What I Love About Freezer Cooking!

My favorite part about freezer cooking is being able to come home after a seven hour drive, pop something from the freezer into the oven, and serve a home cooked meal a short while later. This is the recipe that I created earlier this month.

Has anyone else found that cooking for a toddler can be hilarious and frustrating at the same time? Sadie has recently decided that she doesn't want to eat ANYTHING that I cook. She would rather demand the over-ripe bananas that I try to save to make banana bread with (bananas don't last very long in our house with Sadie, thus I never have bananas to make banana bread with).

However, when I bring a meal to Nani's house and we eat there, Sadie gobbles up every last bite... even if it's a dish she completely refuses to eat at our apartment!

I'm grateful, at least, that she loves eating fruits and veggies! And spaghetti. She can't help herself when we put spaghetti in front of her... even if Mommy is the one who made it!

Eggplant and chicken are close enough to spaghetti that she might eat it... sometimes...

Sadie's Two Horses

Sadie can hardly wait for Maggie to be old enough to ride horses with her. She finally seems to have accepted the fact that Maggie isn't quite big enough yet. For the first few weeks after Maggie arrived Sadie repeatedly brought both horses over and would put one of them next to Maggie and climb on the other.

Here's a picture I snapped of Sadie this week. She brought her horses over to the door and sat there for quite some time waiting to go outside. We were still about fifteen minutes away from leaving, but when she gets an idea in her head it's hard to get her to be patient... the jacket is another example of that... it was in the eighties yesterday... yet she insisted on wearing her jacket everywhere. And when we went to the farmer's market she wore her pink snow boots and orange and green Wonder Pet gardening gloves.

Oh to be two!

Daily Dose of Cuteness: Pumpkin Babies!

My favorite season is less than a week away. And in anticipation of autumn I thought I'd share a couple of Baby Pumpkin pictures. The first snapshot is of Sadie at four months. And the second is Maggie at two and a half months.

Sadie Katie Pumpkin

Maggie Rose Pumpkin

Coupons for Medical Marijuana?

Okay, if you've visited my blog very often, you probably know that I get pretty excited about coupons... not this one though:

Only in California... And it looks like all the competition from hack doctors is driving the price down. Last year people were buying their prescriptions for $200 a pop. Now it's down to $115... It's no wonder that medical marijuana prescriptions seem to be as widespread as iPods in our area. Most iPods are more expensive these days...

Bridalplasty: Another Addition to the Upcoming Reality Train Wreck

We have a TV, but we don't have cable or satellite TV (we do have a very old DVD player that has started having problems that make me think that it will need replacing before long...). And yet I find myself reading about the upcoming shows online (usually because a friend mentioned them on facebook or CAF) and writing about them here. Somehow hearing about some of the shows in next seasons lineup really does feel like driving past a traffic accident... where you want to look away... but you just can't seem to pull your eyes from the wreckage.

Earlier this week I talked about how television producers were sinking to a new low with TLC's new polygamy show, Sister Wives. Now E! has announced a new series that's disturbing in an entirely different way. "Bridalplasty" is a series in which women will compete in "wedding-related competitions."

And from the name of the show can you tell what each weeks winner will be awarded? Here's one description:

"Every week a group will go against one another in challenges like writing wedding vows and figuring out what they want to do for their honeymoon. A group of judges will determine who comes up with the best answer to each weeks challenge; the winner will receive a chance to have a plastic surgery operation that is on their “surgery wish list.”

The woman will receive the surgery before the end of each episode and the results will be shown at the start of the following episode. Each week someone is voted out in traditional reality show fashion until there is one winner at the end of the season."

The grand prize winner will also receive her dream wedding. It will be at her dream wedding that she will reveal her new look to her friends, family, and.... the groom...

""Viewers will witness his emotional and possibly shocked reaction as they stand at the altar and he lifts her veil to see her for the first time following her extreme plastic surgery," says E!, according to the Reporter."

Is it just me, or does TV programming seem to be getting more and more bizarre?

It's as if the people coming up with the ideas are trying to one-up one another in an attempt to see who can come up with the most shocking idea that will make it onto TV... How low can they go?

Sadie Frown of the Week: A State Government in Mexico who Thinks Infanticide Isn't That Bad

In a society where everything is relative it becomes harder and harder to draw lines between right and wrong, much less even use words like "good" and "evil" and be taken seriously ("Evil? How archaic!"). The evil of killing our unborn children becomes common place and then, after a while, the next step, killing a newborn, doesn't seem quite as bad. The Groningen Protocol tries to make murder seem like compassion, which sounds strangely like the self-righteousness of the Pro-Death camp who really just want to "help women."

Many may still be horrified when someone like Dominique Cottrez is found to have killed eight of her newly born children, but between Holland's infant euthanasia protocol and Guanajuato's change in civil code, which makes infanticide a crime that may be punished by a mere 3 years in prison, rather than 35, I have to wonder how normalized murder will actually become in the coming decades.

Of course, infanticide, or "infant euthanasia" isn't really new, even in the recent past. In Nazi Germany some doctors promoted it as a "purely healing treatment" and called it "healing work" because not only did it relieve suffering, it also saved money that would otherwise be spent on caring for the disabled (sound familiar?).

It is heartening to know that every poll I've seen in the past year has shown that the majority of Americans aren't okay with abortion.

Unfortunately the more I read the more it seems that many people who think that matters of life and death is just a "choice" are sliding down the slippery slope that would make those same doctor's who did "healing work" proud.

Looking around and seeing just whose footsteps we are following in can be very telling.

Sadie Giggles

Sadie loves Cinderella! She thinks the mice are hilarious. Here's a clip of her watching the mice trying to get cheese:

Coupon Shopping Triumph: from $200 to $5

I was pretty excited after today's shopping trip at CVS!

I had put quite a bit of prep work into the trip last night. First I went on Hip2Save and brought up the CVS coupons. Than I made my list by copy and pasting the deals and scenarios from Hip2Save into a word document. After that I printed any printable coupons and printed my list and then went downstairs to sit down with the four newspapers I'd bought yesterday morning and my coupon binder (which is badly in need of organizing... which I just never quite have time for...). Two hours of clipping later, it was midnight, and my shopping list had each coupon for the following day carefully checked off and separated into "food" and "other" categories.

This afternoon I undertook the giant shopping trip. I knew that it was going to be huge from my coupons. I had $150 in coupons clipped, not counting sale prices and the extra bucks I'd be getting back.
I don't think that this picture really does my coupon-ing adventure justice. You can't see that there are six lip balms, two lip glosses, six tooth brushes, six flosses, eight air freshners, a ton of baby lotion, diaper rash cream and baby wash, four boxes of cereal, paper towels, six sobes, four 12 packs of soda (which have been put away for a special occasion), tons of snacks for Paul to take when he drives down to school, three tubes of toothpaste and quite a few other deals that were just too good to pass up...

And here's the damage:

My total rang up to a little over two hundred dollars. I used the $150 in coupons. I did have quite a few extra bucks, because I've gotten pretty good at rolling over extra bucks from month to month. That knocked the total down to $65 dollars. After paying the $65 my 12 foot long receipt printed out with $60 of extra bucks (which is like CVS cash) on it for next time, bringing the actual cost of everything to a grand total of $5.

The receipt said I'd saved $260... which I believe is before coupons (from the sale prices themselves), although I'm not 100% sure about that!

Either way I was pretty excited.

Four hours of work saved us at least $200. That's like making $50 an hour. Not bad for a stay-at-home mom. And our cupboards are stocked! By "buying" items when they're basically free we're able to avoid paying very much for anything most of the time.

TLC's New Polygamy Show

Wow TLC... wow... and yet I have a feeling that this will definitely draw in viewers.

I'm glad we don't have any sort of TV service. The promo kind of felt like driving past an accident... where you want to look away, but you just can't quite tear your eyes from the wreckage... I do wonder how the whole "secret" part is going to work since they're going on national television.

Sadie is Talking!

I left out a very important part of yesterday's post. It was, in fact, the reason I started writing the post in the first place and shows just how close I was to falling asleep when I was typing!

This week Sadie began talking.

Sadie's been able to communicate so well that we knew it was just a matter of time before she was babbling away. Last week when we were looking at one of her books she was able to show me every shape and color when asked and numbers too. I wasn't surprised by the shapes and colors because we work on those, but I still haven't figured out where she learned her numbers. I was shocked when I asked her where the number four was and she pointed to it!

And now she talks! She suddenly just started talking while she was at Nani's earlier this week. When I got home from Mass I found that Nani had made a list of the words that Sadie had started saying. The words included colors and actions (she loves the word "pull" and uses it constantly... I never realized how many things we "pull" until Sadie started pointing it out... the zipper on her backpack... the door... and on and on...). Yesterday the word of the day was "pirate." The day before she said both "Mag" and "love" (those are the two that stand our because it was so cute!).

The best part of all this is that the tantrums already seem to be easing up quite a bit! She isn't as frustrated because she's expressing herself much more easily. And that makes me a very happy mom!

Worrying Over Milestones: And Switching to a New MD

The week before Maggie was born we decided that we needed to find a new doctor. The idea made me a little panicky at the time, but we also wanted a doctor who was "on the same page" as we were and who wasn't going to push us to do things that we were uncomfortable with (like putting our kids in day care so that I could "have more time to myself."

In some ways I was a little surprised by our former MDs shock that our toddler had "missed" some developmental milestones. Here were some of the "big" concerns:

1. She wasn't talking much... but the reason was incredibly clear (if somewhat annoying). Sadie has been very good at communicating non-verbally for quite some time. She'd make little gestures and sounds and since we always knew what she meant, she didn't really feel the need to talk. We knew that that would change once Maggie came around and so we didn't really worry about it much. We figured she would start talking before too long and that the process would probably rapidly accelerate once there was a baby in the house.

2. She didn't "go up and down stairs by herself." This one had be kind of shocked. I have seen two year olds who could go up and down stairs by themselves and it made me feel pretty uneasy. And the stairs in our apartment are pretty steep. I knew, at twenty four months, that Sadie wasn't ready to be going up and down stairs on her own. Two months later she is ready and she's very proud of herself. But the idea of a doctor acting like this milestone should be pushed before a child is ready makes me very uneasy... It seems like a recipe for disaster.
3. She wasn't getting dressed on her own (do many 24-month olds do this, because our former doctor acted like it was pretty typical?). In fact, she wasn't even interested in getting dressed on her own. She probably would have been okay wearing her diaper all day (it was the end of June and it just would be easier to jump in the baby pool at Nani's house that way. Now, on her own, without being pushed, she's become obsessed with doing things on her own. She'll literally spend half an hour practicing putting on her socks and shoes by herself.

I know that milestones can be important in determining problems, but I also think that they can be used to create undue stress (as would have been the case if we'd actually believed there was a problem when we talked to our doctor).

And I'm very happy that we decided to make a change and go with the local clinic down the street from our home. It's a much less stressful experience!

CSN Diaper Bag Review

I love my new diaper bag!

When I was asked to pick an item to review for CSN Stores I was very excited. CSN has over two hundred stores, that offer everything from furniture to toys to cookware, so I knew that my biggest problem would be picking just one item to review.

After hours of pouring over CSN's websites, I found it: a laminated yellow corduroy diaper bag. Just looking at the picture made me feel cheerful and the "laminated" description let me know that there was a good chance it would be easy to keep clean.

When my bag arrived it was just as cheerful and yellow as it looked in the picture on diaperbagboutique.com (yellow and red take turns being my favorite color on a weekly basis!). The laminated corduroy is wipeable, which is perfect for busy moms and the bag is roomy enough that I can stow diapers for a toddler and an infant, wipes, snacks, a sippie cup, small toys, spare outfits, diaper ointment, and all the other various odds and ends that I need whenever I leave the house.

One of the handiest accessories that came with the bag is the diaper pad. When Sadie was born we bought a big, bulky messenger bag that also came with it's own diaper pad. However, this diaper pad is about twice as big, making it much easier to change a large baby on. I'd never thought about how handy a good changing pad could be until I actually used one, but it was an added plus to a great bag.

The bag also comes with a handy little pouch that I use to keep spare fleece diaper liners in and an insulated bottle carrier that will probably end up carrying water bottles for us, since we don't have any bottles.

I was especially impressed with how CSN's customer service handled a small problem that I had. The day after I received the bag the magnetic clasp on the inside of the main flap broke off. I emailed CSN and they immediately shipped me a replacement bag and sent FedEx to pick up the bag with the broken clasp. And the new bag definitely has been able to handle all the daily abuse of being hauled around on a day to day basis.

The experience has definitely made me even more likely to shop at CSN stores in the future. Not only do they have everything that I can possibly think of, but they stand behind the products that they sell! And (I can't say it enough!) I love my new diaper bag!

The Rosary: A Key Part of a Good Day

One of my New Year's Resolutions this year was to pray the rosary (5 decades) twice a day every day. Then during Lent I bumped it up to four sets (of five decades), every day. After Lent ended, two sets of five seemed even more doable (in fact, it was easy to fit in two sets, after doing four for a month and a half) and I even started to believe that I would be able to stick through it after Maggie arrived.

Things started out well. I managed to keep up with my daily prayers through the first month. Some days I would only say one rosary, but the next day I would say three and I began to feel confident that I really could find a place for prayer, despite the business of every day life with a toddler and infant.

Then I started falling asleep mid-rosary.

The funny thing is that I don't feel all that tired. Maggie's a good sleeper, and Sadie's sleeping through the night now, so I get a solid seven hours (waking a couple of times to nurse) of sleep most nights. That's more sleep than I've gotten on a regular basis in over two years. I'm finally starting to feel rested. So falling asleep mid-way through the first decade of my second rosary (the first was usually earlier in the day) just didn't make sense.

However I compounded the problem by continuing to add up rosaries. If I'd fallen asleep for six out of seven days before completing both rosaries, I had six to make up. Rosaries started to add up fast.

I decided to make it easier on myself by cutting the number of decades a day in half. After all, it was my own goal, and I'd just had a baby...

Suddenly though, I found myself falling asleep during the first decade of the first rosary. And since I'd been keeping track I knew that I had a huge backlog of rosaries that I wanted to pray...

I found that I was so stressed out by my own standards that I stepped back and took a little break. During this break, I discovered several important facts. Here they are in no particular order:

1. Some people need a cup of coffee before they can really start their day. Before that caffeine hits their system, they have a hard time dealing with other people. Rosaries are kind of like my coffee. I'm happier (and by extension nicer) when I've prayed in the not so distant past (say within twenty four hours).
2. When I stopped saying daily rosaries the migraines I'd been complaining about this past month, started. I didn't make the connection until I started praying a rosary during a migraine last week, and the migraine disappeared. It didn't come back either. I've now been migraine free for two weeks. This is rather dramatic motivation to pray. I talked with my doctor about it today (he attends our parish too) and we're both pretty happy with this alternative to pain killers!
3. Over the past four years praying the rosary has become a very important part of my life and our family life. And I wouldn't want it any other way!

My new goal is to focus on the prayers that are a part of my day and not to worry too much on the days when things are hectic and I end up falling asleep half way through my first decade.

Talk About Trusting Your Husband...

I've been meaning to get a hair cut for a while. It's been months really. And it was getting pretty long and tangly. But while I've meant to set up an appointment, I just never seem to get around to it.

I cut Paul's hair every month with clippers. And I trim Sadie's hair.

That's actually how tonight started out.

A little after 10pm I snuck in Sadie's room to trim her bangs. I've given up on growing them up at this point because nothing seems to keep them out of her eyes (I tried lots of suggestions, but nothing worked!) and she'd started walking around with her chin in the air so that she could squint ahead under her bangs. After turning her over and carefully arranging her hair several times (because she kept flipping over onto her side) I finally got them trimmed. However since she immediately rolled back over though, I'm not sure how great they look.

Then, in a fit of either confidence or insanity I decided to save myself twenty bucks and cut my own hair. I didn't mean for it to be quite as dramatic as it was. And maybe I shouldn't have been using the scissors from the knife rack (Paul called them "meat scissors"...). Within five minutes my hair was an uneven three inches shorter. I called Paul in.

I needed damage control.

Five or six inches (altogether) later my hair is still below my shoulder blades. And it's cut in a straight line across the back (yay! The layers have FINALLY grown out!). I tend to go in cycles where I decide I want layers, have my hair cut in layers, and then remember that I hate having my hair layered and pledge to grow it out again.

And we did save twenty dollars!

Talk about trust though! It takes quite a bit of trust to hand your husband a pair of scissors and say "have at it."

Thankfully, it worked out! Now I just hope I did as good a job on Sadie's bangs. Hopefully no one will come up to me in church on Sunday and ask if she "got a hold of the scissors..."

From the ComBox

Since I've ventured to speak out about recent Catholic topics that have come up in the news (instead of typing up another recipe or posting cute baby pics) I've opened myself up to less than friendly comments (three in one day! That's impressive!).

I remember when I first started this blog a little over a year ago. I was kind of devastated each time I got a comment telling me how much of an idiot I was (despite the fact that I was my high schools valedictorian and scored 150 on an IQ test that same year, which lets me know I'm not quite as much of an idiot as I apparently appear... I know, I know... this is where I get more comments telling me how obviously stupid I am!). But times have changed.

These days I seem to have grown a somewhat thicker skin. Maybe it's all those pregnancy and post-pregnancy hormones that have been surging through my veins lately. Maybe it's just that I find a lot of things going on in the world around us all to be absurd, and so I'm not all that bothered if the rest of the world thinks I'm foolish too.

I mean, in this age of moral relativism it seems crazy to some people to set boundaries of any sort, much less follow the Catholic Churches teachings. So I'm okay if the whole world doesn't love me. That may just be a sign that I'm heading in the right direction.

Anyways here are my two favorite comments of the day:

POB said...

The assumptions made on this blog would make a philosophy minor at a state university cringe...

SEPTEMBER 7, 2010 9:08 PM

And:

Anonymous said...

POB,

This is clearly a proudly conservative Catholic motherhood blog. Given that it is not a website that basks in the glory of its own self righteousness of liberality is enough to make most at any state university cringe.

So what assumptions are you even talking about?

~Thomist

SEPTEMBER 7, 2010 9:47 PM

I picked the first comment because it's not nice, but it's not the meanest thing I've gotten either. And I picked the second one because it hits the nail on the head.

Now to get some sleep and see if I wake up to any more fun comments before another busy day starts!

Daily Dose of Cuteness: A Maggie Smile

If you say the word "Baby!" to Maggie this is the look that she gets on her face 99% of the time!

Needless to say, everyone has been saying "Baby!" a lot!

Why God Matters: A Review

I just finished reading Why God Matters, a new book from Tribute Books, by Karina Lumbert Fabian and her father Deacon Steven Lumbert. Our family had a long road trip this weekend, and while the baby slept in her car seat I read the entire book aloud to Paul. It made the hours of driving fly by as we read and discussed what we had read.

Why God Matters begins with a forward that briefly explains the process by which early converts were brought into the Church, and the reality that the early Church recognized, that conversion was not a single moment or decision, but an ongoing process that takes place over a lifetime.

In Why God Matters, Deacon Steve and Karina mix stories of personal experiences with scripture and Church teachings and then give suggestions to help the reader think, act and pray to grow spiritually.

Deacon Steve offers the perspective of a convert, who attended Mass with his wife and children for years before taking the step to begin RCIA. He began by believing that it didn’t matter what Church a person attended as long as they loved God, but gradually began to realize that the spiritual hunger that he felt could only be satisfied by the Catholic Mass. In time he realized that what he believed were the “hang-ups” of faith were not actually barriers at all but support, which would help his faith to grow and flourish.

Karina, offers another perspective. She was raised in the Church, but notes that “religion was not a big deal in our house.” Once in college however she made a survey of different faiths and returned to Catholicism. After being confirmed while in the Air Force as an adult she has continued to grow in faith, raising a family, writing for her diocese newspaper and attending Mass.

Why God Matters shows how God’s hand can be seen moving in everyday experiences, if we allow ourselves to be open to His will for our lives. Karina and Deacon Steve’s stories show us how God can be found in ordinary, everyday experiences and how those experiences can draw us closer to God.

I especially enjoyed the way Why God Matters linked quotes from the Catechism of the Catholic Church with relevant stories from Deacon Steve and Karina’s lives. It inspired me to open up our copy of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and I’ve now promised myself that I’m going to read it cover to cover. Reading Why God Matters helped me to see that I’d missed out on the beauty of the Catechism by relying overly much on the Compendium of the Catechism that we’d also received in RCIA . Deacon Steve and Karina’s stories alongside the Catechism quotes reminded me of just how relevant the Catechism is in our everyday lives.

God can be seen in ordinary moments and how it is often through those ordinary moments and decisions that we draw closer to Him.

To read an excerpt click here!

Veils By Lily: A Review!

I love chapel veils! But I have to admit, I never quite mastered wearing them. I'd try different things, bobby pins, and clips, but nothing ever really worked. However, that all changed today!

I have been blessed to be able to write a review for a veil given to me by Lily at Veils by Lily (also check out her blog The Catholic Wife). And the veil that she sent me solved the problem (and was gorgeous!).

I can't say enough about this veil! It's the perfect color and the perfect length! And because of the comb that Lily sewed at the crown of the veil, it actually stays in place.

A mantilla that can stay in place when a mom is wrestling with a toddler isn't something that you find every day! I wrangled Sadie today during Mass (I believe "wrangled" would be the best verb to describe Sadie's relationship with me during Mass these days), while Paul held Maggie, and the veil stayed perfectly in place through Sadie's typical toddler antics.

I also absolutely love the color. I may have worried a little too much about the color of the chapel veils that I've worn in the past, so I was thrilled to receive a veil in a color I'd dreamt of wearing. I always felt a little too bridal in my white veil (although I'm sure I'll still wear my white veil now and then). And I've had people tell me that my black veil used to be reserved for widows (that observation usually accompanies one that says the white veil is for unmarried women).

While I think those "rules" are mostly regional and don't really matter (I'll also be wearing my black veil now and then too) I do love the color of this new veil!

I'm a big fan of the silver veils Lily sells too! And the cream veils! And the brown veils!

And of course she also has many beautiful ivory and black mantillas! I've found that my black and white mantillas are very handy because I can keep them in my purse and one of them is bound to match whatever I happen to be wearing if we decide to go to Mass on the spur of the moment.

The store website also says that a couple of the designs can be ordered in 20 different colors, so if you have a color in mind like I did, there's a good chance Lily can make your dream veil a reality!

So take a few minutes (or longer!) and go look at Lily's beautiful mantillas! They're beautifully made by a Catholic stay-at-home mother of three and if you love covering in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament I'm sure that you'll find one that's perfect for you!

If you have hard time keeping your veils on your head like I always have, make sure to remember to request to have a comb sewn in! It really does work wonderfully!

What Would Sadie Do if...

We live in an area with a lot of wild animals. Since we've moved here we've had run ins with mountain lions, bears, coyotes, foxes, and rattle snakes (when I was pregnant with Sadie I had a small rattle snake slither up on the porch right behind me when I was putting on my shoes!), along with the deer and jack rabbits that hang out on the back lawn at Nani and Grumpa's most of the time. And I've always kind of wondered what Sadie would do if she were close to any of these animals (the rattle snakes coming up on the porch worried me the most, but we haven't had any in the last two summers).

Today we found out what Sadie would do if she came face to face with a deer. It's bow hunting season right now, so we have an even higher percentage of deer hanging out in town lately (a huge buck walked across the freeway in front of us a couple of days ago when we were walking in the evening).

After our morning walk today we took Sadie to a meadow in the middle of town and let her run around while Maggie slept in the stroller. Paul and Sadie raced to an apple tree on the opposite side of the meadow from where I stayed with Maggie. They were standing by the apple tree when a doe bounded into the middle of the meadow, directly between us, and stopped. Paul and Sadie turned and saw the deer and Sadie's face lit up. And then she made her move. She took off at a sprint, running straight at the deer. The deer saw her, froze for a split second and then bounded over a white picket fence and out of the meadow.

So Sadie hasn't quite gotten the point of all of our "wild animal" talks yet...

A Mass Video Game? Seriously?

Seriously? A Mass video game? I am somewhat skeptical that this is even real... But here's the video:

I'm think definitely not real...

And if it is real... talk about missing the point!

Edited to ad: Okay, click on the "pre-purchase" button and it all becomes clear. It's just another ad for a gory video game.

Freezer Cooking: A New Chicken and Eggplant Dish

I just invented a new recipe! Like most of my recipes it started out as a standard recipe out of a magazine. But once I changed 4+ ingredients and the way of cooking them I figured it was far enough away from the original to actually be considered my own. Here it is:

4 medium sized eggplants

8 boneless, skinless chicken breasts, sliced lengthwise

5 stalks of celery

3 onions

4 medium sized tomatoes

4 cups tomato juice

Basil

Garlic Salt

Kosher Salt

Pepper

Balsamic Vinaigrette

I began by grilling the chicken pieces on our George Foreman grill and then set them aside to cool.

I sliced the eggplants into rounds and laid them out and salted them to remove the bitter flavor (this wasn't in the original recipe, but I think it's a really, really important step with any eggplant dish!). After half an hour (at least!) I rinsed the sliced eggplant with water, washing the salt away, and then went back to the cutting board to cut the slices into chunks. Placing them into a pan I added a splash of olive oil (I tend to be over generous with olive oil, so it was probably quite a bit more than the couple of tablespoons the original recipe required) and put them on low to cook.

While the eggplants cooked (for about eight minutes, until they are soft) I sliced the celery and onions. Then I placed the eggplants in a bowl and put the celery and onions in the pan with another splash of olive oil and placed them on the burner on low. While the celery and onions cooked I sliced the tomatoes into chunks.

When the celery and onions were done (as was evident by their delicious aroma!) I mixed the celery, onions, eggplant and tomatoes together in a large pot. I then added the tomato juice and stirred everything together.

Then my spice addiction kicked in. I added basil and garlic salt (I would estimate around 3 tbs each, but as with olive oil, I tend to be generous with spices so the best advice might be to add the spices "to taste") along with a little bit of kosher salt and pepper.

Next I added a "splash" of balsamic vinaigrette (around 4 tbs) and stirred.

I then spooned the tomato/eggplant/celery/onion mixture into three casserole dishes. I layered the grilled chicken on top of the mixture (and sprinkled the chicken with pepper) and then covered the meals to freeze. I was able to fill one large, one medium and one small/medium casserole dish. I'd estimate that altogether these ingredients would combine to feed 12 people.

When I reheat these meals for dinner I'll pull them out to defrost them in the morning and then cook the defrosted meals at 35o degrees for 20 minutes.

I did have enough left over that didn't go into the dishes that we were able to try it out and it is a new family favorite. I traded Paul a bowl in exchange for doing the dishes and tidying up the downstairs!

California: Another View

Oh California…

The first time I remember being annoyed about stereotypes about California and Californians I was twelve and at computer camp (yes, I’m that nerdy). Someone asked one of the other girls at the camp what California was like and she said “well, it’s like, really flat, with lots of palm trees…”

Okay, so that does describe a portion (albeit a very small portion) of our state. And I’m the first one to admit that I do get very annoyed at the way politics play out in our state. But there are also some huge misconceptions about our state and since everyone else in the apartment is asleep at the moment I thought I’d take a moment and give you glimpse into my point of view.


The inspiration for this post was a comment the other day that said something along the lines of “you live in California… so the air you breath is awful anyways…”

First off, as anyone who’s looked at a map knows, California is a pretty big state. My senior year in high school we went on a mission trip to Mexico. We drove on south on Interstate 5 all day long. And after a little over twelve hours (starting out in far Northern California) we were… still in California… about an hour from the border.

L.A. is a long way away from my current hometown. San Francisco is a five-hour drive. Sacramento is four-hours away.

Smog isn’t really an issue here. In fact, it hasn’t been an issue in any of the cities or towns (eight in all) that I’ve lived in (in Nor Cal). We do have smoke problems every few years from forest fires, but that ends as soon as the rainy season starts.


The town I grew up in was in the same county as Crystal Geyser and Danon’s bottling plants. The water at my house came from a well that was drilled straight down into lava tubes. It came out of the tap without going through any sort of filtration system, because filtration wasn’t necessary.

So California isn’t the entirely polluted place that some people apparently picture.

Here’s a quick view of the California that I knew growing up. Here was the view I saw out my bedroom window.

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And here’s what we saw when we looked north.

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California also isn’t entirely liberal. The state’s layout actually reminds me a lot of our country’s layout. Blue on the coast. Red in the middle. Our republican congressman has been reelected for decades. And people still talk about the time that we almost escaped California once and for all.

You see far Northern California has tried to join up with southern Oregon several times to form our own state. The name of the state? Jefferson. In 1941 the rebellious northern part of the state almost succeeded. It was in all the major newspapers at the time. A governor was even elected on December 4th of that year and a celebration was held in Yreka. The news of the rebellion was set to hit the airwaves on December 8th... Then the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor… and the rebellion ended. The US has entered World War II and the northern counties of California were stuck with their southern neighbors. And our area still retains the rebellious spirit that almost led to the succession. I wouldn't be surprised if a libertarian won a seat in the North State.

Of course, when people think of California they usually think of L.A. or San Francisco. They think of gay pride parades, crazy liberal politicians, and the parts of the news that most of us in this state would probably like to forget.

And while those parts of this state do annoy me regularly, the rest of the state makes it a little tougher to leave… and that’s what I wanted to share with you in this post: A part of California that may not immediately come to mind when you think of the Golden State.

Upcoming Veil Review!

I am really excited about a review that I have coming up! In the near future you should see a review of a veil, from a new shop that I'm very excited to write a review for (so excited that I'm doing this post pre-review so that you can all go over and get a sneak peak at the shop and hopefully do a little shopping too!).

As you may have noticed if you've read this blog for long, I'm always on the lookout for headcoverings. From hats to snoods I've experimented over the past year to find headcoverings that work with a grabby little toddler and a surprisingly coordinated newborn (I don't remember Sadie pulling my hair this much at two months!).

The traditional chapel veil will always be my favorite headcovering and now there's a wonderful new store, Veils by Lily, that sells absolutely beautiful chapel veils. So head on over and check out Lily's beautiful chapel veils! I can hardly wait to wear mine!

8 Weeks

Maggie is eight weeks old today and rapidly outgrowing the clothing that I have out for her. I'm going to have to do some switching around pretty soon. Today I was downstairs with the girls and needed a cooler outfit for Maggie. I only had a couple of twelve month sleepers that I'd washed and needed to put away and I grabbed one and tried it on her. It was a little long in the legs (by about an inch) but other than that it was actually pretty fitted. Here she is in a 6 month sleeper:


I don't know why I purchased a single newborn outfit this time (I think it was just one exceptionally cute sleeper that I bought at Target the week before Maggie was born "just in case" she was littler than Sadie). And while she was "smaller" than Sadie by a little over two ounces and 1 inch, she's quickly grown and is now bigger than Sadie was when she was much older (and Sadie, who is now a size 4T at 2 was never dainty for her age!). Maggie is such a big girl!

Daily Dose of Cuteness: Princess Sadie and the Pink Tutu

My First Knit Sweater

We've had a cold front moving through this past week (yay! I love being out of the triple digits!) and I've been able to pull out some cold weather outfits (or at least cooler weather). And I discovered my first non-scarf knitting project. I made this for Sadie when I was around three months pregnant (winter 2007-2008). It was the first time I'd knit anything other than a straight line back and forth (I only knew how to knit, it took me a while to figure out how to purl!) and I poured over this book and finally figured out how to read knitting notations.

Here it is, my first sweater:

Of course, Maggie is almost too big for it. At least she got to squeeze into it once though!

The First Rain of the Year!

Here was the view on the drive home today! It was so beautiful that I had to share!

A Children's Bible and a Trip Down Memory Lane

I've been keeping my eyes open for a certain Bible for the last couple of years. It was the Bible that I had in grade school and I can still clearly see many of the illustrations in my mind's eye.

Paul and I had talked about it a few times, and he'd mentioned that he would like to find a copy of the Bible that he had when he was younger too.

Then Rosy (Maggie's Godmother) came to visit for Maggie's baptism. She walked downtown and came home from the new Christian book store in town with a gift for Maggie. As she showed it to me she explained that she'd gone looking for this particular Bible, because it was the Bible that she'd had when she was younger and she'd loved reading it and looking at the pictures. She credited it for making her a person who loves to read.

Then she flipped open the cover and I recognized it (the picture of the inside cover from amazon is towards the bottom left hand side of this post). It was the same Bible I'd had when I was little! I felt like a little kid at Christmas!

When Paul came downstairs and started flipping through the pages he realized that it was the same Bible that he had had when he was in grade school!

Since then I've done a little exploring on Amazon and found the older version of the same Bible that we all had when we were kids. We had the 1965 version (which is shown on the right hand side of this post! It still makes me smile, looking at the cover!) Maggie has the 2006 version.

And it is such a wonderful book!

I'm already looking forward to reading it with the girls. For now we've been reading this children's Bible, which Sadie already enjoys (we had to read the Genesis stories over and over again yesterday).

The stories are at a grade school reading level (I think I got it in second or third grade), so it's still a ways off (I can hardly wait! I'll probably take a trip down memory lane and page through it myself!).

Did any of you have this Bible when you were kids? I'm curious about how popular it was, since all three of us had it when we were in grade school (it's pretty impressive when a Bible is approved for Catholic, Protestant and Jewish children, which this Bible claims on the back cover).

What About The Right Not To Breath in Pot Smoke?

I've been working outside in the little garden patch in front of our apartment. It's tiny, but I've filled it with lavender and violas and it's come along nicely in the past week, from the bare packed earth littered with cigarette butts that it was when we first moved in. But it really is only pleasant to experience when we're getting out of the car, and then there's a good chance it will only be pleasant for a moment.

You see, in our county we've had a number of "doctors" come through town and set up shop on the side of the road. People come through before hand and spread the word. Sometimes there's an ad in the paper. When the "doctor" actually arrives he has people standing up and down the side of the highway advertising his "service." He sells medical marijuana cards, usually for around $200 a pop.

You can get them for anything. Headaches. Cramps. A hangnail.

A recent report in a newspaper claimed that one of our former next door neighbors (his family still lives next door to my family and the stink of their plants drifts over constantly) had made over a million dollars selling the cards. I wouldn't be surprised since he constantly writes in to the paper, telling everyone that every single plant that God made is good for the human body (can anyone spot the flaw in that logic?).

Back to my complaint though... Before we moved we lived next to growers and while there was a quarter of a mile between there house and ours, our home would stink like a skunk had sprayed for months leading up to autumn and the harvest. At least it wasn't year round though...

There isn't much room in our new home for growers to grow outdoors, but since it seems that many of our neighbors have cards, we get to smell the smoke. At night people sit out front and smoke pot. In the morning people sit out front and smoke pot. I open my door and it smells like pot. I open the window after a hot day... and the house fills with the smell...

California makes me feel a little bit crazy sometimes. And what bothers me even more than the basic legalization of marijuana (because let's face it, if anyone can get a card for no reason whatsoever, it basically is legal) is the fact that those of us who don't do drugs have to breath it in all the time.

I have a prescription for hydrocordone that I don't use, despite my headaches, because I don't like putting chemicals in my body if I absolutely don't have to. I'd like to have the option of not breathing in marijuana smoke too. And more than that, I don't want my seven and a half week old daughter and two year old exposed to it every time we open a window or walk outside.

All the druggies in California have there rights. What about the rest of us?

New Pearl Rosary Bracelets

I've finally had time to add a few new bracelets to my store! And two are made with real freshwater pearls!

The first is a Saint Gerard Pearl Rosary Bracelet:

Next is the Saint Therese of Lisieux Pearl Bracelet:

Then there's this Pink Glass Rosary Bracelet with a Saint Benedict Cross and a Saint Teresa of Avila Bracelet!