We knew it was coming sooner or later, this shock to the system: 50 degrees in January, unseasonably warm weather, followed by lots of snow. Winter has finally arrived and it’s beautiful beyond any snowy landscape I’ve ever seen.
The words “heavy laden” come to mind. (click for larger images)
It's hard to see, but there was some glittery blowing snow.
The main path on the other side of the bridge is nearly blocked by the bending branches.
Pretty much every Saturday for as long as I can remember I have made pancakes (or occasionally waffles) for breakfast. Natalie loves them and basically could eat them every day. Usually there are enough pancakes left over to last a couple days into the next week, at least for Natalie. This past Saturday, however, the deviant dog ate about 8 pancakes off the cooling rack on the counter when no one was paying attention. She would have eaten them all except that she couldn’t reach them all. The remaining 4 pancakes didn’t last very long into the next week since they were eaten on Sunday, the next day.
Seeing that Natalie must be going through pancake withdrawal by now, I made pancakes this morning, despite knowing that it would make the morning a little more hectic. Plus I was tired from the dog waking us up at 4:26 a.m. (a whole hour and 24 minutes later than the previous night, but I digress!) I had the kids go get dressed first so as to not waste the time waiting for the food to be ready. When they came back down to the kitchen it was “perfect timing” as Cale announced because I had their plates ready and had even cut up strawberries to go with the pancakes.
I poured on the syrup and Natalie asks “Can I have whipped cream?” Without really thinking, my first reaction was to say “No, you don’t really need whipped cream, do you?” giving the lame, pathetic, and lazy excuse that the can of whipped cream was buried in the back of the fridge (which it really was) and I didn’t want to get it out. To which she replied matter of factly, “If we had guests over, we would have whipped cream.”
Wow. Not what I was expecting her to say, but true. She was right. Why is that? Do I want to impress others? Probably. Do others sometimes express more appreciation than my own family? Sometimes, yes. But don’t I also neglect to thank and show appreciation to people in my family? Is this something like the “life is short, use the fine China/eat dessert first/don’t hold back” lesson? I think so.
So, she got whipped cream on her pancakes. Cale only wanted it on his strawberries.
To all past and future guests, now you know.
My standard pancake batter recipe: 1 egg 1 cup flour 1/4 cup sugar 1/3 cup oil 1 cup milk dash of salt dash of Penzeys pumpkin pie spices (or just nutmeg works too) 1 tablespoon baking powder I mix everything together except the baking powder with a wire wisk and then add the baking powder last and gently mix it in.Once upon a time, there were two rocks, sitting nicely on the ground, until one morning a young canine* quickly grabbed them in her mouth, one in sight of her female keeper, the other in secret.
* young canine shown after a bath with cute ears that look "crimped" when wet
This adorable, but deviant, young canine liked to chew and eat many things that were not food such as shoes, socks from the laundry basket, sticks and wood chips, and apparently rocks.
Because the young canine developed “tummy troubles” that evening, her male keeper took her to the doctor the next morning, a Saturday, for expensive x-rays to determine the location of the thought to be single rock in her digestive system. Much to both keepers’ surprise, there were two rocks inside their pup!
Then, after keeping her keepers up all night for two nights, the young canine expelled the two rocks out of her mouth at an early a.m. hour, thereby saving her keepers many, many dollars in imminent vet bills and possibly saving her own life as well. The rocks were finally free. And there was much rejoicing!
The end.
How many takes does it take to make a Christmas card?
Day 1: 14 takes, no good
Day 2: 62 takes
#16: pretty good, but let's try for a better one (boy's a bit Yoda-like, girl's glasses a bit low, picky-picky, i know)...
#20: dog not looking, kids cracking up...
#30: ok, but girl has shirt issues...
#32: dog not cooperating, girl annoyed...
…really wanted dog in the picture (really, really wanted whole family in a certain other location, but didn’t plan ahead – my fault!), but decided to try with just the kids…
#44: finally chosen as the winner
I must not forget to mention the self-induced online card ordering fiasco (yes, I admit I should have just let the photographer husband handle it using the normal tried and true and better method). Don’t be surprised if we do digital greetings from now on!
Who started the whole Christmas card photo thing anyway?!?
Meet Hindia. She lives in Ethiopia.
Steve first “met” her through Compassion International in 1996 when she was about 5 years old, (at the same concert where he met the Pastor of a newly forming church that would become our “home” for the next 14 years and more significant in my life than I can even attempt to write here), before we were even married, while I lived half a continent away. It is because of her that I now spend some time at concerts and other events helping others meet a child that will change their lives. (By the way, it was during the first larger event I volunteered at, that I unexpectedly “met” Sandrah from Uganda, the other child we sponsor, who shares an exact birthdate with Natalie.)
Hindia is now 20 years old and we got this in the mail earlier this week.
We had received an earlier notification a few months ago to let us know that the time was coming “within a year,” so it was not without warning. Prior to that, her age alone left us wondering when she would be “too old” for sponsorship (though it is not entirely dependent on age, but also grade level in school and probably other factors). This current letter from Compassion indicates that she will be graduating “soon.” Still, even with time to have thought about it, I am left wondering this: What do you write to someone when it may be your last chance, to someone whose mother died before you knew her and only now do you fully realize that maybe you could have been more motherly, to someone you could have written to more often, something that won’t be lost in translation? I am at a loss for words…
At the same time, I remember that I know much more about Compassion now than I did years ago and I have read amazing firsthand stories from people who have traveled the world meeting children like her. It makes me stop thinking so much about what to write in the final letter and start wondering if she has a collection of all the letters and photos we did send (like nearly every other child I have read about). I wonder what she will be doing in the future and where she will be when she is done with school and beyond. I wonder what it was like to grow up without a mother. Will she get married, have children of her own? I find I have so many more questions, to which I will most likely never know the answers in this lifetime, and I realize maybe I don’t have a loss for words after all.
The last year is almost a blur for me. I feel like I’m in a time warp where yesterday and 365 days ago are one in the same. I realize that I have to look back through photos to remember a lot of it. I find myself more grateful than probably any other time in my life, for even little things, and do not want to take anything or anyone for granted.
Some of the pics that sparked memories or represent something more, in chronological order from December 2010 to December 2011:
It turns out that narrowing down a year’s worth of photos from a new place is not easy, nor is labeling them consistently with all nouns or verbs or adjectives that end with -ing (at least they all end with -ing). A few other words I would add are loving (God, people, and the area), meeting (new friends), missing (people and places), & listening (to music, which has meant a lot to me this year).
Those are the 2 paint colors that were involved in last week’s Thanksgiving painting project. The kids had picked them out a couple months ago when we were at the local hardware store. Not only do they love looking at paint chips, but that day we stumbled upon a buy-one-get-one-free paint sale, a deal too good to pass up, and just the motivator I needed to get going on decorating the kids’ rooms (or so I thought). The 2 cans of paint then sat in the hall between the garage door and laundry room until they were sufficiently covered in dust and the motivation really kicked in, which happened to coincide with Thanksgiving day.
sssssssssssss 
I still have to hang some stuff on the walls in Cale’s room and have since hung a couple things in Natalie’s, but I’m thinking that was pretty much the cleanest they will ever be, and that alone is worth documenting.
I couldn’t help noticing
that the forest seemed to be blazing,
even clouds glowing 
like I’d never seen before,
the sky on fire.
First Christmas gifts of the season…
for children we don’t know, a boy and a girl…
maybe the first gift he or she will have ever received…
Looking forward to learning later on which country our boxes were sent to as well as reading stories about the millions of children all over the world who received a shoebox of love this year.
The photos below were taken across the street from the end of our driveway, near the mailboxes, on part of a 50-acre chunk of woods owned by the county.
First the sign went up a couple months ago. Then, the box with the pink piece of paper inside was added about a week ago.
I made a few calls to find out what the deal was since no one bothered to clue us in.
This happened next, a couple days ago:
Any guesses as to what’s going on?
s
Update:
Most of the guessing took place on facebook, where I made the reveal that this is the location of a soon-to-be cell tower. I think I have made a point to tell everyone I know that we got “No Signal” here on our iPhone (with AT&T service). Some people with Verizon service, if they jumped through flaming hoops in the corner of the driveway with the stars properly aligned, could get 1 bar. We moved to this house in March and continued to keep paying a good chunk of change every month for no signal within a 5 mile radius of our house, because it worked in town…sometimes. We literally just cancelled the service about 2 weeks ago and now there will be a tower about 1/4 mile away.
So, we’ll see what we’ll do once the tower exists. It was almost a point of pride for me to say that I lived somewhere with no cell signal. Maybe this is a lesson. There is also a highway about to be built through the woods just to the east of us, something we didn’t know about until after we had made an offer on the house (probably what is driving the construction of the cell tower). While I miss the iPhone, part of me is disappointed that the “machine” of development is taking some of the “lost” out of our forest. It seems to be inescapable unless you own so much land that you have a big enough buffer all around you that is “safe.”
