I remember...

I remember when i was a child and my teacher told our class to go home and ask our parents where they were when JFK was shot, and to report to the class the next day. And not one forgot.

When people find out I went to Columbine, many of them tell me exactly where they were when they heard about it. I think that in remembering and telling me, they are communicating to me that this even impacted them. They have not forgotten.

I remember the first morning after the night Obama won the election against McCain. He would be our nation's first black president. ha, my customers were ecstatic! (he WAS our senator, after all, good 'ol IL).

I remember the morning i decided that i wanted to commit to follow Christ with my whole heart and my whole life.

I can remember my first kiss, however awful and awkward it was.

I remember the moment I met my first best friend in the first grade.

I remember when my mother told me that my grandfather had died. I remember when she told me my grandmother had died.

I remember each moment that i got to hold each of my nieces and nephews for the first time. They were perfect little answers to many prayers prayed.

I remember the moment I arrived in Africa.

I remember the moment that I decided I would love Landon McBrayer for the rest of my life.

It is amazing, the clarity of those memories from the moments when you knew that your life was now somehow changed from that point on - even if so subtly.

I remember 9.11

I imagine that this will be the question my kids have for me as commissioned by their school teachers; "Mommy, do you remember where you were on 9.11?" I remember it exactly.

Cupcake girl

this little shop caught my eye the first time i saw it. Cutsiecakes was being built as i was moving in. I anxiously awaited the opening of this shop of sweets - over the last few years I've been desperately wanting my very own cupcake shop.

I read Cupcakes take the Cake periodically, and Nie always talks about her local cupcake shop (the Sweet Tooth Fairy in Provo, UT) , which she frequents often. I've been on the look out for my own cupcake haven.

In Illinois, i searched the internet yellow pages and actually visited a few cakeries that boasted cupcakes galore. But i was seriously disappointed. The cupcake selections were pitiful.

In Littleton, i went to a sweet shop in Downtown Littleton and chose 2 of the 4 cupcakes they sell and brought one to my grandmother. We enjoyed cupcakes and coffee together, which was sweet. But the cupcakes were nothing really creative or spectacular.

So when I saw the outside of my local cupcakery, i was ecstatic! At last!!! So a few weeks ago i visited this cute little shop on my way home from the grocery store. It was their grand opening. I told them how excited I was to eat their yummy cupcakes and how i have just been waiting with such anticipation for them to open their doors. The ladies were friendly, and i chose a carrott cake cupcake - the most original of them all, I thought (well, beside the lemon cupcake - but i wasn't in the mood for lemon). The ladies that worked there were so so sweet. And the cupcake was yummy.

I guess that since I've never had my own cupcake shop, i didn't know what to expect. The cupcakes were miniature, in my mind, and $2.50 for each seems like a lot for a mini cupcake (although i just checked their blog, and it looks like they've upped the size and saved the price - that might be worth another visit!). I was hoping for really creative cupcakes like green tea and jasmine or something, but it was all pretty ordinary. Maybe i'm wrong.

Utah Loves Cupcakes is a blog i discovered via the ladies at Cutsiecakes (and i owe the props to the photo above to her). This lady is the MASTER of Utah cupcakes and she gave them a great review. Maybe I just need to get more realistic expectations.

I still really want to be a cupcake girl, but maybe i'm not really cut out for it.

Janelle is renting a violin and taking lessons, which Landon and i would both like to do some day, so we asked her to bring it with her. Landon and i both had a lot of fun listening to her play and getting to try it out for ourselves. It's hard to play the violin!

Janelle asked Landon to get out the infamous Banjo. Ha! My family has only HEARD that Landon can play the banjo, but had never seen the instrument or actually heard Landon play (i've only heard him play once 5 or 6 years ago!). We were pretty close to starting a bluegrass band this weekend. but i'm a bit out of place when the only other instruments in the house left for me are: the djembe, the shaker, and the piano. maybe no bluegrass band quite yet.
Landon's TUNING the banjo - Janelle has still yet to actually hear him play it.


Climbing American Fork Canyon



cooling our feet off in the river before we head home

There has been a lot to do in my office

My sister came in to SLC Thursday evening and first thing Friday morning we set to work. My sister is a mastermind when it comes to organization and i simply am quite the opposite. I mean, i know that things are categorized on shelves and everything, but when one is without shelves and is on a low budget, i can't quite conger up the best ideas to put everything in its place. So I call on Nell.
My office has been tricky. In Illinois, my desk was in the family room. We had a small house, so there really wasn't any other place. And then all of my files were put in a organizational system by Landon, actually. They were in card board filing boxes in the laundry room on a nice sturdy shelf. And all of my supplies were in the cupboards above the washer and dryer. And it worked alright. Until the boxes got weighed down and started to bend and make it difficult and slow-moving to access anything. And each time i needed into a box, i had to remove it from the shelf, open the top, and dig in. Which worked, but was not a long-term option. And when ACSI first allowed me to work from home, it was on a trial basis. So i was not about to invest into equipment to house the sponsorship program in my house if they were just going to take it all back.

But they didn't. So now i'm thinking long term. And now i have my own room. So Nell and I went to work in making this the best work space possible. I still have a few small things to do, but everything is in order. Unfortunately, i don't really have any before and after photos of Janelle's work, but we did get a little crafty, and i have some shots of that.

I have inherited and purchased some filing cabinets. I was using 10 boxes for filing (each box is the size of one drawer), so i was looking initially for some really nice wooden filing cabinets, that are the long, wide drawers, so i could still use the space on top and everything would be pretty. but those are hundreds of dollars. So i have 4 two-drawer filing cabinets and i have acquired in the last month. Enough for 8 drawers: WONDERFUL! However, not one matches the other in height, color, or even material. So i decided to have a little fun with them.




Nothing that some pretty paper and ModPodge won't spruce up!

join the ride

okay, so this is the last blog that i am going to introduce to you.

This woman inspire me in a different way than all the other ladies i've shared who are just dynamite moms and home-makers and creatively savvy. No, Jill isn't really any of these - at least, not that i can tell.

Jill inspires me with mountains and sweat and blood and determination.

She is a journalist in Anchorage, Alaska. She is originally from Utah, actually, and is just a regular girl like me, but with amazing drive and determination to experience all the beautiful places of the world....on her bike. Yeah, she's pretty amazing. and she journals her experiences and i feel like i get a really great taste of her life because she takes breathtaking pictures and writes with great talent. These last two years, she's actually BIKED the Iditarod Trail Invitational in Alaska in all the snow and ice and everything.


She inspires me to get out of doors and experience this beautiful world that God has created!

I hope she inspires you too!

Join the Ride

okay, here it is...

Ladies, thank you so much for your advise about my stupid little Singer. I will heed your wisdom and experience and take my Singer in for a tune-up. This may take me awhile because i'm lazy, and a little busy. So instead of waiting until i have an awesome finished product to show you, i thought i'd just show you my progress.

I wanted something VERY simple but a little more complicated than cloth napkins (my first project) for my ambitious second sewing project. I found this really simple, free, and well explained pattern online and thought to give it a shot.

I went to my local thrift store and picked up one beautiful pillow case for $2. While i was there, i found a beautiful piece of green fabric that was sort of retro-ish, that i thought i might be able to somehow incorporate into the apron because the green coordinated so beautifully with the green in the pillow case.

Well, I started following the instructions and had everything going pretty well. But it was boring looking to me, so i decided to go crazy and cut apart my green fabric - which should be pretty simple. And after getting so frustrated with my machine, i decided i was going to sew SOMETHING, so i just cut some leaves out of the green retro fabric and tossed them on the corner.

That's about as far as i got before my machine went completely ca-put. I have ONE pocket sewed on, and the sash i have sewed on one side only. A little farther along than the picture shows, but not much!

Some day i will finish it. But right now my easy sewing project has just become sort of a headache with a bum sewing machine.

I love a little boy in Africa.

I love him so much, sometimes it makes me want to cry. or vomit.

But I've been trying not to love him so. He will never be mine. He has never been mine. I may never see him again.

But last night God played a cruel joke on me and put him in my dreams. I dreamed i returned to Kenya and got to see my orphans (though none of them were three years older now as they should be). I've had dreams of Daniel numerous numerous times in the past 4 years since i've met him. And whenever i go to Africa to finally be with him and be reunited (in my dreams) he either hates my guts or is ecstatically happy. But last night was worse - he had forgotten me completely.

I woke upset. Though I don't think i was sad because he had forgotten me. That was a painful thing to encounter in my dream, but as i was sitting there holding him and smelling his earthy little boy smell and seeing his chapped, chubby cheeks i knew that everything would be fine because i finally had him again. We could begin a new future. We were together again. But then i woke and all of that was taken from underneath me. and I'm still upset, i can't quite push it out of my heart. But really, if he has forgotten me, which i'm sure he has - i left him when he was so young - it really is better for him anyway.

But i will never forget him.

HELP PLEASE

okay, ladies. i need serious help here. I've been working on my most recent sewing project and since i'm such a novice, i'm really discouraged and sort of at a dead end here. I fiddled with my thread, bobbin, tension, put on a new needle, tried different fabric, everything that I KNOW to do. i really don't know much - this is only my second sewing project since i got this machine this summer. I took some pictures of my "problem" and was hoping you could let me know if you have any ideas. these are pictures of the back of my piece.

as you can see, the other side worked just fine. my mother got this machine for me at goodwill. so it came without a manual. i've been referring to the singer website a lot when it came to simple things like threading my machine. also, i'm wondering if perhaps there was a good reason that this machine was thrifted. i'm willing to give it some good time and energy, but i wouldn't know if i had a faulty machine or not..
please help.

Limestone Cliffs and Finding Friends

We had an amazing weekend.
Saturday we slept in and then packed our things and headed about an hour north to Logan Canyon to experience our first taste of Utah rock climbing. We found ourselves in a beautiful canyon filled with limestone cliffs. With only a few of the cliffs bolted for sport climbs (although there are more than 400 routes on those cliffs) among the hundreds of cliffs, we were excited about the potential of the canyon - for enjoying rock climbing and other things. We decided to drive to Logan, even though a canyon outside of Salt Lake would have been closer, but we were hoping Logan would be less crowded. And it was. We were alone most of the day. When we did climb among others, we actually made some friends and swapped phone numbers and everything. That's never happened to us before! I'm excited at the potential of Landon having a climbing partner with a much higher skill level than me, so that he can be challenged.

Well, it was beautiful in this canyon and there were many people fishing, pic-nic-ing (how to spell that!?) and camping, but much less rock climbing. Landon told me that there is very little Limestone in the Rockies, so i think we hit the jack pot this weekend!

I also saw 2 friends this weekend. This is crazy, and i think it was absolutely God's gracious hand in my life. I was so encouraged to see these women!
When i was... eleven, i started playing on this soccer team that i would continue with and play on until i graduated high school. A few of the girls on that team would change each year, but mostly we were the same team every year and we had the same amazing coach that really was an influential and inspirational person throughout my adolescence. Anyways, it just so happens that the only 2 people that i know that live in the entire state of Utah are two girls from this soccer team. We had practices 3 days a week and a game each weekend for years and years and years. These girls were a huge part of my life.

Kristen and i even went to school together through middle school and high school and during some of those years she was one of my very closest friends (in middle school we even passed around a journal between classes and at soccer practices where we wrote letters to each other - but we coded our names after bubble gum so that if the journal was discovered, no one would know it was us (ha!). We called ourselves the "Bursts" - after the gum. Kristen, along with another friend, Nikki, and I were each a flavor: Cinn-a-burst, Mint-a-burst, and Fruit-a-burst. i wonder where that thing is these days.) Well, I haven't seen Kristen for many years, and we recently got back in touch through reading each other's blogs, actually. She and her husband live in Logan and we got to meet up with them last-minute for some Mexican food after our day climbing. It was amazing! I was so encouraged by my time with them, and with my beautiful friend.

Sunday morning we decided to attend an Evangelical Free church out here since we liked our Evie-Free church in Chicago. We were warmly greeted at the door, and were just a bit late stepping into the sanctuary. We scooted into an empty row and as the first song of worship began, i had a tap on my shoulder. I turned around and saw a beautiful face, of which i haven't seen in eight years! It was Adrienne! I just hugged her and blushed and tried not to squeal with joy. But i was beaming with joy and worshiped God with such gratefulness at his faithfulness and sweet provision. Adrienne and i didn't get to talk long after the service, but i hope that we can meet for lunch next week, maybe. How amazing! That i got to see Kristen, and that i just so happened to sit in the very seat right in front of Adrienne out of every open seat in all the churches here in Utah that we could have attended - i sat in the seat in front of the other person I know. Wow. I still am overwhelmed by this, can't you tell?

So wonderful to see two girls from my childhood this weekend. I am so grateful to God for providing me with those encounters. How amazing!

and the winner is.....

Okay, so we've completed our week of Real Simple recipes and I'll share with you our favorite one. We rate all of our recipes 1 - 10 after we make them (as long as i actually follow the recipe), and this one got a 9, which is pretty dang good - we're pretty tough critics.

Here it is:
Potato, Leek, and Feta tart:
(picture from Real Simple's website)
Serves 4
Hands-On Time: 20m
Total Time: 1hr 20m

Ingredients
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 leeks (white and light green parts), cut into half-moons
2 small zucchini, cut into half-moons
kosher salt and black pepper
1/2 cup crumbled Feta (about 2 ounces)
2 tablespoons chopped fresh dill
2 Red Bliss potatoes (8 ounces), thinly sliced
1 store-bought 9-inch piecrust

Directions
Heat oven to 375º F. Heat the oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Add the leeks, zucchini, ½ teaspoon salt, and ¼ teaspoon pepper and cook, stirring occasionally, until just tender, 4 to 5 minutes. Stir in the Feta and dill. Add the potatoes and toss to combine.
On a piece of parchment paper, roll the piecrust to a 12-inch diameter. Slide the paper onto a baking sheet. Spoon the potato mixture onto the piecrust, leaving a 2-inch border. Fold the edge of the piecrust over the edge of the potato mixture. Bake (covering with foil if the crust gets too dark) until the piecrust is golden brown and the potatoes are tender, 50 to 60 minutes.


So, so, so delicious. Landon and i actually ate the whole thing between the 2 of us, but we didn't have any sides except for green beans, so there wasn't much to fill our tummies.

Also, we couldn't taste the feta too well (and i even put in a bit more than the recipe calls for), so i think next time i will take add the feta on top during the last 20 minutes of the baking.

ENJOY!