Thanksgiving

We had our first Thanksgiving as returned Arizonans today.  It was sweet!  We got to host my parents - what better reason to push to get unpacked and settled!  I was thrilled.

My mom knew I was going to make cupcakes, so she surprised me with an early Christmas gift - a cupcake tree!  I arranged the top two tiers with the 10 turkey-topped cupcakes I made for today.  Even before I served them these little guys had brought so much fun to my life, but then when I put them on this stand my family said they looked like a choir - like a living Christmas tree pageant, if you've ever seen one of those.  They're right, of course.  Just imagine them singing, and try not to smile.

Speaking of smiles, I give you here my little boy enjoying finger foods from one of the pilgrim hat style combination plate and dipping-trays I made.  This was another super fun little project.

I liked when I took the picture below that I got so many people in the shot.  Mom and I were standing in my kitchen, just on the other side of that counter with the food on it.  That's my little girl with her Indian-style hat on that she made earlier this week.  My husband was in the kitchen most of the morning, since he made the turkey and stuffing, mashed potatoes, and cranberry sauce, and heated up the gravy.

Well, below is what it's all about; what we have to be thankful for.  I am thankful that my kids got to host their grandparents for Thanksgiving, that they saw them a week or so ago, and will see them in another week or so.  It's rather magical.

Side note: my daughter is wearing an outfit that my mom gave me at a baby shower for Kyrstin four years ago.  I just discovered yesterday that it would fit her, and was thrilled!  It has a bee motif.  On the bib it says, "Bee attitudes," and it is embroidered with attitudes I want to teach Kyrstin: Bee kind, Bee patient, Bee happy, and Bee thankful.  Seemed perfect for today.

We tried to get family pics for our Christmas card - it's all happening so fast! - but the kids wouldn't sit still.  We'll try again next weekend.

I've been trying to teach Kyrstin about Thanksgiving; we have a children's storybook that, I think, fairly represents the story from both the native American and European points of view.  It states as fact that there was a group of people who did not appreciate the way they were forced to worship, and so they were looking for another place to live.  Meanwhile in BSF we have been studying Abraham, and looking at Hebrews 11, which describes Abraham and others looking for the promised land.  

"[T]hey admitted they were strangers and aliens on the earth.  People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own.  If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return.  Instead, they were longing for a better country - a heavenly one.  Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them" (13c-16).

I thought a lot about the faith and endurance of those early settlers.  I know they could have returned on the Mayflower when it sailed back after that first winter, but they didn't; they worked it out  because they believed.  Deep down they must have had the conviction of things not seen, and they stood and walked by faith.  It is a courageous legacy, one that I hope that I can grow and pass on to my family.

Just in case you're (p)interested

Ah, delay! What grief it has sometimes been to me, and yet, what a blessing in disguise! It is a delay that allows me to write this post, sitting here in front of this fire.

We are shifting our deeply-rooted lives 1000 miles west. That is a big ship to turn around. It takes a little more time than we thought.

I've been taking pics of things I think will be my last, like this cup of coffee brewed in my house. Please excuse my hair. I told my husband that I felt like packing up the coffeemaker would be the point of no return. Well, it's not sealed up yet, but I'd kinda rather not get it back out tomorrow, since I washed the carafe. That seems like boring news for the Internet.

Okay, so here's something kind of fun. Pumpkin spice bagels! Yahoo! I'm enjoying all the pumpkin ness.

I'm not on Pinterest, but it benefitted me the other day when I asked my girlfriends for advice on packing up my necklaces. An idea from Pinterest was to thread skinny ones through a straw so they didn't get tangled. So I did. If I were on Pinterest, I'd post this idea. I decided to roll up my busy necklaces in a towel, like so. It made a little necklace log that was easy to pack. TAda! I don't think this is super original, but it was a good solution.

This huge, bright truck is in my driveway. Isn't it pretty? The kids have had a great time running up and down the ramp. Here is my hubs, who essentially wore himself out yesterday and today, loading said vehicle.

So, we're to the point where the house looks like this. And we still have stuff like this in the garage. (Pic was taken during the day, FYI.). So there is just enough left to do that by taking an extra day we can enjoy this fire tonight, rest up, and then wrap up properly and without strain.

Oh yeah, one more pinteresty thing - I saw these apple nachos a site with a other fall recipe I like, and made them for the kids a few times. Nutella a d pb. They LOVE them. Who wouldn't, right? Do other families also go through a jar of Nutella per week, or is it just us, and the novelty of it?

So anyway, in case you're pinterested, we're a day behind but doing fine.

Heigh-de-ho, neighborinos!

We have a new family moving in next door and and I don't know their names yet.  I decided to bake a loaf of sandwich bread to take over.  I hope they are not on a gluten-free diet!  In any case, it certainly can't make things worse.  It will finish baking in four minutes from the present moment in which I am typing, and I am hoping it will be sufficiently cooled that I can slice it and take it over while the kids are still asleep.

Here's looking at Lorelai

Alrighty, my recently relocated friend recently posted this yogurt dough recipe on her blog.  I've been aiming to put it together for weeks and finally got to it this morning.

You melt and cool 1 cup of butter.

Then you add a cup of yogurt, and cream the mixture.  In my case, it was just mixing - no cream was produced.  But I did make the yogurt myself, which I think would make Lorelai proud.

Then you add 3 1/2 C flour and 1 t salt, and mix until a nice dough forms.  This is what mine ended up looking like. 

Then you cover it, and allow it to rest in a warm place for 12-24 hours.  I decided to cloak it to keep in the warmth produced by the heating pad.  This is similar to the method I use to make yogurt (see earlier post).

It smells and tastes really good.  My friend says you can use it for a lot of different things.  I am very interested to see how this turns out tomorrow.

Pear tart

This is an image associated with frugality. An empty plate.

And this was indeed the situation in my house yesterday.  However, there are more images to include in the story.

Trying out a new tart recipe to use up the overripe pears in my fridge.  

The finished product:

I sent it to work with my husband, and it was almost gone in a few hours.  Here is the piece he saved me:

I ate it last night, which brings us to picture #1, for then the tart was all done.  

Yum.  It's something I never would have made if I hadn't searched for a recipe to use up extra pears.  I found this one highly recommended, involving normal pantry ingredients.  Frugality can be delicious and creative.  

D'in I M(yself)

I have been on a major DIY kick lately.

Here is what I had for breakfast.  I made the yogurt and granola myself.

It was delicious.

Other things I have made: laundry soap, dishwasher detergent (new and improved), baby wash.

I also planned our meals for the whole month, and made and froze seven or so of them.

More later.

Sometimes you don't

I posted about making these cookies the other day to satisfy my chocolate craving and calm my inner crazy mom.  I made half of the pan with nuts, and half without, because sometimes you feel like a nut, and sometimes you don't.  In the pic, the nuts are on the L.  You can see that Scott and I went a little more nuts than not.

I would like to make the note that substituting almonds for walnuts in a cookie bar recipe didn't work great because the almonds got a little rubbery.  But it still tasted sweet and chocolatey, was highly edible, and worked for me.

As for nuts, we have a bowl of them on our kitchen island.  They've been sitting there since Christmas.  We bought them thinking it would be fun to use with the nutcracker Kyrstin got for her birthday.  She loves nutcrackers, as her excitement in this picture attests.

As it turns out, though, the nuts were too strong for the nutcracker, which was actually decorative.  Not being "nut" people (in one sense) we didn't know that.  So, now we have this big bowl of nuts, plus another amount the same size where that came from in the pantry.  I'm not sure what to do with them.  I don't feel like having them out anymore, but I can't waste all those walnuts, pecans, hazelnuts, and almonds.  I'm not likely to individual crack and chop them to cook with.  Anybody wanna go nuts?

The half-life of grace, or second-hand miracles

A friend offered me some secondhand clothes and I picked them today.  I appreciate this because a) it helps me extend my wardrobe, and b) I don't have to suffer any buyer's remorse.

I was thinking this morning about the miracle of longsuffering; how over time, indirectly, some of the longsufferer wears off on the suffered.  Maybe this is because I am so hard-headed and proud that you can't teach me anything; you have to show me.  That takes time, which puts the long in longsuffering.

If I could just learn everything directly for myself, I could experience more grace firsthand.  Sometimes, though, I don't even know what I'm missing.  I get around people who've got something special, and think, hmm, where  can I pick some of that stuff up?  Also, I have in the past bought some nice stuff second-hand, and really enjoyed the quality.  It made me more willing to pay the price for the real thing later on, and start counting that cost.  It's the same with spiritual blessings.

This idea makes me uncomfortable, too, because I realize how frequently the grace God shines into my life is  snuffed out by my own selfishness or fleshliness.  This is most evident when I am impatient or short with my children.  I guess sometimes I expect them to be little adults.  It's taken me XX years to arrive where I am, and it's not the finish line... clean or dirty, cute or frumpy, I've got some little wardrobes to launder and fold, and do it all again tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow... until they're big enough to take it all on their own.

The patience to do that would be a miracle that I am just hoping would have a secondhand effect.

It's not easy being Jeeves

Here is my prepared "English Breakfast" in front of the computer where I'm writing.

My overnight plan didn't go exactly as I'd expected; the bread machine was so loud at 3:30 this morning that it woke me up, so I moved it into the guest bathroom where the sound would be least bothersome to the family. Just to ease your mind, this is a bathroom where the toilet and bathtub are behind a separate door. The smell worked out exactly as I'd hoped, though I noticed there was no coffee smell. That is because I programmed my coffeemaker for PM instead of AM. Anyway,at 7:30, here's what I had.

My 1 1/2 lb. loaf of bread and my 4-cup pot of coffee (I was only making the coffee for me). Doesn't that hunk of bread look great? The kind of big bulk that makes you want to sing, "Let us break bread together on our knees." This is the kind of bread that in biblical times could be placed on a table and everyone just pull off a chunk to eat. In fact, I am told people still do this in the middle east. Well, like I said before, I was feeling British, so it needed to be sliced. You know what's the greatest thing since sliced bread? Me, either, but I can understand why that moment split culinary time. Slicing the bread is no easy chore now if you don't have the right knife. I have this small serrated knife that required two separate sawings per slice - one on each side. I wonder when sliced bread came out and when electric knives came out. I often wonder about pre-industrial, pre kitchen-full-of-time-saving-gadgets women and/or their help. Well, I sliced two thin slices for my kids, which turned out kind of uneven, and then sliced two big chunks, which I realized was a much better shape when you can do it. Here are the non-kid slices.

Here are the kids.

Sitting out were the butter, jelly, eggs, microwave steamer bowl, bread machine pain, coffee, and a can of peaches. By 9 A.M. I sat down with the above breakfast. Thinking of all of the conveniences I had, and how long it still took me, my hat is off to all of the house help at Pemberley and Longbourn (no E).