Welcome, Summer!

Today I took a walk down to the mailbox with my three-year old nephew.  The afternoon was rolling away and the a/c had been running non-stop for the last twenty minutes.  So, when we stepped out the front door, the heat felt welcoming.  Greeted by white-yellow sunshine, the verdant green of the grass and trees overwhelmed us as we strolled hand-in-hand down the long drive to the box.  Mike chattered and "told me stories" (things he claims he's done, but never has).  I felt happy just to be outside, even as the sun grew hot on my neck, and happy to be holding this little guy's hand.  Together we carried the mail, freshly placed in our box by the mailman just one box (and twenty yards) away.  We talked about trips to the zoo, swimming, running through sprinklers, and softball games.  It's an afternoon for the grill and cool summer salads.  Alas, if only my family here ate that way!  I definitely think a trip to Monday's farmer's market at the Library is in order (if it's still on for Memorial Day), and if not, next Saturday I can no longer linger in bed.  I want some more asparagus and perhaps some zucchini and anything else that might be available.  Salads and grilled vegetables sound so good.  Welcome, summer!  Welcome, fresh produce, farmer's market, cook-outs, evenings on the patio, and mornings outside.    And I'm sure, as the heat waxes on, I'll be ready to trade in these sorts of things for Fall, sweaters and scarves, trips to the pumpkin patch and heating up the oven for braises and stews! :)

On this diet thing

(And when I say diet, I mean way of eating, not going "on a diet" to lose weight.  Though I do hope that will be a result from our change in "way of life".)

One of my biggest concerns is that I won't like the food.  I grew up not eating many vegetables.  My dad doesn't like vegetables.  He is the second pickiest person I know (my sister is the first.  Seriously, if it's not orange and it's not processed, she won't eat it).  So, we ate what I like to call the holy quartet: corn, green beans, peas, and carrots.  And lots and lots of potatoes, but anymore there seems to be a lot of confusion about whether potatoes are really a vegetable or a carb.  If I was lucky, Mom would go out on a limb and make sweet potatoes (or yams) or broccoli and cauliflower with cheese for herself and me.  But seriously, that was it.  I didn't discover artichokes until much later, and most other vegetables I've had only a smattering of experience.  So, what if I don't like all these vegetables?

Nick may not be any better.  He hates onions and peppers (the foundation veggies for SO many vegetable dishes, especially onions).  I once used onions for a soup I was making for a Bible study lunch, and he was grumpy the rest of the night because of the aroma (he'd say stench) of the onions cooking.  It greatly saddens me not to be able to cook freely with these things.  But, that is to say that Nick may not like the vegetables any more than I do.

I've been thinking about instituting a rule. It's pretty much this: try it three times before you decide you don't like it.  During my walk this morning, I discussed with a friend how we may just have to learn to broaden our tastes; develop a taste, or at least a tolerance, for foods we otherwise thought we'd turn up our noses at.  Or are tempted to turn our noses up because it is such an unfamiliar and pungent flavor, or an unfamiliar and in-your-face texture.  If after three separate occasions (not counting leftovers, I'm thinking), you still don't like, well, alright, then.  But we know from reading the baby cereal boxes that it can take anywhere up to eleven times to try to feed baby a food before baby will accept it.  Are we the babies in this scenario?  I think we are: because we are having to introduce ourselves to a wider range of plant-produced foods than we were as children.  Oiye.  Here goes.

And time drags on

As quickly as we viewed and bought that house is how slow the time has gone since then.  We may have another month yet before it finally closes!  It's hard to believe that it was really only a week and a half ago (almost two weeks, depending on how you divvy up weeks) since they accepted our offer on the house.  The fact that the past few weeks have moved at tortoise pace makes that far off date when we have possession of our apartment and can begin sprucing up and then moving in seem.... interminable.  And of course, I pass the time the best way I can: by torturing myself.  Yep, I've been watching all my favorite HGTV shows none stop, looking at paint colors and thinking about that downstairs kitchen renno which, let's face it, will be the last to come as it's the least absolutely necessary and the might possibly be the most expensive.  It will be a few years before we're able to do more than rip up carpet and paint, but I'm all about getting on that now.  I will just have to patient.  I keep imagining myself in my new kitchen: how I'm going to set it up (because it is small and will be a challenge), how I will make it work for Bittman, Waters and I.  Oh yes, I have been plans for the three of us.  If being a somewhat haphazard mommy doesn't get in the way.  I also think about how I hope I might be able to makeover that hall bathroom somehow.  And make the whole thing a very livable home for the foreseeable future.  But that is still long months down the road...

Please don't wake up yet, please don't wake up!

Yes, I'm not above mentally begging my daughter to sleep!  The first nice day all week, and I'm hoping to hit the hay here for a short bit.  I have at last succumbed to the cold circulating my family and it has completely sapped me.  Now that I've got some things done, I'm hoping to lie down for awhile.  But I can hear her moving from time to time.  Seriously, she needs a longer nap (it's only been an hour and she only slept a few minutes here and there this morning...).  And Mama does, too.  If she could sleep for even a half hour longer (a whole hour?), that would be blessed relief!  Here's praying!  That she sleeps and so do I!

Update:  I slept for all of five minutes!  Apparently, Eliza's bowels don't really believe in naps because more often than not, she is awake early due to a dirty diaper (not wet, muddy).  So.  Let's just hope for another nap before Nick's softball game tonight, shall we?  Maybe I'll get to sleep then!

A rather rainy day

It's raining here.  Again.  I think it's rained more days in May than is hasn't.

I've been up since 5am.  The thought was to get up with my husband so I could accomplish more in the day.  So far, they only things I've accomplished is to have breakfast, feed and dress my daughter, and put her back down for a nap.  Which it sounds as if she'll shortly be waking.  And I did do my devotional reading and my blog post. I am still playing catch-up.  But that's okay, it's been a nice few days: coffee and dinner with friends, reading a cookbook (yes, actually reading the cookbook).

I know that Julie and Julia has spawned a bunch of spin-off projects, which I think is fun and fabulous.  I admit, I was rather tempted myself.  But I really didn't have a cookbook that I felt I really wanted to cook all the way through.  That might have changed.  I am reading Alice Water's The Art of Simple Food and I'm loving it.  She makes the food sound so good and easy and... simple.  I don't know if it really is all that.  Souffle?  Yeah, maybe not so easy.  Boiled dinner?  Hers, of course, is the ultimate and looks like it could take all day.  Or several days.  But I like the chapters, the lessons, the foundations.  When we move out on our own and begin to change our diet (because it is looking rather certain now and I might try starting it bit by bit here at my parents'), I think it would be wonderful to have a family night, one night of the weekend that is just ours that we don't share.  And then maybe I could break out Alice Waters and try something from her book, we could cook through it weekend by weekend.  I'm feeling a Eating Good with Alton Brown/Alice Waters-style coming on (nod to friends on Facebook).  Only Nick would never let me make an Onion Tart.  We'll have to think about that one...

Catch-up

This past weekend was graduation weekend here in Topeka!  Nick and I spent every day lugging Eliza to graduation parties and festivities!  And in the interim my work as a Proverbs 31 wife suffered.  Our room is a wreck, with too many things piled on the desk and the chair by the bed to make it look "cleaner" in here.  The living room is scattered with junk and the dining room dotted as well.  It is a mark of the wonderful woman my mom is that she hasn't said anything, as she really likes a ship-shape house!  I started on it today: I tackled the laundry and that is why I'm still up.  I'm waiting for Nick's uniforms to finish in the dryer and then I'll put them away and put myself to bed.  It will have to be folded and put away tomorrow, along with all the junk.  Eliza had her six month check-up today, which means she had five shots in her poor little legs.  We have to go back in a month for more as some of them were flu/H1N1 vaccines.  She really was a trooper, but admittedly fussy today.  So mama didn't get a whole lot done.  Forget breaking-up: catching up is hard to do!

Rethinking Food

One of the things that having a baby has brought home to me with startling reality is that I need to change the way I eat.  I lost my baby weight, initially, fairly easily: and then I began to pack on the pounds.  Because my baby is sedentary [for the time being] I have often been sedentary.  And my diet has wreaked havoc on my body.  I admit, I've never liked to exercise and I'm only good at it intermittently, and it would likely help if I did exercise more regularly.  But I think it wouldn't solve "the problem."

The Problem is that I don't eat enough fruits and vegetables.  Fruits I love and could gorge on them until I experience crises with my gastrointestinal system.  Vegetables... not so much.  But I'm a firm believer that they are the best food out there for you.  I just don't like them.  So I don't eat them.  Instead, I love junk food almost to an addiction, and I rarely have excellent self-control around them.  This is bad.  Very, very bad.  And my weight is fluctuating at a degree that brings me dangerously close to diet-related health problems.  This is uber bad.  What to do?

Well, the obvious answer is to start eating more fruits and vegetables.  The only problem is, I don't know what to do with them.  A friend of mine blogged about some of her culinary inspirations, which tout the goodness of eating more plants and less animal product (meat, dairy, eggs, etc.  Oh, sigh!  Cheese...)  I decided to check them out and the first tome I picked up was Mark Bittman's Food Matters.  I admit, I'm not as into the "Save the Planet" message of the book as he might hope I'd be, though I do believe in being a good steward of what the Lord has given us.  (I confess, I actually worried about all the jobs that would be lost if the food industry went defunct, but that's another story and likely a useless worry.  Would the food industry really go defunct?)  But I could get behind his message of "Sane Eating".  The bomb didn't start ticking with Bittman, though.  Jaime Oliver's Food Revolution got me to thinking, too.  The way I'm eating now isn't working for me, even if it is easy, convenient, and admit it, tasty in many respects.  Something's gotta change.  I really want to lose weight and eat healthy.  I want to teach my children to eat healthy.  I would really like to do this on a decent budget (and this is where I'm not convinced of Bittman's argument.  Maybe there in New York bulgur and wheat berries are inexpensive, but here they're specialty items.  The only thing I'd save on is beans and not buying so much meat.  And we'd have to grow a garden to supplement the high volume of veggies.)

So I'm rethinking the way we eat and the way I cook.  More grains, more veggies, less dairy (oh, sigh!), less meat, cutting out junk food...  It's kind of scary.  Mark Bittman makes it sound so easy, but it's a lifestyle change.  And what if I don't like the food?

Eliza's six months old!

Can you believe it???  Where does the time go!  I could post a picture, but it would be of her sleeping and you'd really only see her little back curved around herself as she now sleeps on her side a lot.  I'll have to take one sometime today and post it this weekend.

Developments: she now sits up!  Mostly on her own.  Every now and then she'll take a nose dive or fall back on the boppy I usually have sitting behind her (because she prefers not to sit amidst the pillow, thank you very much).  If she's forced to sit any anything that makes her recline, she does crunches trying to sit up straight again.  She can now correct herself a bit if she starts to lean and can even lean over and pick something up and sit herself back up, as long as her face doesn't hit the floor.  She really, really wants to stand up!  If she stands up holding onto your hands you have to wrestle her to sit back down!

TV remotes and cell phones are the No. 1 and 2 on her Most Fascinating Things list.  We've given her an extra remote devoid of batteries and she's so happy anytime you hand it to her.  She loves to go outside and look around, though that bright sun sometimes makes her grumpy.  As well, she is now pulling the shy act around people.  Her head will lay against my shoulder and she'll smile at someone from the corner of her eye.  It's fall-down adorable.  However, she has become quite a Mama's-girl, and when she's overwhelmed she will cry for me (and sometimes Daddy) even if someone she knows is holding her.

Thankfully she is beginning to stretch out her naptimes a little bit.  Today, she's gotten in two naps of more than an hour and a half.  I almost don't know what to do with myself!  Almost. ;)

Alas... There she is!  I hear her stirring on the monitor.  You'll have to excuse me.  I'll have that picture up for you before long!

WOW! What the last few days have brought!

It's hard to believe this only started a week ago.

A week ago, I did some number crunching and realized we wouldn't qualify for a decent loan until our medical bills were paid off.  On further number crunching, it seemed the earliest we'd be able to pay them off would be this fall, meaning getting into a house could take until the next year once a down payment was saved up.  We started considering some drastic measures to pay off the debt.

Five days ago, I mention to Mom a house Nick and I had spotted on the listings several weeks back and had briefly considered: a house-turned-triplex that would give us an apartment and then some income to make the payments.  Only, we didn't qualify for a loan to buy it. 

Same day, my parents run some errands together.  They decide to stop and look at the house I told them about.  They like what they see.  When they get home, my dad looks up the listing and shows me how much the payments would be.  I know this, but had also gotten on our lending companies mortgage calculator, and what we qualify for there doesn't even compare.  That night, Nick and I go to his first softball game for the summer.  When we got home, my parents sat down at the dinner table with us with their game faces on.

They had been doing some number crunching of their own.  Turns out, my grandfather's trust isn't making any money in the checking account (with interest) it's been sitting in.  Thousands on thousands making less than $.50.  Then they get the idea: what if the trust bought the house?  Then we (Nick and I) could rent an apartment in the house rent-to-own until we had debt paid off and could afford to buy the house from them.  In the meantime, the trust could make some money.  My parents had even called a realtor and started asking questions.  Someone is looking at the house on Monday.  We could view the house at the same appointment, but we want to get in before that.

The weekend goes by.  No appointment.  We all decide to meet at the house on Monday and view it at the same time as the other interested party.

Two days ago, we view the house.  We LOVE it.  Original woodwork in place on the main floor (did I mention the house was built in 1909?) and unpainted.  HUGE living room, massive dining room with original wainscoting, fireplace, built-in bookshelves next to fireplace, wood stair case.  Large rooms on second story.  A garage off the alley.  Kitchen and bathrooms need updating, but hey, the rennovations were old.  Updated plumbing and recently updated electrical.  We find out that two other parties viewing the house that afternoon.

We meet together after everyone is off work.  It doesn't take long to come to the consensus that we want the house.  We call the realtor and he comes over after dinner to work out a contract.  I had NO idea it takes that long to work out a contract!

Yesterday morning, our realtor submits our offer.  The listing agent meets with the sellers in the afternoon.  We have a counter offer not long after 5pm.  We make our counter offer.  Shortly after 7pm, I get a call on my cell from my dad.  They've accepted!  We're getting a house!

In just one week we go from being completely dismally disappointed that we may not be able to begin looking for a home until after the first of next year, to suddenly, we'll be moving out of my parents' this fall at the latest!  It's a special circumstance: we won't own the house.  But someday, we will.  I'll post more later, but for now I'm looking at paint colors (as the house needs to be repainted) and starting to get an idea of how much we'd need to budget to renovate the kitchen.  The bathrooms are next on my list.  In fact, a list of renovations to be made when we eventually do take it over needs to be done... But that's some time down the line!  For now, I will just wait (hopefully without anxiety) for the closing date to come and these things get on a roll.  It will be maybe a month and a half before that day comes!

We've made an offer on a house

It's a really long story I shall share soon.  The house will need a lot of work, but we're excited about it.  We're just waiting to see if they will accept our offer.  We're not the only ones interested.

Prayer Request

Something big may be happening.  I don't want to get into details, again, because it involves more than just Nick and myself.  Let us just leave it at me telling you that it is about housing.  It's a positive prayer request, if things will work out.  If you read my blog, would you be so kind as to pray for us: that if the Lord would be willing, that this will work out?  And would you please bear with my abominable vagueness?  Thank you, dear friends.  I will be far more forthcoming if/when, however things work out.

How much do you share?

I don't pretend to be the most experienced or savvy blogger.  I always wonder if I should do it another way or if it really matters.  It's my blog, right?  I can say what I want to.  But there is a falseness in that statement.  Sure, I can say what I want to.  But as Paul says, Everything is permissible, but not everything is beneficial.  So, when it comes to your own life, how much do you put down?  Is it better to put on a brave face and keep the dirty laundry to yourself?  Or do you share some of the harder things in order to "keep it real"?  I've had a painful weekend.  Nay, I painful week.  I've been down (maybe depressed is a good word); I had a horrible, horrible fight with someone I love and respect (but no, not my husband if you're wondering); and I've been discouraged about some ministry things I'm facing.  I spent the majority of yesterday beating myself up for every little thing I said because I felt I could have said it better, or done better, or showed more discretion, or... what have you.  I am simply discouraged about me.  I am fearfully and wonderfully made, right?  I am saved by grace to a life of righteousness.  And I feel I should be doing a better job with what I've been given.  In many ways I feel like I am failing, and in some of those ways, failing epicly.  Perhaps sharing this for all the world to see is stepping over a boundary of discretion, but perhaps I am still learning that fine line between honesty and discretion.  They really aren't in contradiction to each other all the time.

So from this corner of the world, my spirit is in a small amount of turmoil.  What can I do to be and do better?  What would the Lord have me do or change?  There are so many thoughts whipping in different directions.  I could probably write three different posts at least just from one weekend.  But I'm just not sure how much should be shared.