How's It?

You're wondering how the gluten free cooking is going aren't you? Not bad, not bad at all. Isabella is up about ten pounds since she cut out the gluten four months ago. I'm such a proud momma! I still worry there is too much cross contamination going on and hidden gluten in foods that are supposed to be gluten free. But you can't argue with results. And she hasn't gotten sick since then either. I've got the cooking down pretty good. I've learned to cook some new things too. I dare say I make some pretty good stir fry and fried rice. And my chicken enchiladas are quite tasty. Have you ever tried rice crispy treats with rice chex instead of rice crispies? (Rice crispies have malt which contains gluten. You'd think RICE crispies would be safe.) They are better than the rice crispy kind.

I'm finding all sorts of places that sell gluten free stuff. Unfortunately they are all in the city on the other side of the mountain. But I get out there frequently enough. I walked into a Harmon's grocery store and nearly cried from happiness last week. They have a huge natural foods section with tons of gluten free stuff. It even has it's own freezer section. And every gluten free item in the store (many that are throughout the store too) has a label on the shelf that says gluten free. So convenient. It's all expensive of course, but that's just the way the gluten free stuff rolls. Maybe someday it will all come down in price. Hopefully by the time Isabella is an adult. Really, more and more people are discovering they have celiac disease. Bad for them but good for the consumer.

So what else have we been making? I found this awesome gluten free baking mix called Pamela's that is so handy for baked goods. We've made mint brownies, chocolate chip cookies, banana nut bread, muffins, it even worked well for our Christmas sugar cookies. It's so much easier than trying to work with a million weird ingredients and has taken out a lot of trial and error. And the price is about the same as mixing a bunch of stuff together so I may as well save myself some stress. I sound like an advertisement here now, don't I?

Still making homemade bread too. I found a simplified recipe off the Gluten Free Goddess blog that I'm liking a lot. I usually change out some ingredients to find a combination Isabella likes (and Brent, he likes to eat the bread too). She complains about a lot of it that it has "that weird taste". I've narrowed down "that weird taste" to either sorghum or rice flour or tapioca starch. Someday I'll figure out which one bugs her but until then we've found teff, millet, amaranth and potato and corn starch make up a pretty good bread.

Yesterday I made up some gluten free energy bars. Kind of like granola bars. They were so good! You should try them. Your kids will like them. Well, mine all did anyway.

Gluten Free Energy Bars

Ingredients:

• 3/4 cup peanut butter
• 3/4 cup honey
• 3/4 c almond pieces (or other nuts you like)
• 1 cup dried fruit (I used dried cherries and cherry flavored craisins)
• 4 cups GF brown rice crispie cereal
• 1/8 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Preparation:

Line a large baking sheet with parchment paper

Mix dry ingredients

In a large saucepan melt peanut butter with honey over medium low heat. Stir and watch carefully to prevent scorching. When the mixture is smooth and bubbling cook for about 1 minute. Remove from heat. Add salt and vanilla and stir to combine. Use a large spatula to stir in nuts, dried fruit and cereal. Stir until all ingredients are coated with nut butter mixture. Spread out on parchment paper. Let cool and cut.

I also added mini M&Ms. Next time I might add some ground flax seed to make it healthier. If you wanted to try them and didn't need gluten free you could use regular rice crispy cereal instead of the gf brown rice variety.

Birthday Party Year Is Over!

Every other year the kids have birthday parties, starting with Zoe's birthday in September. Isabella and Noah both have birthdays in January so it usually goes: birthday, birthday, party, party. It makes for a LONG, busy month. Don't ask me why I didn't stagger the birthday parties every other year. I'm just not that smart I guess. Anyhow, I think they each had a good birthday and some fun parties. Isabella turned thirteen! I can't believe I have a teenager. It was a good group of girls, they were all loud and crazy but they all behaved well. No drama! I guess we didn't get many pictures. Got more video footage.

Noah had a lego themed party. It turned out fun, Noah said it was as good as the bowling/laser tag party he went to the week before. That is saying something. It helps that he was the birthday boy. There were lego games, lego prizes, lego candy party favors! I even tried to make lego pizzas and lego cakes. Ten 7 and 8 year old boys running around! I swear you burn off about a thousand calories hosting one of these things.

Belated Christmas Post

I never got around to blogging about Christmas. Well, it was a good one. We had fun with family, Brent's mom was in town and stayed with us on Christmas Eve again. Noah got this telescope which turned out to be larger than him. This wasn't planned. Santa was supposed to bring a simple telescope that would be fun for him. He's wanted one for a while-mostly to spy on people out in the soccer field across the street. Hopefully we can make good use of it this summer when the clouds finally go away and at the star parties at the local observatory. The girls got digital cameras and have been having fun with them. They have a video mode so Zoe has been having fun making videos of herself pretending she is having a tantrum. (The things that entertain an 11 year old.)

Brent was sick on Christmas, my poor man, and I was exhausted. I had some minor outpatient surgery a couple of weeks before and between that and all the Christmas prep I was so worn out by the time Christmas day came. So it was a pretty low key day at home with just a short trip over to see my dad and step-mom.

New Years Eve I decided to be nice and volunteered to take the girls and their friends to the ice skating rink that is about 30 minutes away. I misread the weather again and while they all carried on having a good time in the car, I was white knuckling it down the freeway in an ugly storm. But all ended well and the storm had let up by the time we headed home. Luckily, we no longer have suicide tires on the van. New years day we headed over to the sledding hill. I love that we have a big hill that is perfect for sledding just down the street. So that about wraps it up, plus a boat load of pics:

I guess this last one will work in the Christmas post. It was over Christmas break I believe. Zoe and her friend Ellie were messing around with legos and decided to make a lego bathroom. From left to right you've got the tub, sink (with a storm trooper washing up), toilet with a toilet paper holder (yes someone is sitting on it, is this appropriate for my G/PG blog?), and a shower. It was too funny not to immortalize it with the camera.

Thanks For The Assistance

Thanks, my friends, for helping me out with your comments on who is reading this here blog. Actually, I knew you all were readers (thank you sight meter, and a "Hello!" to you all.) Unfortunately, I still haven't been able to out the mystery visitor. And I don't have a problem with mystery readers, just with ones that engage in suspicious behavior. In that case I need to know I know who you are. Hopefully I won't have to make the old blog private. I hate private blogs. Such a pain with the signing in every time and all. Anyway, for the time being, we shall carry on as we are.

My Little Cub Scout

Noah started cub scouts last week. He's so excited and is already memorizing cub scout pledge type stuff (I really don't know what I'm talking about here). I'm still a little skeptical and I won't make him do it if he doesn't want to, but I'm excited that he is excited to be involved with it.

Letting Go

I wrote this some time ago and never published it:

Letting go. I need to work on that. I think I've improved over the years as a mom but it is still a weakness for me. Letting go of what exactly? Control. I've always had the hardest time giving up control when it comes to my kids. One of the areas it has been the hardest is in the kitchen. One of my excuses is I don't have a huge kitchen so it's just easier to do it myself. And it really is a bad excuse because I hosted two cooking classes last year with Isabella and her friends and I had five extra people in the kitchen with me and we managed to make it work.

Sunday the girls found this recipe in a magazine and wanted to try it out since we just happened to have all the ingredients on hand. It was for banana split ice cream sandwiches. We were making to cookie part and I told the kids to put spoonfuls of the dough evenly spaced on the cookie sheet. All of a sudden I'm feeling very tense and I'm having a flashback to this episode of the PBS cartoon Arthur that I saw with the kids when they were little. If you haven't watched Arthur (and maybe they do it differently now, I don't even know if they still are making new episodes of that show, my kids never watch it anymore-stupid satellite discouraging my kids from watching PBS) they had this thing between cartoons where they would show real kids doing things. This particular episode showed kids at a blind school making cookies. I remember watching that and as they were tapping the dough off of their spoons onto the cookie sheet the best they could- but of course it wasn't that neat because they couldn't see what they were doing- I felt very tense just watching them do that and that is the feeling I had watching the kids put the dough on the cookie sheet, especially Noah. I know it's wrong, a bit of a sickness even. What will happen if the cookies don't turn out perfect? Nothing, that's what. And I'm not anywhere close to being the worlds greatest baker and I'm too impatient to make things really pretty so I don't know why I care how the kids do it.

I do things on my own timeline. When the girls were younger I picked the next days clothes out for them every night before they went to bed. This went on later into the elementary years than it really needed to. They could have been doing it themselves. But they do just fine now (and learned how to match their clothes, you never saw my kids wearing ridiculous mismatched combinations, not that that really matters in the scheme of things). I'm lightening up a little as they get older. As I get older. I think it was all a defense mechanism since you often feel like you have very little control over your life when you have young kids. That's also why they almost ALWAYS listened to my music in the car, not preschooler music. But they are growing up. They are capable of much and it's my job to help them discover what they can do. This year I will work on that.

Hello Friends

Friends, I need your help. I have a mystery blog visitor who needs to be identified. I know it's probably a friend or relative and I don't mind strangers popping in. I'm just curious about the identity of a particular regular visitor. So if my regular visitors wouldn't mind, could you leave me a comment? You don't have to register with blogger to comment. Just leave it under anonymous and leave your name. Thanks for the help!

2010 part one

I should write on the year. Wrap up 2010. And do many posts on it too because I need more posts under 2010 (as previously mentioned). First of all, this year kicked my butt a little. I started the year excited. School. I loved school! Then I got called to the primary presidency. (That's still a head scratcher.) I was stressed (it doesn't take much) so I dropped the math class. I had this hand pain that made writing a lot difficult too. So I only had the online art class, but I loved it. I finally felt I had direction. I was working toward something. I've had the raising the kids thing going on for years and I really, really love my kids but I needed to go back to school. I've known that for a long time.

So there I was, in school. I had direction, a major in elementary ed., I was being a great example to my kids. To my girls especially. I believe that kids are more successful as adults if they see positive roll models of success in their parents. I love my parents but I didn't have that from them. So I really wanted to be that kind of role model. And don't give me that whole, well being a mom is the most important job there is for a woman. Don't give me that because I KNOW that. At least if you are a mom it is. If you are not then you are just putting down the woman who is not a mom. So I know that and I constantly think about if what I'm doing, whatever I'm doing, is best for my kids. But I wanted to show them I could be successful somewhere else too. I still want to show them that. But I'm a chicken and I worry about a million different things. In the fall I started with three classes and ended up with zero. One was dropped so I could focus on math, which I am scared of. One was dropped because I was annoyed with the teacher and the 800 page book for a two credit class and the fact that I could not get the 800 page book for the two credit class. The whole thing started off badly and it wasn't even because of my own bumbling which believe me happens often enough. So I was down to just the math class and then we found out Isabella has celiac disease and I would have to learn to cook everything without gluten (read: wheat flour). That and I was scared of the class and the teacher didn't know how to teach very well. Psyched out again. So I took the semester off.

Things started out great then suddenly I was back to square one, actually more like square negative ten or something like that. I was unsure of myself, I didn't know if I was doing the right thing with school. I'm still not sure. There were other obstacles too. After a while you begin to wonder, are these obstacles something I'm supposed to be persevering on and fighting my way around? Or are these obstacles telling me to go in another direction? My thoughts were, well screw it all, I'm just going to go get a job at Barnes & Noble. Because I've always sort of wanted to work at Barnes & Noble. But I'm not about to get a job (if they'd have me) at a store that is at least 30 minutes away from my house, depending on the location, just to be paid minimum wage. So I've been thinking, thinking, thinking. I've come up with an idea. I don't know if it is the best idea. I'm beginning to think there is no best idea. I've wondered if it may be settling. But is there really settling or is there just making choices and trying to come up with the choice that makes the most sense? I don't know. The one thing I do know is the biggest reason this is so hard to figure out is because I've got these three young people in my life and how it affects them for the next ten years is of utmost importance to me. Making everything a hundred times more confusing than it would be otherwise. That and money. Money always complicates things too.

One More

Another video, because I'm still bulking up 2010 on the blog and this was my favorite song going into 2010. Sad and beautiful. It came out in 2006 though. I like music on my own timetable. Maybe in five years I'll be into Lady Gaga. Hahahahahaha! I don't know who's video this is. I'm pretty sure it's not the Decemberists. It cracks me up when people make their own videos for songs and stick them on youtube. It reminds me of when I was in third grade and we'd make up these elaborate lip sync performances to songs from Grease.

Home

There are only a couple of days left in the year and I've only done thirty or so blog posts this year. I keep thinking maybe it's the end of the blogging road for me but I still have something to say that I haven't said yet. I'm not exactly sure what that is though. It's facebook. Too many one liners. There's nothing left to expound upon after so many of those. So I need to start bulking up the blog; and I need to get those singamajigs off the page. They were cute at first but rapidly grew annoying. I'll start with this video.* One of the funnest songs of the year. I've always liked hippies. Have occasionally wanted to be a hippy. I could never reach hippy status though because I'm too uptight, straightlaced and I insist on shaving everyday (legs get too itchy otherwise.) I miss my old hippyish next door neighbors. They brought balance to the place.
*Don't worry, this blog isn't going to turn into a showcase for youtube videos.

Peace, Love and Understanding

One of my favorite Christmas songs that isn't actually a Christmas song but should be, and a good version of it too.