Portraits by Atalie

Before we left Ohio a friend volunteered to come out and brave portrait taking with our family. It’s not easy to take portraits when your family includes:

A. A tiny little firecracker (with a scraped nose to prove it) who has her own ideas of what she would and would not like to do at any given moment and you're just plain lucky if her ideas ever line up with yours.

B. A small boy who often screams and looks in the opposite direction if a camera is pointed at him for more than five seconds.

C. A grown man who is just not that crazy about trying to get tiny firecracker and small boy to be photogenic while enduring the 'pain' (wives, you understand, right?) of family portraits in the first place.

Yes, our photographer was so brave!

And she did wonderfully at capturing some great moments, despite the immense challenges she faced! We were so thankful for her willingness and generosity to practice on us.

Here are just a handful of my favorites, along with the one you see on my blog sidebar...

You can check out Atalie's page here. If you’re in Ohio… maybe she’s the photographer you’ve been looking for! I'd OBVIOUSLY highly recommend her!

Whimpering Down the Hall

It was past bedtime and I heard my boy whimpering down the hall. I hopped off the couch, tread the path to the bedroom door and found my boy on his stomach crying to himself. I dropped to knees and instantly knew that this was no bedtime-stalling ploy.

Something was wrong.

I lifted him to my lap and wrapped him tight into my arms. With my words I gently drew out his worry.

"Mama, I don't want to die."

Oh my. Can a parent ever be ready for this moment?

My sweet, precious little boy. Scared of dying. So innocent, so fun, so full of childhood joy, yet aware of the reality that our lives here on Earth come to an end.

In between his sobs he told me more. I shushed him, rocked him, held him tighter. I told him all the things I could to calm him. I told him that he doesn't have to worry. That if we believe that Jesus died for our sins then we never actually die, we just go to a better place. I told him about heaven. And about how Mommy and Daddy will be there. I told him that he'll get to be with Jesus forever if he believes. I told him that most people are really old when they die and that he is so young still. I told him that life after we die is way better than life before we die. I said it all. I said it again. I breathed the reality of the words that I spoke. I wished I could say it better. I wished I could make him understand.

We prayed.

He calmed.

I laid him ever so tenderly back on his pillow like the fragile and beautiful and valuable gift he is. Then he asked for socks cause his toes get cold if they get out of the blanket. I put socks on him and kissed his toes. I tucked him in tight. I kissed his teary face ten thousand times.

As I sat there stroking his face for a few moments, heart bursting with love for him, I thought about how thankful I am to be able to hope towards heaven. How blessed we are. How un-deservedly blessed I am to know the love of Jesus in a personal way. To have assurance of life after death. To have someone loving and real and involved in my life to put my hope in. He is so much more than this world has to offer.

I have an imminent joy-unfathomable God-filled forever to put this earthly life and all of it's temporary struggles into perspective.

May I live in that reality and the reality that many... most in this world cannot say the same. May I play my part. May The One who died instead of me be pleased with the way I lived...

Tried and True Recipe: Crepes

Crepes for breakfast on Friday (the first weekend day in our region of the world) became a tradition a few years ago. It’s stuck and I’m so glad.

Today, the recipe! I used to use the recipe in Joy of Cooking, but then I discovered the recipe below from Gina’s Skinny Recipes. It’s much healthier. This one I’m gonna stick with. You should know that I normally double it and have a few left over for snacks later in the day. Although I wouldn't’ have any left over if I didn’t cut my son off at 4 or 5. He loves these things…

You’ll need:

1 cup flour (I do half wheat and half white)

1 1/2 cups 1% milk (I actually use whole cream milk cause that is what we have)

1/3 cup egg whites (or 2 large egg whites)

1 whole egg

1 tsp oil

Toss all the ingredients in your blender and whirl it around, (if you don’t have a blender, just whisk it till your arm gets tired) then put the lid on it and throw it in the fridge for the night. Or just use it right away if you failed to plan ahead. But they’ll turn out waaaay better if you whip it up the day before. Trust me on this one. There is some scientific explanation about the gluten in the flour changing and blah blah blah. Just trust me, okay?! Thanks. Also, it’s just a nice feeling to go to bed knowing that your special weekend breakfast is already half made!

In the morning, give it another whirl in the blender while you heat up your pan or two pans, if you’re an efficiency addict like me.

Then check out this post for my frying tips and our toppings of choice. Actually, you probably shouldn’t wait until that point in your cooking process to check out that post. Cause then you’re bound to have some smoking pans and a fire-alarm going off as you hunt down your laptop, boot it up, try to remember what it was you were going to look up, find the web-page and read the long wordy post about frying crepes.

Yeah, you should definitely read that ahead of time. K?

And don’t be discouraged if you first couple tries don’t seem quite right. It took me a long time to improve my technique and they still turn out different every time. Luckily, they don’t have to look good to taste good!

OKFSCMST for Short

I don't know if you remember or not, but I promised you about a million years ago that I’d share some photos from our time in Texas. I don’t like to be a liar (except outrageous exaggerations, like in the previous sentence) and I want this to be included in this blog (aka my online family photo album), so here is a long post of photos from the amazing week we spent in South Texas at the end of June.

By long, I mean loooong.

We only make it down there every few years, but it sure is one of our favorite places to visit. The friends and hospitality are incredible! It was our first time visiting with two kiddos. And if you’ve ever traveled with two kiddos then you know that sitting around ‘relaxing’ just doesn’t really work. Staying busy is better, in many cases. So the week we spent down south felt a lot like summer camp to me. Yes, we did feel relaxed and we took it easy (and did a lot of other things and got to catch up with other amazing people who aren’t pictured or mentioned here), but we also did lots of fun things together… summer-camp like!!

Let's call it the One of a Kind Family Summer Camp Week in South Texas. That's OKFSCWST for short.

This is the location of our 'summer camp'. I love the Brown Ranch. And the people there. Love love love.

And the cows that surround it. (Sweet N learned to “Moooo” while we were there. Ha!)

So here comes a long list of camp activities in no particular order:

1. Swimming!

Big water tanks meant for large bovine animals to drink out of also make fabulous swimming pools.

Little fishy H practiced swimming underwater.

Then Sweet N grabbed a territorial bee and got stung in the hand. She cried for about 4.5 seconds and then got royal treatment from the compassionate medics. ;)

Sweet lil’ friends. One of the major highlights. (Along with their parents!)

2. Paddle Boating

Oh my word. Why does it look like he’s grown up so much since June?!

The kiddos fed the fish while we paddled around.

3. Fig Jam Canning (I know… something for everyone!)

The figs were from a tree in the front yard.

This was my first canning experience… which I was grateful for! I hope to start canning when we get back home. Except I don’t have a fig tree in my yard. Boo. In fact I don’t have a yard.

4. Bird Watching

Road Runners are smaller than I thought! And they don’t actually say “MmnnBeeepBeep” either. Bummer.

5. Front Porch Chillin’ (Captions not necessary) :)

6. Water Balloon Fighting

Mike and Kasey spent at least an hour filling these balloons.

Then the kids chased,

tossed,

dodged

and laughed!

And then the basket was empty again in less than five minutes. Oh my!

7. Pedal Go-Karting

Check out that sky. There are not many places I have seen a sky so amazing and huge and beautiful as I have seen in Texas.

As soon as N would climb on the car, she’d whip out her toy cell phone. Gee, I wonder where she learned that?!

8. Day Tripping

We took a day trip up to San Antonio to visit several old Missions. It was fascinating!

We also visited a museum where the rangers looked strangely familiar. Or strange and familiar.

and the kiddos were especially cute.

9. Date Time!

I explored the RiverFront in San Antonio by myself when I lived in Texas for the summer eight (eight?!) years ago, but Mikey had never seen it.

So we accepted the generous offer of our hosts to take our kiddos home after we toured the Missions together and we had some date time looking around! Wow! It’s such a beautiful place to explore.

10. Worm Wrangling

Ever heard of worm castings?

Me either, until a few years ago when the Browns started their own operation. It fascinates me, so we always have a look around and ask ten million questions.

Questions, for example, about this neat-o contraption that gently separates the worms from the dirt from the castings (aka poo).

And we are always, always kindly given ten million answers with utmost patience.

Hi worm! Thanks for your poo that is organically fertilizing many crops!

N loved it. H didn’t as much.

And last, but not least…

11. Eating Nacho Cheese by the Spoonful

(This activity was led by my daughter) I don’t think even real Texans do that. She is an over-achiever, to be sure. Ha!

Wow. We sure do miss all of our friends down south! What a fabulous time we had together!

Tried and True Recipe: Sweet and Sour Sauce

This sauce can be served with rice and sauteed veggies or meatballs or chicken in any and all forms or even fish probably, if you're into that. Serve it with whatever you got a hankerin' to be sweet and sour. It’s simple, delicious, and (obviously) isn’t picky about what it’s served with.

Combine and cook for 3 mins in a big pot:

2 1/2 cups cubed and drained pineapple (I use canned), save the juice

2 T butter

Add:

1/3 c. pineapple juice

2 c. green peppers, chopped

1 onion, chopped

Add:

1-3 T soy sauce

2 T vinegar

1/3 c. sugar, white or brown

Mix separately and add:

2 T cornstarch

1/3 c. pineapple juice

Dissolve, add to cornstarch mixture and cook, stirring until thick:

1 bouillon cube

1 c. boiling water

Simmer one hour.

Optional: Add other veggies before simmering, such as julienned carrots, green beans, etc.

Glory to The Wycliffe International Cookbook for this one. These cookbooks must be rare now, selling for a hundred or more dollars?! Nuts! I don't understand it. Or maybe I do, cause I wouldn't want to sell mine for even that much... that is how much I love it! Good thing I bought mine on May 13, 2006 for only $16.74 (as Amazon so kindly informed me when I just did a search on it). Enjoy!

My Recipes, Tried and True

Five years ago I couldn't really cook. When we moved to Africa I was SO clueless. Sometimes I'd serve rice with fried onions (?!). Or I'd just serve popcorn. That's all. Learning to pop that in a pan with oil on the stove was enough of a challenge for me. And once I served Mike a whole boiled potato. That's it. He sat on the couch and ate it like it an apple. (Yeah, he loves to tell that story.) I really had no idea what to do with a big pile of fresh vegetables from the local market. I'd look at it and just wonder how in the world I was supposed to make dinner out of it all.

I have come a long way since then and I often get asked what I cook in Africa. The answer is I cook all kinds of stuff... local foods, American foods, international foods and all those foods mixed together. I am no professional chef by any means, but it's been a fun journey for me. By now I have a collection of recipes that are tried and true. You know, the ones that you eat again and again and again and again some more.

I plan to start posting them here and put a collection of the links to those recipe posts on a new tab.

My Recipes, Tried and True

I am hoping you might enjoy the eclectic collection as it grows and also I am hoping that this means I can stop carrying around odd bits of paper that I scribble the recipes out on before I leave my house in Africa to travel each year in case I have a hankering for our fav Czech crepes, lentil and rice burritos or wacky cake along the way. I can kiss my bits of paper goodbye and the recipes will all be on here for good.

My fav recipes are most often completely from scratch and they never require fancy ingredients, cause we just don't have even some basic ingredients readily available, let alone anything fancy. They're also almost always vegetarian, cause when we moved our budget was perty tight. We didn't want to pay for the 'nice' meat from the supermarket and we weren't big fans of the more affordable meat that had been hanging on a hook in the open market covered with flies all day. So we learned to eat beans and vegetables instead. And now we're just accustomed to it.

Tomorrow I'll post the first tried and true recipe! Although fun pics to go with will have to wait until we're home and settled again...

Ribbon Love

Yes, my daughter still uses a pacifier. We've been on the move for so long now we haven't even considered taking away her favorite coping mechanism. I think we may have waited too long taking her big brother's away for the same reasons and I fear we're headed in the same direction towards a traumatizing parting of the child and the cork... but who can take a beloved lovie from a girl who hasn't been home in over four months?

Not me.

Not you either.

Step BACK.

He he

Her paci is attached to this cutest taggie blanket (made by Cuz Lori). This whole attaching the paci to the blanket thing is something my Mom came up with when H kept loosing his paci ("bice" as he called it, don't ask me!) in his covers or behind his bed or under his bed while he was sleeping. He couldn't find the tiny pacifier in the dark on it's lonesome but he could find it if it was attached to a furry blanket.

My Mom is a genius. Seriously.



Soooooo the cutest thing about her with her taggie-corker-blanket is that she always finds the couple tags that are made with the butterfly ribbon and slips her lil fingers through the loops. The butterfly ribbons are soft on the inside because of how they're woven and she likes that.

And I like her. She melts my heart. I'd like to give her the world if I could, she's such a gift.

That's all.

Goodnight.