Howdy folks!

We are here in the process of cooking Thanksgiving dinner, independently, for the first time. Why are we not in PA, you ask? Well, family work schedules being what they are, Grandma is now hosting Thanksgiving on Sunday so we’ll go over later this weekend. This gap in our actual Thursday schedule left us with a unique opportunity to try and cook the meal on our own. Many of you have already been doing this for years but in our family we don’t mess with tradition. Grandma cooks the meal with a few additions from select family members. Always the same dishes. Always the same great taste. Anyway, my mom’s very skeptical because I’m cooking the turkey differently, we’re all a little skeptical that I’m making green bean casserole without the soup cans and who knows what will happen with the gravy.

So far it looks like the turkey is going to be a little late getting finished but hopefully by the time it’s done it’ll be good! I’ll post an update of our adventures in cooking later this evening.

and going to be really upset if this messes up my time with Jennifer and Dave who are supposed to be arriving at my house in 2 days!!! Dumb germs…
That is all the complaining for now.

A couple weeks ago I spent a night away from home (ekbo was there so I have a witness). A few ladies got together and went to the peninsula for a Twilight tour, which probably wouldn’t have been my first choice for a pleasure weekend since I grew up on the peninsula (and hello? no spa?) but the fact that others were organizing made it a great excuse to get away. We went down to Forks and LaPush, ate dinner at Bella Italia and tootled around PA on Sunday morning. It was fun to let ourselves be taken in just a little bit by the cheesiness of it all but still have our moments of self mockery for the object of our trip.

More momentously, it was my first night or significant amount of time spent away from my son. A lot of people I know have already given this a whirl by the time their child is almost two but I also know a lot of people who haven’t. It was definitely surreal in so many ways. I had a great time not adhering to a strict eating, sleeping, setting aside time to play schedule. I enjoyed having uninterrupted conversations with people that are interesting and cool. I really savored eating dinner at my own pace. When you spend most of your waking hours with someone else though it’s pretty noticeable when he’s not there. The first thing I thought of when we were on the ferry was how much he would have enjoyed seeing the boats…when we got to our rooms at the bed and breakfast there were these little cubby areas that he’d have loved playing in…my first inclination when seeing a huge bald eagle flying from a tree was to turn to him and point it out. I didn’t sleep well at all but I’m sure that had more to do with Slanky not being there than Jonah (and shouldn’t it be some sort of crime to not sleep well then you actually have the chance to truly sleep in? it doesn’t make any sense!). And I think they did just fine without me. In fact I couldn’t even tell whether Jonah was more happy to see me or my mom, who was also gone all weekend. So it goes.

If given the chance, I’d do another night away, though in a few months it would be a lot more complicated by the whole breastfeeding thing and the guilt of leaving someone else at home with TWO kids. Maybe at a certain point my urge to get away would far outweigh any sense of guilt or responsibility or fear of missing them that I might have once had! That remains to be seen.

La Push. Where the vampires don't go.

Twilight panties via Bookshelves of Doom (of course).

I clicked through to the blog of the person who was the recipient of this fabulous gift and then browsed through the blogs of some of the commenters…I think “Woah.” pretty much sums up that experience.

We’ve been battling illnesses of one kind and another since Rowan got sick at the end of our Germany Trip in October.  Early on I persuaded Pat to try a twist on the honey lemon tea my mom used to make for my sisters and I when we were sick as kids.  He became so completely addicted to this tea that several weeks ago we invested in an insulated coffee pot so I can make big batches of it, and also a thermos so he can take it to work with him.  If you’re interested here’s how I make the tea–you can adjust all quantities to taste.

• 4 cups of boiling water
• juice from 2 lemons
• 5 heaping tablespoons of honey
• a finely chopped, 1-inch piece of fresh ginger

Steep the ginger in a the hot water for 20 minutes.  Strain out the ginger, then add in the honey and lemon juice.  That’s it!  The tea is very soothing on a sore throat, and also honey, lemon, and ginger are all supposed to be great boosters for the immune system.

I had this fabulous idea for Halloween treats this year. Make two batches of marshmallows and dye one batch orange and one batch black. Then in the last step where you roll the marshmallows in a potato starch/powdered sugar mixture, I’d put orange edible glitter in the potato starch/powdered sugar for the black marshmallows and black edible glitter in the potato starch/powdered sugar for the orange marshmallows. Brilliant, huh?

Unfortunately my plan fell flat on both counts. It took a ton of food coloring for me to get the shade of orange right. I used a ton of food coloring times two in attempting to make black food coloring.  Supposedly yellow, red, and blue in equal quantities make black.  I could never get past brown, even after dumping two whole bottles of food coloring into the marshmallows in a fit of frustration.

And then the edible glitter I ordered turned out to be less like glitter and more like flakes of cellophane. I should have gotten glitter dust, though who knows if it would have worked. Something was off with the orange marshmallows, and the “glitter” kind of melted into them. Looks a bit like mold, don’t you think? Neither of the marshmallows tasted quite right, I’m blaming in on all the dye.

I still think it’s a brilliant idea and am going to try again next year with high quality food coloring and glitter dust. Or maybe luster dust.  I also wonder about rolling the marshmallows in colored granulated sugar instead of cornstarch/powdered sugar/glitter, like Peeps.  Perhaps I should try both, just for good measure.  Oh, and another note for next year–taste the marshmallows before serving them to guests.  That might be the most important change of all.

Now, what to do with the enormous number of weird tasting and weird looking marshmallows I’m stuck with this year?

Prompted by Dahlia’s post and this great idea I saw on Catherine’s board today (school), here we go!
This school year, my preschool has started a Values and Virtues Curriculum (school-wide). We attempt to teach about a different value/virtue each month (I say attempt because some of these concepts will take time for children to really grasp). This month we are talking about gratitude and thankfulness. Catherine and I have been sharing different ideas we’re going to use in our classrooms and today she tried out Gratitude Circles – during circle time, she read the book All in a Day and then the class shared things they were grateful/thankful for. She plans to do this regularly and hopes to encourage the kids to look beyond just their favorite toy. As part of the curriculum, we also send home suggestions for how parents and families can reinforce what we’re learning at school – so this month we’ve been coming up with ideas for how families can encourage thankfulness and gratitude by doing things as simple as talking about why we say Thank You and talking about things each member of the family is thankful for – maybe a new dinner time ritual.
This last idea, making a concerted effort to think about all that I have to be thankful for, is something I have tried to adopt more in my life lately. Some days I can get really stuck on how sad and/or unfair life feels sometimes. I try and validate the sadness, but not dwell – but when it comes to the question of fairness, well life never was and never will be fair so I feel like it’s a waste of time and energy to focus on that. Easier said than done, right? One thing I find that works well for me is to focus on things I am thankful for – maybe something little that happened in a day or maybe some larger part of my life. I try to think of different things each day so that I can see that really, I have a whole lot to be thankful for. I often start my mornings by thinking about what I am grateful/thankful for to kind of set the tone for my day, but focusing on what I’ve got to be glad about also helps when I’m suddenly and unexpectedly hit with a wave of sadness about Mom. Hopefully we can impart some little bit of this to our children at school.

For all of you who are local, Slanky sent me this and it looks pretty awesome!

Not that I don’t have a project in mind for all of those corks I’ve been saving up over the years! REALLY. I’m going to make that corkboard for the kitchen! It’s on the list! Along with about eighty other projects…hmmm, I suppose I can spare a few corks for a good cause and discount!

What’s been up with this blog lately?

How many people are members and have not posted anything lately?!

Bring on the randomness!

Here are 5 random thoughts I have off the top of my head:
1. I haven’t put the monkey costume away yet because I’m considering having Jonah wear it a few more times to justify all the time I put into making it.
2. It’s actually been pretty warm here for the beginning of November but just as I started to think seriously about that it turned cold and very rainy.
3. This weekend I’m going to spend my first night without Jonah. It’s both scary and exciting. Too bad I can’t get drunk in celebration.
4. I am seriously out of cocoa so if I want an afternoon “special” drink I have to concoct one out of baking chocolate, sugar and whatever extract sounds nice. Today I used orange.
5. It’s not that I haven’t thought about the Friday Music. It’s just that I don’t want to look back on the blog and see tons of those posts and nothing else.