Me Stealing Laura's Hat

I figured out how to post the videos! Mom told me to post them on YouTube and her blog. This one is Me Stealing Laura's Hat. You can click on the link below to watch.

Beth Stealing Laura's Hat.


It's awesome!:)

And it was our friend Ella's birthday. This is for her!

Happy B-day Ella.

Creativity

Who knows what's for dinner. I'm totally winging it these days.

I discovered a good recipe for GF pancakes, so we had that twice over the weekend, once for dinner with meat and cheese. And on Friday we went to Red Robin for a surprise birthday party. They'll create a lettuce wrap for any of their sandwiches or burgers, so Yvon and I were both happy with our meals there. They don't really have a GF menu, but at least there is some accommodation for weird diets.

On Saturday night we drove out to Vimy for some family time and were treated to a yummy ham dinner. Most dinners are yummy when I don't have to cook or clean. I've been married now for 16 years and it's the first time we've gone to my brother-in-law's house. That's weird, but we always meet up at his parents and then don't generally socialize outside of that. We went to their son's school production of Grease and it was...well, it was a school production. Some kids could sing, some could act but few could do both well. It was still a good time though. Beth and Laura really liked it, but I realized that sex ed in elementary school is definitely not enough and I'll have to work some education into our conversation at home.

I had no pictures of the play or of dinners today. The kids have rediscovered stop motion animation with my camera and were busy over the two days of Teacher's Convention last week. I can't figure out how to share them with you, but Beth will no doubt figure it out.

I'm Gonna Be Famous!

 Maybe not, but I do get to sing with the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra in this place.

That's going to be me up there in (hopefully) a new black dress. 

Many moons ago I used to sing with a pretty decent local choral group, Da Camera Singers.  It's the only group I ever had to audition for and I still think I got in only because I knew the conductor at the time and he knew how I can sing when I'm not nervous. 

However I actually got in, I sang with them for two years and loved it.  They sang challenging music and probably what I learned most from that time was that I love singing in small groups, and preferably accappella.  Every week we were assigned a segment of our repertoire and would be randomly selected at the start of practice to sing it with a quartet in front of everyone.  I thought that would freak me out, but I really loved it.

Obviously I had to quit when we moved away and when we came back my life had changed somewhat.  We had Beth and Laura was on her way. More importantly, there was a new conductor that I didn't know.  Even if I'd had time to join them again, I've been too scared to audition for a stranger. 

But... I do have connections with the symphony and I was asked to join Da Camera just for one month, ending in two nights of performances, performing Maurice Durufle's Requiem.  If you've got time and inclination, we're singing on March 25th and 26th and it should be really good. 

It makes for a busier than usual month for me, with 9 rehearsals ahead of me, but I got in without a nerve-wracking audition.  You just gotta know the right people.

What's for Dinner

Nothing special.  A pork version of sloppy joes on bread.  With highly processed Cheez Whiz.  Cheez Whiz adds personality, doncha know?

Is pork still considered the other white meat?  We keep eating it on Red Meat Wednesday in spite of my scheduling of meals.  Oh well. 

Last night did not play out the way any of us planned, but I learned a few things about my girls.

1. Beth is the typical oldest child. Responsible, level-headed, practical.

2. Laura will never be an ER nurse or paramedic. Empathy is way too deeply embedded to not come to the forefront in a crisis.

3. Alice lives in the moment like most little kids and is hanging onto her childish ways longer than her sisters.

We have been trying to teach the girls to do the dishes on every night that they are home and not rushing off to some activity. It's been a long process because they are painfully slow. It's not at all like my memories of washing dishes with my sisters, singing Sunday School songs and laughing. I'm sure that's an inaccurate memory anyway. We probably fought the system in the same way my girls do.

Alice is on "clear the table and put away the dry dishes" duty this month. She's very slow and the plates are big and heavy for her. I promised to read aloud to them if they finished in 15 minutes so they were rushing a bit.

While I played the piano to drown out their squabbles, I heard a loud crash and crying. I didn't see what had happened but Laura was loudly crying and Alice too. It was easy to see the pile of plates on the floor, but it wasn't clear who was hurt or if the loud sound had just scared them (I don't think they are afraid of me yellling at them for breaking dishes).

It turned out Alice had cut her foot and needed the bleeding stopped, but Laura needed more consoling. Beth calmly found the bandaids and got pants and socks for Alice (she was wearing a gauzy dress as part of a previous game that was clearly not suitable for a -30 drive to emergency). I had to leave a crying Laura in Beth's care while Alice and I drove for help.

I opted for a MediCentre instead of emergency because even a bleeding child doesn't always get precedence over car accident victims or a loudly drunk bleeding man and the like. Playing up the "she's bleeding into her boot" story, we got in pretty quickly.

I've never had stitches, nor had Alice and she was very afraid of the freezing ("It'll be SO COLD") and the sewing on her foot. I must say that the needle in the non-fleshy top of her foot brought back awful memories of being with Beth once as nurses tried to find a vein on her dehydrated baby body long ago. This time I didn't have Yvon to deal with it while I ran away.

Once the freezing was in, they gave her three stitches and it went something like this.

"Let me know if you can feel anyth...ICANFEELICANFEELICANFEEL...Can you still feel anyth...ICANFEELICANFEELICANFEEL...Okay, now we'll just put the bandage on...Did you do anything yet?"

Obviously she could not actually feel her foot while they stitched it up. They threw her icky sock away and we went home, Alice chattering happily in the back about being the third person in Grade 2 who's had stitches and isn't it good that her talent show entry didn't involve her feet?

As I locked the car door at home, I heard my knee pop. Oh great. It hurt enough to bring tears to my eyes and I was seriously not sure how I was going to walk to the house. Generally when one knee goes, the other does some sort of compensation move and they both have trouble bearing weight. Clearly I couldn't stay outside in the cold though. Even with her own injured foot, sweet Alice stepped up to the plate and offered her arm. Not actually helpful as we climbed the snow pile between the van and our house, but we made it.

Beth had spent much of the time at home trying to ease Laura's worries and clean up some of the broken dishes. Then she promptly helped me into bed and settled me with two hot wheat bags to try to get the swelling down in my knees. Of all my children, she's the one you want around in a crisis. Laura is great for the words of encouragement after the fact and lots of hugs and kisses, but in the moment I think she feels the pain as much as the injured person.

Today I'm hobbling around painfully, and I will follow up this time with physio and try to get my weight down a bit. I've done it before and I can do it again and clearly my knees are having trouble dealing.

What's for Dinner

It's not a very balanced meal and it wasn't on my plan.  However, it was cheap Tuesday at Save-On-Foods and they had a deal on things I wouldn't normally buy.  $10 shrimp, and free linguine, baby veggies and alfredo sauce.  It sounded like an easy meal that would take no thought and my pork in the crockpot was really big and not quite finished anyway.  Meal plan, schmeal plan. 

This was a Jamie Oliver trick.  Slice your parmesan cheese with a potato peeler for long ribbons of cheese.  I like it and it's a bit less messy than the grater.

Alice's plate always looks sparse, but she wanted to be in the blog too.  The kids had leftover pesto pasta and we had our GF pasta and some flat flax bread, so the free linguini is saved for another time. 

Once the pork was finally cooked through, I pulled it all apart and had enough meat for 4 meals.   The plan was for roast beef to be made into Shepherd's Pie and Sloppy Joes this week, but the pork shoulders were easier to find in the freezer.  I'll just make pork versions of the same.

I still struggle with the idea of buying only grass-fed or sustainable meat.  (Have you watched Food Inc. yet?)  It's a great idea and we should probably eat less meat overall, but then I see a great sale ($8 for 4 meals of pork) and I think about our increasing utility bills and our stable income and I snatch it up. 

Somewhere there is a balance and I haven't found it yet.  Ignorance of the agri-business and the food industry is bliss and I sometimes wish I'd stayed a bit less informed.  Ask me about politics or wars overseas.  I know nothing about that.  Why didn't I stay that way about food?  It would make grocery shopping easier and less guilty.

What's for dinner

On the menu tonight:  Sausage and cheese quiche, orange slices and sauerkraut, with apple pie for dessert. 

I've tried gluten free pie crust before and it was quite disgusting.  One particularly horrible chicken pie that caused me to grind up some of my own rice flour, smell the purchased flour and my own and promptly throw away the purchased rice flour.  When you buy it you have no idea how old it is (it travelled from China to India and then to me, with how many stops in between) and I didn't actually know what non-rancid rice flour was supposed to taste or smell like.  Now I do and I won't be buying it anymore. 

Anyway, this was a new recipe and it tasted a bit sweet and was chewy.  Not tough the way a wheat flour crust can sometimes be, but actually chewy.  It wasn't unpleasant, but still not the perfect pie pastry.  I think the perfect pie pastry might be the GF cracker recipe I used last week. 

The sauerkraut was my first ever attempt at fermenting cabbage without the use of vinegar.  It was super easy and turned out really good.  It was also satisfying to see my old Medalta crock being used for it's original purpose; preserving food.  This year I'm growing about 10 heads of cabbage for sauerkraut.  The worms will no doubt feast as well, but we'll get a lot too.