Is anyone still out there?

I haven't blogged in a while. I thrive on production - of producing tangible things. I love it. With my limited time, I have been creating, and blogging has fallen by the wayside. Latest and greatest stuff:

clothes from Goodwill turned into really cute clothes for my kids - for pennies!

metal strips attached to the wall in my kids room and coordinating magnets to hold the hundreds of works of art produced by their efficient little hands

Magnet board for Lucy's room

pillows for porch swing

new potted plants

painted all the cinder blocks the same color and replaced the dead bushes with live ones. I'm trying extra hard not to kill these ones too

Pulled out TONS of monkey grass - that is back breaking labor

and the most exciting... a hotter body. At least that's the idea. Who knew a person could run 11 miles and still have their looks-five months-pregnant belly? When I lose the false-alarm-belly I'll post a picture. Don't hold your breath!

No pic, but I also did a temple dress for a friend of mine - it turned out beautifully.

I will probably not be blogging anytime soon, because next up:

make cork board to cover conspicuous electric box (yes, I know it's against the law, Dad)

make art for beautiful frame I finished MONTHS ago

somehow turn a fabulous tree stump I salvaged from our neighbors yard into side table. Anybody know how to hollow and shellac a tree stump? That thing is HEAVY!

make Easter dresses for all three ladies in our family. (Paul has to work that day, so we don't have to coordinate his tie with our ensemble.)

Sand down, paint, and recover two excellent chairs I got at Goodwill for $20 bucks each.

And now because this has been horribly impersonal, I'll share some of my thoughts of late:

On a very typical day, during a very typical medical rotation, amidst all my typical chores, I had a revelation: Paul is the rock star of our family. He had just walked in the door. He was immediately tackled by Axel, because he's the fastest. He grabbed Paul's hand, "Daddy, Daddy, look at the pictures I made you!" Earlier that day Axel decided that Paul would love it if he made 4 excellent pictures and tape them up in various, visible, knee-height places. Paul, in fact, did love them. The ever snuggly Maggie rushes up begging, "Take down to Chine town, Daddy!" That's Paul's cue to pick her up and throw her on the couch. Of course Axel wants to be 'taken down to China town' too. Lucy crawls over to see what the commotion is about, is too cute to not pick up, and is covered in kisses by the biggest lips in our family. And, there are still kisses left for me, paired with a sincere, 'how was your day?' A few minutes earlier I was telling the kids, "Hurry and clean up. Daddy'll be home any minute. Let's have it clean for him!" The dinner is for Paul. If the kids don't like it, I'm ok if they starve. They're good scavengers. But I make dinner thinking, "Paul is going to LOVE this dinner." And he does. He makes sure to tell me how much he likes dinner. In fact, the kids mimic him, practically yelling, "MMMMM. This is De-Licious. You. Are. The. Cooker!" But the point is, even though Paul is gone a lot, we spend a lot of our time thinking about him, wanting him to be pleased, preparing for him to come home and be pleased. I pictured a red carpet rolled out through our front door and Paul walking in, crazed fans clapping and screaming, camera lights flashing. And I thought, 'that's a lot of pressure'. What about when he has a terrible day, or worse, when he's post-call and super tired, and his 'fans' are super crazed because it's been longer since they've seen him. He doesn't give in to his slugishness and sit down and just be cranky because he feels cranky and tell everybody to be quiet and give him some space. Well I guess he could do that, but it would really hurt everyone's feelings. So, no matter how hard and stinky of a day he has, he comes home happy. And after all the emotional energy it takes to be empathetic with and explaining to sick patients and sick patient's families, he comes home and keeps on expending that emotional energy at home to all the people who still need him to be 'available'. When does he get a break? And I realized I shouldn't complain when he wants to see a movie on date night.

Roller Derby

Alisha and I went to the season opener of the Nashville Rollergirl rollerderby game:

Ummm... It was pretty crazy. I think I can best describe it as this: gold miniskirts, mohawks, thick black eye shadow, fishnet stockings, tattoos, and lots of girls on rollerskates shoving eachother and wiping out. There was this one girl who was probably 6 feet tall, 220 lbs called "Hildebeast". You can imagine...



The video doesn't really do justice to the experience, but at least will give you a little glimpse of what it was like. It looks like everybody is just skating in circles, but there really are rules. There are two "jammers" behind the whole pack of defense skaters ("pivots" and "blockers") that are trying to maneuver safely through the pack. Once they lap the pack once, they get a point for each successive person they pass. Rounds are 2 minutes each. There actually is a lot of strategy that goes into the game. I'm not sure what constitutes a foul, but I can tell you that pretty much everything goes except outright punches. It was pretty crazy.

Here's a video on Youtube from an older game, but it shows off Hildebeast:



At halftime these guys on modified 8 feet tall bikes jousted eachother. I kept thinking someone was going to break an ankle, but nobody got too badly injured:



Alisha thought it was the best date of the year.

Merry Christmas to all who read my blog

For your consideration: my latest favorite breakfast, crancakes. It is a creation from a cranberry pie gone wrong. I made the pie later and I prefer the cakes. Here's the recipe, now perfected.

Crancakes:
2 cups white flour
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 tps. baking soda
1 1/2 tsp. baking powder
8 cups cranberries
1 cup sugar
1/4 cup orange juice concentrate
2 eggs
1/2 cup melted butter
1 tsp. vanilla

Sauce:
1 cup full fat sour cream (low fat is sour)
1/4 cup OJ concentrate
sugar or light corn syrup (optional)

Combine in large bowl flour, salt, baking soda and powder. In a blender, puree half the cranberries and half the sugar. The sugar will draw out juices from the berries to make a very thick, bright red puree. Add 1/4 cup of the OJ concentrate, eggs, vanilla, and blend till just combined. Dump on flour mixture, do not stir. Blend remaining cranberries and remaining sugar. Add to flour, stirring just till combined. Cook on griddle in batches. Batter will be very thick, so flatten a little in the pan. Because of the super-high fruit content cakes will take longer to cook than regular pancakes. I use two pans, to speed up the whole process. While the cakes are cooking, mix together the sour cream and 1/4 cup OJ concentrate. Taste, add sugar or light corn syrup if you prefer it sweeter. (If you've never had sour cream sweet, try it, you'll love it. You can thank me later.)
Serves 4 hungry adults.

I invite you all to try them, improve on the recipe and comment. This is my Christmas gift to you all. If I was more ambitious I'd do cards with update letters included, however, I spend too much time eating for that.

Thief

On Sunday after church, we came home to our back door broken. It was a thief. And they did take stuff. Oh no, have they found my stash of horribly expensive jewelry?! Have they found the vault of original paintings?! What about the safe of unmarked bills? Why would a thief come to our house? Well he took Paul's back pack, but threw out his scrubs. (Thank goodness or Paul would have to go to work naked. Last time that happened it didn't go over too well.) In the back pack was Paul's favorite $40 ICU book. The thief also took our Wii, one controller, and our bluetooth on the printer. We called the cops, made a report, put cardboard over the door, and then went to our friend's house for dinner. Next day I got more educated about home insurance, called a few handy-man businesses, a guy came out, and we determined that I could do it myself.


So I unscrewed the insert, which made a HUGE mess. Sweep, unscrew, sweep, unscrew. Cover empty hole with cardboard. Drive down to pick up new glass for $68 - I thought that was a great deal!
Unfortunately you have to have someone hold the glass on the outside when you screw in from the inside, or else I could say that I did this job completely without my husband's help. And wouldn't you know, even though I did all that work beautifully by myself, he was still coaching me on how to screw in properly. Anyway, due to his wonderful input, our new door looks great.Here's all the glass. Kinda pretty.
So, the good news is, they caught the guy who did it. Apparently, later that day the kid stole a suburban, while the owner was watching. The owner jumped in his brother's car and chased the thief down, crashed into him, pulled him out of his car, punched him and called the police. Well the police found that he had a backpack with a Wii in it. So we got our Wii and controller and backpack back, but the ICU book and bluetooth are gone forever. Paul went to court to testify today and he'll be locked up for 6 months. The kid was only 17. The cops say he does this stuff all the time and needs to learn his lesson. Crime doesn't pay. So remember that next time you want somebody else's Wii.

Twilight

Thank you Jen and Annie for this memorable photo.

I saw Twilight last night. It was fun. Edward was much more attractive than I had expected from the previews. Good girls movie. I may even read book #2. Someone in our stake reserved a theater; more than 500 women (and a few men) showed up. The theater even let us in early at 10:00. There was lots of screaming and howling when Edward entered, and it made me miss being a teenager, with all its forbidden passion, and o so distant and unknown future. I don't often miss being a teenager.
In high school my friends and I would go to 'town' and find all sorts of things to do. Once I ran with Marshal Wiebe across a train bridge that was really really long. We actually only made it half way and then I chickened out, and we ran back. On New Years of 1997, I was at a church dance where my virgin lips kissed about 8 handsome strangers. My friends and I had a competition to see who could kiss the most. What hoochies! My first date ever was a octodate with my brother's friend. We had a scavanger hunt, knocking on doors of our town of 1000. Later we ate spaghetti with our hands tied behind our backs. Kim Drewery's Dad fixed pallates for a living. One cold winter about 12 of us piled on top of eachother on a pallate, and held on for dear life as he pulled us behind his truck. We were freezing, but it was so fun. Benjamin Bickman. What a hottie. I had the biggest crush on him. I was a sophmore, he was a senior. He asked me on a date once and brought me a red rose. I melted. He went on a mission and I dreamt he would miss me. Nope. One of many earth shattering heartbreaks. Oh the agony of heartbreak! I can remember giving boys 'the look'. The look that said, "You are so crazy about me you can't help yourself." I smile. My eyes say, "Too bad you'll never get any closer than this look. I'll be happy to torture you as long as you want to suffer." Oh the evil pleasure of heartbreak!
As fun as all that is, and as unfun as my life is so often now, I'm happy I am here, and not in high school. I am fulfilled in unselfish motherhood. I feel peace in my steady self-betterment. I am wildly in love and have security in its unending warmth. (Now I'm getting cheesy).
Sometimes it's nice to be reminded of the sweet sting of new love.
Speaking of love, mine is gone at work. Mundane, but necessary. I really like eating, so I'm glad he's there. He sure is handsome. He has big lips. You ever notice that? He's nice too, and funny. He picks his nose a lot. He says boogers don't have germs, they're just dirt that got stuck in your nose. He likes playing with the kids and is a sucker when they want a drink at bedtime.
Twilight was good. I may make him watch it with me.

Update from down south

This is what I should be doing right now, because I am post-call:
But instead I am going to make a massive post. A blog log, so to speak.

First off, I just want to remind everyone how tough my kids are:
Yes, those are live snakes my kids were handling. Live POISONOUS snakes. Like pythons or something. And my kids loved it. Yep.

And now, I'd like to tell everybody about one of Axel and I's favorite new past times. Golf. Frisbee Golf. There is a totally amazing course pretty close by that has 18 holes + 3 bonus holes. Axel is getting pretty good at chucking a frisbee. The only problem is that he is always trying to swap his semi-lame frisbee for my high-power frisbee fairway driver. That's not going to happen until Axel is tough enough to take his dad to town. Chinatown. And it is HIGHLY unlikely to happen while I am wearing boy scout pants.
Alisha and I took the whole family to a corn maze the other day. It was my wife's idea, and I have to give her credit, it was pretty fun. Axel and Maggie took turns leading the way, and we pretty much made it straight through.

Here's an aerial shot of the maze:
I took that shot from our helicopter ride. No wait, I mean our family hang-gliding ride.

OK, so I just got it off the Gentry Farms website. But you can imagine...

OK, now to talk more about my kids. Isn't Maggie so cute?
Little do you know that she sometimes is cranky and needs to do time-outs. The funny thing is that she really likes time-outs. She can be so INCREDIBLY cranky, and I'll say (very firmly), "Maggie, go do a time-out right now!" and she'll just say, "OK" and go to the nearest corner and stand in it. When I tell her she is done, she comes out of the corner and is the sweetest little girl again.
Lucy is quickly growing up, and we are all hoping she takes after her big sister. I think she will. Look at this cute smile:
She gets her good looks from her mom...
and not from Axel.
Last but not least, I just wanted to show off that my family took a little vacation to the one and only original Jack Daniel's distillery. You might have to click on the picture to zoom in and read the sign for proof.

I was in the basement watching and enjoying conference and the kids were messing around upstairs. Suddenly I notice that all was quiet upstairs and I'd remembered hearing Maggie drag a chair into the kitchen a few minutes earlier. One of two possibilities could have occurred: 1 - Maggie had gotten into the cookies and eaten all 12 of them. 2 - Maggie got bored of the kitchen and had fallen asleep. She was really tired because she went to a sleep study last night where they analyzed her sleeping (we think she has sleep apnea and needs her tonsils removed). Anyway she got less sleep than usual and she was tired. It is not uncommon for Maggie to fall asleep randomly if she is left alone. Usually I find her in her bed, or Axel's top bunk, or on the floor. However, I was pretty certain she'd eaten all the cookies and was revelling that Mom was busy and hadn't found her. Muahahaha.
Please scroll down to see how I found her.


























Option 1 and 2 happend. Besides being horrifyingly dangerous for Maggie to fall asleep on the stove, it's also pretty cute. I really do watch my kids.

She was covered in snickerdoodle crumbs.