The Wood Between the Worlds

It must be a rainy Saturday in Oregon and husband working day. Thus it has become the official catch up on blogging day.

Back in July my friend Tara, the very talented photographer, took our family pictures on the beach. Well, I finally got around to ordering some prints and hanging them up in our living room. We ordered the prints as canvas and styrofoam-backed prints so that we would not have to frame them. And I really, really liked the way they turned out. I have been trying to take a photo of them hanging in my living room, but the natural lighting is not too great in there...so this is what you get:

Yum, yummy, yummo! I'm on a never ending quest to find more yummy/healthy recipes with vegetables. I tried this recipe and my kids were skeptical at first but after they tried it, they loved it! And the whole next day I felt so good! I had this raw cabbage buzz pulsing through my body. Anyway, it is good enough to share:

Dressing:
3 T sesame oil
3 T rice vinegar
1 clove of garlic, minced
1 t grated ginger (I just used powdered ginger)
1 T white sugar
1 t salt
1 t black pepper

Salad:
1/2 large head cabbage
1 bunch green onions (but I omitted those)
1 C almond slivers
1/4 C toasted sesame seeds (I bought them already toasted, but you can toast them in your oven or probably just use untoasted)

Wisk dressing and toss over salad. I also added shredded chicken breast from a Costco rotisserie chicken. And oh my goodness it was SO good! And folks, I did not know that that you can buy a rotisserie chicken from Costco for 5 dollars! That's about as cheap as buying it raw. I would definitely add the chicken unless you want it vegetarian. It is so quick, easy and it is great as a main dish! Enjoy and feel the cabbage power!

Toby received a little goldfish from his Sunday school teacher a few weeks ago. He was so excited. He named him Mr. Fishy. Unfortunately it did not take long for Mr. Fishy to bite the dust. Poor Toby. This was his first experience having a pet die. So later that week, we pulled out a fish tank that a neighbor had given us (we were saving it for 'later'), and we took the boys to the pet store to pick out some new fish!

Before I start, I am desperate to ask you in bloggerdom if anyone knows how to fix the screen that you write and edit your blog on? Mine is so tiny that I can hardly read what I am writing! The rest of my computer screens are normal, but this screen and also the screen that appears when I comment on other blogs is SO tiny!

-Joshua brought home his report card yesterday and I am happy to say that in reading he received all excellent, above grade level marks and was graded as an Exemplary Reader! I am so proud of him! He is lucky to be so good at reading. The rest of his report card was good too. At grade level and doing great in all academic subjects. As expected the behavior portion of his report card is about 50% "still developing". But he does seem to be making progress behavior-wise. The school staff has told me that he has gone from following directions about 40% of the time to now following directions about 81% of the time! They told me that is about as good as an average student, so that is great news! I still have to keep in mind that he is following directions with the help of a personal assistant during the big transitions of the day...so he's still not independent as an average student is, but we are getting there!
(Just to jog your memory if you don't recall, Joshua has sensory integration dysfunction...when there is too much background noise/activity he can't "hear" the things that he is supposed to be hearing. He has a hard time filtering out the background noises and that makes it difficult for him to follow directions.)

-Toby has lately become rather independent. He is getting himself dressed in the morning and at bedtime without my asking (including brushing his teeth). That has been so nice! He also has been doing laundry by himself. When he gets something dirty, he puts it in the washer, jumps up and puts in detergent and starts it by himself. He has learned this and other things (cooking and dishes just to name a few) by following me around and observing. What a guy!

-Toby is also very stubborn. It has taken me quite some work to convince him that smoking is bad for your body (and folks, I watched two of my grandparents die slowly and painfully from emphysema). Toby though, was convinced (who knows why?) that smoking was cool. I kept catching him pretending to smoke with small cylindrical household objects. I even found him picking up a cigarette butt in the parking lot and trying to put it in his mouth!! Toby is a very oral 3 year old, but EW, ICK!! With Joshua, all I had to do was tell him smoking is bad for your body and he committed himself to never smoke. Now with Toby it has taken me months and months of persuasion, but finally, finally he got the message. The first indication of this was when we were talking about HIS grandparents (of which none have smoked...it was my grandparents who smoked). When we got to his maternal grandfather (my father) we were talking about how he was already dead, but that we believe that we will see him again someday, etc...well Toby suddenly said
"yeah. He smoked, he died".
I had to laugh...
"yeah well Toby...smoking does kill you, but Grandpa Frank did not smoke".
Now when he sees a cigarette in the parking lot, he stops and stars at it for a moment and says, shaking his head
"I don't want to die".
Ah the sweet success of being a parent/health educator.

-Joshua cleaned the boys' bathroom as his Saturday chore both last week and this week. He stated last week that it was about as much fun as playing his video game! This week he told me that it was his new hobby. Well great!

-Joshua also told me that his new favorite hobby is bike riding. We often go on one of the regional trails as a family, and it turns out that he loves it! He just wishes that there were more kids his age in our neighborhood to go bike riding with. There is a ten year old kid two houses down that will do bike races with Joshua, but he often ditches out for his older friends. Poor Joshua.

-For those of you who have been waiting for a Brent job update, here comes:
Well, Brent was lured into trying a couple jobs outside of retail pharmacy this past year (they contact him, offering a job...I know, how lucky is that?), and for one reason or another they didn't work out. But now Brent is back at retail, working in a small country town a few miles south of where we live...and he is really loving it! He still would eventually like to venture out of retail and put some permanent roots down in research and perhaps professorship, but we've realized that we will have to wait until the housing market improves so that we can sell our house to go where that kind of a job would take us.

-And now for a pregnancy update! As of this week, I am 16 weeks pregnant, and my belly has finally started becoming round. Yay! Now I don't have to feel like I just have a fat stomach. I have been having LOTS of crazy dreams with this pregnancy, but up until last night I have not had any dreams about this baby or the labor/delivery. Well folks, last night I had a really crazy pregnancy dream! I feel like I should document it for future reference. In the dream, someone took me to the hospital where the nurses and doctors forced me to be strapped to a table and they put me under general anesthesia. They next thing I knew was I woke up about 3 days later and at home. I had had the baby and people around me were telling me how great it was that I could fit into my non-maternity clothes now. I was upset and angry about not being able to experience the birth and I was wondering where my baby was. These people were avoiding the subject of the baby until finally I pushed it and they agreed to take me to the hospital to try and see my baby. When I got to the hospital I waited a long time and the hospital staff would not let me see my baby. I got really angry until finally they brought out the baby. It was a girl and she was quite a bit older than a newborn (indicating that more time had passed than I thought). She had a big scar across her face from the c-section that the hospital staff imposed on me (which I think is why they did not want me to see her). And they had named her Katherine. I was threatening litigation! But just then when the dream was at it's very worst, I held my baby and told her how happy I was to finally see her and that I knew she was going to be a girl. Suddenly she was such a happy baby, to finally hear my voice and realize that she was back with me. It was such a sweet bonding moment, that even though the rest of the dream was a crazy nightmare...I am now really excited to meet this baby. In a way, that joy overshadows the gloom of the rest of the dream. I'm not sure why I had this dream. I am planning a home birth with this baby, and I am not at all nervous about it or about the birth. In fact I am very excited for this experience! I am not worried about anyone forcing me out of this choice. The only logical explanation that I can have for this dream is that maybe I had Bella and Breaking Dawn on the subconscious. I haven't read it for months...but that story comes the closest to this dream.
Any thoughts on crazy pregnancy dreams?

Chanticleer is the "clear-singing" rooster in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Well, for my birthday Brent gave me tickets for us to go see the musical ensemble "Chanticleer," and we went to see them last Saturday at the St. Philip de Neri Church in Portland. From chanticleer.org:

"Chanticleer - based in San Francisco - has developed a remarkable reputation for its vivid interpretations of vocal literature, from Renaissance to jazz, and from gospel to venturesome new music. With its seamless blend of twelve male voices, ranging from countertenor to bass, the ensemble has earned international renown as “an orchestra of voices.”

My favorite music of the night was the Renaissance music. To give you an idea of how beautiful and ethereal this type of music is (especially in a Catholic church with a very high ceiling), I uploaded Franz Biebl's version of "Ave Maria" (that's my favorite version) to my music list on the side of the blog. It is the last song and they are on random, so you will have to search for it (if you would like to be uplifted by very beautiful music).

Thanks Annie and Nate for babysitting. We can't wait for our next concert: Vienna Teng in April! (She's on the sidebar too).

13 weeks pregnant and skiing on Mt. Hood (Brent boarded, of course), and life's never been better!

Ok, so I had a busy week...and now I'm finally getting around to posting about Valentine's and my birthday.

Valentine's Day was really fun this year. It was the first year that both of my little ones really got into it. Joshua made his own hand made valentine card with a kit from the craft store. Toby thought that was very cool and when Joshua was gone at school, I helped him make some valentine cards for his friends and for our family. Another fun thing we did this year was making valentine love notes for each other on the Family Night before Valentines. We wrote a love note to each person in our family, including one to ourselves. The notes were pretty darling!

We ended up having cake for my birthday the day before, since Brent had to work all day on my birthday. So the day before, we took a hike together on the Canemah Bluff in Oregon City (post a comment if you want directions) and Brent picked me up an ultra creamy cake from the Russian store. Oh yeah...I turned 31! Now I am officially a 30-something mom of 2.5 kids.


A few other awesome things that happened...Brent made breakfast for us on Valentine's Day! It was a total surprise! He made very delicious French toast with yummy apple bread and an orange sauce. Brent gave me tickets to see a concert for my birthday (Chanticleer), which is always a fun gift! On Valentine's day, I gave Brent (and the family) the entire series of Planet Earth on DVD and we sat around all evening being amazed by our planet. We had to postpone our date(s) for the week after when Brent had some more time off. More to follow...

You know what they say? Better nate than lever...

After reading this article on kgw.com (an Oregon news source):

Often-fatal airborne fungus turns up in Oregon

Some random person made this comment:

"The Earth makes no claim, either inherent or implied, that anyone on it will have a nice time. Furthermore the Earth is not responsible for lost or stolen chances to have fun. You exist on the Earth at your own risk. Lastly some aspects of the Earth may not be suitable for younger children, and some may find its contents objectionable."

I thought, in light of the subject matter, that this comment really puts the not so good stuff into perspective...and I had to laugh in spite of all this craziness that is going on right now.

I'd bet that you guys already knew this, but today I discovered that the best way to actually get your kids to want to play with their toys (instead of watching television or playing on the computer) is to make them clean up and organize. Voila!! Not much cleaning gets done...but I am totally impressed with the great amount of play that is going on!

Joshua started gymnastics last week and he is having so much fun! He has a real coach and a very rambunctious little class of boys. He's hoping that in a few years he'll learn how to do a Jedi double jump. This is the best idea we have ever had for extra-curricular Joshua.