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!