Happy Mid Road Trip Meal

On our most recent road trip, when we found ourselves needing to stop (which happened far more often than the car needed gas) we found ourselves straining our eyes for a sign of those golden arches.

McDonald’s is cheap, fast, and kid friendly.  Pretty much guaranteed to have a changing table in the bathroom.  (I’ve gotten so tired of pulling over at a place I’d like to eat when Rori needs a change only to discover that I’ll be changing my darling daughter on the bathroom floor or on a bit of counter space next to the sink.)

But Rori is getting big, and eating grown up food, so all of a sudden there we were, offering Rori her very first (chopped up into small pieces) happy meal.

You can tell she feels like she’s getting away with something.

Please mommy, will you open my milk?

We took the toy back because, well we didn’t really have much use for a strawberry shortcake stamp, and they gave us two free apple pies.

Sweet.

Christmas Pudding

I think I watched this video three times yesterday.  Andrew and I also watched all the supplemental videos.

Today I’m supposed to buy lots of dried fruit and some brandy.

I’m a little nervous.  I’ve never cooked anything that required multiple viewings of a 12 minute long instructional video before.

All I want for Christmas. . .

Speaking of which, I’m pretty sure that Rori will be getting her two front teeth this Christmas.  One of them is already on it’s way out.

So, some of the blogs I like to read have been posting Christmas gift ideas, and I just found something I would really love getting for Christmas, and so I thought, maybe someone else would really like getting this for Christmas, maybe I should share the idea and spread the Christmas love, and I’ll just hope all my readers take it that way and I don’t end up with coal in my stocking because I was greedy and secretly hoping that someone would buy this “great gift idea” for me, right, moving on.

Last year after Christmas Andrew and I went Calendar shopping and I found a leather bound day planner that I have just loved.  The layout is great, it’s just the right size, I’ve used it regularly, and it’s held up really well.  So this year I thought I’d do a cow and my wallet a favor and just order refills instead of getting a whole new planner.  (The refills were only $6, yay! but the shipping was $5.95, boo since I got the planner over 50% off in the first place I think this is actually costing more than the initial outlay, but I’m willing to pay it for the sake of consistency and organizational happiness)

While I was perusing their website I found this lovely lovely recipe book.

Isn’t it pretty?  It comes in such great colors too!  It can even be personalized.  If you could see my current recipe organization method you would understand why this gets me so excited.

 

See?

we’re back

We’re back from a week long family Colorado Thanksgiving adventure.  It’s cold and rainy and I’m grateful that with all the mayhem my daughter didn’t forget how to sleep in.  It’s almost nine and not a peep.  As a mother, it makes me so proud.  But now I am going to go put on socks and make a to do list and let the computer re-start, since it’s been trying to all morning.  Then we’ll see about rousing sleepy head.  I wouldn’t want her to miss her morning nap.  Maybe she’s just enjoying some alone time. . . . kind of like her mommy.

Ours not to reason why, ours but to do and die

I never felt like laundry was a challenge till I got married.

I never felt like I was losing the battle till I had a baby.

Charge!

Oh Sweet Pea, won’t you drink with me?

Yesterday, at World Market I ran across this wine:It’s made from 100% Washington Apples.  It’s got a lady wearing a cute dress on the label.  And it’s called Sweet Pea.  I couldn’t resist.

It only cost $6.99, so I didn’t really try to resist, either.  I held the bottle for a minute as if I wasn’t sure and when Andrew said I should get it, I said ok and put it in the basket.

I love the cherries!

So aside from being cheap and adorable, what did I think of the wine?

Despite what I consider to be an infallible association between Autumn and apples, this apple wine is definitely a summer drink.  You should serve it over crushed ice and sip it in the afternoon as you watch the kids play in the sprinklers.  And I promise you will enjoy every sip.

It made me want to eat a cucumber sandwich.

Bye Bye, I love you, Bye Bye

My Defense

A good college friend recently started a blog which you can visit, here.  Her post and the fact that it’s Sunday inspired me to try to write out, in very short form, my basic defense of my faith.  Here goes, gulp.

Pretty much all human beings recognize that there is good and bad, right and wrong, fair and unfair.  If you run across a human being who does not believe that murder is wrong, most human beings will think this is twisted.  An exception that proves the rule, if you will.

So there is some source of good outside of ourselves because if the delineation of right and wrong sprung from the individual it would be much more varied than it is.  If truth exists it must exist outside the individual and I believe that truth exists.  I believe that good/right/truth/fair/justice/love/patience, etc. are all found in God and come from God.  Because God exists we hold these virtues to be virtues.  So God is holy, set apart, pure.

We see in life that a pure substance can not interact with a tainted substance and retain it’s purity.  If you mix pure milk, with strawberry milk, you’ll end up with light pink, faintly flavored milk.  True, absolute goodness cannot accept even the smallest spot of evil or it will change the nature of the good.

So God is good and pure and holy and he made us in His image.  He walked with us and talked with us and generally intermingled.  God is love.  Father, Son, and Spirit He is constantly in relationship with His own awesomeness.  Out of His awesomeness He created humanity, to participate in the love fest.  But we all know that love is a choice and we humans like to explore our options, being creative and imaginative in the image of our maker.

So we thought we’d try the disobedience route.  My one year old tries this route at least once a day.  Once we made this decision we were no longer pure.  It’s generally accepted that actions have consequences.  Well, the consequence of sin is death.  God didn’t want to abandon His people so He set up a system where we could offer sacrifices to pay the consequences of sin for us, at least temporarily.

Imagine a man in a white robe who is totally 100% clean.  Not only is he clean, he actually repels dirt.  Like two magnets that are flipped the wrong way.  You can get them pretty darn close to each other but they aren’t going to touch.  In this analogy God is an insanely strong magnet.  So, we walk around, picking up dirt all over the place.  Through sacrifice, you could take a bath.  You weren’t going to get every last speck of dirt but you could get clean enough to approach.

Now God did some pretty incredible stuff while this system was in place but he needed something a little more permanent.  All of His human beings were sinning.  All the sin meant they had to die.  He didn’t want us to die.  He created us to live eternally.  But God is just, he couldn’t just write a “get out of jail free” card because that would not be justice and would be against His nature.  The price had to be paid.  But God is also merciful, so He decided to pay it Himself.  He sent Jesus Christ into the world.  His only begotten Son.  100% God, 100% Man.  The Perfect Sacrifice.
The Bible says that sin entered the world through one man (Adam) and so sin was defeated by one man (Jesus).  As God, he had no sin, as human he could pay the price.  And so he did.  And so I’m saved.

Thank goodness.

Ok, there are hundreds of thousands of places to go from here.  Questions to ask.  Things to debate.  But that’s the summation of some of my underlying principles.

I was strongly influenced by reading “Mere Christianity” by C.S. Lewis as a  young woman, and I would very highly recommend it.  I would also recommend “The Shack” by William P. Young as I think he does an excellent job of depicting the whole God in relationship with Himself issue.

Happy Sunday.

Post Pregnancy Weight Loss

Post Pregnancy Weight Loss is a very strange thing.

Like a lot of women do, I worked out a lot leading up to my wedding day.  I was really hoping to look good in that wedding dress.  All the exercise combined with all the stress to help me meet my goals, and I got to feel super sexy running around Greece in a bikini on our honeymoon.

Then came normal life.  When I could no longer jog 2 1/2 miles every day, felt silly doing a pilates video in front of my husband every morning and hadn’t yet found anywhere to do yoga three times a week.  I gained about 10 pounds.

I was also feeling all the euphoria of wedded bliss.  How silly it seemed to worry about things like “eating right.”  Worry about money, sure, but whether or not to eat the hot chocolate brownie covered in vanilla ice cream that my adoring husband wants to share with me, not so much.  This added another 10 pounds.

About 6 months into our marriage we found out we were pregnant.  Very exciting news.  We went to the doctor for that first check up and they had me fill out a form that included things like my pre-pregnancy weight.  I had to guess since I hadn’t stood on a scale in over 6 months and the last scale I used only measured in Kilos.  I was a little disappointed when it came time to step on the actual pound-declaring scale.

It was hard to watch my weight while I was pregnant.  When the nausea was at its worst I lost weight, but I also got zero exercise.  Then I felt nervous about picking it up again when all the pregnancy books warn about changing your exercise habits while pregnant.  For awhile the only thing that helped me feel better was an egg mcmuffin in the morning.  I wasn’t supposed to eat sandwich meat and the idea of a frozen healthy choice meal for lunch (which I used to eat frequently) suddenly turned my stomach.  I never hesitated if I felt like eating seconds.  Even with all this I didn’t fare too badly.  I gained a total of 40 pounds during my pregnancy and never topped the dreaded (at least, I dreaded it) 200 pound mark.

Now that we’ve covered the weight gain we can tackle the weight loss, which is actually the point of this post.

We came home with our new born baby 6 hours after she was born, so the weight that I had lost was pretty much exactly the weight of the baby, 10 pounds.  (Rori was 9 lbs 5 oz, so I also lost 11 oz of other things- you can imagine)

But never before had I felt so skinny!  I mean, how often do you lose 10 pounds in a single day?  I could hug my husband again, bend over, see my toes; it was all very exciting.  I was once again the only human being residing in my body and it felt good.

But pretty soon I looked in the mirror and saw that I weighed more than I had ever weighed in my entire life, and I no-longer had the excuse of being pregnant.

By the end of the first week I’d lost another 10 pounds, just through nursing and losing the extra fluid and blood that your body no longer needs.  I was feeling good again.  At this rate I’d be back to my wedding weight by Christmas.  And I fully intended to see that happen.

By the end of the 6 week post partum period I had walked/nursed off another 10 pounds, but I was thoroughly depressed.  How had I gone from feeling insanely skinny to losing 20 pounds and feeling insanely fat?  This is the mystery of post pregnancy weight loss.  You are significantly lighter and significantly heavier at the same time, it just depends on how far back you look.

In January I was determined to attack the plateau on which I found myself.  I bought “You on a Diet” by Dr. Oz and joined the local YMCA where the free child care helped motivate me to go to the gym regularly.  I lost another 15 pounds but gained back 5 when I stopped following the diet as closely.

I was at another plateau.  This time we switched from the Y to Gold’s Gym, which turned out to be cheaper.  It also turned out to have an indoor pool, a hot tub, individual tvs on the cardio machines and a much more challenging Yoga class.

And here I am.  I’ve lost 50 pounds in the last year.  Although I feel like saying that is misleading, since a chunk of that was baby or baby related, but I also feel like it’s an accomplishment I don’t often appreciate.  I mean that is really a lot of weight.  I remember looking at my pre-pregnancy clothes and thinking, “How did I ever fit into these?  If I ever fit into them again I am not allowed to ever think I’m fat!”   Well, they fit again, but I still look in the mirror or stand on the scale and see the weight I have left to lose. What’s up with that?

It’s silly I know.  But even though I think it would be nice to lose 5 or 10 more pounds, these days it feels more like a fun challenge then an overwhelming task.  In yoga class I’m always trying to sink a little lower, raise my leg a little higher, stretch my hips a little more, and it’s been so encouraging to watch my body change, to learn what I am capable of, and to wonder what else I can achieve.

I think throughout this whole experience God has been working on my heart.  He’s taught me the value of beauty, and that you can’t measure it with a scale.  But while God loves us exactly as we are and nothing we could ever do could possibly make him love us more than he already does right now, I think he also doesn’t want us to be too easily satisfied with ourselves.  Sometimes there’s a reason we don’t like what we see in the mirror.  Sometimes the mirror is on the wall, but sometimes it’s a friend, or a spouse, or a child, and we realize that it’s time for change, for discipline, and a new attitude to set in.  And I think God is a perfect traveling companion for these journeys.  He comforts us when we hit a plateau or just realize we’ve still got a long way to go.  He celebrates with us when we find victory.  And all along the way he longs to show us that He loves us right now and right now He thinks we are beautiful.

You give me fever

I’ve already talked about the whole “I-hate-immunizations-but-they-help-keep-my-baby-alive” thing.   Wednesday night Rori woke up crying at 2:30 in the morning.  I went in to check on her and she was burning up, so hot to the touch it made me cry.  As soon as I picked her up she stopped crying but I was worried.  I woke Andrew from his quite sound sleep exclaiming, “Rori is burning up, what do we do?”  To which he replied “humpububu?”  “Seriously, feel her Andrew, she’s never been this hot before.”  At this I deposited our child in Andrew’s lap where she began to calmly point at things and say “da” in her usual manner.  At this point he looked at me like I was crazy.

But as he woke up he realized that she really was unusually hot.  We got the thermometer and stuck it in her arm pit where I watched the numbers steadily rise till they came to rest at 101.6.  Armpit temp (as I discovered through a frantic google search) can be up to 2 degrees lower than actual body temp.  Which meant she was actually running a 103 -103.6 degree fever.  I was very upset.  I looked back at the immunization information pages and was reminded that a temperature of 101-103 was to be considered normal but that a temperature of 104 meant we needed to take her in to get checked out.  When it is 2:30 in the morning and you’re scared, there is a very fine line between 103 and 104.  And what if the temperature is 103.6, do you round up or down?

It was Rori’s perfectly calm demeanor that decided us on the wait and see approach over the rush to the hospital line.  So we laid her back in the crib and she immediately fell asleep.  She woke up a couple more times during the night and we checked her temp, gave her some water or some tylenol  if the time was right.  But as I lay in bed after putting her back down the first time I was terrified.  What if I’d made the wrong decision?  With everything in my body I wanted to just be able to make it right, make her healthy and fine.  There was a gut wrenching sense of helpless love.  And this was all just for her first high fever, a fever we’d been warned would probably happen.  How does anyone survive being a parent?

I can definitely say that parenthood has taken my trust in God to a whole new level.  Whether it’s trusting that she’ll just keep breathing even though she’s in another room and I can’t watch the air go in and out of her chest, or trusting that God can heal her and that if we need to go to the hospital she’ll wake us up and we’ll know it, I really have no control, and I can’t even pretend I do.

Christmas Quilt part 1

I have been thinking about making a Christmas Quilt for awhile now.  While I was working on the wedding quilt I listened to several books on tape, one of which was the Quilter’s Homecoming by Jennifer Chiaverini.  At the beginning of the story there is a brief mention of a feathered star Christmas Quilt.  When I looked this block up online I found some pretty cool examples (like this one)  and I knew I wanted to use it in my quilt design.  So I went to the library searching out every Christmas quilt and block pattern I could find and yesterday I finished my design!  Here’s a peek:

I paired the feathered star with a Christmas star, and added corners to the feathered star squares to get the continuous chain look.  Each block will be 15 inches.  The pieced center of the quilt should measure 55 inches square, with an additional 10 inches of border on each side, making the finished project a 75 inch square quilt.

Here’s a close up from before I’d finished the borders on the design:

I worked a lot on fabric math yesterday trying to figure out how many yards I would need of the different fabrics.  On my last quilt I did a horrible job of this and bought 7 yards of extra fabric, yikes!  I’m hoping that I learned from my mistakes and did a better job this time around.  But I do tend to round up because I’m afraid of not having enough or the fabric will shrink too much.  That being said, here are my estimates:

Green fabric- 1 1/2 yards

Red fabric- 3 1/2 yards

Off-white/cream fabric- 3 yards

Backing fabric- 4 1/4 yards

My hope is to update as I work on the quilt, so look forward to seeing “Christmas Quilt Part 423″

Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night!

p.s. If you have any suggestions or brilliant ideas, let me know!  Two heads are better than one, or so they say