Seal of Approval

I am delighted to report we are in Moscow Idaho!! It was a rather rigorous plane ride, but the disguised blessing of that was Colin deciding to sleep through the night when we landed. :) And here we are enjoying wide blue skies and the warm enriching fellowship with our family.
Colin has been meeting all his uncles, aunts, cousins and grandparents and I am happy to report that they all find him cute. Or to sum it up in Amara's words "I YIKE him mom!!" She proceeded to say this numerous times to anyone who would listen and follow it with "He's super cute!" (Colin thinks Amara is super cute too. Or at least I think so. He was grabbing her hair.)
We are snapping many photos of cousins and shall post as we can. In the meantime, it's off to the beach today for Colin's first ocean experience. Yes, the irony is not lost. He lives on an island in the Atlantic but his first view of the ocean will be the Pacific coast of North America. :) We'll let you know what he thinks of sand between his toes....

It's How He Rolls

So our son is rolling everywhere lately. This is really entertaining so far, but we realize that the time is coming where we need to baby proof the house. He is capable of sitting, but is clearly impatient with it--would much rather skip to standing. So in the meantime, he prefers to roll to his chosen destinations. These are such tropical places as by the rocker, under the table, under the coffee table, or under the bar stools. And he is STEALTHY. The first we'll know about this (if we're not looking) will be a pair of feet sticking out from under the coffee table. :) Or a dissatisfied clunking because he can not roll through the bar stool. So I made sure to catalogue a few of these moves just for you all.

The smell of bacon

I know it's been too long. I keep telling myself to be more consistent in blogging. It's not that I don't have lots of thoughts. I just seem to run out of time to write them down properly. But I think I'm a little to fussy on that front--a little too pedantic. So, I'll try to keep the teacher quiet for a while and just WRITE.

Mark and I recently bought an electric griddle and I tried out its paces this morning with pancakes and bacon. And it worked beautifully and I love cooking such an American breakfast so conveniently. But as I laid 8 strips of bacon out neatly side by side and they began their lovely sizzle and pop, I was suddenly overwhelmed by memory. Grandma and Grandpa Garfield's home--bacon in the morning that Grandpa always cooked to perfection; not too chewy not too crisp. Yes we had eggs and muffins and cereal too, but you all know how dominant the smell of bacon is. I really don't know why it is that memory that came over me. I've had bacon often while in England and certainly in my lifetime. But this morning by the new griddle I was transported to Grandma and Grandpa's house 15 years ago. It was quite powerful. Standing in my English kitchen, I could FEEL  my parents and siblings at the round table behind me. I could see Grandpa cooking bacon as I was doing and I could see Grandma pulling warm muffins and buns out of the oven. And I was vaguely excited because today we are going to the beach and we'll meet up with the Shermans at Holstrums and....
I'm in England and it's Mark behind me with Colin and I'm married and I have a son. Memory is so powerful isn't it? I shared this memory with Mark and amusingly, though not as strongly, I also had a picture of the Dwarves cooking bacon in Prince Caspian and Sam making bacon and tomatoes with the Hobbits.
We all know that smell is a powerful tool for unlocking the past. I think I rank bacon in the top 5 for doing so. And I'm grateful. It was a nice way to start the morning. :)

Because we have a Creator

I'll start off with saying this is not intended to be a glorification of myself or my family. I was just reflecting on numerous things I'd seen my sisters post on facebook recently and I felt I needed to share my thoughts.
All four of us girls are very different from one another. I'm the oldest and have all the classic traits of one. :) I'm also very classic in my tastes and love elegant chic. My sister Kajsa is much more contemporary and can effortlessly fold new fashions into her repertoire. She's always had an excellent style eye and isn't afraid to try new things. (it took her years to make me try wearing purple. :))
Kathryn is the youngest and falls somewhere in between Kajsa and I in her fashion tastes. She's also the most enterprising, starting her own business and being quite successful because she is very good at knowing what other people need.
Naphtali is our sister-in-law, but is as close to us as if she was always part of the family. :) She has what I would call a very French eye for style and can somehow manage to channel Audrey Hepburn while still being modern.
But all four of us are very creative. We share a passion for creativity and it overlaps in a lot of areas and also shows our uniqueness in others. We love to bake and create beautiful and fun things for birthday parties, holidays and events. We all like to dress up for various functions, and we love to create a beautiful room.
We do this because we enjoy it and our personalities are suited to it. Be we do these things for a much deeper reason as well. We do it because we have a Creator. Because He delights in what is true, and what is good and what is beautiful.
Unfortunately, I think Christians have largely lost what that last one means in the past 150 years. We have slowly let the world erode beauty into an ugly soup of subjectivity and we have been told that only 'artists' can really help us define the beautiful. 
As Christian women though, Proverbs 31 calls us to find and develop what is beautiful-- in our appearance, in our family's appearance, in our homes and property. We can only determine beauty because our standard is the One who spoke a beautiful world into being.
This doesn't mean a home that is basically a museum or a spread in Pottery Barn. It is a home that is lived in. Messed up and cleaned up over and over. It means making a gorgeous cake that will be eaten. It means making a flower arrangement that will die. It means creating beautiful things that will not last. But that is the joy. We get to create new ones. Sure it takes work but that is the world in which we were made to live.
But I also wanted to mention one more woman in connection to this creative commonality we all have. My mom is very simple. She has simple taste in all things. Satin isn't for her. Loud colors don't appeal. Huge floral centerpieces are not her forte'. But for as long as I can remember, it was my mom who taught me to have beauty in my home. She didn't feel she could teach us which clothes to get or make up, but she did instill in us that we should be looking for beauty. And we did. I can't remember a Christmas she didn't work hard to make lovely in every way. I can't remember a time when she didn't decorate for the seasons and holidays. I can't think of a time when she didn't make our birthday cakes from scratch or sew our matching Easter dresses.
My dad is a hugely creative guy with a massive gift for painting so I'm not downplaying that. But it was my mom who gave all of us the example to follow in finding beauty in everything that we do, my dad included. :) And I know that we girls are all grateful because we all have a pattern that is set for life, founded in our Creator and nourished by our mom.
That's all. Just some thoughts as I look at all the lovely things my sisters do and as I putter around the kitchen myself.

Katie's Birthday Cake

So I have become a Pinterest devotee. I do understand those with reservations about it, but I have to say, I adore all the creativity and fabulous recipes on there! It has been so inspiring for me. And thus, the idea for my friend's birthday cake was born. I love the champagne cupcake recipe I found and used a double recipe to create the four layers. And I've ben DYING to do an ombre cake so I had fun with blue gel coloring as well. I have played with royal icing in ways that would never have occurred before and hunted down edible gel pens so I could place great literary quotes on the cake. I am a believer in the idea that a truly great cake should taste as good as it looks. So everything on there is edible. And I can't wait to perfect some of these ideas in the future!!

Happy to be awake!! :)

I love to come in and hear Colin waking up from a nap as he is (usually!) very happy. So I remembered to bring the camera and film him this time! :)

Do you remember....?

I was out today, getting in the ol' exercise in the rain (of COURSE in the rain. Nine times out of ten in the rain!! :) ) and my mind started rummaging around in the memory department as one's mind tends to do. And it delved into the toy box of my own childhood memories. It's done this a few times now, when I've been out walking with Colin, and I decided to write some of it down because hey, it makes me smile. So this is for my siblings, but the rest of you can read over their shoulders if you feel like it.

Do you remember those summer trips to the Carnegie Library? The way that the carpet smelled and the dark blue velvet chairs? We piled as many TinTin and Garfield comics as we could into baskets and then Mom would pick out books that we HAD to read before we could peruse the lighter side of lit? (And it was a good thing too... usually. :))
Or the old Ghormely pool where we all had swimming lessons, even though the shower rooms were ancient and rather dank and dark. When we were little enough that Pop could launch us off his knee and into the water? I still remember how fun it felt to fly through the air. Sometimes they would surprise us with a trip to the pool in those long, warm summer evenings. And we got Baskin Robbins afterwards. Remember how cold it felt to walk in there after being in the warm car?
Do you remember wearing our goggles to the pool so we could watch everybody underwater? Or sometimes, we had friends come along and then we could play Marco Polo. And the ancient sound system played Oldies while the teenage life guards tried to look really official, but usually looked bored.
Seth do you remember setting up the kiddie pool at the apartments? We had a tiny little postage stamp yard in the back, but it had room for the pool. And at the time, it seemed really big. Kajsa could sit in it too, but Mom had to be there watching since she was little.
How could we forget the giant tractor tires in Lena Whitmore Park? They were brilliant to play hide and seek in when you were five, because you could tuck yourself up into the top of it and balance on its rims and it looked completely empty. And the infamous wooden play structure was there where Seth split his chin open. I remember your face looking over Papa's shoulder as they took you to the emergency room and I went to the neighbors' house and had Mexican food.
Do you remember building snow slides with Deacon in the apartment parking lot? We thought they were HUGE and it took us a long time to complete, but it was really fun to play on later. Or we made tunnels and they connected to rooms. It seems like we had a lot more deep snow then doesn't it? Probably global warming. :) We always had to have a snowman with all the traditional features. He used to wear that ancient, long red scarf and have a carrot for his nose and charcoal for eyes and mouth.    Didn't he sometimes have Papa's wool blue hat as well? I remember we made a girl one once shortly after we moved to Concord and it wore that red and white apron of Mom's. How about  our old porch, before we had rails on it? We could walk straight off it into deep snow. Of  course once it had rails we could JUMP off them into deep snow and that was really cool.
Or the play fort that Papa made for us and it was great to go out and swing on after dinner on summer nights. I recall that it was a castle many times and Seth used a series of plastic medieval swords to defend it.
I forget if we actually ever owned a slip 'n slide, but I know it was in our back yard a few times and it was awesome even over our hard, bumpy ground.
We loved building blanket forts in the living room, using mom's wooden cloths pins and that old heavy Indian blanket on kitchen chairs--until Kajsa would knock some element of it over.
I remember Kajsa going through the phase of collecting those little fuzzy animal toys, what were they called? Whatever they were, they had furniture that was really useful when we made our block and book skyscrapers.
Remember playing with Seth's legos? We all had hours of fun with those, but it was much better to create our own castles rather than use the templates.
Or when we older three put on the Christmas story for Mom and Pop as well as Grandma and Grandpa Olsen? I was the donkey and director, Kajsa wore that blue satin Halloween costume to be Mary and Seth wore the Superman cape backwards to be Joseph. Well, he also had a towel on his head and a paper beard that I drew to complete the picture. And I believe we used Kajsa's toy baby 'Carwash' to complete the picture.
Do you remember when we started calling Kathryn 'Doots'? I don't. It just happened and it was perfect. Or how fun it was to have her be the passenger in our taxi when we tied the wagon to our bikes and rode around the neighborhood? Of course, she tipped out several times, but she was usually unharmed.
Or how about when the fields behind our house were still fields and we could make forts out of old wood? I think I was the only one who liked to go feed the horses, but I'm okay with that. I'd come back home and my hands were green from picking grass to give them.
Do you remember barbecues at Grandma and Grandpa Olsens'? When we sat at the metal picnic table on their back patio and the purple clematis gave us some shade. And Grandma's gorgeous snowball bush would bloom and we girls loved to take some home. Or when we played house in her basement? The green and orange carpets down there were awful but provided house division. And remember her blue cookie tin? I think it had monkeys on it. I must confess I would get disappointed when she'd open it and instead of biting into a chocolate chip cookie, I got oatmeal raisin. Kathryn was it you who liked that kind? :)
Remember story time at night? We girls were usually in the flannel nightgowns that Mom made us. And we could sit with our knees pulled up on the couch and tuck the hem under our feet to stay warm. And Pop would read from Narnia or Lord of the Rings or Patrick McManus.
I could go on, but I just had to write those memories down, even though my style is rough. Love you guys!