caitlin, October 31st, 2009
 Freyja did NOT want whiskers drawn on her face.  Zac and Matt shell the last of our summer catch- fresh crab for ragoons with chili sauce for our party later that night.  Aileen and Jason make serious plans for their jack-o-lanterns
 THis requires explantion. Matt Barley brought a hideously ugly child's halloween sweater as a joke. and zac saw fit to wear trick-or-treating  Follow the yellow brick road... (what is a surgeon doing in the Land of Oz?)  Our timd lion.... Make that sugar overloaded, cranky lion.
 a spooky almost full moon.
Our prayers and those of many others have been answered– we are so grateful for all the prayers that have been lifted up on our behalf and thrilled to announce:
It’s a boy!
I’m due April 3rd 2010 and for right now this little guy is going by the name Peabody, given to him by his father.
terri, October 29th, 2009
Let’s see, Heinz and Sandy, David and Michelle, Caitlin, Zac and Freyja, Aileen and Jason, Meghan, Eric, Anwyn, Canon, Athan, Fox, Andrew and I, Jarrett, Taite and Matthias were all standing in our kitchen getting ready to have pizza and having prayed, Erin asked to make one small request, “Could she borrow some maternity clothing?”
I screamed and then cried and then pretty much all of us cried for joy.
So here we have 3 months, 5 months, 7 months, and done! And perchance they all wore gray that night. And every last one of these babies are B-O-Y-S!!
Little Fox will have three cousins very close to his age but I am sure he will want the rest to understand every now and then that he is in fact the oldest.
caitlin, October 28th, 2009
I think my day is pretty typical of many women.
Your To-do list probably has many of the same things mine does, which include things like washing, ironing and putting away other people’s clothing, cleaning up after them, buying their food, preparing their food, etc etc. etc.
Sometimes at the end of day, you can’t think of one thing you did for yourself (except for maybe brush your teeth– but really that’s for everyone else’s good as much as your own, isn’t it?).
You now have two choices:
A) Be grumpy and a little mopey at the thought of your constant sacrifice for others.
B) Rejoice in your labors.
I’m gonna admit it. I chose option A the other night. And after a good, hard day of work, I wasted it with feeling sorry for myself. I wasn’t very nice to my husband and decided I was going to do something for myself, darn it! So… I took a bath!
And I didn’t enjoy it a bit. I was too busy feeling selfless and being irritated.
A day or two later, instead of slamming me over the head with my sin, God gave me encouragement and understanding through a book I am currently and ravenously devouring, chapter by chapter. (Table in the Mist, by Jeffery Meyers)
Ecclesiastes 4:8 “There is one alone, without companion: he has neither son nor brother. Yet there is no end to all his labors, nor is his eye satisfied with riches. But he never asks, ‘For whom do I toil and deprive myself of good?’ This also is vanity and a grave misfortune. Two are better than one because they have a good reward for their labor.”
Like much of Ecclesiastes, this is a little elusive in its meaning. Jeffery Meyers gives these enlightening words:
“Now Solomon gives us a rare instance of some relative “advantage” or “leverage” or “profit” in human life. It concerns our loving work for another…Working for oneself is vapor but working for others is a great gain. Work has meaning primarily as a way of expressing love, not as a means of accumulating individual wealth.”
“Not as a way of accumulating individual wealth“… this is just the perspecitve needed by a wife and mother who never gets paid a dime for putting in a 14 hour day. Her role, more clearly than most any one’s, is on parr with what Ecclesiastes say is not vapor– it is lasting, it is something of value, it is truth you can hang onto. Is it any wonder then, that this is is the exact opposite of what we hear from the world? Or in our own little heads? If we’re not at a desk with a salary, we’re not really doing anything that worthwhile.
It’s not in human nature to put ‘caring for others’ in bold at the top of our “Most-worthwhile-things-I-can-do-with-my-life” list. That’s why Ecclesiastes warns against being like the one who, for all his labor and toil, in the end gets nothing but envy from his neighbor (Ecclesiastes 4:4).
So, instead of being a crab the next time I’m feeling overwhelmed I’m going to stop, think of Solomon’s words, and remember that caring for others is what God calls meaningful. Take heart, wives and mothers, for all your toiling and depriving yourself, He is pleased with you and He promises a good reward.
meghan, October 27th, 2009
 The Charlie Brown Holiday Collection. I think this will be the movie we'll watch this week for our movie night.  I think I'm as excited as the kids to pull these out of the closet and start watching them. Because we enjoy them so much, I just bought the whole boxed collection on Amazon last year.
terri, October 25th, 2009
OK, are you ready for something a little more challenging than my usual Monday morning posts? Try to get your mind around this!
This book totally fascinated me. Math captivates me, though I can not grasp the depths of it and this book covers an aspect that I can not get my mind around- by far.
Math was always just a subject to get through when I was school age; it wasn’t until I began teaching it that its spell took hold of me.
The time I was explaining the concept of infinite and I was totally dumbfounded; I knew what infinite meant but to say it out loud and explain it to my children caught me up short. I was in awe that God was in our math. Or reading an article about the possibility that there is no such thing as a prime number gave me just the slightest peek into realms of which I had never dreamt . These ideas are nothing compared to the concepts in Perfect Rigor.
This may seem tedious, but read this and be totally amazed at the vastness and complexity of, of what? Of God and His creation of all things, things so deep and complex that the creation of the earth seems like finger play.
In 1904 Henri Poincaré published a paper on three-dimensional manifolds. What is a manifold? It is an object, or a space, existing in the mathematician’s imagination- whether or not something like it can actually be observed in reality-that can be divided into many separate neighborhoods. Each neighborhood, taken separately, has a basic Euclidean geometry or can be explained through it, but all the neighborhoods together add up to something much more complicated. The best example of a manifold is the Earth as portrayed through a series of maps, each showing only a small part of its surface.
Imagine a map of Manhattan, for example: its Euclidean nature is obvious. When maps are put together in an atlas, their parallel lines continue not to cross and their triangles maintain their 180-degree nature. But if we used the maps to try to replicate the actual surface of the Earth, we would start with something that looked like a many-many faceted disco ball, and then we would smooth out the edges and ultimately get a globe that reflected the Earth’s curved complexity- and if we extended Manhattan’s First Avenue and Second Avenue, they would cross.
What makes one manifold different from another is its having a hole. To a topologist a ball, a box, a blob are all the same but a bagel is different. If a very tight rubber band is placed around a ball, it will find a way to contract and slip off the ball. A bagel is different. If you could thread the rubber band through the hole and then reconnect it, it will stay around the bagel never slipping off.
So… a rubber band can be slipped off of the box, ball or blob, which makes them essentially similar to one another in a way that the bagel is not. In the language of topology, diffeomorphic to one another. This means you can reshape them into any other and then back again.
This more or less, brings us to the point of being able to understand the Poincaré Conjecture, an innocent sounding question: if a three-dimensional manifold is smooth and simply connected, then is it diffeomorphic to a three-dimensional sphere?
At the dawn of the 1960′s, several mathematician’s proved the Poincaré Conjecture for dimensions five and higher. In 1982, Michael Freedman published a proof of the conjecture for dimension four.
Consider the enormity of solving the fourth dimension. Perhaps one of the problems with four-dimensional spaces is that, unlike higher dimensional ones, they are not quite abstractions; it seems that we humans may very well inhabit a three-dimensional space embedded in four-dimensions, even if we can not wrap our minds around it. And it is here that there is just no denying God; three-dimensional humans embedded in four-dimensions.
But… experts say there is one living man,the American geometer, William Thurston, who can imagine four dimensions, “When you see him or talk to him, he is often staring out into space and you can see that he sees these pictures,” said John Morgan, a professor at Columbia University. Morgan watched Thurston attempt to solve the Poincaré and when he didn’t get it, Morgan was sure no one would.
Enter Grisha Perelman.
In almost a hundred years and with many, many mathematicians working on the conjecture no one had ever solved it. Perelman simply posted his proof for the Poincaré Conjecture in an open forum on the internet in 2002.
Prior to the post about a dozen mathematicians received an email from Perelman asking them to take a look at his post, every recipient had been working on some aspect of the problem for many years. Perelman had proven in half of his paper what one mathematician had unsuccessfully worked on for two decades. The Clay Institute had offered a prize of one million dollars for the solution and Perelman, without fanfare simply posted the solution to the million dollar question on a public internet site.
Perelman had formulated the proof to the conjecture so clearly in his mind that in 2003 he was able, to reduce the original copy by eight pages down to twenty-two pages, later his third revision would be a mere seven pages. His original had taken only three weeks to write- less time than it had taken the other mathematicians to read. Perelam had the ability to absorb a problem in its entirety and then boil it down to an essence that proved simpler than anyone assumed.
Especially amazing to me is that we inhabit a three-dimensional world and that was the hardest part to solve of the conjecture; the fourth-dimension and higher were easier to solve, but right where we live was the dimension that had mathematicians stymied for almost a century.
If you are looking for a great book for someone you know who loves math, Perfect Rigor is the one. Read it and fall prostrate in total adoration of God.
*Please note: if any of this writing seems to be out of my league ,consider those portions totally plagiarized from the author, Masha Gessen.
terri, October 22nd, 2009
He causes the grass to grow for the cattle,
And vegetation for the service of man
That he may bring forth food from the earth,
And wine that makes glad the heart of man,
Oil to make his face shine,
And bread which strengthens man’s heart.
Psalm 104:14,15
The November issue of House Beautiful features various interior designers’ photos of their bar set-up with all the sparkling glasses and bottles and it made me like my little tray of relaxation all the more.
Andrew and I long ago lived in Miami and liked to sip a drink when he got home from work. Back then in was Piña Colada or a Cuba Libre; it seemed so appropriate to the Florida life (which NPR just proclaimed the least stressful city to live in). We were always well stocked with Coco Lopez and pineapple and the blender in good working order. Life was good and it was always summer.
It was our way to relax and catch up on the day, wait for the hibachi to heat up and enjoy the evening. When life got really busy, it seemed imperative to touch base with each other this way, our ritual of sitting, sipping and rehashing our day.
Life is still pretty busy and we still have our nightly ritual but because we live in wine country, it will sometimes be a great glass of wine instead. Piña Colada’s got to be a bit too much work.
My bronze tray was a Christmas gift one year from Andrew because I wanted one and then found out he had spent a lot of money on that tray and so I really thought it needed to serve a lovely purpose. I thought this was a good purpose.
meghan, October 21st, 2009
 A beautiful ghost pumpkin  We all had a pretty fun time picking out our pumpkins. Almost next in importance to finding a Christmas tree, is picking out a pumpkin and I would always rather find one in a field than a WalMart parking lot.  If they look amazing, they were. What would a day at the pumpkin patch be without doughnuts and cider?
caitlin, October 20th, 2009
Aileen has always been the one to take on the yearly gingerbread house construction, my wedding cake, or any other project that requires the patience of Job and will just get eaten in the end.(Actually the gingerbread houses usuallyget blown up sometime in January by Jarrett and Matt’s collection of small explosives, but anyways…)
So it was a little more up her alley when we decided to create mini chocolate cupcakes, topped with a cream cheese butter-cream frosting, decorated with hand-painted, hand-cut fondant flowers and sprinkled with shimmery rock sugar. But it sounded fun to me and I thought it would make a pretty dessert for my friend Becky’s baby shower.
We found everything we needed at, where else? A store completely devoted to cake decorating (gotta love a big city for that) Home Cake Decorating Supply Co. located in Maple Leaf. The store is quite a little mess of a place, but the gruff, nice lady in there has everything you could ever need and there’s something charming about not being able to find a thing you are looking for while she knows the exact location of every Bambi cake topper or clover leaf shaped baking pan in the store.
When I asked about fondant and said I needed just a little bit, she said, “Oh you know, this stuff keeps forever.”
“Oh, that’s good to know,” I said.
“Oh yeah, just throw it in the back of your baking cabinet and you can pull it out any time you’re bored and just turn on the TV and make things out of fondant.”
Sometimes, people you’ve known for all of 2 minutes say something that gives you a ridiculously vivid peak into their life. But anyways, back to the mini cupcakes…
So with our supplies assembled we began.
 sugar, dyes, paint brushes, fondant, and flower shape cutters galore. We found this super yum recipe for the frosting, and used the Hershey chocolate cake recipe.
I got kind of grumpy when the paper started getting a little soggy and peeled away from the little cakes. But Aileen kept with it.
 We flipped for these retro looking green cupcake papers. In the end the pink and purple dyes weren’t the subtle, pretty shades we’d hoped and we went for an all white color scheme. The end product was really pertty cute looking. And most importantly they tasted tasty.
terri, October 19th, 2009
Last week as I pulled out of the driveway, I glanced up and noticed my big beautiful birthday gift from John and Wendy didn’t look the same, the tips of the tree were a lighter color. I am so accustomed to plants in my care dying that I immediately panicked and quickly saw the future, the plant finally brown and dry being yanked from my flower bed. Continuing to back out of the driveway, I made a mental note to tell Andrew about it so he could figure out some sort of systemic remedy to hopefully resuscitate my dying tree. I also knew I would need Wendy down to take a look and pronounce the death sentence.
I had been so hopeful for that darn tree that I would send Matthias out everyday dragging a hose behind him to thoroughly water the tree and now I suspected I has been over zealous and it was water logged no doubt. Precarious little things, too much of a good thing is not good either.
For the remainder of the week whenever I passed the tree I averted my eyes and picked up the pace.
Finally the day came when the tree doctor, Dr. Wendy, came over and I knew it would be my day of reckoning. But no! She took one look and said, “That’s new growth.”
The thought never occurred to me; it was new life! The tree was happy, in fact it was thriving! It was a happy tree and it was in my care, jubilation!
 “So when are you guys going to have kids/ have more kids?”
I’d be very curious to know if there are any couples out there who appreciate this question.
For people who have no problem having children this question could seem a little prying, although it gets asked enough that they usually have stock response ready. For people who have trouble having kids it can be heartbreaking. I wonder sometimes, if a person had to re-phrase the question to be a little more accurate and say “When are you guys going to stop just having sex and start having kids?” would they still ask it? The fact is, if you are addressing a married couple, that’s what you are really asking, even if it’s not what you thought you were asking. And isn’t that a little personal when you stop to think about it?
Within reason, I am usually a big fan of Christians being open and honest with one another in a loving manner. I think that’s what real community is made of. We should share each other’s burdens, encourage, and cry with one another, which means I think there can be a legitimate way discovering if a couple is struggling with infertility with an intent to help and without being hurtful. A lot of times this problem is solved for you because if you are a close friend, the person struggling might choose to share her pain with you. If not, before I go poking about, I try to remind myself to ask pointedly my motives for asking. Am I just curious? Am I harboring even the littlest bit of judgment deep down about why they haven’t had children/ more children? I think some people are just so happy about having children of their own that they think everyone else should be too. Of course they could be just concerned for a friend they think might be suffering silently, and want to come along side of her to be a comfort.
When you are a friend asking out of concern, hopefully will come across as it is meant. I can’t quite remember how a friend of mine asked the question, something like “do you feel pretty okay with that (we had been on the subject of having kids/not being able to have kids), or has that been hard for you?” There was no mistaking her concern for shear curiosity or judgement. She then told me that she and her husband had already been praying for us about it. They’d already been praying! She’d suspected I was struggling because she’s a good friend and she knows me, and she’d already started doing something about it– without even having to ask or confirm first. What a blessing that we have a Father who knows every struggle of our brothers and sisters and isn’t confused by our feeble prayers even if we don’t know all the details!
Even though it’s a much less intimate subject, I think approaching a single person’s love life can use a lot of the same tools. Dating and relationships are a much more public affair, but it still takes sympathy when broaching the subject. I don’t know of any single girls over the age of 25 who love being asked, “So are you dating anyone?/seeing anyone special?/any guys in your life?/(and my favorite– the back-handed compliment:) why isn’t a beautiful girl like you dating anyone?”
I sympathize with them because when people ask me when we were going to have kids, I have wanted to say, ”Don’t you believe God is in control of these things? And if He is, wouldn’t I already have a child (or six) if that’s what He wanted for me? So that must not be what He wants for me right now, right?” Instead I sometimes just say “Yeah, it’s funny how we think we’re in control of things like that, and then we realize we aren’t…”
Sometimes when people have discovered that you are having trouble they will even suggest solutions. “Why don’t you just adopt?” they might ask, but even my very limited knowledge leads me to believe that adoption is not a simple, solve-all answer. There is a reason, after all, why people spend thousands of dollars out-of-pocket to get interventions that may or may not help them concieve their own child. First there’s coming to grips with the fact that you can’t have children, then you have to face the fact that you will never get to see what a child from you and your spouse’s loving relationship would look and act like, you have to face the fear of discovering your love for another woman’s child is inadequate to the task of nightly feedings and lifelong commitment (even though that fear might be unjustified), you might have to help the child struggle through feelings of rejection– all things that don’t even come into play when you are “having your own child”.
Despite this, I don’t feel like I have had anything to complain about. The journey through childless-ness has been nothing but a blessing. I’ve been telling myself recently that there are several lessons I want to remember from it and never forget.
First, it has made me realize my own inability to plan or do anything on my own in a very powerful, very loving way. It has humbled me to the silent struggles of others, and made me more cautious to assume anything about a person’s motives or condition. It actually has made me weirdly sad for people who are allowed to think they are in control of their fertility their whole life and never learn God’s amazing care for them. It also has made me feel like part of an elite class of women, again, as strange as that may sound– the barren women. When I look back over the Old Testament, it is absolutely riddled with stories of women who are barren or have a lot of trouble conceiving. Almost all of the women of note in the line of promise, and many, many of the women who had powerful roles and stories throughout the Bible struggled with this. And the fact that so many of their struggles are included in the canon revealed to me that God must take a special interest in their pain, and that He certainly does take a special care of them and bless them tremendously.
It is certainly still hard but like a lot of trials, it has also been a huge blessing and has made me aware of areas I need to grow in– lessons I hope I don’t soon forget.
caitlin, October 14th, 2009
 Freyja (front) with Rachel's girls Sadie and Raeme. They had each picked out a few items for themselves to wear that day which included a few fairy/princess costumes. And they still managed to look adorable! I’m always so impressed with mothers who make an effort to dress their kids in really cute, pulled-together outfits. One mother in particular at my church always does an amazing job. Her daughters show up with carefully done hair in little braids and updos and often hand made clothing or accesorries. Find some of her beautifully hand crafted items for kids and home here: Arrayed and Adorned
I started noticing Freyja’s wardrobe was a little lacking and the many light pink things borrowed from her blonde cousin Anwyn were washing her out. “How should I dress my little, fuzzy, red haired daughter”, I kept asking fellow moms. One friend, Rachel, whose daughters are also mini fashion plates, recommended purples. So I went with it.
terri, October 13th, 2009
While Erin was visiting, she and Meghan, Taite, Fox and I went to a few antique shops and at one I found these darling little glass cups, so tiny that I had no idea what they would be for. On the little tag with the price, it said, “salt cellar,” and that really excited me. If you have read previously, you know I love big chunky salt so this was a great find.
I can fill these little glass cups with about one teaspoon of salt each and set them down the middle of the table. And the glass is a lot prettier than the Maldon salt box. The middle one in the photo holds truffle salt and the other two hold my all time favorite, Maldon salt. Each dinner guest can simply pinch their desired amount out of the bowl and sprinkle over their food. Canon, my oldest grandson, was very excited to give this method a try. He got out of his chair, came over and whispered in my ear asking if he too could take a little pinch for his food and happily scooted back to his chair when I said, “Yes.”
Of course any tiny container would work for this but I was really glad the antique dealer wrote on the tag what these little things were.
terri, October 12th, 2009
At the risk of taking our sweet blog on cooking and creating up a notch into the nasty realm of politics, what in the world was the Norwegian Nobel committee thinking!? An excellent article by Ronald Kessler says,
“As suggested by the Times of London, the award to Obama was an obvious slap in the face of President Bush. “This is an award for not being George W. Bush,” Peggy Noonan writes in the Wall Street Journal. And what did Bush do to deserve the enmity of the Nobel Committee? He toppled a man who had killed 300,000 people and liberated 50 million people.
Brett Baier of Fox news stated,
“This year’s Peace Prize nominees included 172 people and 33 organizations, the highest number of nominations ever. Among those who reportedly lost to President Obama include two formerly jailed Chinese dissidents. Another is a female Afghan doctor who is outspoken for women’s rights and has been threatened for questioning Sharia law. Zimbabwean opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai was also on the list, as was a Colombian politician who helped secure the release of 16 hostages and was kidnapped herself ten years ago.
But no, the Nobel Peace Prize will go to a man who has been in office for a mere eight months with absolutely no evidence of any achievement other than the ability to read his prompter.
And it wasn’t just the conservatives who thought this honor a bit ridiculous,
The Daily Beast‘s Peter Beinart wrote: “I like Barack Obama as much as the next liberal, but this is a farce.” And Michael Russnow wrote on the Huffington Post that he too is an Obama supporter but, “Whatever Happened to Awarding for Deeds Actually Done?” Russnow likens the “extremely premature” award to “giving an Oscar to a young director for films we hope that he or she will produce.”
Am I missing something?
I guess “easy” and “what you have on hand” are relative terms. For me, those concepts mean: takes 20minutes or less, can be flopped in a tuperware container and eaten while driving down the freeway, and requires no/almost no fresh ingredients (because likely, the ones I have at home are not the ones I’ll need). One of my standbys is a stupidly simple recipe for HONEY BAKED LENTILS AND BROWN RICE– both of which ingredients I keep at home in on my dry shelf with pastas. It’s probably a misnomer to call it a recipe because I will be making it up as I put it down here. I’ve tried to be more creative and add other ingredients to the lentils, and it’s always disappointing. I am convinced that the tastiness of this meal is in direct relation to its simplicity.
1 small bag lentils (1lb or 2 1/3 cups)
water to cover the lentils by an inch or two (add more if it looks like it’s drying out)
uncooked bacon chopped up, but I prefer left-over ham or cured dry ham that I keep in the freezer
approximately 1/3-1/2 cup sugar or honey
salt to taste (I am very spare with it)
1 small bag brown rice, cooked in a separate pot/microwave while your lentils stew
Contrary to its name, I almost never use honey and I don’t bake this. I simply combine all ingredients in a pot on the stove and cook on the highest heat I can without burning them until the lentils are soft and the excess water has been absorbed, leaving a stew-like consistency. Spoon them over the brown rice and serve with whatever vegatable side you have in the fridge . 
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