April Stash Bust

Hello Everyone,

I've been lying pretty low the last few days - stomach flu ate my life... again. It's been a bad year for bugs.

We had a lovely Earth Hour on Saturday night. Chris and I had gruyere (it's G Fortnight) fondue by candlelight and then sat on the couch and talked by the light of our fireplace. Bliss. Makes me want to turn off the lights more often.

Another great Earth-Friendly thing going on is April Stash Busting Month. This was brought to my attention by DollarStoreCrafts and I think it's a great idea.

If you click on the link above, you'll find lots of tutorials, challenges and prizes in association with busting your stash. I'm all over this - it's gonna rock.

E is for Easter Candy

Does "stretching" the candy by putting it on a cupcake make it healthier? LOL


We made chocolate cupcakes and topped them with a peanut butter cream cheese frosting. Yum!

Sorry for the quiet, I have been mostly off line as I haven't been able to manage all my responsibilities (homeschool, house, marriage, special time with each of my boys, home cooking, sleep...) and being online was the lower priority item in my schedule.

This healing up business is hard slogging. My nerves are regrowing and the pain and sensations are very intense. I am thankful for the "pain training" the last few years have put me through or this would have brought me to my knees.

E is for...

Eggplant: We went out for Baba Ganoush
Eight Seconds: One of my favorite movies ever and now my boys like it it too.


Ebelskivers: We bought the pan and are gave them a go. Delish!


Cinnamon Bun Style:



Chocolate Filled:



Today the boys new Escher puzzle arrived - 1000 pieces should keep them busy.



Next up is homemade eclairs - YUMMY! - I used to make them all the time in my teens but haven't since.

D is for Dad

We decided to celebrate Chris today. Besides be an all around top-notch wonder-man for the past fifteen years he's done the job of both mom and dad the last few weeks as I've been recuperating. I wanted to do something nice for him but needed to keep it within my energy and our budget.

The boys and I agree that all good celebrations begin with banners. Not the lovely, crafty, pennant style banners that are all the rage. The butcher paper let-the-boys-free-with-markers kind of banners. The ones I love.

My kiddos made this:


And yes, that is a monster E that craves Food, Blood and Fleash (flesh) LOL.

We made him Nanaimo Bars (a Canadian Speciality) and bought him Bioshock 2, as Bioshock was his favorite game ever.


But the best part of all (for us at least) was making pie in a jar for Chris. We all hate Cherry Pie and Chris loves it. I saw a recipe by Lollychops on Our Best Bites for Pie in a jar and knew I found my answer. This project was absolutely perfect for my kids skill level, age and stage. It was challenging enough to keep them engaged but easy enough to have results to be proud of. Here's some pics:



One of the things I love most about A-Z is taking the time to let folks you love know how dear they are to you.

Have a great weekend everyone. Whether you are celebrating Valentine's Day, the Olympics or Chinese New Year, make time to make it special.

D is for....Dye!

Today is the first day of "D" fortnight and I celebrated the change or letter with a budget friendly (D)ay Spa at home morning. I was due for some maintenance and feel very proud to have accomplished it reasonably well myself. It's amazing the change in perspective seven months make.

Among other thing, I dyed my hair blue black. *SQUEAL*


There is a lot of red showing through so I might take another crack at it next week. It makes for fun highlights though.

We still have a lot of families joining us on Our A-Z year. If you haven't signed up you can check it out HERE.

We also have a Facebook group. You can visit us here.

Chocolate Cobbler with Caramel Sauce

My new favorite blog is Lollychops. She makes the most amazing things from delicious recipes to adorable printables.

When I saw her recipe for Chocolate Cobbler I was a little perplexed. My recipe is fat-free and I'd only known of cobblers as fat free desserts. Sweet, but really missing something. Imagine my shock to see six tablespoons of butter and pecans! Hoorah!

Here's what we made:


You can click HERE to see the recipe.

I think we're getting a hang of "C" fortnight :-)

C is for (even more) Cookies

We made cookies today. During B we found a delicious recipe for Butterscotch Drop Cookies so we used C as an excuse to make a second batch.

This recipe is from Sweet Maria's Cookie Jar

Butterscotch Drops

1 stick butter
1 C brown sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
1 1/2 C flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1 1/2 C butterscotch chips

Preheat oven to 350 degrees

Cream butter and sugar until light. Beat in eggs and vanilla. Mix until well blended.

Add dry ingredients. Mix well. Stir in chips.

Drop teaspoons of dough onto parchment lined baking sheet. Space 2 inches apart.

Bake 10-12 min.

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

Physically I am much stronger today and I am trying to spread out my meds to six hours from four. By six I'm suffering horribly but I can do it.

Emotionally, the day has been taxing. I realized I was 31 when this all began. My boys were 6, 5 and 4 and we were still considering adopting a sibling group to add to our family. My diagnosis put everything on hold. Now I have a teenager, we are too far along the family path to want to add more and I'm closer to 40 than 20. I'm sad for barely making it through these last few years, for the kids we didn't bring home and the years we missed big pieces of.

But, I'm not one to cry over spilled milk. We have the family I believe God intended for us and a close-knit strong one at that. It's just weird to pop out the other side of this trial so much older and having missed so much.

Looking forward to making up for lost time :-)

P.S. It's not too late to join A-Z, we still have new members jumping in every day!

A- Z Activities

Thanks everyone for the support yesterday. I wasn't sure if I should post my feelings splayed naked like that but I also wanted to keep this blog real and right now everything isn't moonlight and rainbows.

A-Z has been awesome. A lot of days I've wanted to sit still and hurt but A-Z has got me engaged. To be honest, I had written myself a pass until "C" fortnight because of the whole back surgery business but I'm terribly glad I didn't use it.

Here are some of our A-Zs so far:

Antiques: We went to the coolest antique store I ever saw. It was very Indiana Jones with towering piles of chairs at least 20 feet high (they looked like they'd been pushed together with a front-end loader), fertility gods, animal heads, pieces of docks... it was AWESOME! I wanted a little bit of everything. We bought the neatest drawer insert. It looked like a modern clipboard but came from inside a huge credenza type of cabinet like a business or post office would use. I'll post pics once I take them :-)

Armature: We made clay creatures with wire skeletons. The boys made up wild tales about each of their creatures and maimed them accordingly.





Arranged Furniture: I'm third shortest or third tallest depending on how you look at it. With all these big people in my house now, our little couch didn't fit everyone. If we wanted to watch TV we'd have to move everything and it was really annoying. But, due to the budget, we don't have spending money for new couches. So I took the couch from our formal living room and made a cute U-shaped family room and then moved our big dining room table (Chris had been using it as an office desk) into the former living room making a dining room. The old office now houses our chairs and is a lovely sitting/reading room. We're all pretty thrilled with the changes.


Altered Item: We went to Re-Store which is the thrift shop run by Habitat for Humanity. It's a wonderful, dangerous store. I bought a selection of drawer fronts for a dollar each and used three of them to rescue to a favorite old print of mine that has suffered some injustices over the years. I really like the effect and we now have a large piece of wall art for three dollars. Yay for Mod Podge.


And finally, unrelated to A-Z, I was reading the Oh, Fransson blog and decided to dip my toe in joining their Quilt-A-Long. Basically everyone works on a similar quilt at the same pace. I used to quilt about twelve years ago. Then as I was finishing the binding of a very time consuming Bargello Quilt, my house burned down. I never felt the urge to quilt again. This Paintbox Quilt is tempting me though. I made a sample set to see if I want to take a crack at it. I'm still on the fence. Fortunately, quilt squares wait happily in zip-loc bags so I can come back to this later if I don't do it now.



Well, I think it's safe to say I've talked your ear off. Hope you join us doing A-Z. You can start anytime.

New Year's Eve

My friend Jenn posted this quiz over at TSR and I thought it was beautiful:

One year from today, I hope to have:

Learned- To use Photo Shop. (I know, I should say something profound but I really want to learn PS)

Changed- my hair color at least three times.

Figured out- How to get Brayden to focus, Avery to read (for pleasure) and Trenton to slow down when he eats.

Completed- a 5K

Stopped- Taking pain meds

Started- Drawing and painting

Acquired-A little note from the bank saying our 2nd Mortgage is paid in full

Given up- Questioning my abilities as an artist, crafter and writer. Such a waste of time.

Visited- My friends in PDX and maybe my new friends in AZ.

Left behind- Concerns about my spine, for good.

Leave a comment filling in the list with your answers :-)

Come join me on a year-long adventure through the alphabet. For starters, CLICK HERE and visit the website I started to share ideas.

Don't know what I'm talking about? The posts are HERE and HERE.

It's going to be a blast!

A-Z FAQ

Wow. First off, thanks everyone for the overwhelming response to my little suggestion that we shake things up in 2010. Yay. Crazy ideas are always way more fun with friends. In the spirit of making new friends and sharing ideas with other A-Zers I created a Ning community. You can join us HERE

I started with about a dozen groups (hint, click "see all" or select "groups" from the top menu to access them) so people with specific interests (books, food, kids, art, photography etc) can inspire each other.

Several questions have popped up repeatedly so I thought I'd dedicate an entire post to them. Sorry to bore those who aren't intrigued.

Where did you come up with A-Z Year?
I was reading the paper in Portland, OR and there was a feature of a local restauranteur who felt her life needed a little more zest. She decided to plan her year around the alphabet and did everything from adding something appropriately alphabetical to the weekly specials at her cafe all the way to taking new routes home from work to go down "B" roads. She salsa danced, speed dated, tried Bikram Yoga, went on road trips... I was inspired! May I also point out that she was unmarried and didn't have any kids. Which brings me to question two~

Maybe if I had kids, but I don't think I'd do it for myself. This is a family thing, right?
Yes and No. It can be a family thing. Or a singles thing. Or a group thing. It's a PEOPLE thing; a fun idea for anyone who wants to break loose of the daily grind. Where families tend to organize their grocery shopping around a letter, singles can plan road trips, shots from A-Z, sky diving - you name it. If I didn't have kids, I'd probably be able to do more, not less.

Isn't it a lot of work and planning? I lack the bandwidth right now.
Last time we did it, I moved three times and we still had fun. For me, "B" is going to be for "Back Surgery" so I probably won't be playing billiards or bowling but I bet I'll be eating Braeburn Apples and reading Beowulf. To say it again, in the simplest terms, ask yourself, "In the next two weeks what can I eat, watch, read, listen, do?

Do I have to do every letter?
Life is hard and busy and often unexpected. Sometimes there isn't time or energy to think of one more thing. I suggest doing every letter you can but feeling free to skip if you need to. Whenever I feel too locked in, if I miss something it's like I broke it and then I'm free to quit altogether. I don't want you to quit - I want you to play along as much as you can.

Anything else?
I really recommend starting a journal, blog, scrapbook or plan to make daily/weekly updates to Facebook, LiveJournal, Twitter - share what you are doing so you can inspire others to throw off the mantle of boredom as well. Also, tell your friends and family what you are up to. It's fun to have them join you on this year of adventure.

If you have any other questions please leave them in a comment so I can share them - of you're wondering, other people probably are too :-)

My Big Idea - You Must Play Too!

This is a reprint of an article I had published in a parenting magazine. It lays out the gist of my proposal. Hopefully reading this will inspire you to join us. It is the easiest way to build some memories, creativity and romance into 2010.

Our A-Z year

When you think of the alphabet, sweet-faced five year old’s singsong voices and Sesame Street come to mind. What we did was something else altogether.

In an attempt to sidestep the rut that inevitably comes from soccer practices and dinner at six, our family decided to devote two weeks of the year to each letter. This allows us to get through all twenty-six in one year and to have a broad range of new experiences.

We broke down our plan into categories: music, movies, food, fun and learning, chores/household/health.

At the start of each fortnight we brainstormed activities to fit into the two weeks ahead. We made play lists, sifted through our DVDs to find ones with titles or actors with the right initials and skulked through the grocery store aisles looking for the letter perfect ingredients.

Suddenly our life was full of possibilities.

This alphabetic emphasis led us down many unexplored paths. Instead of going to our usual pizza hangout, during B we went to Brick Oven and invited our friends the Bellows. M was a mish-mash of movies, mini-golf and visiting a nearby mine. S was a sweet surrender to Snickers, Skittles and Starburst. During D we baked donuts and tried duck and disco dancing. When planning our summer vacation, our boys suggested forgoing the usual theme parks and inquired if London was a possibility, being L fortnight, and if not, maybe Las Vegas.

We also read by letter. For years I have had a reading list and the accompanying guilt of never getting through it. H heralded my success - I managed to read Hemingway. My kids saw me struggle with not getting into a story but making the effort to read it anyway and learned a lot from my satisfaction, and I admit, enjoyment that came from entering into that particular “great conversation”.

We scheduled annual necessities on the calendar by letter as well: C was for check up, D for dentist and diet, G for garage, O for optometrist, S for stocking our emergency supplies - you get the picture. This spread the chores and maintenance over the year and freed up my mental space, as I no longer needed to worry about putting off activities that are vital to our health and welfare.

Another bonus of the A-Z year was connecting with long distance friends and relatives. I admit, we fell down a bit on this task but our intention was to contact the folks whose last name falls during the current fortnight. People loved getting letters and cards outside of the usual Christmas/birthday time frame and it felt wonderful to nurture those relationships.

I bet you’re thinking, “ That sounds like a lot of work and I’m already pretty busy.”
I can assure you that you can spice up your routine without making too big a dent in your mental bandwidth, honest!

During F week, ladle your famous tomato sauce over farfalle instead of the usual spaghetti. (Pasta is an A-Z Goldmine. You can get from ‘acomo pepe’ to ‘ziti’ without any trouble and it really helps to have Udon and Quadrefiore in the back of your mind when those tricky letters come along.)

During S rent Sleeping Beauty and Spy Kids, sing in the car, send email, smile at everyone, and spend time together.


It can be as simple as filling out this list every two weeks and trying to make it happen:

Eat:
Watch:
Read:
Listen:
Do:


Here are some ideas to get you started:

A: Anne of Green Gables, Aladdin, Amazing Race, artichokes, astronomy, anagrams, acrostics, alfredo sauce on angel hair pasta.
B: Benji, bowling, billiards, beef and broccoli, the Beatles, baking, bananas, baba ganoush, baklava.
C: cinema, camping, cookies, Cranium, chess, checkers, clean closets, costume party, charades, calzone, coc au vin, corn dogs, crepes.
D: Dim sum, Dumbo, Dippin’ Dots, duck, deep dish pie, deep-fried ice cream.
E: Eggs, Ever After, Eragon, ecology, emergency phone list, edamame, elephant ears, eel.
F: Fishing, flossing, fair, Ferris Beuller’s Day Off, fire drill, fossils, fondue, fudge.
G: Gardening, gallery, Geocaching, games, gingerbread (it is so fun to make a gingerbread house “off-season” you should try it.), graham crackers, german chocolate cake, goldfish.
H: Hockey, hiking, hair cuts, Harry Potter, home show, clean your house, hook-a-rug, hot dogs, honeydew, horse riding.
I: ice cream, Internet, insects, ice-skating, Italian food, icing.
J: Jam, jelly beans, Juggle, Jungle Book, jacks, johnny cake, jicama, jerky, jambalaya
K: Knot tying, kite flying, Kit-Kat, karaoke, karate, knock-knock jokes, Klutz books, knitting, knead bread, kegels, key lime pie.
L: Little House on the Prairie, linguine, lasagna, library, Lego, lemons, limes.
M: Museum, make a mobile, plan a menu, marshmallows, Malomars, mints, macaroons, magic, Monopoly, manicotti, marmalade, maple syrup.
N: Make a newspaper, New England Clam Chowder, nuts, noodles, newtons, nachos.
O: Octopus, observatory, origami, organize, Operation, orchestra, oranges, Oreos, orzo, oatmeal.
P: Pie, pizza, puppets, Pirates of the Caribbean, make paper, pap test, painting, picnic, polka, pumpkin, pork, penne.
Q: Queen Latifah, quiche, Quincy Jones, quesadillas, quilting, quick breads, quiz shows, quarters.
R: Risk, road Trip, recycle, redecorate a room, romance, Redwall, roller coasters, river rafting, read, red licorice, ravioli, rice pudding, risotto.
S: Scrabble, Solitaire, simplify, sushi, Star Wars, scavenger hunt, SuDoku, Sleep over, swimming, salsa dancing, scrapbooking, salmon, Saganaki.
T: Tango, table tennis, teepees, typing, tap dancing, tic tac toe, tie shoes, trampoline, trek a trail.
U: Ugli fruit, unpack, Uptown Girls, Untamed Heart, Uno
V: Vin diesel (The Pacifier), vineyard, vermicelli, vacuum.
W: Water park, wash windows and walls, write a letter, walk, wink, wrinkles.
X: (e)xercise. X-men, X games, (e)xtreme sports, roman numeral for ten.
Y: Yahtzee, yo-yos, yogurt, yakisoba.
Z: Zoo, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Zaire, Zoom.

Don't forget about the adults in the house, this idea works equally well for mom and dad as it does for the kids. Watch the sunset for S, give each other a massage for M, have a candlelight dinner for C. Weave alphabetic romance into your life, your whole family will benefit.

Be sure to start a journal, blog or scrapbook recording your adventures, You'd be amazed at how many people will be interested in joining you as you celebrate the year from A-Z. Our online journal became another way for us to keep in touch with friends and family.

Try it; an alphabet of experiences is waiting for you.

This week I'll be posting updated suggestions - more adult pursuits like crafts, reading lists and even some sexy ideas to make this year great for your relationship too.

Please sign up in the comments section and let me know if you're interested in playing along with us. If enough people decide to join in the fun I'll start a little community for us with weekly email and ideas plus chatting and discussions. Don't stress, this is actually really easy. For example, the week I have surgery we'll probably set our iPods to the appropriate letter and call it done. YOU CAN DO THIS!