The most requested thing for dinner around here? Noodles. With butter.

Sunday, January 29, 2012

Easy salad

This is one of my favorite salads- not just because I invented it, but because it is easy, quick, and tasty. Start with a bag of broccoli slaw and a bag of shredded carrots.
(Could you chop the broc and shred the carrots yourself? Of course. But why?)
Mix those together with a heaping cup of raisins and store in it the fridge. When you want a salad, add sunflower seeds and a dressing of your choice to each individual portion. I prefer a poppy seed dressing, but recently I discovered this amazing onion dressing (that has some poppy seeds) from Tastefully Simple and I don't think I'll go back to regular poppy seed any time soon.
I don't use a ton of dressing- just enough to introduce the taste to each piece of veg. If there is dressing in the bowl after I have eaten, then it was wasted, and that would be a shame.
Then I add the seeds, and done! No chop chop, no Veg-O-Matic, no washing of knives!
Just dig in and enjoy!

Saturday, January 28, 2012

Friday, January 20, 2012

Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it.

Well, Tuesday night brought the snow. It started around 8 at night and it was beautiful to see in the light of the street lamps. I went to sleep watching it through open blinds. At 4 in the morning, I woke to the sound of rain slamming against the window. It was still pretty cold and the 5 inches of snow wasn't dissolving very fast, so school was cancelled for the day. It was nice to crawl back into bed and just listen to the trucks drive through the slush on the nearby freeway.
Didn't make for very good snow pictures, but we did get another snowball for our freezer.
The thing is, even though the snow only really lasted one night, we were spared some very nasty results of this "monster" storm.

North of us was a deep freeze. They had two or three times the amount of snow, topped off with a layer of ice. Pretty, but treacherous. Tree limbs came down, power was cut off, at least one person died.

South of us was a swimming pool. Most of a whole town was evacuated, a car was swept into a rain-swollen culvert, two people died.

Latitude. Longitude. Altitude. Temperature. Humidity. Ocean. Mountains. Cold fronts. Warm fronts. Micro-climates.

It all contributes to the interesting weather stew that is the PNW. Personally, I love the rain and I enjoy the occasional storm drama. It reminds me that despite our preparations, things can happen that are outside of our control.

So we pray, and leave it in the Lord's hands. Better Him than me!

Monday, January 16, 2012

It's teasing me...

It starts. It stops. It starts again. Sometimes the flakes are huge, sometimes miniscule. It's not sticking, but it might tonight when it gets a bit colder.

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

A wish...

if this rain
were only snow
and i had no good place to go
i'd stay at home
with ab and fri
and a new book i would try
by the fire
toasty and warm
i wouldn't mind a winter storm.

Saturday, January 7, 2012

Good Morning, Nangua!

Nangua means "little pumpkin" in Chinese. It's what they called Abby at the orphanage.

10 years ago, I didn't have a digital camera. One of the dads in our travel group did, and he took this photo of us at our first breakfast together. (Thanks, Steve!)
Then he sent it to my email, and I used the hotel's business office to get to my email and send it back home. When I got back to work in February, every classroom in my building had a big red heart on its door, with that photo right in the middle of the heart. My substitute teacher (Thanks, Rick!) had printed the pictures and placed them. What a great homecoming!
(At 16 months old, she looks like a little pumpkin, doesn't she? And that wonderful sweater was made by another teaching colleague- I work with some pretty great people.)

Ab looks pretty happy in that picture. Here's one scrapbook page of the night before:
She was a bit worried during the hand-off, but after a bath (she hated it) and some food and toys (she loved them), things settled in.

There's a saying that goes, "With children, the days are long, but the years are short."

True, that.

After many long days but 10 short years, Happy Gotcha Day, Nangua!

And a BIG THANK YOU to my family, friends, church family, colleagues, and neighbors. Your support, babysitting, encouragement, babysitting, words of wisdom, babysitting, sense of humor, and babysitting have been overwhelmingly wonderful. Couldn't have made it this far without you!

Now about puberty...