Granny Miller Challenge--Food and Water

Food

We ate well during the weekend. I think, the main reason we did, was that we menu-planned to the nth degree--kind of like we would have if we were taking a trip. It helped us to stay focused and organized to already have the decisions made. I wonder how that would work in any sort of a long term situation, because I know that I am often hit or miss on meal planning on a day to day kind of a basis. (Note to us: work on being more consistent with menu planning, so the habit is there when the need is.)

For dinner Friday evening, we had planned Vegetable Beef (venison) Stew. Plan A was to cook it in wood-fire coals, but Owen worked with a neighbor off the farm and it rained, so we cooked inside on the propane cooktop instead. We all became fans of the long butane lighters over the weekend and laughed at ourselves for turning off burners and trying to light them by the knobs, without any flame.

Saturday morning, we had planned coconut flour pancakes and homemade, homegrown pork sausage with eggs. We thought it would be handy to use an old-fashioned hand-powered hand mixer to mix the pancakes, but it turned out the whisk was much more effective with a batter. The sausage was easier to make than I thought it would be (I used this family favorite recipe from Alton Brown, and used 2 and a half pounds of already-ground pork.) I used an old cookbook holder from the farmers' market box and really learned to appreciate how much easier it is to read from a cookbook or recipe binder that is propped up in a holder and lit with a lamp on the counter. We cooked the pancakes and sausage over the coals outside. Owen and Becca set up the awning to protect us from rain and Owen's Boy Scout fire-making experience kept us in plenty of hot coals. It was hard work to bend and cook over fire just a foot off the ground. The cook cooks just as much as the food does! We decided to leave off the eggs. The pancakes were egg-y enough and plenty filling with the sausage.

We wondered aloud if homemakers of bygone days wore a towel over their shoulder with 'designated spots' for different 'messes'. Perhaps they wet one end and used one corner to wipe their hot, cooked face, and the other wet corner to wipe off dirty hands. Maybe they saved the dry end for wiping only what was clean, like washed hands. We decided that cooking over the fire is almost too difficult and time consuming for everyday meal preparation. We will be improving our dutch oven cooking skills, learning and trying pit-roasting, looking into making and using a solar oven. In the long run, we'd like to build an outdoor stove and wood-fired oven that will allow us to cook in a more upright position without our faces directly over the fire.

Saturday lunch was more of a snack... rice cakes on hand with hummus or egg salad or pb. It made for a nice break in the day and we visited at the table as no one was distracted.

Saturday supper Hannah and Owen worked together over the fire again. We had pork ribs--they had already par-cooked so they warmed over the fire mopped with sauce, foil-wrapped potatoes cooked in the coals, we had sauerkraut that had fermented in our crock (as a side note, the kraut we have made with homegrown cabbage has been much more flavorful to us than that which was made with boughten cabbage), and broccoli steamed on the stove inside. Dessert was dutch oven-baked applesauce hung over the fire.

Sunday breakfast was home-made yogurt, apples or bananas. The yogurt had already been made using a heating pad for incubating. We talked about options for making homemade yogurt without power. One idea would be to place the yogurt in jars in a cooler and adding some jars of warm water to keep the cooler warm. Perhaps this could be done in an oven as well.

Sunday 'lunch', after church was eggs, bacon, refried beans, corn tortillas, salsa, avocado, lettuce. We cooked inside on the propane cooktop (and wondered how many butane lighters or boxes of matches we should keep on hand).

Sunday supper was our celebration meal. We hand-churned coconut milk ice cream, and popped popcorn on the stove. We agreed we had survived the weekend very well, indeed.

The next post will be about Water. I think it will take longer than I originally thought...

What a little girl wants...

 

When I was a little girl, one of my biggest desires was to have a dollhouse. And then, one year I did get one! It was a large dollhouse and it came with lots of little wood parts to make it. Daddy and I set up one of the bedrooms to be able to work on it, without little ones touching it. We were only able to glue the first and second floorboards together, before James was born and we needed that bedroom. 

Momma and I looked online on that day to see if we could find some dollhouse furniture that would go with it. I distinctly remember seeing a nursery set, with a cradle, crib, rocking chair and a rocking horse. I loved seeing the different sets, but didn't ever get any and finally lost track of the site with the sets. Recently, I came across another site and they carried the same sets I remember seeing a long time ago. I didn't see any on the site, but it would be great to see drop leaf tables for a dollhouse. I could think of many different uses for a mini drop leaf table, but the primary one would be that it wouldn't take up a lot of room. :)

Katie, Owen and I have been talking about seeing if we can put together my dollhouse and that means I will look into getting some furniture and finishing up some dolls Katie and I started when we were about 7 and 5 years old. I really hope we do, because I still like dollhouses. And decorating them too! 

CSN Stores sells drop leaf tables, dollhouse furniture and an amazing selection of dollhouses, if you don't have one yet. ~Sponsored

Happy times

I think the hardest part for me this surgery (besides praying and wondering about pain management) was the fact that James was doing so great before surgery. It is not so difficult to hand your baby over to the surgeon when you know his life depends on it... and he looks like he is depending on you to help him.

It's a little different when he looks the best he has in five years... and you're sending him anyway.

I believe it won't be long until James is back up to full speed and, since pain management has not been the nightmare this time that it has been in the past, I really have no regrets. Already his little belly looks more like that of a little boy and less like that of a war-torn veteran. That is certainly something to be grateful for... and I am!

I am also grateful for some sweet time yesterday. Just about the time I was wondering if this was our day of trouble since James had gone so long without food or drink, the Big Apple Circus clowns that are permanently assigned here showed up. They occupied James for about 45 minutes and I think they had just as much fun as we did!




If you want to see MORE pictures you can go here!

Our mother's day

My mom and dad drove down for mothers' day this year. We had a really nice visit and absolutely gorgeous weather. Vern and the children planned the meal and prepared it and cleaned it up. Delicious food, relaxing holiday with family and perfect weather. We even got to sit around on the front porch!

What else could a girl ask for?

Vern picked a delicious BarbecuedGarlic Chicken recipe from a Lebanese cookbook we were given. It included a dipping sauce (called Tratoor bi Sade) with *45* cloves of garlic in 1/2 cup of olive oil and the juice of one lemon.

He also made and Afghani bread, called Nan or Nani, to go with it.

My mom brought a Nona salad. And the children made herbal mint tea to drink. Mmmmm.

Been there

My children already know this. But my future grandchildren don't.

And with the current news of the day, it seems like a great time to write about it.

Vern and I met in Alaska, courtesy of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Some may remember that about 21 years ago, the Exxon tanker Valdez ran aground in the Prince William Sound and dumped most of her load of oil. Exxon began clean up efforts, severely hampered by environmentalist oversight and the U.S. military was called in, just in case we needed to federalize the clean up. I was sent up to Alaska as a logistics planner and Vern was our Navy liaison officer. His ship was one of two Navy vessels providing berthing (sleeping space) to oil spill clean up workers. He was the only one who knew about Navy ships. To my knowledge, Exxon leased the ships.

There was a lot to be learned during the effort and while I was only actually on site for about 5 weeks.. and Vern was there for 6 or 7 weeks, we both learned to be pretty doubtful about the ability of the mainstream media's ability to accurately report a story.

We also realized that, in general, people don't learn well from history. The Coast Guard folks we worked with had lots of experience in oil spill cleanups. And they knew their history. Historically, oil spills have been one of those things that clean up themselves over time. During the two world wars, there were lots of spills and within a decade, there was usually no evidence of the spill remaining. This proved to be true of the Exxon Valdez spill as well.

Hopefully, it will be true of the explosion in the Gulf as well. Once the oil stops flowing.

What country children do when they don't have a swingset

Earlier this year, Vern got a nice hoist so we can pull up our own hogs and cows when we process them. We had, at Christmas time, done our first hog all ourselves and found it nearly impossible to lift it up to scrape and gut. So now we are ready for the next time.

Vern and Owen like to think ahead (or so they say :*), I think they just like to play with their new toys!) so they hung the hoist in the carport to practice with.

And our country children put the hoist to work, giving carnival-like rides to anyone in the family that wanted one!

'Tis the Season: Be flexible and let the Lord speak to you!

Some years ago, our now-older children looked forward to Christmas. Every time they saw an evergreen tree, especially one with lights or decorations, they would exclaim with great glee, "Look Momma! Look Daddy! It's a Christmas!"

Of course the best Christmas of all was the one we had in the living room at our house.
Try as we might to explain with words and other family traditions that the trees were not Christmas and that Christmas was Jesus' birthday, we could not seem to get the message through.

Vern and I talked about what might finally help the children, so we had a smaller tree and gave the creche a more central place in our already limited decor. That didn't work either.

Somewhere in there, we must have finally asked the Lord for wisdom. He sent us a dog. She was a black lab and would be about six months old at Christmas. I was also seven and a half months pregnant with our fourth child.

We talked about simplifying Christmas, since we had a very active puppy and a very pregnant mommy, and had the bright idea that maybe this would be a good year to skip on the Christmas tree. Some of our friends and family thought we had really gone off the deep end, but after Christmas, Vern and I agreed that not having a Christmas tree significantly decreased our Christmas stress. We would certainly keep open the option of skipping the tree the next year.

We skipped out on Christmas trees for eight years, and somewhere in there, our children stopped calling them Christmas. What a huge relief that was.

Two years ago, for our first Christmas in this house, Owen, who was then 11, found a tree that would need to be cut down anyway and asked if we could have a tree. He volunteered to cut the tree, set it up, decorate it with the help of his sisters and take it out after Christmas. We all agreed, since we couldn't keep the tree watered, that it would only be in the house for three days--it came in on Christmas Eve and it went out the day after Christmas.

Since Christmas trees no longer seem to be a stumbling block to anyone, we are free to enjoy having one. It no longer causes additionally stress and it doesn't detract from our celebration of our Lord's birth.

And that helps us keep Christ in Christmas!

Merry CHRISTmas!

This post is part of 'Tis the Season Carnival--Keeping CHRIST in CHRISTmas--hosted by Hannah and Mckenzie. You can find more Carnival posts here.

Nuts and leaves

Last year, we raked up a good bit of leaves from a friends place. They have pecan trees and leaves are plentiful. We thought we had nearly gathered a lifetime supply of leaves, but it turns out we could have used four or five times as many as we collected.

A cousin in Minnesota has the richest garden soil we have ever seen. She attributes her fine soil to the addition of large amounts of leaf and leaf mold over the winter. The leaves degrade and become great soil and the leaves on top are mulch, keeping in moisture and keeping out weeds.

Since our goal is ultimately for our garden to be like Cousin Marian's, we started implementing the leaf plan. We noticed a difference in our soil this year and bugs were not near the problem they were last year!

So, we set out this fall to collecting as many leaves as we could. We were filling lawn and leaf bags, but decided it was more efficient to use a friend's trailer. We've raked hauled and spread more than 40 leaf bags and six trailer loads of leaves!

We also found nuts (heart nuts and acorns) which we shared with our hogs.

The flower bed is in need of pine straw. So I guess we'll be looking to rake up a trailer load of that soon, too!

'Tis the Season: Advent helps us keep Christ in Christmas

This post is a part of 'Tis the Season: Keeping Christ in Christmas carnival hosted by Hannah, over at her new blog, One Southern Girl, and her friend, McKenzie, from Pecan Pastures. Hop on over to Hannah's blog to find links to more Christ-honoring-Christmas ideas.

I don't remember where I found our copy of Family Celebrations, but I know we have been using it for about 15 years now.

We really enjoy this advent celebration. Although we keep saying we are going to try something new or different each year, we nearly always come back to this book. (One year, we read through Jotham's Journey--it was also very good, but had no 'props' to really involved everyone.)

The advent celebration in Family Celebrations includes a tradtitional advent wreath with candles, a banner with a Christmas tree and homemade felt ornaments appropriate to each night's advent devotional, and devotionals with hymns to sing for 24 nights leading up to Christmas. Initially, I thought that repeating the same thing every year for advent would be boring and less meaningful, but, after 15 years, it seems that the repetition is both beneficial and comforting to the children. It's kind of soothing to us adults as well! Even though the devotionals are scripted, we can tailor it with different questions and extra thoughts, but it is still the same story and the same, timeless ideas.

The book also has a Christmas worship service and an Epiphany Party plan. We use the Christmas day celebration most years and we enjoy doing the Epiphany Party whenever we can.

The Epiphany party is a great wind-down and wrap up of the Christmas Season. It includes a feast (which is relative to whatever you want to make--we have done real feasts and we have done soups with homemade bread), a pageant (in which the children re-enact the Christmas story--ours have been better if they have a chance to plan ahead) and a service (during which time we read all the advent devotional scriptures and take down the ornaments from our tree banner and sing some of the Christmas hymns.) It makes for a late night, but lots of sweet, Christ-focused memories.

That little red hairbrush

Daddy has a little red hairbrush that he's had  for as long as I remember. When Owen was a little boy, about 4 years old, he loved Daddy's hairbrush and would borrow it whenever he could. Finally Daddy and Momma got him a little red hairbrush of his own, so that Daddy could find his.The other day, James found Daddy's hairbrush and immediately attached himself to it. And then it disappeared. James hasn't been able to find it yet. I guess he hid it to keep us from finding it and taking it away and hid it too well. It seems that James might be getting old enough to get a little red hairbrush of his own. Maybe for his 5th birthday in December. My, how time does fly!

Hannah

Today

 

Happy Birthday Momma!!!

and many more!

969 days later

Edited: James' off treatment pictures weren't showing up for some reason. Hopefully it's fixed and y'all can see Mr. Handsome. If not please leave a comment and we'll try to figure out what's going on. Thanks, Hannah

On February 25th, 2007, Momma posted that for some reason, she had this feeling that we had several more big weeks ahead of us. And she was right. Though, none of us would have thought it would have turned out this way. Those several big weeks turned into 2 years and 8 months!
But yesterday, James took his very last chemotherapy pill at 7:10pm and is now officially OFF TREATMENT! In a way, I am so thrilled, for James, and me and our family. But it brings more unknowns... and unknowns are.... well, unknown. But not for God and that is full of comfort. Before we close the chapter on leukemia, I would like to share some pictures of James before, during and after treatment. GO JAMES!!!

***************************************************************************************

Before leukemia and with hair....
(January 2006)

During Treatment

(March 2007)


(May 2007)

(December 2007)

(May 2008)



(August 2008)


(September 2008)

(February 2009)




(September 2009)

And now.... Officially OFF TREATMENT

Off treatment pictures by Daniel R. Simpson Photography

As I put this 'in review' post together I saw so many other pictures I would love to have shared with you. If you want to see more pictures and to read James' journey through treatment, the best place to start is in February of 2007 and then finish up here.

We are eternally grateful to everyone who supported us in this journey and continues to support us through everything coming up.

With gratefulness and happiness,

Hannah

Shin splits

I haven't been doing any real running recently. A couple of days ago, Owen was going to run up to where the chickens are and move the pens and I asked to go along, because I wanted to get out and stretch a bit. So Owen and I ran pretty much all the way down and back. The next day, my shins started hurting and I thought it was just sore from where James had sat on me. The next day, my shins felt like there was a bruise and someone was pushing down on it all the time, except there wasn't a bruise and I couldn't think of anything I had done that would make my shins hurt this long. So I told Momma what was hurting and what it felt like and Momma said "That kind of sounds like shin splits." so I asked how would one get it and you'll never guess what she said... running or walking after not exercising much. I checked on Wikipedia and now I have shin splits and they hurt! Next time, I think I'll walk, in my sneakers, not my boots!

Hannah

Camping tonight

Tonight in the south (where we haven't felt 'global warming' in nearly a year), Katie, Owen, Becca, Carrie and I are going camping in the yard. It seems that all us children set up our 8 person tent and sleep in it about once a year. Usually, we set it up in the livingroom/diningroom. But this time we are actually going to sleep outside. Some of us (including me!) are wimps when it comes to camping and we wimps decided to take our mattresses out and sleep on those, smothered in our sleeping bags and piles of blankets. Hopefully we'll stay warm, it's supposed to get down to 39* tonight.

Owen has built a fire and beds and bedding is set up. We even decorated with pine boughs inside and outside the tent and we have boards at the entrance, so that we don't track in sand. Carrie is all dressed up in her flannel pantelettes, red turtleneck, blue couch-pouch and two pairs of socks. Becca has her horse sweatshirt, a denim shirt, flannel pantelettes, sweatpants and two pairs of socks on. They both look too cute for words and are eagerly looking forward to sleeping in the tent tonight. Maybe I should go take pictures, so we can share our experience.

Hannah

Mendelssohn's 200th Birthday

This evening, Momma, Katie and I went to a concert given by GCSU, celebrating the 200th birthday of the famous composer, Felix Mendelssohn. It was very pleasant to listen to the choral groups and finally the orchestra play. We heard 'There Shall A Star From Jacob Shine Forth' from his unfinished oratorio, Christus and some from the oratorio, Elijah, and then the orchestra played first movement of Mendelssohn’s famous E Minor Violin Concerto (there are clips of the concerto on the link), which was awesome to listen to. We ended up leaving during the intermission, because it was already 8:40 pm and we had things to finish up at home. As we talked on the way home, we agreed that James would love going to listen and it would have been neat to hear more of Mendelssohn's music. Going tonight inspired me to learn more about Mendelssohn and perhaps get some, if not all, of his music from the library to listen too.

Hannah

A recent dessert

This is what I made for a quick and relatively healthy (wink) treat recently.... Chocolate Pudding, whipped coconut cream and fresh mint leaves on top. Yummy!!!

and the side view.... We had just taken them out of the fridge.

The Little Ones

Momma took these pictures of James and the little girls a couple days ago. After James' hair-cut, known as 'Plan B'. He got a buzz, because he wasn't staying still. It looks pretty cute and James likes to try to make the front stand up, using a pick.

Yep, I think we'll keep them....

Two years ago

February 28, 2007 was the day James was diagnosed with leukemia. Owen, James and I spent the night in Duluth at the hospital in the PICU. There was an incredible snow storm. We didn't know then exactly what kind of leukemia we would be fighting or for how long...

But here we are two years later and the Lord has sustained us all the way.

So much has happened in two years. It's really quite amazing.

We have so much to be thankful for. Including your prayers for us!

Becca turns nine

Last week we celebrated Rebecca's 9th birthday. She LOVES horses and anything cowgirl. She has been wanting a denim skirt and a 'horse vest'. With a little bit of a late night and some team help with other things around the house, we were able to make both.

It ended up being a really good day to drive to Macon to let all the children get the bikes they had saved some of their Christmas money for.

We found them at Academy Sports. Then we came home and opened presents and ate good food and road bikes in between rain showers.

We ate so much, we save her cake for Sunday (we did this last year too!).

Horse lover that she is, this was one of her favorite birthday gifts.


I love you, Sweet Becca!

Helpers

During the last couple of months, I have been working on cleaning, staining and sealing the wood trim in our house. Mostly that is the window trim and sills in the big room and the front door. The other trim and doors (in the mud, laundry, bed and bath rooms) are painted. All while I was working on the trim (in the evening and on weekends) the little girls would ask if they could 'paint' too. And I would have to say, "not this time."... Finally the day came when I was done with the trim (everything got a few coats and I couldn't do it all in one evening). Then I started on the boards for the shelves that would go over my very messy desk in the kitchen.

I was happy to have help since this would be done outside:

Me and my two little helpers. "Painting" and wiping the boards.

Happy faces, dirty hands. We smelled of paint thinner for a few days!!!