Growth

There has been alot of 'growth' around the ol homestead.
Both girls have grown taller and heavier just in the last month.
jacob and i have been growing even closer together as work takes so much time that when we have time, we really relish it.
and then,
there is the garden...our new pride and joy. we inspect it every day, to see the amazing way that it just grows, slowly and surely.
We are doing "Squarefootgardening" this year and love it. Iwould recommend it to anyone, there is a website that goes along with it. It is seriously the easiest way to garden and still get loads of vegetables. We even grew all of our own seedlings this year (a first for us). So we just bean when we look at it.
We have already harvested our first batch of radishes, lettuce, spinach, and swiss chard...
These pics were taken a few days ago and already the garden looks twice as big...

exercise (in patience)

Well tonights plan was to get the children to bed and be a couple...so...after dinner, we get ice cream cones (FHE around these parts)
then we are off on a walk (i.e. " you are getting very sleepy, just relax and close your eyes")
Mattie is out in the first 10 mins of walk and liliana is complaining about everything (her normal for when she is about to fall asleep and is fighting it)...but, she is a fighter, so we keep walking. We walk farther then we have yet to ever walk, and she is still carrying on about how tired she is and when are we going to get to her street with her house on it (she wants to fall asleep in her bed). We of course just want to arrive home with two sleeping children and transfer them, and then go about our QUIET evening...well we arrive home, mattie still asleep (mind you she has been sleeping for 30 minutes now in the carrier on jacobs back), liliana stays in the stroller (plan B, jacob will now go running with her as the method to get her to sleep and his exercise). so we carefully take mattie upstairs and the minute we hit her bed she wakes up, I try giving her the 'sleepy' juice, but to no avail, she is up and ready to play (afterall she just had a powernap). I told jacob not to come home from running this liliana was asleep. Well after being gone an hour i hear the door open...liliana comes bounding in and Mattie starts squeling in delight at the return of her noisy sister..tired jacob comes in a little bit later, he has just run over 6 miles (not just any 6 miles mind you, he had to listen to a 3 year old jabber his ear off with "why" questions all the way home).
So I take my 3yr old and get her into bed. I then try to nurse baby to bed and her way of letting me know what she thought about said plans was to give me three bites in a row (oh, the things one endures!!!), I quickly close shop ("I will show her"!), and place her on the floor in my room..she is a happy playing clam (Its 9pm), jacob enters the room and says that he will take her on a walk (again)...so I am hopeful that the baby will return asleep, although I wonder if this is just the children's way of making sure we get some exercise:)

Surfaced

well it has been awhile since I have gotten on to post. I have surfaced (come up for air) and thought I would put up a brief post myself.
Liliana has spent the last 8 or so months getting together every Tuesday morning with her friends for Craft morning...(the kids would participate in a craft, have snack, and then play-us mommies would have snack, take personality test and die laughing about one anothers results, chat about our changing mommy bodies, etc...)anyway...as I was writing this, well in under 10 minutes i have gone from happy surfacing mommy to, " I have nothing nice to say to any of my children" mommy...I going to get a bowl of Ice cream and go to bed..but before that, here are some quick pics of her end of the year craft morning party...

Memorial Day

Once again, life seems to be racing forward, our lives have become extremely busy, and it has left us postless for about a month.  Wanting to celebrate Memorial Day (one of the holidays that the Hospital recognizes, thus giving me the day off) we went to the beach with some friends and Mikhaela, who came down to spend the afternoon with us.  Here are some pictures of our crazy girls.

Liliana still loves the water and could care less that the actual temperature of the water is a touch about freezing (remember it IS only May in Maine!)

Mattie loves attention and will laugh and "talk" to just about anyone.  She loves being held by anyone who will hold her.

I don't think that there's a baby out there who doesn't love necklaces! 

update, more babies and kids

Well it has been awhile. Things have a little crazy around here, crazier than normal that is.
Jacob is entering his last week of Psychiatry (so, he should be all fixed up by the end of the week :)). He can't wait for it to be over. He would much rather crack your bones than listen to you talk about the voices you hear coming from the chimney (yes, this really happened).
As for me, we have a few more babies and alot more kids around here!
You see, our babies are in the egg shells just about to hatch, and when they sprout they get moved to a cowpot (yes, you can use your imagination on what the cowpot is made out of, sure you can guess) and grow into our kids.
We have become farmers (well minimally) and have grown our own seedlings from little tiny seeds. What a miracle of life. Not to mention, what a savings on the pocketbook.
We have bought most of our seeds from Seeds of Change and a few from Johnny's. We recommend both company's for quality and service. We also recommend Cowpots. And we will be Squarefoot Gardening this year (they have a website, it is sooooooo great) Esp. for those who are not sure about the quality of their own soil. or those to have no 'farming' tools to deal with soil....
Jacob is building our garden tomorrow and we are just excited. We will post pics tomorrow.
The children(this time I am referring to the kids jacob and I made) are growing well. liliana lost her fork tonight at the start of dinner (due to misbehaving with it). She wanted some suggestions as to what she was going to eat with and we started off by saying, "well, you could use your hands (most kids would jump at that, but she didn't), then we said, "or, you could use chopsticks (she has never seen these before). She went with that suggestion. I hope to include a pic tonight. It was fun watching her try to figure it out.
Jacob and I have recently learned that discipline does not always have to be punishment. She can learn correct behavior from consequences and not all consequences are miserable, meaning that it is not the misery that induces someone to change a behavior...
Anyway, enough soapboxing for me.

spring is here, the snow melts, the wind blows....

Spring has sprung in Southern Maine...!!!
I just looked at my back porch deck this morning and the iceberg that had previously been habitating the deck was gone...all gone..all that was left was a wet mark..I quickly ran to the front window and looked out. I wanted to see if the iceberg in the front yard has melted...all that is left of what used to be the sledding hill is now a mere bump in the grass....I then looked up at the sky, almost as if to see if it had any plans in the near future to spoil springs arrival (by trying to build up the iceberg again), but all i saw was sun...
how lovely to see the sun...yes it is still cold, but not that cold. I no longer need a jacket during the day. I still wear my hat (mostly to hid the fact that during the winter I do not fix my hair (frankly, I don't fix my hair during the summer either, always going to the beach and all)..
Since this festive mood came upon us we decided for Family home evening to plant our seedlings. We are excited to be growing our vegetables from scratch this year. Normally we let someone else grow our seeds for us then purchase them as strong seedlings. Each year we are getting abit more courageous. We are after all planning on becoming farmers. Medical school and the career that follows it are to finance our farming career. I should make a side note that medical school and the eventual career will also be financing our other interest, woodworking. Did I mention that my husband spent a good hour salivating and staring at the Thomas Moser Website last night (all those thoughts about how he could make this and that for loads cheaper etc...)and how this morning upon getting ready for work (which for the next 3 weeks is a lockdown Psych institution (anybody looking for a vacation spot?)), he laments, "what am I doing, I want to be building furniture, not going to a psych ward..."....
We are always becoming are we not :)

Baking

I have been baking/cooking since I can remember. I just have always had an interest in creating. My parents were laid back about such things and I can remember cooking the bacon by myself (standing up on a chair to reach the electric skillet, fork in hand) when I was just 4-5. When I was 8 I would cook whole meals by myself and without a parent even home to supervise me (that was part of the fun, surprising my folks with a wonderful creation upon their arrival home). Now, at first I would thumb through any cookbooks I could find but even from the beginning I was not one for being told what to do and how much of it to do! Hmm...I think I still have this problem...
I would (and still do) scan a recipe to get an 'idea' of what categories of things need to go into the product: For example, in order to make yummy bread you need a flour (or a mix of different kinds), an oil (many to choose from here as well), a leaven (yeast or sourdough or chemicals like baking soda (sounds like a food item I know, but it is actually a chemical with its own MSDS sheet, and I clean more with it than I eat it), a liquid, and a sweetener (so many options here as well). This is the basics. You can add things from here like spices, nuts, etc...
Now once I know the categories I need and a general idea of ratios I just improvise. I love it when things turn out and when they don't (I have made quite a few interesting creations without meaning to) I learn by my mistakes and try again.
I have been baking/cooking with liliana since she was little (my first memory is of her around 9 mts or so and sitting her on the counter to 'help' me as she refused to play with her toys while i was cooking/baking.
It is hard to be creative when another wants to help. Only I know in my head what I am trying to create (cinnamon bread for instance) and I am the one who has an idea of ratios. She wants me to let her measure everything (she is abit concrete when it comes to this, she even will take a knife pat out the flour, then swipe off the excess, something i would NEVER do!) but I know by feel or sight what is right, or I know if something needs more water by how it feels...
It is hard to teach. Regardless of the difficulty I would rather my daughter learn how to cook/bake instead of learning just how to follow orders (recipe's). Don't get me wrong, it is nice that another has figured out the particulars so that we do not always have to reinvent the wheel ourselves. I just feel that in the long run it is more helpful, or will be more of a help to my children, if they learn how to really cook/bake, and make a nutritionally balanced meal. This world is crazy. Food may get scarce, you may not have every item a recipe calls for. What are you going to do? Starve?
What if you have taught you child a skill (like if you need to build a fire out in the woods, they know the various categories that go into building a fire, so are better able to make use of what is available, instead of lamenting the fact that there is no kindling or matches, when they are sitting on some dry moss and throwing sticks and some rocks in their frustration).
You know, as parents, we are baking/cooking. Jacob and I have been examining alot lately how we are doing as parents. We noticed that we are trying to control too much (following a recipe to a T) instead of just focusing on instilling categories ('teach them correct principles and let them govern themselves").
I also remember something from my own childhood. I was 8. My mom was talking about me to my aunt and kept referring to me as "my child". By that age I had learned that the word "my" was a possessive pronoun and it rubbed the wrong way. I interrupted my mom and said, "Mom, you do not own me, I just came through you, you are in charge of raising me, but this does not give you ownership of me".
My daughters were with jacob and I before this life. All four of us were mature spirit children of a lovingly Heavenly Father. All four of us on our own decided to come to this earth. We were put into family units for a purpose, that purpose was not to have someone to control/dominate/boss...My daughter may be 3, but her spirit is mature and full of faith (that is why she is here after all, just like the rest of us)...
I hope, we hope, that after all of our 'baking/cooking/creating' with our daughters is over, they will turn out delicious, yummy, healthy, wise, self-sufficient, faithful, loving, strong women...
Now here is a delicious new thing I started making, my version of a recipe:
Cinnamon Buns(seriously the best I have ever had...)
Alright, so you put some oats in a pot with some water, bring to a boil (how much of the following two items depends on how much bread you want to end up with, in general, pretend you are making oatmeal for one person to eat for breakfast)
While that is getting up to boil, in a big bowl, put in 1/2 stick a butter (assuming you are using just one serving of oatmeal, this morning I added a whole stick of butter as I wanted to make lots for our ward potluck), 1 tsp salt(a little more or a little less wont change a thing), 3 big spoons of honey (hmm, you may be asking yourself how big my spoons are compared to yours, good question...not sure of the answer...so lets just estimate it at 3-4 tbsp of honey, once again, a little more or a little wont hurt it).
Dump your oatmeal into the big bowl, let is melt the butter (you can stir if you feel inclined to do so or if you have a kid who is dying to 'help'), then add milk (for one batch of buns i would say it is around 1 cup milk- I should say that I have only ever tried this with whole milk (raw at that-but why I drink raw milk is for another blog post)), this helps the milk get alittle warmed up, which helps with the yeast (by the way while all the following is going on you should let the yeast proof in a small bowl or cup, about 1 cup warm water to 2-3tsp yeast), dump the yeast mix into the big bowl with everything, give it a mix with the spoon. Now it is time for flour. I like to use mostly whole wheat and a little white, there are loads of other combos that would work. So I would say I put a 3:1 ratio, 3 parts whole wheat to one part white (white has no nutrients so I try to minimize its usage, it actually robs my body of nutrients (b vits) in order for my gut to digest white flour (same goes for white rice and any other 'white' (stripped) food item)...I stir abit and see how the dough is coming together, if still sticky I add abit more flour alittle at a time until dough is no longer sticky. I let sit for around 30 mins.
Now comes the fun (for the kids), I roll out the dough, like pizza, taking butter knives we use soft butter (real butter), and spread a layer all over the dough, then using a different butter knife we spread raw honey all over the dough (on top of the butter). I have tried using regular, filtered honey, but it does not cook right, you have to use the raw, which is great, it is yummy and has the extra added bonus of being a healthier version of honey, it is great for kids with allergies or food sensitives), then we use a fine mesh thingy (strainer) and i put cinnamon in it and my girl shakes it around till the dough is covered, then we roll up the snake and cut.
I grease my pans with either butter or coconut oil(my favorite cooking oil by far and soooooo healthy for you...really)
and place the buns in them, get my oven up to temp 375, than pop them in ..once i start smelling them they are within 5-8 mins of being done, so I just check on them by seeing if the tops are alittle brown..
Then for an icing if you want one I do the following:
I melt some butter (about 1/2 stick, pour in a cap full of vanilla extract, and some powdered sugar (still working on how to replace this white sugar with something better) around 2 cups, 3 or so tbsp of milk and just drizzle it over the buns...so yummy....
so, this is why I have a hard time giving out my recipe's for everyone who ask for them(it turns into a miniture book)...enjoy