Rose Parade Preparations

Eric, who is on the Ronald McDonald House Executive Board invited us parents to join his family at a reception at the Rose Parade Float Pavilion where the Ronald McDonald House float and 15 others are being constructed.

Roses imported from Ecuador, where they are in season.

The flower tent.

"May I take your order, please?"

Various color seeds.

The Space Shuttle has pulled up to an outer space McDonalds Drive-through.

Christmas Day 2009

The children are older so we don't have to get up so early now. But the call came at 8:00 a.m. that Grant was awake and ready to open stockings so off we went.

Breakfast was traditional cream cheese puffy buns and fresh pineapple wedges with a cherry on top. We like our traditions! Then opening gifts (this is the quilt I designed and made for Vanessa, whose name means "butterfly"), cleaning up the mess, resting, then off again to Eric's sister's home (Christmas Day meal is her holiday). This year it was a Mexican feast. Yummmmy!! It reminds me of one of my favorite Christmas carol lyrics by Alfred Burt, a man who wrote a carol for his family every year until he died of cancer:

We'll dress the house with holly bright and sprigs of mistletoe

We'll trim the Christmas tree tonight and set the lights aglow

We'll wrap our gifts with ribbons gay and give them out on Christmas Day

By everything we do and say, our gladness we will show

We'll dress the table daintily, our finest treasures use

That all a-sparkle it may be and bright with lovely hews

Then for the feasting we'll prepare a kitchen full of wondrous fare

That each from all the dishes rare, his fav'rite one may choose

And ye who would the Christ child greet, your heart also adorn

That it may be a dwelling meet for Him who now is born

Let all unlovely things give place to souls bedecked with heavenly

grace,

That ye may view His holy face with joy on Christmas morn (mor-n)

Christmas Eve 2009

Christmas Eve was filled with Christmas music, last-minute baking, late afternoon church service, and dinner at Eric's parents' home. Christmas Eve is "their holiday." Then Tom and I slipped home to rest up for the next day while the children and cousins opened mounds of presents from the other Nana and Papa. We always open gifts on Christmas morning at Roxanne's (Christmas morning and Easter are Roxanne & Eric's holidays). Here is our Christmas card picture and the cake I brought to the Christmas Eve feast.

Good News Club

Here are some of the actors in our Christmas play at "Micah House-Oxford," a large house in a low-income area of our town where volunteers from our church give the children a snack after school, help them with their homework, help them cook, do crafts, and this is where I have a Monday afternoon Good News Club. Good News Club is where I tell a Bible story using flannel-graph and teach the children God's Word. We have Joseph and Mary, the star,

the 3 wisemen with Herod in the background. They took their acting very seriously, and the children in the audience were the quietest they have ever been.

Annual Gingerbread Tradition

Ahhh, the day after Thanksgiving. Everything is cleaned up, everyone has gone home, and the grandchildren are staying the night for our annual day of baking gingerbread. This year they requested Snoopy's doghouse, so I went on the internet and found pictures of the other characters and made patterns. Here is this year's result.

Visions of Sugarplums danced in their heads...

Advent Devotions

This is the first year I actually got around to making a "Names of God" tree which I've had in mind for about four years. We are getting together as a family with the grandchildren and looking up the names of God and their Bible references on the Sundays of Advent to prepare for Christmas.

Thanksgiving 2009

So you see I'm not very good at regular blogging. Life interrupted my posts. So it's catch up time.

First Thanksgiving. In our family each family member hosts a different holiday, and mine is always Thanksgiving, a uniquely American holiday of praising God for his blessings of home and family and country...and of course, feasting. Here are some of the fun things I made this year. Pilgrim hats made of marshmallows dipped in chocolate on top of a store-purchased chocolate cookie. Frosting buckles added. Then the salad course was a pear and citrus Turkey. Everyone loved it, but never again. Too much last minute preparation when there are so many dishes to juggle so they're all warm and ready at the same time. The funny little green and yellow thing is supposed to be a cob of corn. It's really a wrapped tissue tube filled with a Bible verse of Thanksgiving and a little card for each guest to write and take home a Thank You note to God for his blessings. My only "mistake" (although Julia Child says never admit your kitchen mistakes) was substituting our family's traditional Tortilla Soup course with a strawberry yogurt soup that really should be served only in summertime. Almost everyone turned their nose up at it, and because they are family I was teased unmercifully for changing their precious "traditional meal." Certain dishes must always be included and some must prepared the same way every time because this holiday is the only time we eat them. Even though my creative nature is somewhat discouraged, Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, because there is no pressure of gifts, and the secular culture hasn't come up with a substitute to dilute the meaning of the holiday.

For ME????

Can you believe it??? I get my license in one month!

The Big Surprise

Happy Birthday, Vanessa, from Dad, Mom, and Grant.

Finally we don't have to keep this secret anymore.

The party

There were photos,

dancing,

and, of course, birthday cake

Sweet 16

Grand-daughter Vanessa is Sweet 16.

Where has the time gone?

This calls for a party.

A masquerade ball.

New backyard

Wow! It's been a busy time getting ready for the backyard sod installation. Much earth moving and leveling. I've always wanted to name my home, but never found anything I thought suitable. Now I've found it. Stoneyfield. We've taken partial truck loads of stones and "released them into the wild." Well, here are the before and after pictures. We love it, and Duchess Gwendolyn loves it. There is a long narrow area behind the hedges at the back where my vegetable garden will grow out of sight from the house.

Tomato Basil Soup

Even though it's hot outside, I love fresh tomato basil soup. The tomatoes are from my friend and the basil is from my garden. It's looks like carrot soup pureed, but that is after the cream is added. Yum.

Sweet Summer Treat

Summer is great for cold treats. Instead of ice cream, I sometimes make frozen banana bites. They are dipped into vanilla yogurt then toasted coconut or tiny peanut chips. Yummy, and less calories than ice cream.

The local bakery

Ahhh. A nice start to the day with Tom before garden and house chores.

The joys of gardening

The potted Blue Angel rose has bloomed abundantly. So gardening has its ups and downs and its "wait and see's."

The woes of gardening

Tomatoes do not like to be planted late nor transplanted once they have set fruit; but the sprinkler trenches required a move so I tried it anyway. One survived and two didn't, but they still yielded a small crop. Thank goodness for friends who also garden. Well, there's always next year.

Gardeners know all the best dirt

When there's nothing but dirt in the backyard and the vegetable garden is at the back of the lot, watering is a muddy business. This is after 5 hours of trimming, watering, weeding, loading the dumpster several times, and organizing the yard utility area. I had to take a bath with the garden hose before entering the house.

Blog Day

After working on the family photos for six hours yesterday, a light fever came over me and I succumbed to the cold I've been trying to avoid for days. My voice is basso profundo, sore throat, but no runny nose....yet. I took a long nap then rested in a chair and read farm and quilting blogs on the internet. A couple are amazing, and I follow them regularly. I found a cool site for embroidery: Crab Apple Hills. I will join their stitchery club. Though I'm not crazy about the name, I meet every criterion:

Join our Knot-y Girls Stitchery Club!!

Before you can proudly display the official seal of a Knot-y Girl

you must first meet our strict criteria:

1. You must embroider

2. You must have un-finished projects that you

“will get to sooner or later”

3. You must own several patterns that you will probably never make

4. You must have, AT LEAST ONCE, purchased a pattern

that you later found you already owned

5. You must have, AT LEAST ONCE, sewn either your clothing,

tablecloth or a finger to one of your stitcheries

Congratulations!

You are now an official Knot-y Girl!!

It sure smells good in here...

...that's what my piano students say on bread baking day.

It's a girl!

Miss Bella Mia: It's good to be the Queen

Roxanne got a standard poodle puppy this week. But Eric, Vanessa and Grant all claim her too. A cousin for Duchess, Sasha and Tiffany, and Jules (pretty much everyone in the family has dogs). I don't envy them the "new baby" training stage, but she is playful, lovable, and loves to be held. Just wait until she's 60 pounds!

First visitor

First visitor to our birdhouse since adding seed recently. Now that his tummy is satisfied, he's singing his thanks to God. The picture is fuzzy because it was taken through the screen door, so I wouldn't frighten him.

Duchess Gwendolyn

This little Havanese has declared herself Queen of the Household, even though she came from a spurious background and was rescued from "The Pound" not the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm. Her name is inspired by the children's book about a homeless cat in the city who thought her name was Scat because that's what she was called everywhere she went, but eventually was picked up by a little girl who took her home and gave her a jeweled collar and let her drink milk from a dish, and gave her a real name: Gwendolyn. So this royal rascal assures we don't yet have an empty nest. She has a jeweled collar and loves to drink milk from a dish. She gets all our puppy love.

A life in pictures

Trying to organize a lifetime of pictures, first by decade then by year. I'm up to the 1990s. Note to self: at least put the year on the back as soon as they're printed.

But then, I don't print pictures anymore. Since a couple of years ago, they're all stored on my computer. That's a whole other pending project. Putting the grandchildren's pictures on a CD for them.

Garden redesign

Can you imagine weeding this amount of garden space?

Notice the new fence along the back.

The garden in 2007

Our beautiful English garden is being redesigned to mostly grass. I will still have areas for flowerbeds, but not the entire huge backyard! It was impossible to keep up the weeding and also have a life. The sprinkler trenches have been dug, and the pipe and electronics will be installed this week. It looks sad now, but will be beautiful soon. Have faith.

Exercise, gardening, and finally rest!

Today was both exhausting and restful. This morning Tom took his usual Saturday hike to the other side of town and back (10 miles). I am getting reacquainted with my road bike, and rode the same route. He's the athlete. His effort took 3 hours and he does it EVERY Saturday. My effort took an hour, and I probably won't do it that often.

Anyway, when we returned home the gardener and landscaper were hard at work trenching the backyard for new sprinkler lines. Since we've dug up the elaborate garden for a simpler one, we have 3 large piles of supplies: gray large trapezoid bricks, regular red bricks, and a woodpile. The orange groves our valley is renowned for are slowly disappearing for new homes and businesses. One day I actually saw them cutting some down (they usually do it at night so the citizens don't notice raise a fuss until suddenly a field is cleared). I asked if I could pay for a truckload, and they agreed. Thus orange tree firewood. But I digress. We had to move the large gray brick pile and half the wood pile so electrical line could be installed to automate the sprinklers. So we spent three hours in the garden doing that and clearing rocks unearthed by the trencher (we live in a river plain), and removing plant debris. After lunch we both napped a couple of hours and had a relaxing afternoon. I sewed awhile on a project requested by a friend who is going to deliver it to remote Africa women in a few days. Then dinner and more resting. A good day.

About that river rock. Tom and I have disposed of two partial truckloads of rock. Then three days ago my ten-year-old grandson and I loaded three wheel barrow loads into the truck bed and "released them into the wild" of the nearby dry riverbed. It's amazing that anything grows in the garden with the amount of rock that is lying hidden beneath the soil.

Picnic in the park

Our summer music festival venue.

I'm trying to change my lifestyle: carefully selecting what I eat and exercise consistently. However, summertime has just the best foods to eat and so many celebrations requiring food. My sister, her husband, Tom and I have begun having a picnic each Friday night at the local summer music festival. Delightful sitting on blanketed grass and enjoying the slightly cooler evening with good food and excellent music.

:( I baked oatmeal raisin cookies this week for my piano students theory classes. They loved them and so did I, so the leftovers went to the monthly quilt guild meeting Friday morning.

:) I've substituted buying store brand ice cream by the half gallon for making my own in my Vita Mix machine: 1 cup milk, 1 pound frozen fruit, 1/4 cup Splenda sweetener, 1-2 tsp vanilla. Takes 3 minutes. Delicious. Makes two generous servings. I get bonus points from Tom, and I don't eat as much, because I don't make it that often. With ice cream in the freezer its too easy to frequently serve up a cone with a double-dip.