May Day

Not sure whether we should be punctuating that as one word or two this year... It sure doesn't look or feel like May outside!

There were ice pellets bouncing off the deck railing when I finished putting the kids to bed this evening... It feels like this winter will never end!

I've always loved the idea of "going Maying," looking for wildflowers on May 1st, but it's never been warm enough long enough before that for flowers to be blooming. This year takes the cake, though; I have never seen this much snow still on the ground in May. 

A couple of weeks ago, the craft in LB's Waldorf curriculum was fingerknitting flowers. I had grand plans of making a whole bouquet in time for May Day, but... as grand plans plus kids tend to go, I finally finished the first flower during Otter's nap this morning. The instructions called for finishing the flowers with a yarn needle, but after two weeks of "maybe I'll make it to the craft store next time," I just used a crochet hook and it worked fine.

I cannot find the program we used for our May Crowning last year—how I can have a whole stack of liturgical year-related books and none of them mention May Crowning is beyond me!—but there's definitely way too much snow in the yard for a procession around the house like we did last time anyway. The kids and I pulled some ideas from Catholic Icing, though, and had fun crowning our big statue of Mary and arranging little paper flowers that LB made next to the little statue in the kids' room. We switched from Easter hymns to Marian hymns for bedtime, too; not sure yet whether I'll stick with Marian ones through the whole month of May, or go back to Easter ones until Pentecost. 

How did (or are) you celebrating Mary in May?

Seven Quick Takes

I
Time for spring colds! It's been a never-ending challenge this past week, catching kids as they run out to play and hustling them back into the house to get jackets on, get them zipped, where did you put your boots?!? etc. And so now we have the inevitable consequences of outside time without the proper gear, and LB and Kit are bewailing their fate of being stuck indoors until their colds get better even though it's beautiful and sunny outside. And it is beautiful! Temperatures are in the upper 40s with clear blue skies, and under the blazing sun our snow is melting quickly. The flat top part of the driveway is pretty much all dry at this point, so the bikes/trikes have been getting a good workout. There is still a lot of snow to melt—Little Bear managed to get himself good and stuck in the back yard yesterday, in snow up to his waist, and his feet were not touching the ground—but a lot has melted this week, and if these temperatures hold it won't be too much longer.

II
Otter picked up his siblings' cold, so he and I have had a couple of kind of difficult nights. I'm still so spoiled from Kit, though! She slept straight through the night every night when she was tiny, so it's really only in comparison with her that Otter is giving me trouble: when he wakes me up four or five times over the course of the night just to eat and goes right back to sleep, it's really not that bad.

III
What kind of "marketing language" would you use to help win someone over to the idea of sweet potatoes for breakfast? I made this sweet potato breakfast bake from Kitchen Stewardship, and I'm really excited about it! Kit and I think it tastes amazing, and I love that it's naturally sweet: the only added sweetener is two tablespoons of maple syrup in the entire 13x9 pan, so its real function in the dish is providing a subtle flavor, not sweetness. But I'm getting a few... raised eyebrows, let us say, over serving vegetables for breakfast: a practical "it's a great start on the recommend 5 servings of veggies a day!" was not all that helpful. :-) LB did eventually concede that it didn't taste bad, but I was hoping for a little more positive response.

IV
The kids' current favorite "everything-free" snack is halved bananas spread with cashew butter—I think several of you suggested that, so thank you! They've been topping them with sliced strawberries and calling them banana boats "because they're quarters of bananas that look the bottom of a boat, and the strawberries could be stood up like sails but I like to lay them down on their sides." - LB

V
I am buying so. ridiculously. many. bananas these days. Between kid snacks, using them in recipes the way I would normally, and substituting them for eggs, we are going through them quickly. I'm grateful that they're the least expensive fruit in the store! Sticking to the grocery budget on this diet has been pretty difficult.

VI
Okay, what are your projects for the weekend? I'm thinking that maybe if I write mine down, on the internet where anyone can see them, they'll be more likely to get done... Sound reasonable? There are always too many things needing my attention, but even if nothing else happens, at the very least I need to plan next week's menu, go over lesson plans for Sunday School and for LB's last week (!!!) of the school year, scribble out an initial ILP for next year so that I'm not walking into Monday's curriculum fair blind, do laundry, and bake some special treat for Sunday. Before I touch any of that, though, we're moving and reorganizing all of the too big/too small kids' clothes; hopefully that takes less time than I'm expecting it to!

Have a good weekend! For more quick takes, check out This Ain't The Lyceum.

Lessons from the first week

We made it a whole week on the "everything-free" diet! (Not literally everything; in case you missed it earlier, our whole family is off egg for three weeks and gluten, dairy, soy, citrus, almonds, peanuts, and a couple of other legumes for six weeks.)

And we ate well. Well as in "food that tasted good," but also as in "food that was good for us." When you have to cut all of those things out, it's pretty hard to find junk food, or really much pre-made food at all. I definitely spent a lot more time in the kitchen this past week because I had to make almost everything from scratch. Soy, gluten, and whey and other milk derivatives like to hide in many, many things. I did find, on Friday, a company that makes bread free from everything we can't have (Little Northern Bakehouse, I think it was called?) It was weird to buy sliced bread for the first time in years, but very nice to have bread with our burgers Saturday evening.

A few takeaways from the first week:

Sticking to a menu plan really is possible. When I suddenly could not use pasta, sandwiches, etc as fallbacks, supper actually happened as written on the menu plan every day. There were a couple of minor deviations (lamburgers instead of moose burgers, taco salads when I forgot to buy corn flour for making tortillas), but we pretty much stuck to the plan and there were no last-minute "oops, I wonder what I'm doing about supper" evenings.

Prepping breakfast the night before makes a big difference. Blueberry baked oatmeal, chia pudding, oatmeal apple breakfast bars (which turned out to require forks, but were still a big hit), cinnamon roll baked oatmeal... If I made something good and filling the night before, it helped everyone get off to a good start. Also, apparently we ate a lot of oatmeal last week, but having special baked oatmeal variations was much more popular than multiple days of "look, a bowl of oatmeal" would have been. There's a cranberry vanilla rice pudding in the fridge for tomorrow, but I think we'll be back to oats the next morning.

Note: unless I did something wrong, which is certainly possible, chia pudding does not set up in coconut milk the way it does in almond milk or cow milk.

It's easier to give things up entirely than to find substitutes that make you very aware of what you are missing. That bread was pretty good, but since bringing it home on Friday, suddenly people are talking sadly about other wheat products like cereal and pasta.

Lunches were the hardest meals for me, and I don't entirely have a solution yet. It was okay as long as I made enough supper for there to be plenty of leftovers, though there were a couple of days when the kids weren't interested in having the same thing again. Sandwiches are out, and our normal non-bread quick lunch, hummus, kind of needs the lemon juice so I can't just make a batch without it. Ideas?

Using fruits and vegetables as the main snacks worked pretty well, but at the rate we're going through them they are expensive! I need to find more ways to stretch them. There is something very gratifying, though, about telling the kids that they can have more broccoli for dessert and getting an enthusiastic "okay!" in response.

What we ate this past week (suppers):

Sunday - grilled chicken, green salad, white rice
Monday - pork chops with spiced nectarines, roasted cauliflower, green salad
Tuesday - garlic chicken, brown rice
Wednesday - chicken taco salads
Thursday - grilled rosemary-dijon moose steak, garlic masked potatoes, grilled zucchini
Friday - honey-balsamic salmon, leftover mashed potatoes & zucchini
Saturday - BLT lamburgers on "everything-free" bread, grilled sweet onions, sweet potato fries

Week two, here we come! I know that the next two days' suppers will be a chicken-rice casserole and something made from ground moose, but that's as far as I've gotten on the new menu. Time for me to get to work!

Sleep Cycle

Lately it's seemed like Otter has fallen into a pattern: good night, rough night, good night, rough night, repeat. On Sunday, he and I spent midnight—7am on the couch so he wouldn't wake everyone up; I did get several hours of watching the northern lights out of it, but was very grateful for a good night's sleep on Monday night. Last night wasn't nearly as rough as Sunday, but Otter and I were still upstairs hours before anyone else. Now he's peacefully snoring on my lap as I sit here figuring out breakfast for the rest of the family.

I've come to the conclusion that sensible people do not voluntarily take on elimination diets with a newborn in the house: being so tired has made it difficult for me to make the transition to the new diet easy for the rest of the family. Lunch and snacks are definitely the hardest—supper is easy, breakfast is manageable especially with gluten-free oats, but the kids are not thrilled about eating leftovers every day for lunch and being told "fruit or vegetables" for snacks.

Now, fruit and vegetables are reasonable snacks—it's hard to get five servings a day!—but I want to be able to give them a good variety of types of foods so everyone isn't completely sick of this diet by the end of the first week. My Sunday attempt at baking biscuits with gluten-free flour was a total failure, and Monday I tried a batch of cookies that... Well, they weren't awful. They just weren't much of anything. My banana bread, though, seems to be working well! Maybe we'll just eat a lot of banana bread for the next two months.

I have high hopes for this morning's breakfast: I made Oatmeal Apple Breakfast Bars from Don't Waste the Crumbs (substituting coconut oil and gluten-free oats/flour), but filled it with close to four cups of apples, sliced thinly and tossed with cinnamon, because I already had them prepped in the freezer. It sure smells good! And what's not to like about having basically a healthy apple pie for breakfast? Hopefully the kids agree and it helps get us off to a good start this morning.

A beautiful "breakup"

breakup, n. The period of early spring in which snow and ice are breaking apart and melting (Alaskan use)

It's so warm outside! Our highs for the foreseeable future are all in the 40s, the sky is clear and blue with blazing sun, and a curtain of waterdrops is falling steadily from the eaves. There are bare patches on the driveway where gravel is showing through the snow, and the stretches of road that get the most sun are a patchwork of dirt and slush. Spring is coming!

How I wish I was a little farther along in recovery and up for a walk in this beautiful weather, but I'm not quite there yet. Otter and I will have to get outside tomorrow for a little bit, at least, to watch the other kids as they run around. They had a blast on the deck this afternoon! We're at a funny point in breakup, since there's still snow piled higher than LB's head (and it's getting soft and punchy now with all the sun, so the kids sink in instead of running on top), but it's warm enough that they want to spend hours out playing in it. It's messy-boot-area season, or messier-than-usual, because the kids need breakup boots for town but snowboots for home and I can't quite reach the floor with Otter in my arms, so I have to keep reminding them to keep all their gear neatly organized themselves and somehow it all just spreads everywhere...

Matt is taking advantage of this warm weather to thoroughly break in his new grill; so far he's made bourbon chicken, moose burgers, grilled chicken to add to a Mediterranean pasta salad, and this evening he made a pork loin stuffed with apples and onions. And tomorrow there's lemon-basil chicken planned; hopefully I'll have it ready in the fridge marinating by midafternoon, so he can throw it on the grill when he gets home from work.

And we know it's sure not winter anymore when it's still broad daylight at 8:30 pm! I'm not sure exactly when the sun rose this morning, but it was some time between 4 and 6 am. We've already had the annual conversations about how "the sun has nothing to do with what time it is" (i.e. whether or not it's bedtime) enough times than Kit and LB believe us. Otter doesn't have any reason to associate light with waking/dark with sleeping, so I can't blame the sun for his keeping me up half the night either. :-) He's been awake for a couple of hours consecutively this evening, though, so maybe there's hope that he'll be tired and sleep most of the night tonight!

Has spring arrived where you live yet? It sure seems like most people are ready to be done with winter!

Seven Baby Takes

I

Otter is so cute, it totally makes up for his lack of interest in sleeping at nighttime. Well, maybe not totally. But he is very cute.

II

So far he's gaining weight at a rate of a pound a week, which is a little bit ridiculous. I'm grateful that he is getting enough milk and isn't having any trouble gaining weight, it's just been funny realizing that outfits that were too big when he was born are already getting too small. 

III

Also, he is my only baby so far that hasn't hated wearing hats... 

IV

The night before Easter, we were reminded again to be thankful that we live in such a great neighborhood: a neighbor whom we'd met a grand total of once, at a party back in September or October, stopped by with two meals of moose stew and two loaves of bread because she thought she remembered that the baby was due at the end of March. So incredibly kind of her! We live near some wonderful people; we need to do a better job of getting to know our neighbors.

V

LB and Kit are both so eager to help with Otter! LB especially has impressed me: the other day in the car Otter was crying, the loud, unending angry cry of a baby who must. eat. now., and instead of getting upset LB talked quietly to him and rubbed his tummy until he fell asleep. Kit has (usually) been quick to run and get things for me when I'm stuck on the couch feeding Otter, and she and LB both want to hold their little brother all the time. Otter slept on LB's lap all through bedtime stories this evening!

VI

Since we never did get around to taking a spring break when everyone else in town did, LB and I decided that the octave of Easter was a good time for a break. It's been nice to have my mornings theoretically clear for non-school activities, though in practice I'm spending most of that time sitting on the couch feeding the baby anyway. We did school the first two weeks after Otter was born, but Matt was home to help; the coming week will be my first school week with Otter without Matt... We'll see how it goes! I'm glad we're getting close to the end of the school year—there isn't as much going on as there was earlier in the year, we've already begun wrapping up several subjects, and honestly I don't particularly care if we move through the remaining subjects at a slightly slower pace and wind up having a week or two of math lessons to do in May. Most people do school well into May anyway, don't they? I've always been in favor of not taking any days off and getting done as early as we can, but I really won't mind this year if we wind up on a more relaxed schedule due to Otter and wrap up a little later.

VII

One more baby photo:

Different baby :-) We had a cow (mom) and calf (baby) moose hanging around our yard Wednesday and Thursday this week! They were right up close to the house, and the kids had so much fun watching them. LB and Kit know better than to ever get close to one outside, but having them close enough to see so clearly through the windows was a treat.

Don't forget to check out more quick takes at This Ain't The Lyceum!

It's springtime somewhere

Okay, so in my opinion, it's springtime here. Matt feels strongly that it can't be "spring" until all the snow has melted, though, so... basically it won't be spring until some time in May? So we're compromising by using the Alaskan term—breakup—for the snow-is-melting messy season, and once most of the snow is gone and things are starting to green up we'll call it spring. Which is okay; before we married he was accustomed to determining when the seasons changed based on the calendar date, so living in a place where we calculate seasons purely based on climate has been enough of an adjustment... I can accept his definition of spring as being snowless. :-)

If you look at the weekly ads for the big chain stores, though, it's already grilling season... Clearly, they don't make separate ads for Alaska with our remaining 2.5+ feet of snow! (And as my father recently reminded us, it's not at all unheard of for us to get 15+ inches of snow in April. Though hopefully that doesn't happen this year!)

Matt's been looking at those ads and talking about a gas grill for a while now; we've had a charcoal grill for five or six years, and while we really like it, the time and effort involved in lighting charcoal and getting a good bed of coals has meant that we really only grill on summer weekends, and only those weekends that it's not raining or windy and we're able to dedicate a good block of time to pre-supper prep. And every fall, we wish that we had done a lot more grilling. It was time to find someone else who wanted a charcoal grill, and pick up a gas grill instead. 

When would you expect grills to go on sale? I said Memorial Day or Father's Day. Matt figured there would be some beginning-of-the-season sales, to which I said "yes, like Memorial Day..." Apparently he was right, though, because he just found the exact model he's been looking at for a deep discount. Thanks to the sale—and a new-baby gift that his coworkers would definitely approve of him using for a grill—Matt brought home a very early Fathers Day present this afternoon, and spent the next hour or so assembling it with LB and Kit.

And it wound up being the perfect day to try out a new grill, since our power was off and on for most of the afternoon and evening, so I wasn't able to cook supper as planned! It was a windy 39 degrees outside, definitely not the best charcoal weather, but the gas grill did just fine. And having a hot supper as opposed to whatever bits and bobs I could pull together without electricity? Delicious.

It felt pretty strange to be grilling with this much snow still on the ground! I'm hoping that we'll get a lot more use out of it, though, now that it's so much quicker to heat up the grill. Anyone have some favorite grilling recipes to share? I've gotten away with only having a couple of good ones up until this point, but I know that the family would appreciate some new ones to try!

Assorted things (7QT)

I

Baby has not made an appearance yet; figured I'd better get that one out there first! :-) It's a good thing, because we don't necessarily have a name nailed down yet... or the newborn clothes or other baby things ready. I'm 37.5 weeks now, so that should probably go on the *really does need to be done* list for this weekend.

II

I started seeing a new chiropractor last week, and she's been so helpful: I can actually walk again! I'm definitely still having a hard time, but being physically capable of walking and getting some things done has been good. The kids have also been getting lots of practice helping; with me literally unable to pick things up off the floor, they've learned that they actually can clean up quickly without me doing it with/for them. Two of my sisters have been coming over regularly as well, and their help has been invaluable. I'm so thankful for all of the ways they've helped and let me sit/lay down!

III

School is going really well. We just finished our 27th week today, which doesn't actually mean much since we aren't required to do school for a specific number of days/weeks each year per Alaska homeschooling regulations, but it's nice to have a measure of how long we've been working. We are starting to see the end coming: there are only a few pages left in the handwriting book, three or so chapters in religion, I think five weeks of math... Our grammar/language arts program I expect to carry through the summer, since we started it in January and he's enjoying it so much.

IV

We spent this week in science learning about cheese, and yesterday we made cream cheese out of whole milk and vinegar! It's really closer to ricotta, I think, but it tastes good. And as initially horrifying as it was to see four cups of milk shrink down to just one cup of cheese, when I did the math, making homemade ricotta is still less than half the price of buying ricotta or cream cheese at the store!

And to go with our cheese, my sister and I made our first-ever batch of homemade bagels! We used the recipe from King Arthur Flour, making some plain and some cinnamon raisin, and they came out so well. I wasn't entirely sure what to expect, but they are exactly the texture and flavor I want from a bagel! And they really weren't that much work; we will definitely be making them again.

V

It's beginning to look and feel a little more spring-like outside, despite the slightly ridiculous amount of snow on the ground right now: 

That would be our deck. The snow is almost up to the top of Kit's head! But it really is feeling springish anyway, because we have so much sunlight—more than 11 hours today! 

VI

Of course they're taking away our lovely morning sunlight this weekend... I'm always so disappointed when we have to change the clocks and suddenly it's dark in the mornings again. I know it won't take long before the sun is up before we are again, but it has been so nice to open the shades in the morning and not have to use the lights! At least our parish doesn't have religious ed this week (the public schools have spring break), so we don't have to get up at feels-like-5:15 for the early Mass on Sunday!

VII

Kit, wearing Matt's ear protection: "You don't hear me, Mama, 'cause I have hearing protections on!"

She is so funny, chattering all the time and telling us stories about what she is doing. Lately she's been pretending that Matt's office area is Nome, because we've been talking about the Iditarod a lot with the kids; she keeps telling me about what she's going to go do in Nome today, or how her baby dolls are waiting in Nome to watch for the sled dogs.

Little Bear signed up for the IditaREAD this year: he picked a musher to race, and then tried to read 998 pages before his musher's team completed the 998-mile race. The race started on Saturday, and he had already passed 1,000 pages by yesterday afternoon... I now understand why my mom never bothered having us sign up for the program! :-) I love that he loves reading so much, but he definitely didn't get as much out of the program as he would have if it had actually been a challenge. He had a lot of fun, though, and we got to practice mental addition of two- and three-digit numbers keeping track of how many pages he had read!

That's seven! And hopefully a somewhat adequate catch-up on what we are up to. For more Quick Takes, visit This Ain't The Lyceum!

Freezer Cooking

I have been intimidated by the idea of "freezer cooking," "batch cooking," whatever you want to call it, for years. It wasn't until I participated in an online roundtable on meal planning last month that I realized something super important: there are different ways of freezer cooking. Maybe this is ridiculously self-evident to most people, but my mental picture of freezer cooking was that you had to dedicate a full weekend (or similar block of time) to cooking all the food in the world, and fill up your freezer with it, and then... I was a little bit foggy on how it was actually helpful, because I think I was picturing freezer meals as being a way to save dinnertime if you weren't able to make whatever you had already planned.

Last assumption first, while there are certainly some things that you can pull out of the freezer and use immediately, that's probably not going to be the main way that freezer cooking is helpful: quickbreads, breakfast cookies, chocolate banana oatmeal fudge bars, yes, but main dishes not so much... For full meals, it's more about having the prep work done ahead of time than about having healthy versions of instant pizzas in the freezer. Having a menu plan is still important—ideally, the freezer meals get built into the menu plan, so that they're written down and I can see on my planner a day ahead that I need to pull whatever it is out of the freezer and let it thaw in the fridge overnight.

Matt and I were talking about this a couple of weeks back, about slow cooker freezer meals specifically; he was confused about how it could possibly be all that helpful to have, say, a pork shoulder frozen with a marinade. "But you still have to cook it all day!" I certainly saw his point, but (as we were actually discussing an upcoming cookbook that I'm excited about on slow cooker/pressure cooker freezer meals) it got me to think through exactly how it would be helpful. Yes, in that case you still have the cooking time of a regular meal, but all of the prep work is done and if you're planning your cooking ahead, there's no last-minute "oh no, the orange juice has been sitting in the fridge too long and has a funny smell so I guess we're making carnitas with grapefruit juice today!" (It's not awful, for the record, but orange is definitely better.) And as we're getting ready to have a newborn in the house, even the 20-minute prep work of making a spice rub, coating the pork, dicing the onion, and making the marinade sounds a whole lot more challenging when I picture trying to do with with a tiny person who wants me to sit on the couch and feed him constantly. So in that case, yes, being able to dump the thawed bag into the slow cooker and turn it on instead of doing that small amount of prep work would be legitimately helpful.

Okay, now back to my first assumption. There certainly are people who do huge batch-cooking marathons and get an entire month's meals into the freezer in one go, and that works for them, and that's great! But there are other people who just make double batches of suppers when they know something freezes well, and stick one batch into the oven/slow cooker and the other into the freezer. Some people mainly freeze breads/sides/snacks, things they can easily use from frozen (or after a quick thaw). And some people just make staples ahead of time, things that can easily be transformed into a variety of meals, like beans, rice, tomato sauce, pesto, cooked meat... 

And any of those methods, or any combination of them, helps to save time and get dinner on the table more smoothly. I've actually been doing a little bit of several of those methods for years without realizing that I was "freezer cooking": sticking leftovers in the freezer when there's enough to serve as another full meal, keeping things like pesto and pureed beets portioned out in the freezer, storing batches of muffins or individually wrapped bars in there to be easily grabbed for quick breakfasts or snacks.

I've been trying to be a little more intentional about it as we prepare for a new baby, though. I don't even remember how I started reading the Thriving Home blog, but our family has enjoyed their recipes (and their "real food meets reality" philosophy) for a while now, and when Polly and Rachel released a cookbook full of freezer meals last fall, I was so excited to pick up a copy. Many recipes from From Freezer to Table have since become favorites in our house—their Killer Carnitas, Peach Baked Oatmeal, and Pesto Feta Tuna Melts all made it onto this week's menu plan! 

And in this last however-many-weeks pre-baby, I cannot tell you how helpful it is to have meal components already in the freezer and easy to assemble! I'm exhausted today, and had been dreading the end-of-the-day "they want to eat again?" time... until I realized that all I have to do is slice bread, pull pesto out of the freezer, and combine tuna with a couple of items from the fridge. I can practically make supper sitting down! Little Bear can peel some carrots for me, and if I have enough energy we can make ranch dip, but if not there's some hummus in the fridge. Easily-assembled suppers are very, very valuable!

Do you use any (or all!) of these methods of freezer cooking, or are there other ways of doing it that I missed here? How do you incorporate cooking ahead into your meal planning?

Instant Pot convert

Confession: for the past several years, I've been ever-so-slightly scornful of the Instant Pot as a, perhaps not silly, but unnecessary extra appliance, a fad that would burn itself out quickly enough.

I was wrong.

This pregnancy has been... not easy. There's nothing seriously wrong with me or the baby; I have chronic loose joints, which during pregnancy makes standing/walking/bending down much harder and more painful than it otherwise would be, and means I tire more easily. I had to stop sitting on the floor months ago, for example, because it was too difficult to stand up and walk again. And now that I'm mid-third-trimester, I am so tired all the time, but that's kind of to be expected.

All that to say, my meal-planning abilities have been lackluster lately. By the time the kids are in bed and the kitchen is clean, and maybe I've even picked up after the two-year-old tornado, I am firmly stuck on the couch until bedtime. Getting chia pudding started in the fridge last night (3 minutes of work max) was an embarrassingly rare feat of breakfast-prep. Pulling meat out of the freezer so it can thaw in the fridge overnight just hasn't been happening. (Though to be honest, I couldn't tell you how much of that is due to being pregnant-hurting-tired and how much is attributable to the meat being in the chest freezer out on the sub-zero deck...) 

And so the Instant Pot has been saving me, over and over again. Oh, the chicken breasts are frozen and it's mid-afternoon? Not a problem. Ground beef is frozen and supper needs to be in the slow cooker in an hour? That's fine. I told Matt we were having moose stroganoff, and accidentally pulled out stew meat instead of steaks? Pressure cooker to the rescue. And the reason I first decided to give it a try: dry, unsoaked beans to cooked in less than an hour! I haven't even found a permanent home for it off the counter yet, because I've been using it almost every day. (And we got an 8 quart, so while it's not too heavy for me to lift, it's certainly heavy enough that I don't want to be hauling it up and down twice each day.)

Even with all of those applications, I would still have said that it was nice to have but not necessary... And then we got home tonight after a long afternoon of appointments and discovered that the pork shoulder I'd had in the slow cooker all afternoon was not done, not even a little bit. It wasn't the first time in the last month that a recipe hasn't gotten done in the called-for length of time in the slow cooker, but the other times were new-to-us recipes, so I figured they just hadn't been written well or I'd made too many "tiny adjustments" to the recipe. Tonight's planned supper was a recipe that I made successfully in the same slow cooker two weeks ago—the only difference was that las time I use high heat instead of low, because I got it started (quite) late. And looking back, all of the failed recipes were supposed to cook on low. So it seems that the low heat function of our slow cooker—which is certainly at least as old as I am—is no longer working properly. I guess it's time to actually read the four or so articles I have bookmarked on how to convert slow cooker recipes for the Instant Pot!

We've loved our ancient slow cooker particularly because it has a dial instead of buttons: with the frequency of power outages this winter, it has been helpful to have one that doesn't reset when it thinks it's been turned off and on again! But I'm also grateful, now that I can't rely on it anymore, that we have a machine that can take its place; it's rare enough for the kids and I to be out of the house for a long span while the slow cooker is on that, at least for now, it shouldn't be a huge deal to go reset the Instant Pot if we lose power while it is running. And we probably have less than three months left of winter, so power outages shouldn't be a regular thing for too much longer.

Do you have an Instant Pot (or other kind of electric pressure cooker)? What's your favorite way to use it? I would love more ideas—I know there are so many more things to do with it than the ones I've tried!

November

It's November again! I mean, it's November, and I'm posting again. Maybe; hopefully I will actually manage to finish a post this time instead of getting halfway through and running out of time and/or energy, and the draft sitting here waiting for me to finish it for so long that it becomes more work to make it current than to just start writing a new one. 

I had assumed that I would make it back to blogging regularly once I was out of the first trimester, but here we are, at 20.5 weeks, and I'm still feeling fairly first-trimester-ly. I'm pretty sure that I got the fabled second-trimester burst of energy in at least one of my other pregnancies, but not this time! At least my nausea is finally lessening, as long as I stay away from anything sweet and other foods that baby doesn't approve of. Little Bear and Kit are still very excited about the baby, and their enthusiasm makes it easier for me to not be so frustrated with how I'm feeling and how little I'm getting done. We found out on Wednesday that the new little one is a boy, and Little Bear is very excited; Kit was disappointed about not getting a sister, but that evening Matt had a conversation with her, and I'm not sure what he said, but she's perfectly happy about it now!

Among the things falling through the cracks lately has been celebrating the liturgical year this pregnancy; any extra energy goes toward exciting things like laundry or vacuuming. We did a credible job of celebrating Hallowtide though, and I'm hoping we will be able to keep that momentum through the coming Advent and Christmas seasons! I managed to make our family's favorite All Hallows' Eve supper, stuffed jack o'peppers:

We came up with costumes for both Halloween and All Saints; Thomas the Tank Engine and a butterfly princess, and St Nicholas and St Margaret of Scotland. Matt and Little Bear had fun making his crozier!

We made it to Mass for All Saints Day as a family, despite Matt's crazy work schedule right now, but couldn't make it back to town for All Souls; it doesn't work for me to have the car more than two days a week, and for some reason that I can't remember anymore I needed the car on Tuesday that week, and then my second day was Wednesday for All Saints. The kids and I talked about how November is a month particularly for praying for those who have died, though, and Little Bear and I filled in a Novemner calendar page with names of deceased friends and relatives so we could pray particularly for one person each day. What did you do for Hallowtide?

Between school, cooking, and keeping up with the house, I'm short on free time these days (probably obvious, given how long it's been since my last post!) Last week, though, I did manage to process about 30 lbs of Jonagold apples for the winter: 10 lbs portioned out for pies and kuchen in the freezer, nearly 20 lbs canned as slices and juice, and the last eight apples went into a pie earlier this week. Mmm. I used the pie and crust recipes from Joy of Cooking this time, and everyone though it was much better than my previous fruit pies. And the picky no-eating-sweet-foods baby even let me enjoy it! I think I'll be sticking with this recipe. :-)

Speaking of recipes, I keep trying to post Seven Quick Takes and it's just not working for me right now; I like categorical-type posts, though, so I think I'm going to start trying to write up a What's for Supper? post each week, like Simcha Fisher does; hopefully some of the things we make will be interesting or unique, but if nothing else, it would be good for me to see written down that yes, I did accomplish something each week!

Everyday Organics with the Kroger Co

Our local flavor of the Kroger Company is called Fred Meyer, and they've been one of the main stores I've shopped at since I was a kid. The Kroger Co. recently started a program called the MyMagazine Sharing Network, where participants who "qualify for missions" can receive free samples in exchange for sharing about the products. Free food is always helpful to our grocery budget, so I was quick to sign up! We just received the box for my first mission, "Organics Everyday." So here's what we tried, and what we thought of it!

In the box were individual-sized bags of Garden of Eatin' ranch and nacho chips, a full-sized bag of organic Tostitos, and a can of Bush's organic chickpeas. There were also coupons for free items that wouldn't have shipped well, like drinks.

We portioned out the Garden of Eatin' chips over several lunches. "So, healthy Doritos?" Matt laughed when he saw them, and yes, that's pretty much what they are; my kids have never had Doritos, though—any chips at all are a rare treat in our house—so I can't say whether they would have preferred one over the other, but they did enjoy these. Little Bear and Kit both liked the ranch version, and Kit enjoyed the nacho ones. Baby deemed the nacho ones non-offensive as well, which was a pleasant surprise, because lately I've had trouble finding anything to eat that doesn't make me feel sick.

The Tostitos taste like Tostitos... They're fine; like I said, we don't usually eat chips, so it's been a bit of a conundrum figuring out what to do with them all. I'm hoping that the baby is up for some fresh salsa, because I'm planning to run by the farmers market this afternoon and see if anyone has tomatoes. That sounds like a good accompaniment for tortilla chips!

The kids love helping me make hummus, and helping me eat it, but they run and hide in the other room when I turn on the food processor. One of these days, I'll manage to convince Little Bear that it's not that loud; he would have more fun helping in the kitchen, I know, if he wasn't scared of the noise it makes. We made up a quick batch of hummus with the chickpeas we received, and everyone has been enjoying it with raw veggies.

One thing that frustrates me greatly is how most brands that sell canned goods use BPA in the linings of their cans. When was the last time you saw a plastic container intended for food prep or storage that didn't say "BPA-free" on it? "BPA-free" is practically synonymous, in public perception at least, with "safe for use with food/drink." But how many brands of canned goods do you see the BPA-free label on? Hunt's, the tomato company, is one. I think I saw it recently on some Del Monte fruits, too. But most beans, vegetables, and canned meats, even organic varieties, are still being packed and subjected to high heat/pressure in cans lined with BPA. 

So when we got organic chickpeas in a can that didn't say BPA-free, I called the customer service line for Bush's to ask about it. And it turns out that they are now using cans with BPA-free linings for all of their beans! The lady I spoke with wasn't sure why they don't advertise the fact, but assured me that there was no BPA. I'm so glad! I try to use dried beans in my cooking anyway, but I usually keep a few cans of pre-cooked beans around for just-in-case times, and up until this point the only BPA-free beans I'd found are a bit more expensive and are only stocked by stores that are inconvenient for us to shop at. And I grew up eating Bush's baked beans, and have not yet managed to find a recipe for homemade baked beans that we like better.

There were coupons for a couple of types of teas and a soda? Carbonated lemonade? I'm not sure. I couldn't find them at the store, but honestly, they're not things we would buy anyway. That's true of almost everything we received, other than the chickpeas, though the kids were excited about the chips. But the "most appreciated item in the box" award goes to a sheaf of coupons for free/discounted items from Horizon Organics, which among other things sells half gallons of milk. I wish I could say that I tasted a difference between conventional and organic milk, but baby didn't like the granola I poured it over yesterday, so the best I can tell you is that it's good milk. At the rate we use milk, given that the baby isn't currently letting me make/eat yogurt (why, child?!?) and doesn't love granola, I shouldn't need to buy milk again until mid-August, at least!

If the Kroger Company was trying to use the "Organics Everyday" mission to encourage people to eat healthy or to show off the healthful options they offer, I think they missed the mark a little with their selection of samples; the chickpeas and milk are great, but everything else... organic junk food is still junk food, you know? But they do offer a lot of other healthy and organic options in their stores, and I'm so glad to have had the opportunity to learn about the Bush's cans, and grateful to not have to pay for milk for a while! 

Watery week

So much water everywhere right now. It's still above 40 F at nine o'clock this evening, and the snowmelt is dripping from the roof like rain. Everything is getting so soft and punchy! The kids helped me make a snowman out of the sun-softened snow in the front yard today, to their delight. Little Bear was clambering along the piles of scraped-up hardpack along the sides of the road on our walk this afternoon, decided to step out onto the parallel snowdrift, and promptly sank in deep enough to lose a boot. Kit had fun sliding on her belly down the bank over and over ("swimming wike a turtle!") as I climbed to the top to "rescue" Little Bear and his boot.

I hadn't been in town since Tuesday, and was startled this morning to turn into the grocery store parking lot and be faced with a giant puddle. Our road is looking pretty muddy, and I'm so thankful that they removed the hardpack a couple of weeks ago—it would be beginning to resemble a bog if they hadn't! It's certainly that time of year again: breakup. ("Spring," as you call it in other parts of the country.)

I was at a farm in the hills this afternoon for a workshop on root cellars, and as everyone trickled in we were talking about the weather. It was so pleasant to be sitting in the sun in a hoody and breakup boots instead of a coat and snow boots! We sure have a lot of snow, though—it was still waist-deep on me a few days ago, when I foolishly decided to break a new trail pulling the kids in the sled—and with the sudden swing to high temperatures, we were speculating on the likelihood of some roads or small mountain highways washing out as it all melts at once. We're going to need to start chipping away at the hardpack on our own driveway really soon; it'll all run downhill away from the house, so we weren't too worried about it, but I'm starting to realize the mess we're likely to have at the bottom of the driveway if we let it all melt and run down as it wills.

And we've been making the poor water system repairman navigate our driveway all week; I'm sure he'd appreciate having a less-slippery slope to drive up when he comes back again next week. It's not really his fault he's had to keep coming back... We've been having trouble with our water turning yellow and smelling rusty/earthy, and I think, I hope, we've finally figured out what the problem is. Apparently our water softening system is supposed to be serviced every year, and we didn't know that so it didn't happen this past summer, and the water was slowly getting harder and harder. When we finally realized there was a problem and had a tech out to service it, the current theory is, it'd sat so long that sediment had built up in the bottom of the tank, and now each time the recharge cycle runs, that sediment gets stirred up and sent back into our pipes. So we'll shop vac out the whole thing, get rid of the mucky stuff, and see if that puts a stop to it.

It's not like the water is currently dangerous—we're using it to wash dishes and persons—but it's not so fun to drink, so we're revisiting our water-hauling days with a big blue jug of water perched on the kitchen counter for drinking and cooking. The kids, predictably, think it's great fun. It's not a huge headache for me, since Matt's the only one strong enough to carry the water jugs up into the kitchen, so he's definitely the one most looking forward to having clear water coming out of the taps again!

What does your spring weather look like right now? Having a bunch of snow still around in April is normal here, but I know that's not the case everywhere!

Sticky fingers

Not my most spectacular job of "getting back into blogging," but at least it wasn't my worst! Matt left for an out-of-state work trip a few days after my last post; I'd somehow sort of figured that I'd have time in the evenings while he was gone that would be perfect for blogging, but it didn't quite work out that way... I don't like to say anything online about him being gone until after he's home--probably not a big deal, I know, but I feel safer knowing that the internet doesn't know that I'm home alone with the kids--and it was hard to think of anything to write about that didn't somehow tie in to him being gone. Then he got home late late Saturday night, and we've been catching up on everything that didn't happen while I had the munchkins on my own.

Like peanut butter.

You would be hard pressed, I think, to find something more exciting to my toddler than a 5 gallon bucket of peanut butter. She hovers expectantly, watching out of the corner of her eye with a cheerful little grin on her face, waiting for me to turn my back so she can dart over and plunge her hand into the bucket, stuff a handful into her mouth, and then wail in a rather sticky sort of way because her hands are messy and she doesn't like sticky hands and Mama needs to wash them Right. Now. Please. She does say the please! But pleases or no pleases, it's much, much easier for me to refill the 2lb peanut butter jars in the kitchen when Matt is around to play with/distract Kit for me.

I felt silly, very silly, the first time I brought home 35 pounds of peanut butter from the co-op. I just spent more money on peanut butter than I did on my entire grocery shopping trip this week. Peanut butter! What is wrong with me?? And then Kit was diagnosed with casein and soy allergies, and I had to find a substitute for ice cream, and peanut butter with a swirl of melted chocolate chips consoled my sweet tooth. And then it was Lent, and peanut butter became my midday protein of choice. And then I discovered no-bake bars and balls, and started making them for snacks regularly. And we worked our way through the bucket, until it came time for the biannual co-op order and I realized that we were almost out. I actually had to buy a little jar of it from the grocery store, because we ran out completely a couple of weeks before our order came in at the co-op.

We're on our third bucket now, and I no longer feel silly bringing them home. It's good peanut butter, and certainly more cost-effective than buying it one tiny jar at a time, especially the way we eat it and use it in recipes! I prefer the "natural" (a.k.a. not no-stir) version; even though it's more work, I think it tastes so much better, and it works better in most of my recipes. I've had several batches of no-bake treats turn out oily or refuse to hold together when made with no-stir peanut butter, and it seems like that's caused by the extra oil they add in order to homogenize it. 

After watching me today, Matt added "carve a giant spoon" to his to-do list, because the longest one I have doesn't reach all the way to the bottom of the bucket. I'm looking forward to having it: while I don't mind the extra step of stirring together the separated peanuts and peanut oil, dealing with a full bucket of it sure is a messy job!

On the last day of Christmas...

Happy Epiphany! Today I thought we were having a fancy pull-out-the-china dinner with friends to celebrate the magi's arrival, but I have a toddler with the stomach flu instead. C'est la parenthood. She's not completely miserable, and no one else has it yet, so how about I take advantage of not making a big meal this afternoon to do a little Christmas/year-end recap?

Matt and Little Bear picked a beautiful white spruce this year! Strong, straight branches, even spacing, and a spread of more than 6'... It's one of the best I've ever seen. The menfolk went out tree-hunting on the Fourth Sunday of Advent, and we got the lights and angel on that evening, but then we waited until the following morning for the kids to help me hang the ornaments. Little Bear was very helpful; Kit was very protective of whatever ornaments she picked up, and suspicious of our strange desire to hang them on a tree. She has done a wonderful job of not trying to touch the tree since we finished decorating it, though!

By a fluke of calendaring, Christmas Day wound up being the day that we were supposed to try Kit with cow's milk dairy again. She had been doing fine with A2 milk for two weeks—did I ever write about the technical protein stuff? I don't think so. Maybe another day—anyway, we were due to test and see whether she could handle regular cow's milk again, so I told my mom not to worry about trying to make dairy-free versions of things for Christmas dinner, Kit and I would eat what everyone else ate and we'd see what happened. And she's outgrown her casein allergy! It appears that she's still somewhat sensitive, in that she has some trouble if she's had a lot of it at once, so for now we are letting her (and me!) have baked items with dairy in them, small amounts of cheese, as much yogurt as either of us wants, but we're not having straight milk (which is relatively rare in our house anyway).

"Mouth!" she informed me brightly, when I caught her with my lip gloss.

Little Bear won a Christmas coloring contest hosted by ABCatholic.com, and they sent him this nativity playset! The kids have been having so much fun with it ever since it got here, and I'm very impressed with the quality and detail of the plastic figurines. Kit is constantly putting the baby Jesus in the manger on the coffee table, running over to hug me and exclaim "Baby Jesus! Sleeping! Coffee table!" and running back over to readjust him so she can come tell me again. 

Little Bear's winning coloring page:

Christmas Eve the kids and I were busy baking stöllen and crescent rolls, and were very grateful for the woodstove's help making all of the dough rise. Little Bear was very helpful, rolling out the dough for both and helping me shape the crescent rolls.

I have no actual Christmas Day pictures, because as you've doubtless noticed, all of the photos my phone takes are blurry... Something to do with the autofocus, which is a warranty repair, but we bought this one used so there's no warranty. So Matt took the Christmas morning photos, and they're still on his phone. We did have a lovely day, though; we attended the children's vigil Mass on Christmas Eve, and on Christmas morning the kids slept until nearly 8 o'clock! We spent the morning at home, then went to my parents' house midday for dinner and presents there, and were back home in time for Kit to take a late nap. Peaceful: it was a peaceful Christmas.

Ha! Now I remember why it wasn't entirely peaceful: our furnace stopped working as we were heading out the door to Christmas Eve Mass! There wasn't anything we could do about it until the day after Christmas, since we didn't want to pay holiday call-out fees, but the woodstove kept the upstairs warm just fine and we plugged in electric heaters in the garage and downstairs so that we didn't have pipes freezing on us. (That happened the week before; didn't need to deal with that twice!) The repairman who came out Monday was great, though; he taught Matt a lot about how our particular furnace works, and what Matt can try on his own next time this happens.

We were bracing for a big storm a couple of days after Christmas, up to 18" of snow and 55 mph wind gusts, and I suppose that we did get both of those things, but we never lost power like we'd expected to. Folks near us did, and in a similar storm last winter people in this area were without power for a full week, but we only saw the lights flicker a couple of times. We did have an awful lot of snow to clear, and Matt did a heroic amount of the shoveling and snow blowing himself, since Kit and I both had quite the headcolds. Fortunately Matt had more than a week off work for Christmas/New Years (yay, working for a school!), so he was home when we got all of the ridiculous snow.

And I couldn't very well wrap up this Christmas season without mentioning music; our house has been full of it these past twelve days! Instead of toys, we gave each kid an instrument this year—a ukulele for Little Bear, and a pentatonic scale of chimes laid out hammer dulcimer-style for Kit (and the whole family). Little Bear is playing it in the photo with the Christmas tree. I am happy that they're both so excited about making music, especially Little Bear, but goodness the house has been getting loud these days! We've almost mastered the "no music while Mom is on the phone" rule, and Little Bear is doing a pretty good job of remembering not to play while anyone is sleeping, so I can handle it the rest of the time.

Well, instead of a fancy dinner tonight, the non-stomach-bugged members of the family shared a super vegetable pizza that Matt and Little Bear picked up in town. Mmm, pizza with cheese on it for the first time in more than a year! We laughed that it was still appropriate for Epiphany, because they had to travel a long way to get it and bring it home. Though if we had the ability to get Middle Eastern takeout in town, that would have been even better!

Celebrating Hallowtide

Happy Hallowe'en, y'all! Since this week is full up with holidays and holy days, Little Bear and I are taking a break from our regular religion curriculum to talk about Hallowtide, Halloween, saints, purgatory, et al. And I wanted to hear what kind of traditions or plans you have, too; I'm kind of throwing things together haphazardly here, since this cold has made it hard for me to get ahead on planning things out, so more ideas would be welcome!

Today we looked at the calendar to see that All Saints, or All Hallows', is tomorrow, and then talked about how when we start celebrating something the evening beforehand we call it the "eve." So one thing we can remember on this eve of All Saints is that God has conquered death, and that as we celebrate the saints tomorrow and pray for the souls in purgatory the next day, we are glad and grateful that Jesus made it so that we can one day be with Him in heaven. So some people might have scary decorations or costumes, but they remind us that with God, there's nothing we have to be afraid of.

But mostly, Halloween is an American holiday about having fun, carving pumpkins, and going trick-or-treating, and we talked about that too. Matt and Little Bear had fun carving a pumpkin yesterday, and tonight for supper we had stuffed "jack-o-peppers," because clearly keeping up with life was too easy and I needed an extra challenge today? I don't know. Little Bear was excited about them, though, and they turned out better than I expected.

I bundled Little Bear into his superhero costume (over top of his coat, because that's how costumes work here) and we went trick-or-treating at four houses in our neighborhood before the car decided that it didn't like the key and wouldn't let me turn it on, and Matt had to come over with the spare key and save us. So then we went home.

Turns out that if the steering wheel is turned too sharply when you take the key out, it can "lock" and not let you turn the car back on. At least there's nothing wrong with our car!

All Saints Day is a holy day of obligation; we're still trying to figure out how we are going to make it to Mass, because all of the parishes in town have their Masses at the same times which is horribly inconvenient if those few times don't work for you. I'm sure we'll work something out, though. Little Bear and Kit are both excited about wearing Saint costumes tomorrow; okay, Kit is just excited about the pretty red princess-y dress (Bl Gisella, first queen of Hungary), but Little Bear was very sure he wanted to be St Juan Diego again this year. We didn't make it to the cathedral's All Saints party yesterday since the kids were sick, but Little Bear figured we could just have our own party on All Saints Day instead. So I guess I'm looking up a few simple games tonight!

I have a nice dinner planned for the feast day—ham, butternut squash, and roasted Brussels sprouts with a honey-balsamic glaze—and we'll be celebrating our own little saint in a special way throughout the day.

For All Souls' Day, Masses are even harder to find than on All Saints, but we'll try to at least visit a cemetery and say a rosary as a family. From inside the car, because it'll be in the 20s out and we can be pious and practical at the same time, especially when the kids are sick. The religion lesson for the day will involve talking about purgatory and November being the month specially set aside for praying for the dead; I'm planning to have Little Bear help me write the names of our relatives who have died on slips of paper to put in our prayer corner, so that we can pray for them all month. And the kids will help me bake doughnuts, because soul cakes. 

Thursday, November 3, is the feast day of St Hubert; as the patron saint of hunters, St Hubert is a pretty big deal around here! We'll read the story of St Hubert and the white stag, and talk about how we pray for Saint Hubert's intercession when Dad is out hunting, and what "intercession" means. If the kids are healthy enough by then, we'll go for a quick tromp in the woods, looking for birds and animals. And there might be one last package of moose steak hanging out in the freezer from last season; I think that'd make a fitting supper.

Friday... We try to go to Mass on First Fridays, but that'll depend on how the kids are doing. Friday Mass is right in the middle of Kit's nap time, and I am not going to mess with nap time unless she's much better than she is right now. I think we will wrap up the week's lessons by learning and discussing the Requiem aeternum, Eternal rest grant into them, O Lord... and probably reiterate Wednesday's discussion of praying for the dead in November. Little Bear seems to have gotten my love for the liturgical year—he appreciates explanations of "we're doing X today because today is Y/a part of Y season"—so I think he will respond well to the idea of there being a particular thing we do because it's November.

So that's my master plan! And now that it's all written out, I'm probably going to get hit with the full brunt of the kids' cold and our actual week won't be nearly as organized, because that's how life works. :-) We'll see how it goes.

What are your traditions for Hallowtide? Is anyone else celebrating St Hubert in a special way on Thursday? I'd love to hear your plans.

Seven Quick Takes

Still unpacking, organizing, settling into the new house and trying to create new rhythms to fit the new space... and a little bit of extra excitement, just so we don't have to worry about getting bored, right?

1

The kids and I had two moose in the yard the other day! There was a big cow and a two-year-old bull, and we ran from window to window watching them both meander all around the yard and through our woods. Kit got so excited, shouting "Dog! Dog!" Pretty much all animals are "dogs" right now, except for sheep/goats. Little Bear and I have talked a few times since then about always checking for moose before we go outside; it's fun to see them from a safe distance, but you definitely never want to get close!

2

Kit and Little Bear both had fun seeing the animals at the fair; Kit in particular amused a good number of folks in the barn by carrying on an excited (loud) conversation with some of the sheep: "Baaa." "Baa!" "Baaaa." "Baa! Baa!" etc., for the better part of five minutes. She's also adamant that every time we visit my parents, she gets to pet their dog; "Dog! Wuh[f]!", she insists. "Wuh, wuh! Dog!" Little Bear's takeaway from the fair was that he wants to raise rabbits. I explained that if that ever happened, they'd be meat rabbits, which of course I don't actually expect that he completely understood... Though we have been consistent in talking about how moose meat comes from moose, grouse meat comes from grouse, etc, so maybe he understood better than I think he did.

3

Our car is back in the shop for the second time in two weeks. First it was overheating every two miles, and needed a new water pump. This time, the transmission died and is getting rebuilt; we were fortunate to find a guy in the next town who would do it for less than the jeep is worth, so that's something. I don't know how long jeeps are expected to last, as a rule, but we're only at about 125k miles... We are going to have to decide, once we get it back in a couple of weeks, whether there are enough new parts in it now that we should hang onto it in the hopes that it will not need work for a while, or if we should sell it while we still can and get at least a little out of it to put toward our next vehicle.

4

The timing, if it had to happen, worked out about as well as it could have: the transmission went out on the afternoon that my sister was getting ready to head back to college, so the old suburban she'd been driving all summer was still on insurance but she didn't need it anymore. My parents let us borrow the 'burb so we didn't have to rent a car; the transmission is going to take two and a half weeks! We really appreciate being able to use the suburban. It was a little odd at first, driving my own kids around in the vehicle I grew up riding in, but it also feels comfortable, familiar—I know the 'burb, know how it handles, and it feels right to have little kids chattering in it again.

5

We accidentally reinforced Little Bear's desire for rabbits last weekend, when the kids and I went out to "pick up your share at the farm"-day for our CSA. After getting the rest of our vegetables from the stand, we got to go into the field and pick our own snap peas, which was fun for the kids. I gained empathy for my mother's slightly-exasperated "lift up the vines and look under them" every summer; my siblings and I would always insist that we did that already, and then she'd have to come along behind us and pick half again as many as we'd gotten. "There are more peapods right there," I kept telling Little Bear, and each time he was shocked; clearly I had just made them appear out of nowhere because there hadn't been any pods left when he checked, no sir. But it was fun. And after we were done picking, we stopped to see their sheep and goats (for Kit), and on the way back to the car, discovered the farm's rabbit enclosure, so I let both kids sit and watch the rabbits for a few minutes. Little Bear learned somewhere that rabbits live in hutches, and he spent half the ride home talking about building a hutch so the rabbits could come live at our house. I don't expect we'll be ready for any animals for several years, but anything's possible; who knows if we'll wind up with meat rabbits some day.

6

This weekend has been full; yesterday morning the kids and I ran errands in town and attended part of the morning session of our Catholic radio station's anniversary celebration and fundraiser. I missed a bunch of the last talk, running around with a noisy Kit out in the foyer, but everyone said that it was wonderful and very funny. On the way home we picked up my meager winnings from the fair—a blue ribbon for my dairy-free version of my mother-in-law's pan cookies, and a red for my cranberry banana bread—and promptly spent the money a mile down the road at the farmers market. On salad turnips! I was so excited to see salad turnips, and very proud that Little Bear was excited about them too. Also exciting: the local orchard with special apple-crabapple grafts had a table, and we were able to bring home several bags of the only apples that Matt can eat raw!

A scant two hours after getting home, we were heading back down the hill with freshly-frosted mini cupcakes for the dessert auction at the radio station's celebration. There was a slow-cooker cook-off, and I enjoyed a spicy posole. I trust that Little Bear ate a real supper as well; he was sitting with my youngest brother and his friends, and they all do a good job of looking out for him (and are good sports about letting him run after them). After dinner there was another talk, this one on marriage (the earlier one I'd been in and out of was on parenting). We tried to listen, but Kit hadn't napped much and it was after bedtime, so we had to leave part way in.

7

Matt wasn't able to come with us either time, unfortunately; his day was dedicated to two huge chores, cleaning/organizing the garage so that we can pull the car in, and moving our woodpile over from the old apartment. The garage looks great now! And two of his coworkers spent the afternoon out in the cold rain helping him haul and stack wood, so he wound up grilling for them and having a pleasant evening in. Hopefully we'll all be able to go to the celebration together next year.

Quick Takes

Whoops! Let's slip in at least one post for July... Seven Quick Takes it is. Quick ones, at that.

I

This has been a beautiful summer! Lots of sun, lots of rain to cool things back down after the sun, and not a single smoky day so far. Not one! Any time I'm starting to feel like I'm all done with the hot/rainy weather, I remember that Anchorage is under a nasty pall of smoke from forest fires down south, and I'm immediately thankful for our weather again.

II

This is, hands down, simply the best ice cream ever. Even though it's non-dairy! Salted caramel, dark chocolate, and the faintest hint of coconut... mmmmm. Matt disagrees, but none of those things are exactly his favorite; I'm not going to try too hard to convince him of the ontological superiority of my dessert, though. Then I'd have to share!

III

Speaking of sharing desserts, Little Bear is sounding out words well enough now that we can't get away with spelling out desserts around him. He's known i-c-e-c-r-e-a-m for a while, and last night when Matt asked me if I'd made p-i-e, he perked up and asked what kind of pie it was.

IV

Kit is walking and running, still losing her balance and falling over close to half the time, but she walked all the way across the living room several times tonight before she toppled! She prefers to hold onto my finger, though, and if she isn't in the mood to walk on her own when I try to get her to let go, she certainly makes sure I'm aware of her opinion. 

V

Her latest all-the-time word is "ba," bath. We spend lots of time running down the hall toward the bathroom with her shouting "ba! ba! ba!", then trying to turn her around and convince her to do something else. Usually, she turns toward the deck door instead and starts asking to go out on the "deh! deh!" It's not very conducive to getting things done! I'm glad she's talking and we can understand her, though. Other words we're hearing: "duh," done (at the table); "mo," more; "wa," water (water bottle); "ma" and "da," mom and dad; "bah," ball; "meh!", amen (while folding her hands).

VI

This doesn't sound like a terribly busy summer so far, does it? Why haven't I been blogging? I've been home with the kids, doing a little school, enjoying the summer, eating ice cream... and packing.

We're moving! After going in ridiculous circles with our lender and the local government, everything finally worked out with the house we made an offer on several months ago, and Matt and I signed the final paperwork yesterday. We're pretty excited! There's a lot of cleaning and packing and cleaning and moving and cleaning to do yet, but very soon we will be in our own house!

As a side note, our sale absolutely would have fallen through without the immense amount of work our realtor put in, meeting with many people at the borough offices—even our lender was strongly encouraging us to forget about this one and look for something else. If you're looking to buy in the Fairbanks/North Pole area, we wholeheartedly recommend Billy at Madden Real Estate.

VII

We're enjoying the challenge of planning a menu around whatever the CSA gives us each week, and it's been great learning to use new vegetables! I can't tell you how happy I was today, though, that I won't have to think too hard about what to do with any of the vegetables I picked up this afternoon: snap peas, pak choi, multicolored carrots, broccoli, kohlrabi, squash, and lettuce. And a bunch of thyme, which didn't make it into the picture somehow. All things that I already know how to use—perfect for what will definitely be a very busy week around here!

I hope that your summer is going well! I'm looking forward to getting back into a more regular cycle of blogging once we are settled into the new house.