she can learn to better handle how she responds after eating sugar, we'll be doling it out sparingly.

There are other factors at work besides the sugar, but those are things that will take more time to change and to train.  But it's been nice to have a good stretch, and the more of those we have and the longer we go between big outbreaks, the more encouraging it is.

My car is now back from repair and feels downright zippy.  It took $870, including an oil change, but that still saved us $268 by going to the dealer vs. taking the quote that Midas gave us.  And we got Hyundai factory parts by going to them, too.  The only downside of going there is the drive to get there and having to pick it up during certain hours, but I think it's worth the hassle.  Hopefully this will be the end of the problems we've been having and it'll be fine until we do the next round of recommended maintenance.

We still have a drip happening between the master bathroom and the laundry room.  I'm guessing the plumber will have to pull off more of the sheetrock to figure out if the tub drain is leaking.  Beyond that, I have no expertise and really couldn't begin to guess what's causing the problem.

The snow stopped late yesterday.  The streets are largely cleared, except for the ones within a few blocks of our house.  But, they did come through and scrape and put down some dirt, so it's been okay.  Driving to pick up my car was mostly uneventful and just a little scary coming down the hill to our house and pulling into the garage.  But, no slipping!  Hopefully it'll warm up now and melt the iciness away from the roads.  And allow our house's heater to work more effectively - it's been going nonstop for probably the past day and a half, and it's still only 58 degrees inside.  But considering that it was 10 degrees with the windchill factor this afternoon, I suppose 58 degrees isn't all that bad!

Snowy Jesus

This sculpture is outside of World Vision's office in Federal Way.  It seemed so odd to see him blanketed in snow this morning!

Indulgent Breakfast Recipe

Paula Deen has some great recipes, but as you may know, they are often high in calories and fat.  Still, sometimes you want to indulge yourself, and holiday breakfasts and brunches are a perfect time for this recipe!  I served it for Christmas brunch last year, and everyone raved over it.  It's a Baked French Toast Casserole with Praline Topping and Raspberry Syrup:

Is your mouth watering now?  Yeah, I thought so.

I served it with a Spinach and Strawberry Salad, an egg/sausage/cheese casserole and fresh fruit.  (What?!  It was Christmas morning.  It's not like I eat that every day.)

If you're not interested in indulging quite that much, Paula Deen's son Bobby has lightened up the original recipe.  You can find his version here.  His version brings the count down to 226 calories and 8 g fat per serving.  I don't even want to think about how many calories and fat grams are in Paula's dish.  I just choose to treat myself to it blindly on the rare occasion.

It's Snowing . . . Yay?

And I'm okay with that.  A week ago, I was completely not ready for snow and was dreading the thought of it.  I'm a little scared at how steadily it's falling considering that it's out first snow of the year and started several hours ago.  I'm hoping that there's not going to be enough of it for a while to really stick around and make driving tricky.

I think the thing I've dreaded most about it being snowy is picking up Rachel at school.  I hate hate HATE having to sit in the carline and will usually just park and walk over to her and go back to the car as an alternative, but then it's sometimes hard to get back out of the parking space due to how many cars are backed up waiting in the carline.  They move to the right so that people who are leaving the lot can drive down the left, but if they're blocking you in from behind, you're pretty much stuck until someone leaves enough room or the carline gets short enough to back out.

So most days I park on the street just past the school, put Ben in his stroller and walk up to the playground where we wait for Rachel's class to come out of their upper floor classroom on their way to the stairway and the front of the school.  We just meet her there and walk to the car, and take off and we're done.

Not sure that's going to work so well with temps in the 30s and icy ground.  If the ground's not icy and I can keep Ben warm enough, I think standing and waiting for a few minutes in the freezing temperature will still be preferable to dealing with the overcrowded parking lot, especially if I can time it so that we're pretty much just walking up to the playground as the classes are letting out.  It's hard to time, though, because some teachers let out right at 3:19 or 3:20 (dismissal time is 3:20), some seem to wait for the bell to ring so that it's more "official" (and the bell rings late for some reason, around 3:22 or 3:23) and some are stragglers.  Rachel's class is often one of the last to leave.  I don't know if that means there are a lot of dawdlers in her class, but if so, she was placed in the right one.

Anyway, I *am* enjoying watching the snow fall.  We get a lot of rain here, but snow can be harder to come by, especially some years, so it's usually welcomed by most people.  I'm just hoping we aren't in for a repeat of the Great Snow of Aught Six, when living on a hill that doesn't get plowed became a serious issue.  If so, Rachel just may be missing some days of school.  But, hey, I won't have to worry about the carline then.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, pt. 1

I saw the latest Harry Potter film today, and overall I think it was a really strong adaptation of the first half of the book.  Some (possibly spoilery if you haven't seen the movie yet) thoughts:

• The scene with the Death Eaters around the table at Malfoy Manor and Charity Burbage dangling above it was harrowing, just as it should have been.
• How Hedwig meets her fate made more sense than in the written version, I think, as well as the fact that her defense of Harry is what gives him away to the Death Eaters.  I thought it was strange in the book that they would just put her in a cage and shove the cage into the bottom of Hagrid's motorcycle.
• I wish they had included the interactions between Harry and the Dursleys as the Dursleys were leaving Privet Drive.  I especially missed Dudley's conversation and handshake and think that would have made a touching moment.
• I would have liked to have seen more of the flight from Privet Drive and the battle that went on, but what we saw was well-done, though condensed.
• Mad Eye's eye was left at the Ministry of Magic, which seemed like a big oversight to me.  Harry made a point in the book that he couldn't leave part of Mad Eye there for Dolores' use, and I believe it's his taking of the eye from Dolores' office door that alerts the Ministry to the fact that there are intruders.
• It would have added more poignancy to the trio's inability to return to No. 12 Grimmauld Place if there had been scenes of the warming relationship between them and Kreacher, and his increasing care for them.
• The time wandering in the wilderness was handled well and didn't feel like it dragged on overly long.  The book has about 110 pages covering that, and it did seem like it went on and on.  I'm thinking the book editors could have trimmed a little here and there while still conveying how they were weary, demoralized and spending a lot of time doing nothing.
• I was disappointed that Wormtail didn't meet the end that he does in the book.  Presumably he'll die in the second movie, but I liked that his moment of mercy towards Harry is what leads to his undoing.
• Dobby was awesome, totally heroic and not at all annoying.  He was great when helping Kreacher to drag Mundungus to Grimmauld Place, as well as during his appearance in Malfoy Manor.  And I'm not ashamed to admit that I teared up at his death.
• I thought the movie ended slightly abruptly and would have liked for them to have already had the discussion to decide whether they should pursue the Deathly Hallows or the horcruxes.  I thought the ending would be when they decided to go after the remaining horcruxes, somewhat like in LOTR: Fellowship of the Ring when Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas go after Merri and Pippin and there's more of a note of hope and purpose.

I think this movie did quite a good job of including all of the important pieces and depicting them well.  It translated the spirit of the book without jazzing it up too much for the movie audience and including things like a dragon breaking free from its chain and going on an extended chase of Harry around Hogwarts.  I'm glad that they decided to break the book into two parts, because I can't imagine what kind of choppy mess they would have ended up with had they tried to fit everything into one movie, even if it was a very long one.

Definitely looking forward to part 2 and seeing the Battle of Hogwarts happen, even though I won't be happy seeing the deaths to come.  I have a feeling I may need some tissue for that one.

Darn, I Missed a Day

I realized earlier today that I'd missed posting yesterday.  I totally intended to post, even though I knew I was going to have a late night.  And I toiled away at the other things I needed to get done, and completely forgot.

So here's post #1 for today.  I'll post a second post later so that at least I'll average out to one a day for November.

And here's what I'm sharing with you:



I used to love this show, for some reason, and the theme song is still stuck in my head all these years later.

You're welcome.

One of Those Days

It's been one of those days, and I'm tired and don't feel much like blogging.  I'll just say that the day started out rough with Rachel choosing to misbehave.  She pulled it together and we got her to school.  She did alright for a little bit after school, then just went right into intense dawdling mode and not doing what was asked of her.  Got her ready just in the nick of time to go to Awana at our church.  She seemed to enjoy herself there and was sweet when I picked her up.  I gave her a cracker snack in the car and made her some warm vanilla/maple milk when we got home, and then it all went to pieces from there.  Manic behavior with an intense focus on direct disobedience while smiling.  We finally got her calmed down and ready for bed, with no nightlight and almost everything removed from her bed (stuffed animals and comfort blankets) except for one polar bear, Poley, who's her special favorite.  She was also aware that any further misbehavior would result in Poley going out the door for the night.

I hate times like these and wish she wouldn't choose to be so darned willful and stubborn.  It's like she thrives on wreaking havoc when she gets into this particular mode of behavior, and it's so difficult to derail her from that and get back on the right track.  We're working on it and we won't give up.  I believe we'll win out in the end.

But sometimes it sucks.

My Love Language

Christmas is my favorite holiday of the year.  I love all of the excitement, joy, fun events, the music, visits to Santa, Christmas cards, yummy food, the Christmas tree and other decorations, and everything else about it.  And, of course, I love celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ throughout the season and having that special worship service on Christmas Eve.  It's wonderful having so many visual and audible reminders about Jesus as I go about my days!

I was thinking about my gift list today and realized that's one of the reasons that I love Christmas.  It may sound shallow to say that, but gifts are my love language, so I have a reason to express my love language over and over as I work on my gift list, start buying gifts early, finish up with the last-minute ones and the stocking stuffers and then get the joy of giving them to people!  It's why I put pressure on myself to find something they'll really enjoy or need and why I find it so frustrating when people make it difficult to figure out what they'd like.  Not everyone needs to have an Amazon wishlist for me to know what to get, but it makes it easier if I don't know enough about their interests or hear "I don't really need anything" or "I'm not sure what to get her, either" when I'm trying to figure something out.

And it's why I have a hard time drawing the line on buying gifts for some people and have to tell myself 'Seriously, you are giving them plenty.  Enough.  Save it for the next occasion.'  That doesn't happen with James, though, because his birthday is about 5 weeks after Christmas, so I usually struggle with the opposite problem of using all my best ideas for Christmas, then having to figure out what to do for his birthday.  Or I forget that I'll have another gift-giving occasion in the near future for him and try to cram it all in for Christmas.

I'm always disappointed when I'm done buying gifts and then just have to wait for Christmas to give them away.  If I had more disposable income, I think I'd just keep buying things to donate to charity and go crazy with it!  Maybe one day I can do more of that.  For now, I have to practice self-control, being wise with our finances and making sure I'm keeping my focus where it belongs, instead of being too wrapped up in the gifts. But I'm sure looking forward to giving them away!

I *Love* Finding a Bargain!

I went shopping today at Once Upon a Child, a children's resale shop.  I found some cute things for both Ben and Rachel, including this sweater for Ben:

It was brand new with the tags still attached and was only $8.50 for a nice, heavyweight sweater for our upcoming reputedly-very-cold winter.  Cute sweater and a great deal, right?

But wait!  There's more:

That's right.  This sweater was from Nordstrom and was originally priced at $62.00 before 4 markdowns occurred and it finally went on to greener pastures at Once Upon a Child.  Who on earth would pay $62.00 for a sweater for a 2-year-old?  Obviously it's someone who has way more disposable income than I do and isn't concerned about paying that much for a child's sweater that will be outgrown in 6 months to a year.

I buy a good deal of my kids' clothing second-hand because I find a lot of great clothes that way for good prices, and you also find a better variety at many childrens' resale stores than you do by going to one store at a mall.  I've gotten or seen plenty of things from Gap Kids and Baby Gap, The Children's Place, Old Navy, OshKosh, Carter's, Ralph Lauren and other name-brand clothing stores and been able to do it with one-stop shopping.  I now would find it hard to justify buying all new clothes for my kids every time they outgrew their current wardrobe.

Away With You, Clutter!

Along with our newfound determination to lose weight and keep it off for good, James and I have been increasingly motivated to rid ourselves of the clutter that has been the bane of our existence for far too long. James has always hated clutter, but I've been more laidback about it until fairly recently; it annoyed me, but I figured that was just the way things were with young kids and that we'd eventually get around to clearing things away.

For about the past year, we've been able to successfully beat it back in most of the common areas of our home and have kept those areas from getting too piled up and overwhelming, but we were still struggling with numerous little piles of clutter in our master bedroom and too much disorganization in the family room.

Our family room was half-painted for months, and we had a bookcase that was mostly painted but needed to be painted the rest of the way and assembled so that we could finally unload our books from their boxes in the garage. James and I buckled down and got the painting of the room finished. He completed the bookcase and moved it into place, and we brought in our books to figure out which ones we'd keep and which we'd donate.

Then James cleared the clutter from our room and moved it to the family room so that we'd have one area of clutter on which to focus and could reclaim our master bedroom for ourselves. We've been working through it a little at a time and steadily making progress, enjoying the fruits of our labor.

Tonight, we were waiting for Rachel to finish getting ready for bed. The shelves in our closet had become a place where I put things until I got around to putting them where they belong, but somehow that step of the process never seemed to happen.  I'd already made a note on my to-do list to clear out the shelves and go through things, do a little rearranging and use them for organizing Christmas gifts for now and other things once Christmas is over.  I've been chomping at the bit to get started, so I started pulling things off the shelf while we waited.

I cleared off two shelves, moved (with James' help) the clothing rod to a higher shelf, got rid of enough stuff not worth keeping or donating that I could fill a decent size shopping bag, came up with a big box of things for donation and gathered like items for storage (shorts - too cold right now; maternity - don't need that currently).  It was so nice to make a big dent in the shelves, and I can hardly wait to get back to it and get them finished!

Getting things cleaned up and decluttered is making me feel really good, like I'm clearing away things that have been weighing me down.  It's similar to how my weight loss is making me feel, and I think both are emblems of being in a time of transformation.

One last area where I'm also working on "decluttering" is in my spiritual life.  The Bible study that I'm currently doing, Breaking Free by Beth Moore, talks about the things that weigh us down and keep Christians from living an effective and abundant spiritual life, not fully experiencing the blessings of a relationship with Christ (knowing and believing in God, glorifying God, finding satisfaction in God, experiencing God's peace and enjoying God's presence).  We may still do some or all of these things, but we may not be experiencing them to the extend that we can because of things that hamper us.  This study really gets to the core of issues that are sometimes long-standing and is helping me figure out how I can become closer to God and truly love Him as He should be loved - and how I can experience that love to the fullest myself, and be satisfied fully by Him,  so that things like the love of family and friends, material blessings and activities I enjoy are icing on the cake and not the means for my sustenance.  It's opened my eyes to quite a bit, and I'm praying it brings about a lasting transformation in me.

So many good things are happening as I get older!  Honestly, I should have turned 40 years ago.

Clearly, I Need to Make More Time for Baking

I received a copy of the book Cookie Craft:  From Baking to Luster Dust, Designs and Techniques for Creative Cookie Occasions for my birthday last month.

I first about it on Bakerella's website, which is a great one to read if you like seeing beautiful baked goods and finding mouth-watering recipes for sweet things.  The book basically takes the act of making sugar cookies and turns it into an art form.  The first section of the book contains a number of design ideas for various holidays, such as:

Thanksgiving

This is the first place I opened up to when I got the book, and I was amazed at the beauty of these cookies!  I was really hoping to make some for this Thanksgiving, but we're already going to be spending several days with family and indulging in a Thanksgiving feast.  Combine that with my desire to continue losing weight, and it seems like taking cookies along might be a bad idea.  On the other hand, there will be more people to help me eat said cookies, so perhaps I shall do that after all!  I love the turkey with the candy corn and the big turkey in profile, although I would choose chocolate brown frosting for the turkey's body instead of black for both.

Christmas

This one gives some great basic Christmas-themed cookies and jazz them up a bit.  I think I'd expand the selection of colors, especially for the stockings and the Christmas tree decorations.


New Year's

I don't know that I would have thought of making cookies to celebrate New Year's Eve, but the champagne bottle is a really cute design.  I like how they used basic circle cutters for a clock about to strike midnight and a gold bauble, and notice how they reused candy cane cookie shapes for noisemakers?  The hats are just triangles.


Easter

Again, creative use of circles!  The Easter basket is beautiful, and so is the Easter hat made from two circle cutters.  The technique on the pink Easter egg is one that was seen in the large turkey from the above Thanksgiving cookies.  You use Royal Icing to pipe the basic design and flood the piped area, then use a toothpick to pull the icing to give it that cool look.  I've only tried using Royal Icing once and failed miserably, but this book has some great tips that I hope will help me to overcome my aversion and become a Royal Icing expert.


Baby Shower

Wouldn't these be cute as party favors for shower guests to take home or as a treat at the shower itself?


They also have photos and instructions for many other occasions, including Winter, Valentine's Day, Mother's and Father's Day, Sports, Girlfriends Gathering and Pets.


Other chapters of the book cover explanation of the ingredients you'll want to have on hand for cookie crafting, equipment you'll use, tips for planning, recipes for 4 types of rolled-out cookie dough, tips on decorating both prebaking and after baking, websites where you can find tools and supplies for cookie crafting and more.  It also features helpful information in boxes interspersed throughout (such as Make-Ahead Tips, a Cookie Craft Planning Page and Suggested Color Palettes for different themes).


I find myself itching to start making these designs, and enjoying poring over the pages of the book in the meantime.

Great Website for Calorie Counters

One of my favorite recipe websites is Allrecipes.com.  I've found many wonderful recipes there, and some have become favorites that I make over and over.  But one drawback of their website is that not all recipes have nutritional information, and there's no nutritional calculator if you're submitting a recipe of your own.

When I started keeping close track of my calorie intake, I searched for a recipe calculator I could use for things like cookbook recipes and the meals I get from my monthly Make Ahead Meal group (ooh, future blog post!).  I found one on SparkRecipes.  It's a website with a huge database of health-focused recipes.  Not every recipe is low in calories or fat, but the primary focus is to provide recipes for people who are looking for healthier choices.  They have recipes in the Dietary Needs categories of Vegetarian, Vegan, Lactose Free, Gluten Free, Low Fat, Low Carb and Sugar Free.  To give you an idea of how many recipes you can find, there are 3,898 recipes in the Gluten Free category and 2,110 in Lactose Free, to name just those two.

In addition to having a big storehouse of recipes, all with nutritional information, you can also use their Recipe Calculator to enter ingredients and find out how many calories, fat, carbs, etc. are in each serving of a dish.

There's a database of ingredients to use, but you are also able to add those ingredients that you can't find, provided you have the nutritional information from their packaging.  That information is then available for other people who use the calculator.  If you only want to know the nutritional info on a one-time basis, you just enter the ingredients at Step 1, then go to Step 2 and enter the number of servings and click Calculate Info.  If you want to keep the recipe on file, you'll need to also go to Step 3 and complete the required fields (Recipe Name, Ingredients List and Category).  You may also want to input the Cooking Instructions so it's all there for you later.

I've found this to be really useful and have actually used it to find out the calories for some recipes from Allrecipes that didn't have that information.  I've also used it to tweak ingredients from some recipes to see if I can significantly cut calories and fat by using lighter versions of milk, cheese, sour cream, etc., or by adding vegetables or other lower calorie foods and upping the number of servings.

This Post is Just Six Words Long

Computer sucking. Using iPhone. More tomorrow.

Don't Let It Snow, Don't Let It Snow, Don't Let It Snow!

I've heard several people in the last few weeks state that "they" say it's going to be a rough winter.  I'm not sure who "they" are, but I sincerely hope that they're wrong.  I see on Accuweather that the local forecast shows 3 days with bits of snow here and there in the next couple of weeks.  That's earlier than we usually have snow, but I'm still holding out hope that it will be a fairly mild winter.

I don't mind a little snow here and there, so long as it doesn't build up in big drifts or cover the roads, partially melt, then refreeze and make it slippery all over.  We live on a hill that doesn't get plowed, so icy roads really stink.

We've only had one very snowy winter since moving here in early 2006, and that was the roughest one seen around here in some time.  People kept saying "It's never like this!"  They also said that during the previous summer, when we had a number of weeks of temps in the 90s.  We didn't believe them at the time, but after having lived here for 4 1/2 years, we've seen for ourselves that it was true.  Summers get warm, and sometimes unpleasantly so when most people around here don't have a/c in their homes, but they're generally not too bad.  And winters get cold and we get lots of rain and the occasional snow, but not usually enough to be a nuisance.

The first winter, though, we had enough snow happen that Rachel and I stayed home for 3 solid days because I was afraid of driving on the icy roads, and on the third evening, I told James we were going out to dinner or I was going to lose my mind.  That was also the year that we had a major windstorm (I think it was 70 mph) that knocked down power lines and caused transformer problems over the entire western half of Washington.  There were some areas that never lost power or only lost it for a few minutes, but many more areas that were severely affected.

We lost power for 3 1/2 days, despite being in a city of 85,000 people and situated between Tacoma and Seattle.  It just took that long for them to get to everyone and get things fixed.  After hunkering down for a day and a half and using up our firewood only to wake up to a temperature of 55 degrees in the house, we hightailed it out of here and went to stay with James' parents, who live about an hour away.  We were there for 2 nights, then came back because we wanted to make sure our cats were okay.  Shortly after getting back to town, we went to Home Depot to pick up a few things, and while there, we got a phone call from our security company letting us know that they were getting an alarm from our system.  We thought "Hey, if they're getting an alarm from the house, that must mean the power is restored!"  Sure enough, we drove back and could already see lights on in certain parts of the house - and it's hard to find many sights that have been more beautiful to us than that!

The next winter had a decent amount of snow, too - enough to cause church services to be cancelled the Sunday before Christmas because they didn't want people to take risks trying to get to church with, again, icy roads.  But it is pretty unusual for things to be that bad.

So I'm holding out hope that the winter will just be a normal one, with cooler temperatures that make us break out the winter coats, hats and gloves, some nice snowfalls to watch out the window, and rains that come along to wash the snow away before it becomes problematic.  Is that too much to ask?

Potpourri

A little of this and a little of that tonight:

• My Christmas gift-buying list is coming along.  I started buying gifts in August, but only got a few and a few more in September.  October slipped by me with no purchases, but I'm really ramping up this month. I'd like to start even earlier in the year next year and buy at least 3 or 4 gifts per month so I can spread out the expense and also prevent the stress of Christmas approaching and feeling pressured to figure out what to get.
• I need to start wrapping the Christmas gifts I already have so that I don't do like I did last year and end up wrapping all of the local gifts on Christmas Eve.
• This cold rainy weather we've been having has been making me very sleepy and sluggish during the day.  It's tough to be productive when it's like that.
• I've been doing the revised Breaking Free Bible study by Beth Moore.  It digs really deep, much deeper than any other study I've done, including half a dozen other ones by her.  Really gets to the core of what keeps Christians from fully experiencing abundance in Christ.
• Today was a pretty good day.  Ben didn't want me to leave him in the church nursery when I went to my Bible study this morning, so I just sat with him and rocked for a while until he felt better.  I suspect teething has really bothered him today, but there were a number of times when he just wanted to snuggle, and that was nice.  He's big on snuggling.
• Rachel did well with her behavior today, which was great.  Some days have been a struggle lately, and it's nice to have a day without battles.  I got to spend time with both kids just playing and tickling and having fun this afternoon, then Rachel and I sat together under a blanket and read part of a Magic Tree House book.
• It's hard to believe that Thanksgiving is only a little over 2 weeks away.  And Christmas Day is exactly 1 month after Thanksgiving.  Where on earth has 2010 gone?  Why does it seem like every year goes a little it faster than the one before?
• I'm supertired right now and looking forward to going to sleep, but I already know that I'm going to still be tired in the morning because I'm not going to get enough sleep.  Tomorrow night, I really must make a point of going to bed early.
• We're winning the war on clutter in our house, and it feels good.
• Glee was only meh tonight, but I liked the music, especially "One Love."  Probably going to download that on iTunes using the gift card that James got me for my birthday, along with "Hey, Soul Sister" by Train and the new JJ Heller album, When I'm With You.
• I'm thinking about trying my hand at making a pendant for James' grandma for Christmas.  I want to create a birthstone pendant with crystals representing the months that each of her great-grandchildren have been born and put it on a nice silver chain.  The stuff I'm finding online is either pricey or looks cheap, so I'm hoping that by making it myself, I'll be able to make something that's nice in quality and a reasonable cost.  I've never made jewelry before.  Wish me luck.

That is all.  Good night.

Lose It!

Whew!  I almost forgot about writing a blog post today, and I already had my topic picked out ahead of time and everything.  It would have been a bummer if I'd missed one.  Be forewarned that I'm about to sound like I'm selling Amway.  


For a number of years, I've been unhappy with my weight.  I'd steadily put on a few pounds here and there every year until I was finally 40 pounds heavier than when I'd gotten married in 1999.  I didn't like how I looked and just didn't feel that good about myself as a result.


During both of my pregnancies, I'd been diagnosed with gestational diabetes.  Since I didn't have a big appetite for snacking in the earlier trimesters and had to stick with a strict diet for my health and the health of my babies, I ended up about 20 pounds lighter right after giving birth than when I'd gotten pregnant.  I loved being thinner and hoped to hang onto it, but I didn't take steps to do so and wasn't paying enough attention to what I was eating or making any lasting changes to my regular habits.  Gestational diabetes would go away, and I'd go back to the same bad habits.


On top of that, my willpower seemed nonexistent.  I'd want so much to be in better shape and to feel good about myself again.  Sometimes I'd think "Maybe I'm just going to be this size the rest of my life, and I need to stop feeling bad about myself," but I couldn't reconcile myself to being that overweight.  I knew it wasn't the healthiest way to live.


Some months ago, my friend Corey started to use the Lose It! app for the iPhone.  And over the next couple of months, he experienced a steady yet healthy rate of weight loss - he's still using it, and still losing steadily.  Soon, my husband started to use it, and he, too, started to lose weight and get into healthier shape.  He kept asking me for calorie counts on things I was giving him for meals.  (Frankly, I found it annoying at that point since he was the one who was using Lose It!, yet I was the one who had to hassle with figuring out calories for things he ate.)  Then Corey upgraded his iPhone, and he gave me the one he'd had.  When he formatted it for me, guess what was on it?  You got it.  So I figured "What the heck?  I'll give it a try and see how this works for me."


If you're not familiar with the app, here's how it works:

• You put in your weight, height, gender, goal weight and the rate at which you wish to lose the weight (1/2 pound, 1 pound, 1 1/2 pounds or 2 pounds a week).
• Lose It! tells you how many calories you have each day before accounting for any exercise, and it also tells you approximately when you'll reach your goal weight based on your rate of loss, if you are consistent with sticking to the recommendation. And they have a Maintenance option that you can use to keep track of your eating once you've reached your goal, to make sure you don't start going back up again.
• You track your food with the program, which has a large database of items (both generic and brandname, as well as a number of restaurant foods) and allows you to put in custom items or recipes. You also track exercise, and as you add exercise to your day, it gives you those calories back towards your eating allotment.
• If you have friends using Lose It!, you can create an account on their website and connect with friends so that you can see their progress and encourage one another.

It's been a real wake-up call to me to see what my daily calorie allotment is, compared to what I was probably eating even when I thought I was doing well. I've also been much more conscious of portion sizes and how much I'm putting on my plate, even using measuring cups and spoons for some things like carbs (potatoes, pasta, rice) and salad dressings.


And it's been something that has given me a concrete goal and a super-easy way to keep track. I'm pretty lazy about that, so having to write down amounts and keep track of it myself would be much harder for me to maintain. It's also a challenge to come in under my daily calorie goal, a challenge that's been surprisingly motivating for me! i started to think "Dangit, I can DO this!"


Best of all, the program is free! The creators said they want it to be free so that it's available for anyone who wants to be healthier, which is just awesome.


I've actually started viewing fat as the enemy to be vanquished, and I'm determined that it's going down.  I'm done with being overweight.  Now that I'm more aware of how much I'm eating and what a burger is really going to cost me, I'm much more likely to make a better choice, or I adjust my other meals so that I can enjoy a higher-calorie meal here and there.  Nothing has ever motivated me in the same way before, nor have I been able to stick to any other kind of plan previously.  If you're searching for a way to lose weight and have had trouble finding something that works, I highly recommend you check this out.

It All Seems to Hit the Fan at Once

We got hit with a one-two punch in the last 24 hours.  First, late last night my husband noticed that a sizeable section of the ceiling in our laundry room was bowed out and cracking.  We suspected it was connected to a problem in the master bathroom above, where we had been feeling a portion of the floor that seemed spongy, like water had gotten underneath the linoleum and softened the subflooring.  James called American Home Shield, and as they considered it an emergency, they planned to have someone contact us on Sunday morning and come out that day if possible.

James stayed home from church and waited, and the call came just before 10:45.  After talking with James, the plumber said that he was pretty sure the culprit is a leak in the seal between the bathtub and the floor or around the tub drain, and that it was slowly leaking down into the drywall of the laundry room ceiling.  He didn't seem to feel it was an emergency and set an appointment to come out on Monday morning at 9:30.

We're pretty sure fixing the leak is going to involve pulling up the floor and subfloor in the bathroom.  We don't know if more will need to come out, but at the very least, bringing everything back to normal afterward is going to require replacing the subfloor, and replacing the flooring through the whole bathroom, in addition to taking out the drywall in the laundry room and replacing that, too.  We're hoping and praying that it doesn't snowball into any bigger kind of problem, like mold.  I don't know if the toilet or bathtub will need to be pulled out to fix things, but this could turn into something big quickly.  And in the month before Christmas, so it would be hard to find worse timing.

So that's problem #1.  Problem #2 occurred tonight, when the washing machine showed an error code that translates to "Contact for service."  It's not like the other minor codes we've seen that just require unplugging the machine and letting it sit for a bit, then plugging it back in, and everything works fine.  We bought our machine when we moved here over 4 1/2 years ago, so it's way past the warranty, and we didn't buy the appliance coverage from American Home Shield (DANGIT!) since we didn't think we'd need it any time soon.

James is currently downstairs with the machine partially taken apart, working to try to fix it so that we don't have to pay someone to repair that, too.  I'm trying to remain calm and not freak out thinking about all the "What ifs?"

Especially since my car has also been sounding really strained, and I'm going to be taking it in soon to see what's wrong.  Hopefully something minor, but it never seems to turn out that way with car repairs, does it?

I'm starting to feel like a really tightly-wound ball of stress and have to seriously work on committing this to the Lord before I end up with stomach pains, as I tend to do when I hold onto stress and internalize things.  I'm reminding myself of Philippians 4:6-7:

Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. ⁷And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.


Praying about things probably isn't going to magically cause my car to stop making that sound, or the washing machine to put itself back together in working order, or the laundry ceiling to move back into place and the bathroom floor to feel normal.  But it will allow me to deal with all of this without wanting to pull my hair out, and with the assurance that God knows it's all happening and will bring us through while granting the peace that I really desperately need right now.

Giving Thanks

Since Thanksgiving is in a few weeks, I thought this would be a good time to list some of the things for which I'm thankful.  I'm thankful for:

• a Savior who loved me enough to come to earth and die for my sins, centuries before I was even born.
• a wonderful loving husband who is a caring father to our children and who seeks to serve the Lord in all he does.
• a 6-year-old daughter who sometimes drives me crazy but always keeps life interesting, who is intelligent and funny and sweet.
• a 2-year-old son who lights up when he sees someone he loves, who sometimes expresses his love with a little *too* much hands-on demonstration and whose giggles are infectious.
• the liquid maple trees and their vivid red leaves at this time of year - they look unreal!
• music - all sorts of music, from cheesy 80s pop to Christmas songs to praise music to Hawaiian and lots of others in between.
• having family nearby and being able to see them regularly.
• a really fun vacation to Victoria a few months ago with our dear friends Corey and Gilda.
• a warm comfortable house (and especially my warm comfortable bed).
• being able to sleep well again at night and not dealing with several of coughing before I'm able to settle down.
• physical health.
• a weight-loss tool that has allowed me to finally develop willpower and self-control and see results that I know will last.
• computers that provide opportunities for organization, communication, creativity and fun.
• a church staff and membership that is striving to follow what the Lord would have us do and is growing and being challenged in how to put that into action.
• the ability to sing.
• trees, grass, flowers and bushes, and the general abundance of greenery in the Puget Sound area.
• rain that keeps me from having to water said trees, grass, flowers and bushes for about 9 months out of the year.
• sun breaks in the rain that keep me from going nuts and allow me to appreciate the beauty of the rain falling.
• the double-layer pumpkin cheesecake that I'll be having on Thanksgiving.
• fondue.
• board game nights with friends.
• Christmas.
• Reese's peanut butter cups.

It was actually pretty easy to come up with that list, and I could keep going, but it's getting late and I'm down to the wire with publishing this today.  Perhaps I'll do another thankfulness list in the next week or two and see what else comes to mind.  Suffice it to say that I'm feeling pretty thankful!

A Little Break

Tomorrow, Rachel is going to my mom's house to spend the day and the night, a Grandma/Granddaughter Day. They started doing this probably a year and a half ago, a few months after my mom had moved out of her house and into her own place.  Rachel looks forward to these times, but I think I may look forward to them more!

I love that they enjoy each other's company so much that they look forward to their overnights together, but it's also nice to get a break from the drama that life with a 6-year-old girl often brings, at least our 6-year-old girl.  The last few weeks have been particularly tumultuous, so it's with a sigh of relief that I'll be sending her off for this weekend's overnight.  It's amazing how you can hit some really high highs and some really low lows all in the same two-week period.

While Rachel visits with Grandma, James, Ben and I will be going out to a brunch summit.  (Ooh, how official-sounding!)  James and I started doing this years ago but have been spotty keeping up with it, and we're trying to reestablish summits as a regular event.

What is a summit? you might be thinking.  It's just a time devoted to discussing the next few months and what they entail:  holiday plans, people we'd like to get together with, places we want to go (museums, zoos), restaurants we want to try, events that are coming up and things that we want to accomplish around the house.  It's a way to make sure we're being organized and getting to some of the things on our mental to-do lists that would otherwise just stay in our brains and never get done amidst all of the regular goings-on in our lives.

We like to start out at a restaurant with a comforting breakfast/brunch-type meal and have as much of our discussion as we can there without either rudely monopolizing a table in a busy establishment or annoying everyone because our kids have gotten restless.  Then we head home and finish what we didn't get to at the restaurant.  Sometimes it also entails physically walking through the house to think about the projects, big and small, that we may have forgotten or that come to mind as we discuss things.

We've found our summits to be really helpful with making sure we don't just keep saying "Hey, we should go to that place sometime" and never actually go there.  And getting all of those things out of our heads and onto paper helps me to declutter my mind and have fewer things going round and round, competing for attention.  If you've read the Harry Potter books or seen the movies, I suppose you could say it's kind of like my own Pensieve, but I use it for thoughts about things in the present and the future rather than memories of the past.

I'm looking forward to getting back to regular summits.  And I'm also looking forward to a yummy breakfast out!

Frustration

Almost didn't make it in time today.  It's nearing midnight and I'm scrambling to type so I can post and not already fail at blogging every day, 4 days into the month, because that would be sad.

It's just been one of those days.  Ben was in a pretty good mood this morning and ate well at breakfast, so we headed to Target after dropping off Rachel at school.  (She did mostly decent with getting ready, but it got a little bumpy for a few minutes.)  Got our shopping done at Target with minimal fuss and lots of belly-tickling (his belly, not mine), then we headed home to hang out for a bit.  I turned on WordWorld and Clifford the Big Red Dog for him while I got a late breakfast, then gathered things for going to lunch with James.  Each week, we take lunch to him at his workplace.  Rachel comes, too, when she's not in school.

Normally Ben is completely uninterested in TV, but it provided enough entertainment that I wasn't being inundated with "Snacks! Crackers! Goldfish!" every 2 minutes while I was getting lunch ready, and that was helpful.  Is it wrong to wish your child was more interested in television?  But I digress - he did well, then we went to lunch and had a nice time there with James having lunch in the cafeteria, then going for a walk to the lake that's on the property.

Home for nap time, but a nap didn't happen.  As is often the case, he decided he'd rather jump and shriek like a monkey instead of laying down and sleeping.  Crazy kid - I'd totally nap if I had the chance more often.  I was able to get in some time on the exercise bike while he amused himself in his crib, then we went and picked up Rachel from school.

And it all went downhill from there.  We're having some real challenges with Rachel's attitude and anger again, something we thought was largely behind us, at least until teenage hormones set in.  Instead, her temper is flaring up now that she's back in school, rather than settling down like it usually does when she's back to a scheduled day and activities that allow her to get out of the house, socialize and expend some energy.

When she acts up like that, Ben gets agitated and starts to act aggressively, too, so at one point both kids were in their rooms and I called James to let off some steam and tell him what had happened so that he'd know what to expect when he got home.  It's so frustrating - we have to keep teaching the same lessons over and over, and just when we think we've made some great headway, she pulls a day like today that makes us (or, at least, me) feel like we're back at square one again.

I have no doubts that we'll win the parenting battle and that Rachel will grow up to be a strong, confident young woman with a heart for God and the ability to control her temper and make right decisions.  But sometimes the road ahead looks long.  I'm thankful for the past three days when we really did see some strides forward in her behavior and choices, and that helps me to be hopeful for more of that.  Feeling a little battle-scarred tonight, though.

Who, Who, Who Made This Owl?

Okay, I know that was corny and that you already know that I made this owl.  It's from the book Hello, Cupcake!, which I received as a birthday gift last year.  I tremendously enjoyed looking through it and picking out designs I wanted to do.  It's full of so many creative designs, and many are fairly easy to carry out, judging by the pictures and instructions.  But a year passed and I hadn't done any of them.  Then this year's birthday arrived and I received the sequel, What's New, Cupcake?, and I figured that I'd better get started actually making some of the designs.

Our pumpkin carving party last month provided the perfect opportunity to make some chocolate owls.  I had planned to make some carrot cake pumpkins, too, but ended up having to just improvise a much more simple design of my own instead of the really cool pumpkins from the book. so I'll just be blogging about the owls this time.

If you'd like to make these yourself, you'll need to start with chocolate (or another flavor) cupcakes and chocolate frosting.  I believe the book recommends using about 2 cans, but I made some from scratch because I didn't have enough of the canned frosting.  And boy, did that frosting turn out well!  You can click this link to find the recipe for Chocolate Frosting from the Hello, Cupcake! book.  It's thick and tastes like a semisweet fudge.  You'll need to use it pretty quickly after making it since it sets once it cools, or you can add milk to thin it to a spreadable consistency if you make it ahead of time.  FYI, getting a flatter cupcake actually works in your favor for these, since the owl eyes will sit flatter that way - something I figured out after I'd already gotten started with mine.  I used brownie mix for mine and added an extra egg to make it more cakey, but I think leaving out the extra egg would have given me flatter cupcakes with which to work.

Next you'll take a package of Oreos and, half a dozen or so at a time, microwave them for a few seconds to soften the cream filling.  Twist them apart.  The sides with the cream will be the base of the owl eyes, and the plain sides will be used to form the ears:

Take the plain sides and cut about 1/2 inch into each side.  If you use a serrated knife and saw carefully back and forth, you'll get a better result and less breakage:

Frost your cupcakes, getting one side as smooth as possible since that part will not be covered:

Place two of the cream-side Oreos on each cupcake and two of the ear pieces at the top:

I cut a bit off of each end of the ear pieces since they seemed to fit better that way.  Then you'll take chocolate frosting in a pastry bag with a small round piping tip (or fill a ziploc bag with some and snip off a small bit at the corner) and use it to cover the ears and to make "feathers" at the top and just underneath the eyes on each owl:

Using yellow Runts candies, push one into each cupcake to form the owl's beak:

I got enough of the yellow candies in 3 bags of Runts to make 18 cupcakes.  Then you'll pipe a small dot of vanilla frosting (canned, or you can make some by scaling down this recipe for buttercream frosting) onto each cream side and use it to attach a Junior Caramel (or Junior Mint, if you prefer those) to finish the eyes:

Hello, Cupcake! also suggests that you pipe a little vanilla onto the chocolate candy to make a highlight, but I found that it looked fine without it.

I was pretty happy with how these turned out, and now I'm excited to make more fun cupcakes!