A day in Micah's life

Here is a typical day from Micah's perspective as a two-week old infant:

My day usually starts out with breakfast... Dad offered me this breakfast burrito, but Mom turned down that idea.

While my parents eat, I lay on a quilt and exercise my legs and arms.

When Mom needs two hands, she puts me in my bouncer.  I like being in my bouncer a lot and I like falling asleep here, unlike my cradle. 

 After naps, I like to eat and then fall asleep again...

Sometimes, I get bundled up and taken on a walk.

If I'm lucky, I get to have a friend over to visit.

 When Dad gets home from work, we spend some time together.  Laying on Dad is my favorite position, and I like to fall asleep here too.

 Other times, Dad and I have intellectual discussions.

 At night, my parents swaddle me to keep me warm and content.  Dad calls this particular wrap a mermaid swaddle.  Sometimes I like this...

And sometimes I don't...

 And here is where I sleep at night, in a wooden cradle handmade by Opa.

Goodnight!

Retreat

This week, Caleb and I got away for a few nights at a place nearby called Living Springs Ranch.  The couple that runs it has a really neat ministry where they keep up a couple of cottages on their property for pastors and missionaries to get away for times of renewal and refreshment.  Caleb's parents also stayed there in a different cottage.  During the daytime, the four of us met together to pray for our church and ministry there, and also to discuss and plan.  

Such a cute little cottage!

Hot chocolate with whipped cream!

At 35.5 weeks

Photos of Everyday Life

Recently I was inspired by my friend's post here to take more everyday photos instead of just "staged" photos.  So often, I only take my camera out for big events or trips, not everyday life.  Since one of the main purposes of my blog is to help family and friends stay connected with us despite distance, I decided I should give this everyday photo thing a try.  I'm not literally going to try to take a "photo-a-day", but we'll see where this leads.  For starters, here are a few pictures from our recent everyday life.  My apologies if they are boring to you!

Our front yard has a large flower bed that used to all look like this picture,
filled with rocks, invasive ground covers, tall grass, and  crowded irises.

Over the past year, we've worked on digging up the ground cover while trying to preserve the irises.  Recently, we finally made some noticeable progress by trimming back the irises and transplanting them in spaced out rows, as you can see here.  It doesn't look like much, but believe me, this has been a long work in progress!

A (two-week old) baby bump picture, taken at 31 weeks.
There, hopefully, I've (temporarily) satisfied those who keep asking for more "bump" pictures.

I spent Friday sorting baby clothes and paraphernalia on the living room floor. 

While I organized, Caleb decided to be really adventurous and try out a quite complicated,
gourmet upside-down cake recipe to utilize the red pears he found on sale.  Doesn't it look beautiful??  

The chef  with his baked cake - did I mention he made homemade caramel to use in the recipe?  

Summer Recap

We had a great summer including a lot of growing between our somewhat prosperous garden and developing baby Gunther!

Here is a recap of some of our summer adventures:

In June, we helped with the "Amazing Wonders Aviation" Vacation Bible School at our church.  There was a great turn-out of kids this year that increased each day.  Caleb led the music and I taught the 1st/2nd grade class.

For July 4th, we hosted Caleb's family at our house for a picnic gathering and then played in our church's "As American as Apple Pie" concert.  Caleb sang a solo as Johnny Appleseed.

In late July, Caleb drove some of the youth group members over to Rathdrum, Idaho each day for a week while they helped teach the same aviation VBS at a church there. 

My brothers Sam and Tim came over for a visit for about 10 days at the end of July/beginning of August.  We went camping up near Canada, toured Boundary Dam and Gardner Cave, attempted to bushwack our way to a waterfall, swam alot at the city pool, picked raspberries and made jam, and weeded the garden.

In August, Caleb and I performed in the first ever classical orchestra concert in the city of Deer Park (if I am remembering the correct description), which was a fundraiser concert for a church-sponsored community back-to-school fair which we helped put on at the end of the month.   

Also in August, we spent a week as program staffers at Odyssey Kids' Camp, an overnight camp at Waitt's Lake sponsored by our association of churches.  Caleb played on the worship team, co-led the silly songs, and taught the 5th/6th grade boy's Bible study, among other things.  I operated the sound/video systems and taught the 5th grade girls Bible study.  We both led a track time for 6th graders where we taught them basic camping skills such as how to build fires and set up tents.  

We got away on some quick one-night camping trips ourselves close to home several times throughout the summer.  Most of them were car camping, but we did go on one canoe camping trip to Horseshoe Lake.  When we camp, we like to do two main things: explore the area and read books at the (hopefully) quiet and scenic camp site.  It's our way of getting away from reality for a little while to relax.  On our camping trip to No Name Lake in the Colville National Forest, we had a rather hair-raising experience during the middle of the night when we heard what we thought was a bear growl, much too close for comfort.  We never saw a bear, but needless to say it took us a while to go back to sleep!  This was in an area with both black and grizzly bear sightings - one of us contemplated staying a second night, but the other was grateful to go home without an opportunity to repeat the experience! 

And now it is officially fall, the season of our baby's expected arrival!

Of life and chicken.

After a three month hiatus from blog writing, I am back!  Caleb and I were pleased to announce in March that we are expecting our first baby around Thanksgiving!  However, from March to May, I have was not too keen on looking at pictures of food or smelling food, or blogging about recipes, which partially explains the absence of posts.  What a joy it was yesterday to be able to prepare a monthly menu without feeling any ill effects!  Today, Caleb and I experienced a kitchen incident, so I will blog about that.

First, however, a quick life update since my last post.  Here are some things we have learned over the past three months: April  is too early for camping if you don't like waking up to snow.  Fishing and actually catching a fish are two very different things, and we have yet to accomplish the later this season, although we have done lots of the first.  Buying a $30 annual Discover Pass is well worth it.  Treating nausea caused by morning sickness is contrary to common sense - eat when you are nauseated and feel the least like it, and hopefully you will feel better!  If you serve dinner before youth group, your youth group will double in size (well, maybe not because of that!).  No matter how much you nurture and invest in growing healthy, flourishing vegetable starts from seed indoors, if you don't harden them first, they will curl up and die within hours of transplanting them out in the garden, even after the last frost.

A couple of months back, I bought a whole chicken, hoping to be economical instead of just buying chicken breast all the time.  It has been sitting in the freezer intimidating me since then (handling raw meat is not my favorite part of cooking), until I finally bite the bullet and thawed it yesterday.  I did some online research and went with a simple approach.

First, I rinsed off the chicken and removed the pack of innards, which I wanted to throw out, but Caleb saved from heading to the trash and made chicken stock out of them instead (what a good husband!).  Then, I patted the chicken dry with some paper towels (supposedly to make a better roasted skin) and rubbed it with a mixture of herbs (I used fresh sage and rosemary and dried thyme), black pepper, coarse sea salt, and olive oil.  I stuffed the chest cavity with onion slices and a couple of whole garlic cloves.

Then, I placed it in a 9x13 glass dish to bake since I don't own a roasting pan, and put it in a 450 degree oven for an hour to roast.  I checked on it a couple times, checked its temp with the meat thermometer, let it go a little longer, then called for Caleb to help me maneuver it out of the oven.  It was quite smokey, and our smoke alarm went off, but that is not unusual for this house - it happens just about anytime we bake anything for some reason (and not because we always burn things...).  Caleb lifted the pan out of the oven and set it on the stove top.  We looked away for a second, and the entire pan shattered!

I am so grateful neither one of us was hurt, and am glad I had asked for Caleb to help me with it so I wasn't the only one around when it happened!  It was quite a hot, greasy mess to clean up, but Caleb did most of the hard work, and the glass mostly broke off in chunks, not little shards.  The part directly under the chicken came off in large pieces, thankfully, and we carefully picked the chicken over because we did not want to sacrifice our week of dinners!

I am not sure I can recommend using a glass baking dish at the temperature, but the seasoning method turned out wonderfully - it has excellent, rich flavor!

My favorite cleaning product

I'm not sure if there are very many people in the world who enjoy reading about cleaning products, so I debated whether or not to even write this post, but I decided I had to share about my favorite cleaning product!  

It seems almost every week I find another use for it. I keep a spray bottle full of it close by when I clean.  Other times, I just pour a half cup of it directly into the washing machine, dishwasher, or sink.

It has an almost indefinite shelf life.  It's non-toxic.  It's  inexpensive.  Have you guessed what it is yet?

Here are my favorite uses:

• To clean the refrigerator.  I learned this from my mom - wipe down the refrigerator shelves with a wash rag soaked in this product to remove undesirable odors.  
• To prevent or clean off mildew from shower curtains (non-fabric type).  To help prevent mildew, spray down the inside of the shower curtain every once in a while with this product, then just leave it to air dry (it doesn't leave residue).  If it needs a more thorough cleaning, you can actually wash plastic shower curtains in the washing machine.  Just run them through by themselves with cold water in addition to laundry detergent, half a cup of this product, and a little borax if you have it.  Don't put plastic shower curtains in the dryer though, just hang them back up wet - they will dry, and the steam from future showers will straighten out the wrinkles.  
• To remove cloudiness from drinking glasses.  Soak them for half an hour in a sink full of warm, soapy water with half a cup of the product.  I was so amazed when it removed the cloudiness and restored our glasses to their original sparkling clear condition.  Evidently, repeated washing in the dishwasher starts to etch glasses; the etching can become worse and permanent unless the residue is cleaned off every once in a while. 
• To mop the floor.  This product doesn't streak or leave residue.  
• As a rinse agent in the dishwasher.  Pour this product into the rinse agent cup in your dishwasher.  Not only does it help your dishes come out without water streaks and drips, but it is a natural cleaner for your dishwasher itself.  I had never used a rinse agent before, but I amazed how my dishes come out actually dry now!
• My new favorite: to clean stove top drip pans.  The drip pans on our range get dirty so quickly and the blackened residue takes a lot of elbow grease to clean off.  My husband suggested we try soaking them in soapy water with this product, like we do for the drinking glasses.  We left them to soak in the sink while we were gone at church one night, and when we came home, most of the residue just sloughed off!

Have you guessed what it is yet?  

White vinegar!

What do you like to use it for?

Homemade Yogurt!

I finally attempted to make homemade yogurt for the first time.  I had considered for a while, but the impetus to actually do it came because our milk was about to expire and I wanted to use it up quickly.  I think I will be making yogurt more frequently now!  Because it doesn't require much direct involvement for most of the process, I think it is worth the lengthy preparation.

I'm not going to lead you through the detailed process here, because I am just a newbie at it and am by no means a yogurt expert now!  I followed the directions in this Frugal Girl post, so you can go there for a detailed recipe.  For those who are just curious though, I'll fill you in on the basic process.   For my trial run, I fourthed the recipe and just used four cups of milk to make one quart of yogurt.  Basically, I heated milk up to about 185 degrees, let it cool to 120 degrees, and added a few tablespoons of store-bought yogurt (the starter - now that I've got it "started", next time I can just use a bit of the leftover yogurt I just made to start another batch).  Since I wanted to make vanilla yogurt, I also added a little sugar and vanilla at this point.  I poured it all into a sterilized quart canning jar, screwed on the lid, and placed it in our camping cooler filled with a gallon of hot water, where it stayed for three hours.  Then, I stuck it in the freezer temporarily (I read elsewhere that this improves the texture), then moved it to the fridge, and that's it!

Initially, I was wary of this process because it seemed unsafe to just let the yogurt sit there in tepid water for three whole hours.  However, as I read up on it, I became convinced that it is OK, because the sitting in warm water is really what makes the milk turn into yogurt; it is safe to eat I'm told.  Most recipes let the yogurt sit for much lengthier periods of time, actually.  Methods of keeping the yogurt warm during that time vary from using a cooler with warm water to a heating pad to a crockpot to a special yogurt maker.

I was pleasantly surprised to taste test my yogurt and discover that the flavor was very comparable to store-bought vanilla yogurt.  However, it wasn't as creamy and it had a thinner consistency than store-bought, although this is common with homemade yogurt; plus, I used skim milk.  Since the taste was still good, I think I will make yogurt more often!  If left unopened in the refrigerator, the jars of yogurt are supposed to last a month; once opened, around a week.  The cost-savings are great!  I figured it cost me around $0.75 to make one quart of yogurt.  I normally pay around $2.50-$3.00 for a quart of yogurt a couple times a month, so theoretically, I could save around $48 a year by making homemade yogurt.  Imagine the savings if you are feeding a lot more family members than our two!

Decorating with water beads

I've seen water beads used before, but I've never had any of "my own" to play with until now.  They are so soothing to run your hands through!  If you aren't familiar with water beads, they come in packets of little dry crystals.  When you add water, they expand to several times their size into perfectly round little balls that hold water.  You can use them for decorative purposes and they reflect nearby colors, but I've also heard that you can grow certain plants in them because the beads release water.
Anyway, I got to take home a floral centerpiece from a banquet we were at recently, and the vase had water beads floating in it.  When I topped off the vase with water a few days later, the beads looked like they had disappeared because they floated down.  I forgot about them and was quite surprised today when I dumped the water out of the vase into the sink and there they were!  They are supposedly reusable for years, as long as you rinse them off in-between uses, so I pulled some creativity out of the deep recesses of my brain to figure out a different way to display them.

A glance at my reading stack, part two

Same Kind of Different As Me

by Ron Hall and Denver Moore
Just knowing that a book is based on a real-life story usually causes me to become more engaged in reading it, and this book was no different.  Growing up a Louisianian sharecropper yearning for the freedom of the white men, Denver eventually finds himself living on the streets in Fort Worth, Texas.  On the other hand, Ron lives a very different life as a Texas rancher and fine art dealer. Through an amazing journey of redemption, their lives intersect.  I won't give away the ending, but I rarely cry during books and this one made me sob (just ask Caleb!).  I highly recommend it!

Don't Panic - Dinner's in the Freezer
by Susie Martinez, Vanda Howell, and Bonnie Garcia
On a complete different topic, I've found this cookbook to be the most helpful freezer cooking resource I've tried so far (although I have not tried many yet!).  I found their tips for how to package and prepare foods for freezing to be particularly helpful in letting me fit more into less space.  Also, each recipe lists the amounts of ingredients x1, x3, and x6 so that you see at a glance how much you need for preparing large quantities.

More Freezer Cooking

Today I decided spur-of-the-moment to do a bunch of freezer cooking.  It was a good thing I didn't have anything going on today, because it took me 5 or 6 hours!  It was time well-spent though.

First, I scanned through my menu and picked out recipes I already had purchased ingredients for that would be conducive to freezing.  I also selected recipes that used similar ingredients.  Yesterday, I picked up a multi-pack of chicken breast on sale, so I put it to use right away instead of portioning it out like I usually do into quart bags to freeze for future recipes.

Before I started, I sketched out my action plan so that I would have a sequence to follow in my preparation to maximize my time.  At various points during the afternoon  (particularly as I spent time packaging foods for the freezer), I wondered if this whole freezer cooking afternoon was actually saving me time, but I came the conclusion that it did.  For example, most of the recipes called for chopped onion and/or garlic, as well as chicken, so I was able to do the chopping all at once for several recipes at a time.  Handling raw meat is my least favorite part about cooking, so I appreciated being able to process a large quantity of raw chicken at once, then disinfect once, instead of separately for each recipe.   A few of the recipes called for fully-cooked chicken, so I boiled some chicken breasts in a pot with water and onion so that I could both cook the chicken and prepare several cups of fresh chicken broth I needed for other recipes (I learned recently from The Cook's Illustrated Cookbook that onion is the only essential ingredient to making a good chicken stock besides the assumed chicken, water, and seasonings - you may as well save your celery/carrots/other vegetables for something else because they don't affect the flavor much).  Preparing homemade tortillas can be time-consuming, but it felt much more worth it knowing that the effort was contributing to several dinners at once.

One thing I will do differently next time is focus on fewer recipes and make more batches of those.  It seems like that would be more time-efficient, but for today, I was limited by the amounts of ingredients I had on hand since I had not planned ahead of time.

At the end of the afternoon, here is what I ended up with:

3 meals of Creamy Chicken Enchiladas
2 meals of Curry Chicken Salad (for wraps)
2 meals of Arroz con Pollo (Mexican chicken with rice)
2 meals of Chicken Tortilla Soup
1 meal of Lemon-Dill Chicken
2 meals of Honey Chicken
6 individually-wrapped burritos (to use together in a dinner casserole or to reheat quickly for lunches).

Additionally, I also put together an easy refrigerator cherry cheesecake and baked a loaf of braided Challah bread that won't end up in the freezer but is for our lunch tomorrow after church because we're hosting company.

That was a successful day in my book - thanks to my husband who did all the laundry while I was tied up in the kitchen and who washed many of the dirty dishes I generated!