zane

A little while ago I took some photos of a sweet little 5 week old.  He is the son of Alaina (and Loren, of course!)... the beautiful pregnant lady I was able to also photograph.  Sweetest family.  The sweetest.

The goal was to get pictures of their little Zane while he was still the constantly sleepy and moldable.  Unfortunately, that was not possible, so at five weeks, we were finally able to make it work.  While still completely adorable, he wasn't too happy about having his picture taken.  He also wasn't too thrilled with us wanting him to remain still.  A wiggly worm, that one.  I kept telling Alaina that she was going to have to watch out for him when he starts crawling, which honestly seems like it will be soon.  We had to watch him very closely as he almost got out of the basket a few times.  He's going to be a mover and a shaker!  Alaina kept nursing him to get him to sleep but he would have no part of it!  

While I couldn't get focussed on him a lot of the time, I was able to get some good ones.  As you can tell, he is as sweet as he is squirmy!

 Alaina had a great idea of photographing their wedding rings on Zane's toes.  Super cute idea of which Zane was a little too fast and clever for us!

 In very short order he figured out how to brush the rings off of his foot using the free one.  Pretty smart kid - it was no fluke either.... he did it consistently every time we put the rings back on.  It was pretty hilarious!

 Don't let this cute little "sleeper" fool you......

 .....He was currently fighting sleep for all he was worth.  I happened to get a few snaps in while his eyes were heavy, but he managed to fight off the fatigue!

You can probably tell from the pictures, but Zane seems to be getting his mom's beautiful reddish/auburn hair.  He's going to be a looker, this one (isn't he already?).  Better watch out for him, Loren and Alaina!

wishing

Two weeks or so ago I asked the kids for their Christmas wish lists.  I'm not sure why exactly, as most Christmas shopping was done this summer.  But there is just something about writing out your wish list and getting all excited thinking about Christmas morning.  Only Lucy and Mia took me up on it, however.

Lucy:  make up (oh, joy), barbies, barbie house, pretend crown, books jewelry, pretend glasses, littlest pet (shop.... she ran out of room for that word)

Mia:  books, (then she wrote stuffed animals but scribbled that out and wrote no.... smart girl.  She realizes that she has accumulated plenty in the short time we've lived here.), pet shops, candy, fabric, ribbon (girl after my own heart), set of gel pens or good markers.  She later added to her list on the computer: canvases, paint, a Kindle, and money

Cade and Maddy ended up writing something up on the computer as well...

Cade: a fish (a held-over request from last year), lego, and an ipod

Maddy: cell phone, kindle books, money, candy.... the cell phone has been the thing on her mind for a long time and it has been the thing in the conversation for just as long.  I hope she won't be disappointed Christmas day.....

Then all of the kids wrote "Puppy!!!!!!!" on their list.  And they wrote puppy on my list as well!  I would like a puppy, but I sure don't want the work, so I'm a little in the middle on that one!

I will say that the whole Christmas list making is not nearly as fun as it used to be.  I think our kids today get ripped off.  They don't get the Sear Christmas catalogue. 

Life was way better when we had the Sears Christmas catalogue.  I remember getting super excited whenever it arrived in the mail.  Now that was a good day.  I got more excited than Steve Martin when the new phone books arrived.  And the Sears catalogue had a long run.  We've been reading "The Great Brain" books to Cade lately (fabulous books!) and they talk about it there - the books are set back in 1900 or so.

I wish my kids could sit around looking at the catalogue.  Its so fun, and it doesn't even feel greedy for some reason.  I've got so many great memories over it.  All of us kids marking in a different color or with our first initial the things that we wanted.  Good times.

Some of the best times were at Carolyn's house - and it didn't even have to be the Christmas edition....  Carolyn and I would have a sleepover on her hide-a-bed in the living room.  They had vellux blankets that were really soft - I always thought they must have been pretty rich because only nice hotels had those kind of blankets.  Now-a-days you only find vellux blankets at Motel 6 with cigarette holes burned in them.  I can just hear their dog Cinders barking at something and snuffling around while we sat on the bed and looked at the catalogue.  We would go through the entire - the entire - catalogue, and pick out our most and least favorite thing on each page.  Each page.  Oh, I lied.  We skipped the men's underwear section because that was gross.  But every other page, regardless of what it was - even boy's socks.  Now those - they were great times.

So what I do want?  Maybe this picture will help out.

I want our bed off the floor.  I'm tired of camping..... comfortable camping, but camping nonetheless.  Eric thinks it is great still being on the floor as he can sprawl out his limbs and rest them on the ground if need be.  Not me.  I don't need the extra space and I do want to make the room nice and pretty for a change.  And I don't want to camp anymore.

The rest of my wish list is all rather pricey.  What happened to my inexpensive taste?  I want a Kindle Touch, "Silhouette" craft cutter, a dishwasher and a VW bug so I have a small car to drive around in.  Oh, and apparently I want a puppy.

And what does Eric want?  That's a great question.

limited ingredient chicken lettuce cups or wraps or whatever

I had four kids at home from school today.  All sick - or saying they were sick.  Four kids.

Do you know how many kids I have?  Four.  I have four kids.

I kept thinking "Didn't we just do this?  We just did this."  

(quote from Ella Enchanted)

We just had five days in a row with four kids at home - actually, make that five, as we had a friend of Maddy's over for four nights while her parents were gone.  But she's a dream child....  Anyway, Mia has been home since Monday, and now the other three today as well.  I think, after the hours went one and they got less effective at faking it, only one - Maddy - was really sick (Mia most definitely was the first two days but I think she could have gone today after all.)  It is really hard to know sometimes and I don't want to spread their germs to other kids if they really are sick.  Tough call.

Anyway, I wasn't going to even make dinner today as it wasn't worth it with so much illness.  But by the time came for dinner, I realized they needed some real food.  I had planned to make lettuce wraps because we got a free head of lettuce on Sunday.  Makes sense, right?  Plan meals around free produce that will go bad if not used?   Yes, except as Eric pointed out, that free head of lettuce would have cost us about 17 cents......

I googled a recipe - thinking of PF Chang's lettuce wraps.  I haven't had them in years and boy are they tasty.  I copied two recipes down, thinking that I would use one of the two or a combination.  Then I realized that I only had a fraction of the required ingredients.  Hoisin sauce, oyster sauce, rice wine vinegar, sesame oil, dried chilies, dry sherry among other things where not stocked in my pantry.

But I was not deterred.  Nope, not me.  I figured I could just throw some stuff in there that are used in asian-ish cooking and it just might work.  And what better time to experiment with cooking than when your family is ill?

Lo and behold - it was quite fabulous!  I quickly jotted down what I think I sort of had done (not measured or anything) so I could keep it for later..... why reinvent something that I just invented, right?  So I thought I'd share it with you in case some day you too want lettuce wraps and are lacking in the asian liquids department.  Here it is:

Limited Ingredient Chicken Lettuce Wraps

(or, Using Only What I Had On Hand Chicken Lettuce Wraps)

Marinade:

juice from 1/2 an orange

3 T soy sauce

2 t corn starch

1 t ginger*

1 t red pepper flakes

1 t oil

four chicken breasts, cut into small pieces (like 1/2 inch or a little smaller)

Mix all the marinade ingredients together in a bowl and add the chicken pieces - let sit and marinade for about 15 minutes or so.  In the meantime....

Veggies and stuff:

1 red pepper

1/2 medium onion

8 mushrooms

3 cloves of garlic

4 oz or so of rice noodles, broken up

1/2 c chopped peanuts

Chop up the pepper, onion, mushrooms and garlic - I chopped it all really fine so that they kids wouldn't notice it.   I'm sneaky that way.  Cook them in a bit of oil for 3 minutes or so.  Cook the rice noodle pieces as directed on the package.  Do nothing with the peanuts... at least right now.

After the 3 minutes of veggies cooking, add the chicken and cook until you can't see any rawness.

Sauce:

juice of 1/2 an orange

4 T soy sauce

3 T honey

1 T cornstarch

3/4 t ginger*

1 t oil

Combine all this goodness.  Add it to the chicken and veggies when the chicken is cooked.  Cook for a few minutes until thickened.  Stir in the rice noodles and peanuts.  Cook for a minute or two or until it is all hot.

Serve with ice berg or bib lettuce pieces.  Take a leaf, pile in some of this goodness and wrap it up... eat!

It could definitely benefit from some water chestnuts, but those are hard to come by here.  Oh, and the ginger*....  I didn't have fresh, so I used powder, but if you have fresh on hand, that would be much better, I'm sure.

All but Cade loved it.  He made it abundantly clear that it was not his favorite meal.  I'm pretty sure he didn't mind it but he had decided ahead of time that he didn't like it.  He said it looked gross - so his mind was made up.  I gave him the often used Auntie Jann quote "looks gross, must taste good", but he didn't buy it.  That quote, by the way, is probably over thirty years old and has rung true that whole time.... she stated it once when we were having a yucky looking meal (don't recall what it was... do you remember mom?) and it has stuck ever since.

Everyone else thought it was great.  Then when they (the kids, not Eric...) found out there were mushrooms in it (after they had oohed and aahed and ate most of it), they weren't so sure.  Uh huh.  But in the end, they agreed that it was a keeper.

happy fallness

Apples, pumpkins, beautiful leaves, crisp air.......ahhh fall!
Apples - no problem (as long as they are gala or granny smith)
Pumpkins - funny looking, but available to some extent
Beautiful leaves - it would be hard to find an ugly one, but they are all still green (and won't be turning...)
Crisp air - it can get cool, but crisp?  Only if you climb one of the volcanos.

I adore fall.  And I miss fall so much.  I even missed it in California, even though there was some measure of "fallness".  But regardless of the weather and the surrounds, the internal clock is still regulated for fall.  When the calendar strikes September, it hits.
Halloween is something our family loves and misses a lot.  It has been our third year away from it.  To some degree, you can tell.  There was much less moaning and groaning about not being at the Wurzbach's, not being able to trick-or-treat in Rancho Solano (THE area for this activity in our home town).... but we still definitely missed it.  A lot.  While I don't miss a lot of the ugly decór that many homes sport, I certainly do miss the fun.  I have so many great memories from Halloween (note:  "so many memories" for me would mean something like 3 or 4, being of very little brain in the memory department).  It is sad to think that the kids, particularly Lucy and Cade, will have few of these memories.  Lucy might very likely be clueless as to the typical Halloween goings-on.
Out of sadness and determination, we decided to create our own new traditions.  A friend Katie and I thought it would be fun to have a fallish day during this break we are having (Días de los difuntos - or muertos, in other latin american countries, and Cuenca Day).  I emailed a bunch of families and invited them over, asking each family to either bring some food, or better yet, bring and activity.
This was yesterday - and it was a good time!
We started with my little event - caramel apples.

I made the apples ahead of time and let me tell you, it was no small task.  Last year I think I was so careful because of the newness of the altitude that the caramel turned out perfectly (for apples and pretzel rods).  This time I lost my head.

My first batch I made too soft, so I scraped the caramel off the apples (the kids helped with this!... I washed the apples really really well after!) and re-cooked it.  But then I cooked it too long.  Now I have some nice hard caramel candy.   Just what I wanted.....

The second batch (on the left side of the picture) seemed to be going well.  I calculated it all out and took the caramel off in time, dipped the apples, and all was well.  Unfortunately the caramel still was a little too hard.   The third batch (on the right side) came out great.  I cooked the caramel a mere 3 degrees (fahrenheit) less.  Only three degrees but it made a huge difference.  That is part of the joy of candy making at 9500 ft!  Well, we let the younger kids have the softer apples and the adults got to risk loosing their fillings.

Anyway, I had bowls of toppings - sprinkles, toasted coconut, chopped almonds, chopped peanuts, peanut butter chips (imported!) and cookie crumbs/chunks.

The kids - with adult supervision - wrote their name on the popsicle stick and then dipped their apple into melted chocolate.  Then then could dip them into the topping(s) of their choice.

Yum!

The paparazzi was in full effect:

After the apples were made, but before they were consumed, we headed out in the back yard to the pumpkin patch - brought to us by the Bryans family.  They bought pumpkins for all the kids to paint....

or to balance on their heads.

Or maybe their just brought paint to paint bodies with and the pumpkins were just for show.

But the pumpkins did all receive some paint, and they were a happy cheery sight all lined up together to dry.

After the pumpkins was my personal favorite part.  I was pretty darn excited when I found out what Katie was doing:  Bobbing for apples!!!!!

I love bobbing for apples!  And she even brought bottled water so that the kids wouldn't have to accidently swallow tap water.  She decided to make it into a relay race - boys against girls.

Lucy and Luke were the first up for their teams.  Luke was up with an apples in about 1/1000 of a second.  Lucy went in for it a few times and got water up her nose and freaked.

Soon after Cade was up (with Molly in the background).  Cade went at it fiercely but after struggling a few seconds, came up screaming that his eyes burned.  I guess the acid I put in the water wasn't a good idea...... kidding, just kidding.

Mia was the sole Ackerperson to come up with an apple in her mouth.  In fact, if you note her hand has its death grip on another apple.  She had to go twice.

After the race was over (the boys winning by a core) Cade decided to give it a go when not under pressure.

A gave him a little coaching and he came up with a beauty in just a few seconds.

Just had to throw this one in......

Three of my four kids reacted to this game the three ways I would have reacted to almost any game as a kid:

1) Don't do it at all.  Don't know what the reason was here, but my reasons would have been because of fear of failure.  Whatever the case or reasons were, it makes me sad - missing out on a lot of fun.

2) Do it wrong.  This was the main reason why #1 happened so often for me.  I figured I would do it wrong so I just didn't want to do it at all.  Lucy did it wrong - but I think that is only because she didn't know any better.

3) Fake an injury.  A very standard go-to for me.  Any sign of failure and I would fake an injury or sickness.  Often the injury or sickness came before-hand so I would have to experience failure.  I'm pretty sure that is what happened with a certain perfectionistic child.  You usually don't get "burned out" eyes from bottled water.

The worst of it was my reaction.  I got so frustrated with all three of them.  I think I just don't want them to miss out on stuff or be so hard on themselves like I was.  I want them to be able to laugh at themselves - something I never did.  I want them to have fun regardless of whether they are the best at something or not.  But that doesn't excuse how I behaved.  I was no-where near the kind, loving and tenderhearted mom that I want to be.  

Apologies were issued.

Moving on....  After the bobbing was done, the kids had a ball sticking their heads in the water and soaking themselves quite thoroughly.  I'm sure it was rather refreshing as it was a rather warm day.  I'd find other ways of refreshment, however.

Then it was time for the goodies.  I neglected to take a picture of all the yumminess brought.  Its for the best though, as you would have been super jealous that you weren't here.  Marlo made scones and apple butter, Nancy made pumpkin bread, Casey made his fabulous salsa, Beth made yummy gooey caramel apple buns, and Katie made rice krispie/cocoa puff squares.  Oh, and my crack-your-tooth-I'll-send-you-the-dental-bill caramel apples.

Lots of yumminess and lots of fun.  I think this will be an annual event.
And I'm happy to say that no teeth were actually  harmed in the course of this day.

But if they didn't brush before bed - that's their own problem!

highlights of the big game

No - not that big game.... the World Series game 7 last night.  I can't talk about that because my good friends are from Texas and they are a little devastated.  So I just can't bring it up - although I guess I already did....  The sad/ironic thing is that their eldest son's team is the Cardinals, much to his chagrin, so he had to don his cardinals uniform today for his game.  He tried to get away with wearing his Rangers hat - but that didn't get to far!

The game, or games I'm talking about are our Saturday morning baseball games.  Lets start with Lucy, shall we?

Her and her friend Molly did well, naturally.  It goes without saying, yes?  

 Hit the ball, go to first base, high-five the coach, and all is good (Doesn't the coach know that the high-five is passe and the new, much more cool thing to do is the pound?  Get with the times dude!  We won't talk about my slow transition to the pound.....)

Apparently Lucy got a little confused with the 7th inning stretch.  It became the 6th inning relax-on-the-infield-my-teammates-can-cover-for-me-while-I-rest-a-little-'casue-T-ball-is-excessively-strenuous time.

 She even had a little company.

 I'm not sure why the coaches didn't get her tuckus up and at 'em.  I would have but my tuckus was strapped to my friends camping chair.  Whatever the case, it must have revived her - look at that swing and the distance that ball carried.

 Second base was a good place to "readjust" - it was almost like a major league game with the shifting going on....

 Good sportsmanship is highly encouraged, even if they play the same team every single Saturday (there are only two t-ball teams).  It is hilarious watching as the coaches have them stand in a straight line, put out their hands and then tell them to walk.

On to the big leagues - machine pitch.  Cade and Jordan are on the "bad-news bears" team - actually they are the Orioles, but they could be the bad news bears.  They have the team where the majority shows up about 2 minutes after the game has started, and they aren't "stacked" like the other teams are.  Sort of the leftover kids would do have some connection to the people who organize the whole thing.  And it has showed - losses - mind-blowing losses with very few hits.  But today was a new day!  The practiced batting the other day and it paid off.  We got some hits - a lot of hits!  And they WON against the undefeated team.  Yah boy!

 Cade really likes playing catcher - that is him above with all the gear on.  I'm not sure why he likes it so much as the gear is all much to big for him and it looks like he can hardly move in it (and doesn't much, either).  But he'll grab a ball every now and then and for some reason he loves it.  That was always my nightmare position as the ball constantly came directly at your face.  Fortunately (?) I was so unskilled I hardly ever had to worry about it.

But my boy?  He's got skills - skilz with a z even.

 I'm delighted to inform you that the Orioles won 24-15.  Oh yeah!

And then a little cuteness for you all....

After the game, we stayed and watched Luke's game for a while, but after being in the sun for three hours we were done, so we left before it was over.  And we were hungry - very hungry.  We drove past this sight on the way home.

 You can tell I've lived here a while now.... this sight didn't even spoil my appetite.  But the following sight just about did....

There were live models on the second floor window display of a store called "Valdi".  It wasn't really surprising as their billboards, that are all over, are a lot like that.  It reminds me of some clothing stores/lines in the US as well.

I'm not exactly sure how advertising clothing using half-naked models makes sense.  If you're trying to sell clothes, why not show the clothes?  I guess its just me....

longing for

The perfect day in my mind right now:

Cold - so much so that you pretty much have to snuggle on the sofa in your jammies and a very soft blanket (but not so much so that your feet and nose would freeze going to the bathroom or kitchen).  Watching movies - fun, feel good Christmas ones that I haven't seen before or haven't seen for a while (I think those might be few).

Company - Eric and the kids (who are mellow and well behaved).  If we had a ginormous sofa and large screen TV, I'd have some family friends over as well (with their kids also being mellow and well behaved - although that goes without saying...)

Eating - yummy, hot, mildly spicy chili in a bread bowl with cheese melted over the top, runny over the sides (french onion soup style).  The cheese should be slightly crispy on top.  Dessert/snacks would be my Auntie Phyllis' ginger snap cookies (I had the recipe once, lost it in all the moves.... but it might not work up here anyway...), my mom's chocolate log-roll and some almond roca (since this is my dream world - the previously mentioned deliciousness would be calorie free so I could have as much as I want).

Drinking - ice cold Diet Dr. Pepper in my perfect turquoise soda-drinking glass (only one left - the other one broken... the downside of thin glass) with the chili.  Then ice cold milk (from North America preferably.... still not completely adjusted to the milk here) with dessert, and a side of Chai Tea - the creamy kind but could still use a dollop of whipped cream and a sprinkle of cinnamon. 

Sigh.