Gifts of Christmases Past

Last year when I stumbled on a recipe that my husbands family had loved, but thought they had lost when their grandma died, I got to thinking about how easy it is to loose those little things we remember that made the holidays special.  This year I am resurrecting a few other old recipes of Grandma Tallman's that I found in her old cookbooks.  While we'll be giving the cookies to my in-laws as gifts, I think preserving some of these traditions, left over from "the old world", is also giving a gift to ourselves and our kids.  In an effort to recover some of the lost past on my side of the family, I have contacted a cousin in Ireland and explained that I don't have any old, handed down traditional Irish recipes, and would he ask his mum, and her siblings what they remember.  I explained that even if they could remember a name and a few ingredients, I could likely find something close on the Internet.  I'm chasing down the past and trying to make new traditions for my own family.  I want my kids to have more of a sense of their heritage than just knowing where their ancestors came from. 
     One of the better gifts I have ever given, was homemade, and will probably never get used.  In digging up old recipes, my mother-in-law gave me the names of some dishes that she remembered from her childhood.  With those and a few others, I put together a "cookbook" of traditional Norwegian recipes.  In between the recipes, I put old pictures of her family that I had found on Ancestry.com.  Pictures of her grandparents when they were still in Norway.  Pictures of her mother as a teen.  Pictures of the family in later years, more the way she remembers them.  My mother-in-law is in poor health.  She can't do much cooking and baking the way she used to.  She will probably never use even one of the recipes I printed out for that cookbook.  But, when my husband gave her the cookbook, she remembered almost all the recipes I had found.  Her hand traced over the pictures of her family.  She murmured the names of loved ones lost long ago.  And she was speechless. 
     Hindsight being 20/20, I should have made a copy of that cookbook for myself, as well.  Someday I will.  For now, I keep fining new recipes to try, I'm still chasing down the old recipes, and I'm trying to find a heritage for my children that has nearly been lost.

Marks of Success

About a year ago I took an interest in cooking.  It turns out that I'm pretty good at it.  I have a good instinct for it.  It's been a ton of fun building my own cookbook and trying new recipes.  I love planning menus and organizing the grocery list so that I have a plan when it comes to dinner every night.  I feel like I am doing something good for my family as well as for our household.  It's funny how what I see as being a success was one of the trappings my own mother and especially her mother broke free from.  Grandma was a professional woman.  In the 40's darned few women went back to work after having children.  Usually if a women went back to work after she had kids, it was because, for some reason, her husband couldn't or wouldn't support the needs of the family.  With Grandma, that wasn't the case.  I mean sure, they struggled through the depression like everybody else, but Grandpa had a pretty good nest-egg stashed.  Grandma didn't cook much.  I remember a few breads and things, our joke was always that our favorite family recipes could be "found on the back of the box" of brownies, or cake or whatever.  In a lot of ways, to a lot of people, Grandma had made it.  She had a good marriage, family and a career.  My own mother was a stay at  home mom, but she was really involved with a lot of things and rarely stayed at home on any given day.  She was a lousy cook.  To be very honest, I don't even think she really enjoyed what she cooked.  I think "eatable" was really her highest goal in cooking.  She had one cookie dough recipe she used for everything.  It had variations for peanut butter cookies, chocolate chip, and sugar cookies.  It was the only recipe she ever used to make cookies.  Ever.  She tried lots of new recipes.  But in the end, while mom was good at a lot of things, cooking wasn't one of them.  It was never a priority for her.  She had other things she wanted to spend her time on.  It's funny to me to look at how the marks of success change.  My grandmother "got" to work and didn't cook.  Just a couple of generations later I "get" to stay home and love cooking.  I wonder what my daughter will do.  :)

Me learning to cook & the Visa commercial

So I only started to cook about a year ago.  It has been fun, I seem to have a good instinct for these things.  The best story, however, comes from last Christmas.  I wanted to revive the Norwegian tradition of making 7 different kinds of cookies for the holidays.  I found one recipe that looked really good, but I had to order one ingredient from Amazon.com.  Bakers Ammonia is hard to find, and stupid expensive when you can find it.  So, there I am making these Norwegian almond cookies and rolling the dough into little balls and sticking them in the freezer and my husband had a childhood flashback: he remembered those little dough balls in the freezer.  So after they had frozen, and I cooked them, yep, they were exactly what my husband remembered from his childhood.  A recipe that they thought they had lost with their Grandma, and I had pulled it off of the Internet.  Who would have freaking guessed?  It was better than a visa commercial, cause I had made the cookies-and they were perfect.  We sent goodie boxes to all of his family for Christmas.  For me, the best thing ever was giving them a little of their past as a Christmas gift.  I hope to do it again this year, I have another recipe I need to try.  :D

women like that

I hate women like that.  Even today in our modern world sometimes simply being a women puts us gals at a disadvantage.  My husband's best friend has had the misfortune of having been married to two of those women who give the rest of us a bad name and it pisses me off!  Wife #1 cheated on him, got credit cards in his name, and of course ran them up to the limits, and when he finally found out about it all, she wouldn't even talk about anything.  She just bailed.  He never saw it coming.  He pretty much lost everything-and his credit.  So after living on hot-dogs for a couple of years, he pulled himself out of debt and went back to working only one job so he could have a social life again.  Enter wife #2 (current wife).  I'm sure she has redeeming qualities, but for the life of me, I cannot understand how anyone can have such a one sided view of the world.  The first Monday of EVERY month she has a standing hair appointment.  Every Tuesday she has her nails done, every other Tuesday she gets a pedicure, too.  She doesn't work outside the home and her one child is long since out of the house (I think he's nearly 30 now) and she constantly complains about how busy she is.  The kicker?  The once or twice a year my husband and his best friend get a chance to go out and have a couple beers together, she gripes about the cost of him going out!  My husband said the last time he was at their house she acted like he (my husband) was stealing the bread from their table.  And given that my husband has to drive an hour and a half each way, it's not like they go out and hit every bar in town!  Seriously, there's this little Mexican joint they head to, have a couple of beers and the fish tacos.  That's it!  And she complains about him spending the money to go out-with his best friend since high school-like once every 10 months or so.  I hate women like that.  Don't you?

I'm still a little twitchy

I used to like October.  The change of seasons is refreshing.  Leaves turning colors, crisp air, all that sort of stuff.  Now it seems that October just makes me apprehensive and uneasy.  Two years ago my husband and I had the October from hell.  There is no explaining the build up of pressure that happened all around us.  A lot of it didn't happen directly to us, so much as it seemed like every thing around us crumbled.  Over the course of one month six people we knew died.  Some, like my Aunt's passing was sad, but not tragic.  My friends niece dying at age 12 in a car accident was tragic.  Lenny OD-ing in a hotel room came as a shock, too.  Another two were lost to cancer.  Our neighbor had been unhealthy for a while, but none of us thought he was gonna up and die right then.  Two others were injured in a way that neither of them will ever fully recover.  With one of them we still don't know exactly what the hell happened, head injury, possible bear attack, unfortunately when our friend came out of his two month coma, he had no clue as to what happened.  My husband and then 4yr old daughter got H1N1.  Pretty much the highlight of the month was the cat breaking his leg. 
     I've been thinking about some of them a lot lately.  I miss them.  So I'm gonna try to keep a lid on it, but every once in a while I look back at that month and still get a little shakey.  October sure ain't what it used to be.

Race for the Cure

I'm a really bad runner.  I have NO clue what possessed me to do the "Race for the Cure" for/against breast cancer next month.   For my race, I'm making a list of women who have suffered/fought/however you see it,  with breast cancer.  My mom tops the list.  She had breast cancer twice, and ironically, it was colon cancer that killed her.   If any of my new friends on my new page read my blog and would like to post a name for my list, I promise I will run with that list in my hand.  I hope I don't end up running with a phone-book sized list, but I'm sadly expecting that I might. 

Good Parent or Mean Mom? The Jury is still out.

I have always been a no fun mom.  I'm paranoid she's gonna get hurt, killed, snatched, or something else even worse.  I have a strong sense of realism and know that someday I'm going to turn her out into the real-world and expect her to function as an adult I can respect.  So imagine how mortified I was when we were walking home from the store and she tossed her grape stems on the street in front of some random house.  We doubled back, but in a sudden loss of memory, she couldn't find her trash.  I swear, it is a good thing we were in public or I probably would have slapped the flippant little bitch.  We were just around the corner from our house.  I told her to run home, and get her butt in bed and hope that I calmed down before her brother and I got there.  So, now it's not yet 4pm, she is in bed for the day, and I am throwing out some of her toys to make a point about how it hurts when people disrespect our property.  I'm not throwing out a lot, mostly just the Mr. Potato Head set that has been a thorn in my side from the day my husband wasted $20 at Costco on it. 
     I'm livid with the kid still.  Really??  Just throwing trash on somebody's yard???  She's luck I only grabbed a grocery bag to toss her toys into.  Or am I just being mean?

My Mid-life Reorganization

My Ongoing Evolution. 

Last summer, my husband was on a long tour.  Most of the time, he’s gone for a few weeks here, then home for a week or so, then back to the road.  Last summer was 3 months straight.  We had survived that kind of time apart before, but last year it broke me.  I spent several days practically chanting “I hate my life”.  Finally, I realized that something had to give, I couldn’t keep going that way.  I tried to figure out what I could do to change my situation.  I felt trapped.  It seemed like every direction I could think of to turn in, there was a very valid reason stopping me.  I wanted out.  I wanted a change.  I was bored, restless, lonely, and completely phoning it in as a mom.  Somehow, while I was paying attention to the kids, the house, the yard, my husband and everyday life, I had lost myself.  That is so not like me. I don’t know how it happened.  I can only imagine it happened slowly, over time.  That’s just so not me. To top it off, now that I have checked back in to me, I’m not the same person I was last time I checked.  What I want has shifted.  I decided to go back to school.  I decided to quit smoking.  I decided to finally loose that last ten pounds.  I decided to be selfish.  It’s sort of an early mid-life crisis.  Now that I am over the crisis part and into the changing part, I prefer to think of it as my mid-life reorganization.  I still have times where I slip back to the way I was before.  I don’t eat right, I blow off exercising,  I drink more wine than I have allotted calories for.  Some of those lost pounds have now been found again.  (It seems like no matter where I loose them, they are never far behind me) It’s all an ebb and flow thing.

      I’m not a fun kind of a mom.  I hope that when my kids are old enough they understand that I love them and the only way I could keep from hating them was to start loving me again. 

     I thank God everyday for my husband.  He has handled all of this like the knight in shining amour he always has been.  I don’t know how he does it.  He’s my biggest supporter, even from thousands of miles away.  

 

                         

cause it's funny

Wall Photos

Life, the economy, and other shit that screws with me.

So, even us hand-to-mouth bottomfeeders know that this economy sucks.  It's costing me my "unwilling surrogate" mother. 

     When she moved in across the the street we were just neighbors.  As we talked, we discovered that her daughter and I were born the same summer.  One awful day, when I was missing my mom so much that I could NOT get it together, no matter how much I tried,  I showed up on her doorstep, crying, with only the choking sounds of " I-just-really-miss-my-mom" as an explanation.  Thus, my unwilling surrogate.  She was the first one I showed the pregnancy test to.  (yes, she willingly looked at a pee'd on stick).  She was the one who we called when things got dicey during my second pregnancy.  Now, she's moving to AZ.  Moving in with her real daughter.  The economy here sucks.  This is no-one's idea of plan A.  I want to send a letter to the President.  But this isn't his fault.  Even though I despise my Congressman, this isn't even his fault.  My unwilling surrogate and I have discussed that this isn't even a depression; it's a new low that is going to make us all rethink how we deal with life.  I cannot even begin to explain how much I do not want to have to think about anymore than I already do.  Is anybody else tired? 
     So, here we are.  Please share the stuff that makes your day-to-day life easier, laundry schedules, recipes, coupon tips, etc.  Feel free to ask for help with what hinders your existence.   Some days I just need to vent.  Some days I need to have a  wine-date across the "net".  Some days I have a great moment where our church pastor has some great way of looking at things that makes me feel less crazy.  Some days I find some new nail polish that has both the 6yr old and I ridiculously pleased.  If it can help, it's valid is a philosophy of mine.  So, who has what to share?

My first Blog

Wow, so I have this idea that I need to share everything all in one dose.  Ask anybody who knows me and they can tell you that it's a bad idea.  If you count pregnancy, I've been a  mom for just over seven years now and at least 4 confirmed kids.  In reality my daughter is 6 1/2 and my son is 2 1/2.  I am a stay at home mom and my husband frequently travel, leaving me alone w/ too much for my feeble little brain.  Daily I think that I am not a good parent.  Daily, I think that my kids are going to turn out better than most of their peers.  I struggle with being true to me, and being a responsible adult.  I write this in hopes of getting like-minded folk to share ideas and support a new idea of "functional family".  I cling dearly to many (not all) of the ideals I was raised with.  I cannot be my parents, and, as much as I love them, I do not want to be them.  In a nut shell, that's why I'm here.  There are more fractions to explain, like my new jogging obsession, but, that has to wait till at least next hour.  Thanks folks~