Did you miss me? Reflection and Confession

Yes, I know I haven't posted in three months. I apologize to the half a dozen of you that occasionally read my blog, but I had my reasons. Life has gotten busy. So, let me show you what I have been doing, in no particular order:

Running after a very mobile little boy.



Filling my new chest freezer (which we've crammed in our already cramped apartment) with eggplant, pesto, blueberries and anything we can find on sale.


Re-rearranging my hall closet to fit in my canning (First time I've ever canned!).


Working on my Pain au Levain making skills and showing them off at the fair.


Celebrating one birthday...


... And then another.


Developing scars.


Swimming in Zion (with a bunch of polygamists (not shown)) and learning to wear underwear everywhere.


Growing our very own rooftop oasis.


As you can see, I've been busy. Mathias is getting to the age where he demands a lot more attention. But how can you resist such a cute little boy as he lifts up your hand and gently places Moo, Baa, La La La into it for the 15th time in a day?

Summer time is a time of light, and here in the northwest, you have to take advantage of it. In addition, summer is a time of fresh produce and I really have been spending many of my evenings canning and freezing.

And above all, I've been trying really hard to not spend so much time on the computer. There are much more important things that I need to focus on and that I take too long to do. Besides, I have trouble believing that there are people out there who really want to know what I'm doing everyday. I mean, who really wants to know that I can nurse Mathias in my Ergo while hiking near Cedar Breaks? Maybe there is someone, but I really don't feel like I am that talented of a writer or that interesting of a person to really matter in the blogosphere.

Whew, I got that out of my system. Now you know the real reason behind my silence. Now, don't worry. I'm not going to drop out completely, but my posts are going to be fewer and farther between. But I'll save this blog for the major discoveries.

One Man's Junk

Let me tell you the story of our water pitcher.

Once upon a time, Hubby and I got married. With said marriage came gifts, for which we were very grateful. And one of those gifts was a lovely Brita water pitcher, making it possible for us to drink the water in Utah. Oh, we loved that pitcher. So much, in fact, that we carefully packed it up, sent it in a trailer to Oregon, and picked it up on our way to our new home.

Somewhere in this process, however, the unthinkable happened: the pitcher cracked. Being the frugal (cheap or miserly also works) person that I am, I could not bring myself to purchase a new pitcher and instead took epoxy to the outside of the crack.

Though the epoxy wasn't exactly food safe, the pitcher worked just fine and we tried to be careful to keep the water line below the crack.

Now, after three something years of living with the crack, we have finally moved on. We now have a new pitcher!

But wait, you might say, I thought you were miserly, I mean cheap, I mean frugal! How could you possibly convince yourself to purchase a new pitcher when the old still worked just fine? Well, I have one word for you:

Freecycle

Oh be still my miserly, cheap, frugal heart! And I thought Craig's List was amazing. Here is the description from their website:

Welcome! The Freecycle Network™ is made up of 4,763 groups with 6,854,000 members across the globe. It's a grassroots and entirely nonprofit movement of people who are giving (& getting) stuff for free in their own towns. It's all about reuse and keeping good stuff out of landfills. Each local group is moderated by a local volunteer (them's good people). Membership is free. To sign up, find your community by entering it into the search box above or by clicking on “Browse Groups” above the search box. Have fun!

Have fun, indeed. Once I discovered Freecycle, I was able to start getting rid of perfectly good stuff lying around our house that just couldn't be given to a thrift store and that I just couldn't throw away, like a partially used bottle of perfume. And through Freecycle, I was able to get a relatively new Brita pitcher (complete with three unused, still-in-the-wrapper filters) for free. And yes, keeping usable things out of the landfill is a great bonus.

Now, should I post my cracked pitcher on Freecycle? After all, it does still work...

Spring Cleaning: Finally, some results

Yeah, I know. Spring cleaning started, what, three weeks ago? And I still have yet to report on my progress? Shame, shame on me.

Unfortunately, I'm still not done with everything. The bedrooms have yet to be touched because of the overwhelming amount of work that needs to be done there. But they will be done. The kitchen I did do, but the problem is I use it, regularly. So what was once clean and nicely organized is now slightly cluttered. I'll get "after" pictures soon.

So what do I have to report on? The hall closet. Yep, the linen/food storage/wheat grinder/games/guest pillows closet. I've wanted to better organize that 4 square foot section of my apartment for months, if not years. And I sure am proud of it.

Before:

 

After:

 

Doesn't it just make you want to weep with joy? It is amazing how organizing such a small space makes such a difference in my life. Everything there has a place.

Now, on to the bedrooms...

Spring Cleaning Update

So, like I mentioned before, I'm following the spring cleaning schedule of simple mom and I feel like I have been rather successful so far.

Day one was easy, just a "clean sweep" for trash and other clutter. Day two and three have been the living room and, well, my living room is roughly the size of the bed of a pick-up truck. That, and I had recently dusted and de-cluttered my bookshelf. However, I did do some pretty thorough cleaning, of which I am very proud. In fact, the only place I didn't clean was behind the piano because I couldn't move it by myself. I wonder if it is too late to get Hubby to move it...

While everything has gone well so far, I'm a little worried about the bedrooms. Now there's a headache waiting to happen. But this whole cleaning thing is making me feel pretty good about myself. I just hope I can keep it up all the way to the end!

Inspired by Spring

Yesterday I got to wondering why I try to make resolutions to change around New Years. Sure, the beginning of the year is a great time to rethink our life and try to make changes, but you can get all excited to exercise and then look out at the cold, grey sky and continue on with your life unchanged. Surely there is a better time to make life changes, and what better time than Spring?

Lately, I have been getting the urge to do exactly that: change my life. I don't know how we can look at the flowers blooming, smell the fresh scent of spring rain, and feel the warm sun on our faces and not want to change, to start over fresh just like the world outside. Here are some of the things that I have been inspired to do lately:

Clean: Thanks to simple mom, I'm going to be doing Spring Cleaning for the first time in my life (I'm just following her daily tasks as outlined on her blog, not buying her e-book). I'm not particularly fond of cleaning, but I've been thinking the last few days that if I want to have the life that I want (ie large garden, fresh bread often, etc) and be organized, I need to start working on liking work now. And I do love having a clean, organized home.

Organize: I need to get rid of stuff. Just like pulling weeds to clear the ground for spring planting, I need to dump a lot of stuff that has accumulated over that last three years. I'll just have to be careful not to make Hubby cry when I tell him to get rid of his "special treasures". It has happened before.

Records: For some reason, while sitting at church yesterday, I was inspired to write more in my journal.

I'm sure there will be more things that come to mind, especially as I start planting our "garden". Oh, how I love Spring!

A Challenge and a Change

I believe I've already proven myself to be a geek, but if you are looking for further proof I am prepared to provide it.

You may have noticed there has been a change to my blog. This is a change I've been wanting for a long time. I was tired of the monochrome look created using the limited features of Blogger. I wanted something different that would help me to express myself better. So I looked around.

Sure, there are plenty of places online where you can find free blog backgrounds, but they don't quite cut it for me. There is nothing wrong with them, really, but I don't like how they don't scroll with the rest of the blog. A personal preference, but a severely limiting one.

And so began my search for instructions on how to change the html of my template to get what I wanted. See? I'm a geek. I did google search after google search, but didn't really find anything. To make an extremely long, boring, and geeky story short, I finally realized that my friend Liz, who has a background that moves as you scroll, had gotten her background from Smitten Blog Designs. So I checked them out. In all my searching, I never found any blog template so accessible as these.

But, being the geek that I am, none of their templates really fit me. Instead of using one of their templates, I studied one to see what changes they made and where. From there it was "easy". Now I'm off to create a new heading using Paint, Picasa, and any other free program I can use. Wish me luck!

Thank you, Mrs Gaskell

It all began in September when my Mother-in-law came up here to watch Anna while Hubby and I went to the hospital. Since my Father-in-law finds great joy and purchasing anything in the form of a DVD, she came loaded with videos to watch during the down time, ie when Anna was asleep. Among those videos was Cranford. Now, I must admit, I was rather hesitant to watch it, as my MIL happens to be very fond of Hallmark movies, which I am not. However, I did end up watching it after she had left and just loved it.

Fastforward to Presidents' Day weekend when we finally got to celebrate Christmas with Oma and Opa. Sitting on top of the entertainment center, where most of the new DVD acquisitions end up, were two more movies that caught my eye: Wives and Daughters and North and South, two more adaptations of books by Elizabeth Gaskell. I quickly grabbed them to take home, which I have discovered to be a very good choice.

While I still think I like Cranford best, with Wives and Daughters a close second, both of the movies were very good. If you don't mind a spoiler, Wives and Daughters has one of the best proposal scenes I've seen in a long while. I would watch from the beginning of the clip as it provides some explination for why they do what they do, but the proposal starts at 4:30.



When I was still in school, I remember watching just a portion of Wives and Daughters on TV while at my cousins' home and wanting to see the rest. How exciting it was to actually find it again and be justified in my desire to see it!

North and South was also very good, but much more political and dreary, definitly a drama. The music was a bit heavy and there were far too many close-ups of people's faces and clips of people just walking. That and Mr. Thornton is just a little too, umm, serious and gruff for my liking. He doesn't smile until the very end of the film. In fact, there isn't much smiling at all, now that I think about it.

Now, I won't compare Elizabeth Gaskell to Jane Austen. I like them both very much, but their styles are very different, at least when their books are made into films. Also, Mrs Gaskell tends to kill of her characters, which can be a little disturbing but in line with what actually happened during that time period. I do plan on getting the books behind these films to see why the movies are so good.

White Bread is Evil! (sort of)

Now before you blow me off thinking I'm about to go one a rant about how white bread is causing the decline of civilization, I won't be doing that. I like white bread. I eat white bread. I even let my children eat white bread. So why is white bread evil? BECAUSE IT IS TOO EASY TO MAKE AND TASTES TOO GOOD!

As you may know, I'm obsessed with whole grains and love to make whole grain bread. In fact, other than the test recipes I am doing, I almost never make white bread. Until Anna got diarrhea. She isn't sick, so we are having to battle it with diet rather than meds. That means less fiber, or no whole grains. And since I had very little in the way of white flour baked goods, I made white sandwich bread from the Joy of Cooking. If I say so myself, it turned out perfectly. The texture was incredible: light, fluffy, and perfectly even throughout. So, why can't my whole wheat bread turn out so wonderfully? *Pout, whine*

My beautiful bread, the day after baking:

 

 

The one good thing that this has taught me is that I must have improved considerably since I started making bread a few years ago. All that work trying to get my whole wheat bread to turn out has helped me tremendously to know how bread works. That and bread flour is an amazing thing and should be used instead of the ubiquitous all purpose when making bread. It is called bread flour for a reason!

 

By the way, if any one has any suggestions on how to help a two year old to be "regular", please let me know. So far the "bland food" diet (bananas, applesauce, white bread, etc) hasn't done much. Neither have the probiotics we've been giving her (she's in a no yogurt phase).

Miracle of the Potatoes

Today was a bad day. A really bad day. I knew it was going to be bad when Anna woke us up by coming into our room at 6:15 and my headache from the night before had only gotten worse. I won't go into the details of the day, as they really don't matter. The bad day was entirely inside myself.

There was, however, one miracle. One brief moment where a smile graced my tired features. The miracle of the potatoes.

Knowing that I wasn't going any where today, the effort to get kids into the car being just too much, I needed to come up with something for dinner that didn't require a trip to the store. In a stroke of genius, I thought of shepherd's pie. I had plenty of carrots (I use about 5 times the amount recommended by the recipe), peas (another of my modifications), and some lamb in the freezer. Perfect! I started chopping carrots, thawing meat, and then I reached into the cupboard for the potatoes. I only had three. Normally, I use at least 6 to top my shepherd's pie and I was crushed. Not only could I not find a way to be happy today, but I couldn't even cook dinner for my family.

I tried thinking of anyway to get potatoes. I even tried calling Hubby to see if he could come home early, but the pre-WWII, bunker-like, cell phone reception squashing cement walls of Bagley Hall thwarted me once again. Finally, I decided to just make it with three potatoes. Sure, it wouldn't be as good as the other times I've made it, but it would be food. Then, as I was putting on Anna's shoes so we could run down to the front of the building and cut some rosemary, the miracle happened. For no reason at all, I suddenly remembered that the last time I had gone grocery shopping there had been too much to carry, so I left a new bag of potatoes in the car. Cue angels singing. Sure enough, there they were, in all their potato-y glory.

Thanks to that simple bag of potatoes, I had a smile on my face for at least a half an hour, a record for today. God certainly is mindful of every one of us. I'm glad that he loves me enough to remind me about a forgotten bag of potatoes just so that my day could be that much better.

The Boris Chronicles: First Steps

It has been a few days, but I did finally take my wild yeast starter on a test run and was moderately sucessful. The start, which has been named Boris (Thanks Bridget!), did very well and grew beyond my humble expectations. I don't think I've ever smelled a sourdough start that sour.

The big test came on Tuesday, when I made two different types of bread using the start. Both recipes came from Peter Reinhart's Whole Grain Breads. The first was the "master formula" or 100% Whole Wheat Sandwich bread (p 78 or p 95; yes, it is in there twice) and the second was Multigrain Struan (p 102). I actually made two loaves of the multigrain because I made a no-salt loaf for a friend. In addition to trying new recipes, and testing Boris, I also tried out some new functions on my camera. Please forgive my lack of photo skills.


The no-salt multigrain bread proofing in the bowl. According to Reinhart, having the flaxseeds soak overnight means that you can put them in whole rather than using them ground and still get all the nutritional benefits.

 

Proofing in loaf form.

 

Baking in the oven. Sorry the picture is fuzzy. I was trying to take it quickly so the heat wouldn't escape too much.

 

A beautifully baked %100 whole wheat loaf. I did mean to get a picture of all three loaves, but why show the mistakes? (They all turned out well enough, but one loaf did raise to long and collapsed a bit when baking)

 

I will have many, many opportunities to use Boris, especially since I just volunteered to be an official tester for Peter Reinhart's next bread book. Yes, I am a geek, but I'll have my name in the book if all goes well!

Thanks again for all of your name suggestions. It was certainly hard to choose, but Boris just seemed to fit. Hubby suggested that it was the Russian version of Bob, which is the name he gives to everything. (Bob was promptly vetod when he suggested it. There are just too many Bobs in the house right now.)

Mange ton gateau!

"Let them eat cake." If that doesn't just sum up the French, I don't know what does. France and anything French is near and dear to my heart ever since I was able to live there as a missionary (I've been home 5 years!). Luckily for me, there are four other sisters in my ward that also served French speaking missions and so we try to get together once a month to indulge in a French menu and speak in French. Today was our Christmas celebration.

My assignment (self-imposed, I must admit) was to make the Buche de Noel, or Yule log cake. And I had a little too much fun.

I found this recipe on Epicurious.com and it sounded wonderful. Really, who wouldn't love a nice sponge cake with marzipan cream filling, ganache (basically pure chocolate) frosting, and cute little marzipan mushrooms? While the recipe wasn't all that hard, I did have to make the frosting twice. Word of advice: always use a double boiler for melting chocolate even if the recipe says otherwise! The cake tasted wonderful, even if I did forget to buy flour and ended up making the cake with mostly whole wheat flour. In the end, the cake was a success and I was successful in sending cake home with everyone, "for the husbands" (wink, wink).

Making this cake was very good for me. I love being successful and creating things, whether it be food, knitting, or otherwise. I was giddy when I went to bed last night after finally getting the frosting on and couldn't wait to show the finished product to my friends. President Uchtdorf, of the First Presidency of the LDS church, had it right when he spoke to the Sisters of the church this last October. Creation does bring "deep satisfaction and fullfilment". Creating this cake has certainly made my week, and even perhaps my Christmas season. Well, perhaps not as much as Anna's Christmas present, but I'll post about that once it is finished and Anna has claimed it as hers.

Merry Christmas and don't forget to eat cake!

What to write?

Well, it has been some time since I've posted, but not because of lack of subject matter. I just can't seem to find a time when both kids are asleep and I have nothing better to do. And now that the planets have aligned and my children are asleep, there aren't many dishes in the sink, and I am somehow able to restrain myself from knitting, I can't decide what to write about. Let's see, there's how much I love Picasa (I've always wanted to hyperlink text!), a thumbsucking little boy, Christmas baking, a little boy who is almost 16 pounds at 2 months, a little girl who says "Dude" (still need to get the video for that one), Mathias' blessing, sleeping, long overdue pesto recipes and the list goes on and on.

Perhaps I should just go through the list I just wrote in the order I wrote it? I'll start with Picasa. (If you see something there that you would like to hear about sooner, please let me know and I will do my best.)

A few weeks ago, I went to open Picasa to do some more organizing, or perhaps to indulge one certain narcissist toddler, and was informed that there was an update available. Ok, sure. I always takes updates, even if they do mess up my computer sometimes. But this was no ordinary update. This was the introduction of Picasa 3.

Now, you must keep in mind that I'm a geek. When something new comes along, like a cell phone, camera, or computer program, I start exploring. I love discovering how things work and how to do what I want/need to do. This time was no different. I sucessfully managed to ignore children and Hubby while I checked out all the new buttons. Of course, many of the things that thrill me about the new version were probably there in the old, but I just didn't notice them. Here are some of the things that thrill me:

Albums. I had no idea that I could organize photos and videos into albums. No more scrolling through everything to find a video for my narcissist toddler!

Collages. My desktop will never be the same.


Uploading. Photos are automatically organized into albums and then it tells you how many photos are online. Then I can just press a button and any new photos I add to the album will be added to my web album as well!

Well, I could go on and on, but I won't. There is still more to discover and I do want to get some knitting done before a hungry little boy decides that 16 pounds just isn't enough.

An Acceptable Addiction

I have a confession: I'm addicted. Badly addicted. And I don't feel bad about it. And don't tell me that I need to stop knitting, or so help me...

So, you might ask, what is a good little Mormon girl doing justifying an addiction? Well, knitting is such a release for me and I love being productive with my time. I just love knitting. To see my hands creating garments, toys, and anything I want from needles and yarn gives me such a sense of accomplishment. My knitting makes me feel special and different; it is something that brings me joy.

The other day, I was reading on Ravelry forums (a knitting geek website) about knitting and feminism, and Ravelry member leTonBeau had the most beautiful retort to those that consider knitting anti-feminist, despite the poor wording. She said "My personal feminist/ craft rant is that to consider in “traditional women’s work” is anti-feminist is to deny the worth of the women who came before us and did it out of necessicity rather than choice." I certainly don't knit because I have to and I don't knit because it is considered a "womanly" thing to do. I knit because I enjoy it.

Ok, I need to stop rambling, so I'll just end with a few pictures of projects I have finished recently.

This is Hitty, a doll Anna will be getting for her birthday in a few weeks. I'm working on making some more clothes for her.


This is a poncho that I made for a friend and her new baby. I've made this poncho several times and absolutely love it. I made a few changes this time just to make it more interesting.


This was my very first lace project and I was very pleased with how it turned out. Unfortunately, I just used yarn from my "stash" and I didn't have any good colors to choose from, so it is a nice, lovely brown.


Thanks for letting me rant and show off my knitting!

Green Thumb

Because of pregnancy and the distance we had to travel to garden, we decided to garden at home this summer. This, of course, is rather limiting since we live in an apartment and have to use containers to garden. However, we have a few containers up on the roof deck of our building (it certainly is nice to have an "in" with the managers) and we are very proud of our plants.

This is our garden.

We have three tomato plants (one cherry, two larger), a pot of basil and parsley, a bell pepper, arugula, Swiss chard and chives. As you can see, the tomatoes are doing quite well, especially the cherry which is covered with baby tomatoes.

Our pepper has 13 peppers growing, according to my husband's count. I haven't bothered counting. They seem innumerable.

Our cherry tomato is huge. We can't even fit all of it in the tomato cage! We lost a few tomatoes while we were gone for the Fourth of July, but it is still covered.

This is one of our other tomato plants. See how many tomatoes it has?

Before I took the pictures of our garden, I had pretty much decimated our Swiss chard to make dinner. But look how much we got out of a little container!

Growing this garden has been very good for me. I've always loved fresh produce (thanks, Mom, for spoiling me) and I like to see success. Gardens, while they don't provide instant gratification, certainly progress fast enough to be either very satisfying or very discouraging. I'm feeling very satisfied this year.

Count your blessings...

Hubby and I manage an apartment complex as a way to live comfortably in an expensive city while on a student budget. We feel that we were very lucky with the place that we found and have been working here for almost two years.

Yesterday, I was talking to our property manager about some rent increases, and she made the comment that perhaps we need to increase them even more because we have absolutely no trouble filling vacant apartments. Well, that got me to thinking, as it has many times recently, and I really don't think it has anything to do with what we charge for rent, the state of the building, or even our skill as managers. But how do you explain that you think that building stays full because God is blessing you?

I really do feel blessed because of how things are going here in our building. Our pay is determined by how many people pay on time, and over the year and a half that we have been on that payment plan, we have fewer and fewer people paying late. Also, we get a bonus if we are able to rent apartments within a week of vacancy. We have only missed 3 or 4 in the whole time that we have been renting apartments, and we've had quite a few vacancies. In fact, we had three people give notice this month and already they are rented. Honestly, how could God not be blessing us? We certainly aren't the best managers ever. We make our mistakes. But we still have a full building and our property manager wonders how we are able to do it.

All of this makes me want to continue to pay tithing forever and to accept all church responsibilities that come my way. Now, I've never really had a problem with those things, but seeing how much we are blessed right now just confirms to me that those things, among others, really do make a difference in our lives.

Nuance of Language

I've been wanting to post something about this ever since Hubby and I had a slight disagreement about a month ago. Our disagreement was based on Hubby's use of a word that I felt did not fully communicate what he was trying to say, or that it was misleading in some way. Unfortunately, I have this issue quite regularly because I don't feel that Hubby has a complete grasp of the nuance of language. (This could come from living in Germany for much of his young life.)

In any case, this "disagreement" really highlighted the fact that I love the meaning of words and that I'm a little, ummm, exuberant when it comes to using words correctly. (I'll do the same thing with grammer as well.) Why am I this way? I don't know. I've always loved reading and English, though I prefer editing to writing (I almost made Hubby cry when I edited his Letter of Intent for grad school, but that's another story.) My mother also loved writing and reading, though she studied Microbiology in college. And my sister (older and perhaps a little bossy) is an English teacher, which can explain quite a bit. But what it all boils down to is a love for words and using words correctly.

Unfortunately, I have to admit that my vocabulary is not very extensive, as I may have led you to believe. Along with an obsessive insistance on the correct use of words is a fear of using words incorrectly. So I tend to use the generic, everyday type of words in my speech with a few "superfluouses" and "acquiescents" scattered here and there, properly used, of course. Every time I use a word that has just the right nuance, I get this warm feeling inside that just makes me want to use more "big" words, but, of course, only if I use them correctly.

Normal? Maybe?

Maybe having a pity party worked....

So, yesterday after breakfast I was playing with Anna and suddenly I felt like cleaning my leather couch and chair. Wow, that was strange. I haven't felt like cleaning in, umm, a couple months? After the couch was done, I dusted one of my plants. And then I felt like doing laundry, particularly my woolens that are so hard to clean (I cheated. I'll give instructions at the end.) I can't tell you how suprised I was. After a couple months of wanting to do nothing but read and lay on the couch, it was a welcome relief. I even was able to decide on something for dinner(with my sister's help), make it, and have it ready when Hubby walked through the door!

With all of the cleaning urges happening, I can't help but wonder if the end of morning/evening/all day sickness is in sight. I'll be at twelve weeks this Friday, so maybe things are starting to calm down a bit. Expecting it to go away almost immediately is unwise, but maybe I really am starting to feel better.

Instructions on cleaning woolens:
My in-laws are obsessed with all things wool (my sister-in-law married into a sheep herding family and my mother-in-law cleans, cards, spins, dyes, and knits her own yarn). This would explain the wonderful wool blanket (Pendelton, because that is the only place to get good wool blankets) we received from them for our wedding. And the last time we were visiting Grandma and Opa, my mother-in-law showed me how to clean our blanket without having to take it to the dry cleaners. It is actually very simple.

Here are a few rules to remember when washing wool:
Never, NEVER agitate (unless you intend to felt your woolen)
Always use the same temperature of water for every stage of cleaning (hot or cold, it doesn't matter, just don't switch from hot to cold or vis versa in the middle of cleaning)
Never run water directly onto your woolen

Here is what I did with our sweaters:
First I added Woolite to the washer and filled it up with water.
Then I added the sweaters and gently pushed them under the water until all the air was gone.
Then I let it sit for about 30 minutes to an hour.
Then I moved the dial ahead to the spin cycle, let the water spin out and then refill, stopping it as soon as it started to agitate. (my washer fills from the bottom up, no water shooting into the bowl. If you have one that shoots water, you will want to move your woolens out of the way, or remove them from the washer until the water stops shooting.)
I repeated this process again just to make sure all the soap was out, then I moved the dial to the final spin cycle and let it finish.

Now, if you have one of those fancy front-loading washers that I covet, just use your handwash setting and forget about these complicated instructions.

Getting Excited

So, Hubby and I were surprised last month when my period didn't show up. We were being careful, but somehow by the end of the month I was lying down on the couch suffering from morning sickness.

Now, don't get me wrong, it is not a problem that I am pregnant. In fact, we had discussed this timing previously, knowing that if I got pregnant in December or January, our kids would be about 2 years apart. Not bad timing for us. Then we discovered that Hubby forgot to sign me up for his insurance, which he has to do at the begining of each school year. Now, he immediately signed me up, but it wouldn't start until January, so December was out. So, because of that and because I am just plain scared of having more than one child running around, I wanted to put off the conception until this summer. Well, that obviously didn't happen.

Am I excited to be pregnant? Let's just say that I am working on it. Like I mentioned, I had mentally prepared myself for getting pregnant several months in the future. Also, I'm afraid that other women that I know will think that we are irresponsible. Because we live in such a liberal area, I get the impression that people that have kids only two years apart (or even just have kids) are looked down upon. Somehow, and I don't know how this happened, women are seen as not being true to themselves if they have children. I certainly don't agree with this, but I still worry about what others think of me.

And the biggest reason I'm still working on being excited? Well, it is rather simple. Very shortly after I found out that I was pregnant, the nausea set in. I really didn't have any time to prepare myself before I was sick. So, once the sickness goes away, I'll really be able to get excited. :)