Cookies for the County Fair

In an effort to justify my cookie baking habits, I decided to once again enter two cookie entries in the Indiana County Fair. I spent more time than I think it appropriate to admit preparing for my big baking day. 

First, there was the whole matter of choosing what kinds of cookies to enter, then the recipe search, taste tests, recipe tweaking, practice runs, and big day production. But hey, it was great fun and delicious! And this year I did learn something - make sample batches in half-recipe amounts, which only generate half as many calories to have lounging around the house, begging to be consumed.

Bakers can only enter one product per category, which is a good rule, but a frustrating one for me. I prefer to make drop cookies, and I wanted to enter two kinds of cookies. Therefore I had to figure out a different kind of cookie for my second entry. This year I opted to try a rolled cookie, which is hardly my forte. I can't remember the last time I made rolled cookies, to be honest! But I wasn't up for experimenting with filled or refrigerator or sugar-free or spritz ones, the other cookie categories.

Many months ago I had volunteered to help make cookies for a friend's son's wedding. I did a lot of internet browsing to look for a cookie recipe that was wedding-worthy, and found Guyanese Lime Nutmeg Cookies. They are kind of like lime snickerdoodles. They turned out fabulously that time, as did my trial run a few months later. Choosing them as one of my fair entries was an easy decision.

Recipe number two, however, took a lot more work. Andrew had suggested once that I try to make ginger lime cookies, and I set about working on those. Well, let me tell you, there are not (that I found, and I really tried) any rolled ginger-lime cookie recipes out there! Necessity is the mother of invention, so invent I did. After four attempts that didn't turn out quite right, but each one got a bit closer in some way, I am happy to say that attempt number five, which was the one I had to enter in the fair, turned out excellently! I wanted to replicate the flavor of a Stoney Tangawizi soda with a lime glaze, and I think I got it.

A friend in town is also a bit obsessed with fair cookies, and she and I had a lot of fun discussing entry options during the year, and then e-mailing and texting each other while baking. That made the whole experience that much more fun. We'll find out how we did after an interminably long two-day wait!

My enthusiastic helper

Every heard of a silicone baking mat? This is why you should use them! Cookie on the left, no mat, cookie on the right, mat. Go buy yourself a Silpat now. Silpat on Amazon

The finished products! Ginger-Lime on the left, Guyanese Lime Nutmeg on the right.

Northwest Vacation

We went on vacation! We flew from Pittsburgh to Seattle, and had one night and a two Sunday morning church services in Olympia. Then we journeyed down to Oregon where we spent a week with Andrew's family. After that we went up to Priest Lake, Idaho, for another week, this time with a whole pack of people - my parents, my sister and her husband and two kids and his parents, and our near and dear family friends and their four kids! Ai yai yai! Then the kiddos and I went back to Olympia for a week at my parents' house (Andrew had to return to PA after the week in ID). That third week finally felt like my week off - two grandparents to two kids is a great ratio, and it left me rather free at long last!

Here are a few highlights among many, many great moments.

Zarya had some awesome bedhead every morning

 Jerod would like his dinner now, please. He often sat at the head of the table where all 18 of us were, and this is his family patriarch expression.

 Neither of our kids liked Priest Lake all that much, to my great disappointment. They grudgingly agreed to let me push them around in this little boat, but when they discovered that they didn't get wet while in it, we found a successful compromise.

 Andrew went on a hike one day. I guess it was a decent view at the top!

 There were some good male bonding moments. Nothing like a little elbow in the gut to say, "I love you, Baba."

Bob and Jerry

Jerry and Zar

Before I start this blog post, I'd like to make sure it's clear that the names Bob and Jerry are perfectly fine names and I know some great people with those names.

As I think I've mentioned before on here, Andrew goes by Baba, the Swahili word for father, with our kids. Of course we lived in Tanzania when he decided to be Baba instead of Dad or Father (does anyone actually call their father Father?), where it was a bit more common than it is here in Western PA, but I think he'd have chosen it anyway. We like being a little unique. I'm Mama, which is both Swahili and English, so that was a straightforward choice.

Sometimes Zarya calls me Mom instead of Mama, usually after being around other kids and hearing them call their mothers by that. Although it's not my preference, it's not a big deal, and sometimes I don't really notice, because the two sound pretty similar.

What we do notice, however, is when Baba becomes Bob. I guess Zarya figured out the Mama/Mom connection, heard other kids call their fathers Dad or Daddy, and so created Bob out of Baba. It was just occasional at first, but it's like she thinks it's just too much effort to get out two syllables of Baba and now prefers to keep it short and sweet, Bob. A few times I've even heard her call him Bobby... We're going to be out in public someday and she's going to yell across the room, "Hey Bob!" just like she does at home. Eventually this Bob business will get to the point when other adults assume his name is Bob and that he's her step-dad and she calls him by his first name.

He tries to call her Zar every time she calls him Bob, as in, "Hey Bob!" followed by, "Yes, Zar?" She gets mad and insists that her name is Zarya, and seems to miss the point as he explains that his is Baba.

And if having Bob around weren't enough, Jerod has become Jerry recently, too. Andrew and I never, ever call him Jerry. Nothing against the name Jerry, but that's not what I'd like to call my baby boy. I'm hoping that he sticks with Jerod. If he wants to be cooler and go by Jer at some point in his future, fine. But not Jerry. Zarya, however, seems to think Jerry is a great name and calls him that quite regularly, and she never consulted me on the matter of his nickname. Crazy toddler!

Popcorn and smoothies

First of all, I will not apologize for my recent lack of blog posts. I am sorry that I have not been able to write any for a while, but I'm not sorry for having chosen spending time working on Bible translation, making dinners/cleaning the house/etc., hanging out with my husband, or taking care of my children instead of being at my computer.

But, it's Saturday afternoon and the kids are both asleep and the baby food is cooking away on the stove, so I've got a few minutes.

I had a revelation a few weeks ago. It was the same one I'd had a few years ago, so you think I'd have remembered it and wouldn't have had to figure out the same thing twice, but I guess I'm a little slow sometimes. I realized that the same meal every week was stressful for me. It occurred to me that if we just had popcorn and smoothies, which we all love, is pretty quick to make, and not too bad for you healthwise (I'm not saying it's amazing, but it's not awful), for that meal every week, life would be a whole lot better on those days.

It used to be Tuesday dinners that worked me up. Back in Musoma, I had Bible study late in the afternoon on Tuesdays. By the time I got home at nearly 7:00pm, Andrew had been taking care of Zarya on his own for almost three hours, he and I were both hungry, Zarya needed her bath and to be put to bed, and making dinner (or trying to make sure we always had leftovers on hand) was just stressful. I loved Bible study, but on the way home every week I could feel myself tensing up and bracing for this low-blood-sugar racing around trying to do everything at once stressful evening.

Then I discovered the relief of a planned popcorn and smoothies night. We had that combo for lunch or dinner sometimes, but not on any sort of schedule. But as soon I figured out that if we had popcorn and smoothies every Tuesday evening, all of that dinner stress disappeared. Okay, so we were still in Musoma where nothing is really stress-free, because sometimes there was no electricity for running the blender to make the smoothies and the stores periodically ran out of our preferred kind of popcorn, but most of the time the plan worked well.

Skip ahead a year: we're now in Pennsylvania and have two kids. What's stressful about life here, you might wonder. Well, let me tell you, and you might agree with me - Sunday lunch! Seriously, we get home from church and we're all hungry and want lunch NOW, and naptime is the looming deadline, so we really do need to eat lunch soon so we can get the kids down for their naps on time so we don't all dissolve into puddles of hungry exhaustion after having all of that fun at Sunday school/church. Andrew tends to prefer different kinds of lunch foods than what Zarya and I eat Monday through Friday, so figuring out something we could all eat and get it together quickly stressed me out.

Voila - popcorn and smoothies! We had been having popcorn and smoothies for Sunday dinners in PA, but when I figured out a few weeks ago that moving my emergency meal to being Sunday lunch, well, life got a whole lot better. We now come home from church and Zarya and I make the smoothies and Andrew makes the popcorn (for the world's best popcorn, please see the Whirley Pop - http://www.amazon.com/Wabash-Valley-Farms-25008-Whirley-Pop/dp/B00004SU35/ref=sr_1_1?s=home-garden&ie=UTF8&qid=1434824414&sr=1-1&keywords=whirley+pop) and then we sit on the couch and enjoy ourselves.

So, maybe popcorn and smoothies isn't your family's thing, but I bet you know some meal that is your well-liked, quick go-to meal. Should you find yourself getting stressed out regularly by some meal each week, do yourself a favor and plan your easy meal in advance!

Titular humor

Warning: immature humor that some might consider in poor taste to follow.

While washing dishes this evening, I had a flashback to something my sister Alyssa and I found hilarious back in the day. Way back in the day, to be clear.

Our family used to listen to Garrison Keilor tapes (see, told you it was back in the day - we had tapes!) when on long trips, One of his stories was about how he and his brothers (or were they cousins?) used to play a game with book and song titles, substituting the word "buggers" (or if you prefer a different spelling, "boogers") for one word in the title. We included movie titles when we played, being a bit more modern than Garrison.

Our house was packed with bookshelves, because this was pre-Kindle. Alyssa and I would slowly walk along the shelves, trying out "buggers" in the titles until we found a good one, then call it out to the other person. It was hilarious stuff to middle schoolers. Dad's theology books were the best - titles like "Transformational Christianity" lent themselves well to becoming "Transformational Buggers." Even mature readers like yourselves might find a little humor in it if you're lame enough. Try a few classics:

The Old Man and the Sea
The Sound of Music
Little Orphan Annie
The Scarlet Letter
A Tale of Two Cities
100 Years of Solitude
A Room of One's Own
Five Little Peppers and How They Grew
As I Lay Dying

See - simply irresistable.

As an adult, I found out about a similar game that a friend had played as a kid, one that would have sent Alyssa and me into eruptions of laughter if we'd known about it back in the day. That being said, I confess that as a mature missionary singing hymns with friends, occasionally it still popped into my mind and made me make a muffled snort at times. This friend's version (which, she told me, most of the kids at her Christian high school and Bible college also knew, so apparently it's popular in some circles) was to add the words "in the toilet" after the title of a hymn, as in, "Jesus Paid It All in the Toilet." See, I told you this post was ridiculously immature.

So, want to give that idea a go? (No pun intended...)

For the Beauty of the Earth
All Things Bright and Beautiful
Abide With Me
Fight the Good Fight
Jesus Christ is Risen Today
Nearer My God to Thee
There is a Fountain
Are You Washed in the Blood

Okay, so you may now forever think less of me. I have probably knocked whatever missionary pedestal you had right over, but that might be a good thing and high time it happened. But whatever the case, I hope you laughed at least once as you let your inner child out to enjoy some bodily function humor.

Interested in teaching missionary kids?

Did you know that one of the biggest needs on the missions field is for teachers for missionary kids? That's right - doing a job that involves you speaking your own language and doing the job you're already trained to do (I'm writing to teachers... of course there are plenty of you who are not teachers!). So, should you be interested in doing missions overseas but aren't sure how your skills as a teacher would fit into a Bible translation or church planting or medical missions organization, let me tell you, they would fit perfectly!

Should you be interested in living in Musoma, Tanzania (see hundreds of my previous blog posts for what living there is like... it's the town we used to be in!), there is a little school there, Lake Victoria Learning Center, which is in desperate need of an elementary school teacher. To learn more about this position, go here: http://www.teachers-in-service.org/lvlc_tanzania.php. To visit the blog of the teacher pictured above (my friend Lyndy), go here: http://mkteacher.blogspot.com/.

And if you're more of a big city person who'd rather be at a bigger school, teaching not only missionary kids, but children from a great variety of cultural and religious backgrounds, there is a great school in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, called Haven of Peace Academy (see picture above). It currently needs quite a few teachers, in elementary, middle, and high school levels. To learn more, go here: http://www.teachers-in-service.org/hopac_36_2.php.

I hope some of you out there might be interested! There are links to some interesting blogs and other articles at the bottom of those two websites, too, if you want to read more about teaching missionary kids.

First haircuts

At almost five months old and almost two and a half years old, our children both received their first-ever haircuts today. It's not that Jerod is all that hairy, but he had a stringy forelock thing going on that wasn't his best look. And as for Zarya, she's always had plenty of hair, but since it's curly, it's never gotten very long. The lower back part was starting to look a little droopy, however, so it was finally time for a trim.

I neglected to take a before picture of the back of Zarya's head, but here's what I do have for you:

See what I meant about the comb-over look on Jerod?

And here's the little guy all cleaned up:

And you probably can't tell from this angle that Zarya got a haircut, but she wanted her picture taken after she saw me taking Jerod's:

:

Coincidentally, I happened to get my hair cut this week, too. It doesn't look any different - my ponytail is a little shorter, though. Someday when I actually bother to have a hairstyle and style it, before and after pictures might be in order.