My Birthday Boy!

I am happy to announce the age turnover of my only son! Each birthday for him has been a challenge since he is a summer baby. His friends are scattered around the earth and something drastic always happens around his birthday. But he never complains..........

Dear Young Man,
You have been such a blessing to our family. As you grow into a responsible youth, I want to thank God for your presence. Your gracious spirit, kind heart and cheerful demeanor have been an anchor to your sisters. You have the smile of a saint and the heart of an angel. You don't complain when you need anything, you just merely put a gentle "word in my ear". There is no nagging from you. I have to drag you out to buy things that you need and you are so thankful when you receive things. Your sisters love your very presence and you are always willing to play with them (even when it comes to being their servant!). You are the family tech guy! If you can't fix it, we are all out of joint! You always know how to have fun. You are the only person in this house who can keep up with my barrage of wisecracks and badly timed jokes.
 You know that you are here for a purpose and that God himself sent word of your coming to your father. We don't know what His plans are for you, but we ask that you always listen to Him because you will never go wrong doing the will of God.
 We love you WynMan!

A New Version of Loaves and Fishes aka "Beets and Sausages"

If you know my family at all, you know that my children eat just about anything. They are a blessing in the picky eating department since they really aren't picky. I have one who dosen't like "fishy fish"(but loves salmon croquettes), another who dosen't like raw carrots,(but love them cooked) , one who dosen't like mashed or baked potatoes (but loves french fries or hash browns) and that's all. Oh, and none of them like cheap American chocolate, highly processed foods or microwaved anything!

 Now with that list, you can imagine that our diet consists of a lot of homemade food. So, for a dinner surprise tonight, we had a thrown together meal of Polish Kielbasa, Thai rice, garlic butter sauteed-california blend vegetables, sauerkraut and pickled beets. Hmmm, sounds like a refrigerator clean out meal to me.

Whilst I sauteed the sausages, the girls each plated a side dish. I heard the rants and raves of one daughter saying how much she loved beets and that they were "Natures Candy"! The two youngest ones hadn't really had them before so they were invited to have a preview bite. The youngest slowly chewed hers and as she swallowed her last bite, you could hear the sounds of delight as she asked for another bite, Then another bite and also ANOTHER! She was sent to help set the table in an effort to save some beets for the rest of us.

We finally sat down for dinner and dished out the meal. The youngest quickly devoured her sausage  and beets, promptly asking for more. We obliged, saying how much she was eating lately and if this was a growth spurt. Everyone had another round of dinner including another serving of the beloved beets. Us older folks knew we shouldn't push the limits of food intake, so we surveyed the leftovers in hopes that there would be some to pack in daddy's lunch for the next day. There wasn't much left but a half dozen coin sized slices of sausages and after fishing through the beet juice, only one slice of beet left.
As you can imagine, the little one asked for it and another round of sausages to accompany it down. She should have been full and stuffed by then, but we let her have 3 sausages and the last beet. She gulped that down at about the same time when the nearly teen asked for a couple of sausages to help "clear the table". Whatever girl! Here, we shall make Daddy something else for lunch. Effectively with that, everything was gone and there were no leftovers, but the little one persisted. She had to have some more (could this have been a competition?). We explained that it was all gone and she just had to look forward to thee next meal with beets. She kindly grasped the beet dish and used her fork to sift through the red murky liquid..... She stirred for a few moments and intently looking into the dish, started to stab and drag something to the side of the bowl.. What could it be? Three of us already checked fro stragglers and there were none, but she dragged two more beets up the side and with help, flopped them onto her plate. She was so happy! She stuck her fork back into the sausage dish and fished out two more sausages also! What was this? There was nothing left in those dishes but the child managed to get exactly what she wanted. It was nothing short of a miracle for which she was truly thankful for. After that, she put her plate away and ran off to prepare for our after dinner walk.

Have you had things like this happen to you??? Even the little things count.......

Night of the Neckbones!

It was an untypical night. We were feeling a little need to be in touch with our southern roots.  My oldest was inspired by a smothered pork chop recipe and really wanted something different for dinner. There were various meat products in the freezer that needed to be eaten since the freezer burn clock was ticking........
Voila! Neckbones!
 For some strange reason, there seemed to be several packages of them in the back of the freezer and I only used the smoked ones when making cabbage or greens, so how did we end up with so many packages anyway? Errrrr, whatever. Let's do something with them! Smothered porkchops, neckbones, smorkchops, smeckbones, smothered neckbones! (Did you see the evolution in that?) So somewhere, someone had made them and it was up to Google to help us find a recipe.
We were directed to Iheartcooking.com where the grainy video appeared to make the upcoming dish look delicious! (I also viewed the Ghetto Cooking Show version of this dish and was highly distracted by the strange blouse/bra strap and lecture about Whitney Houston's unfortunate death.)
Needless to say, my oldest had her heart set on this dish and it looked like we needed another package to make sure the teenagers had enough to make their meal. A run to Wal-Mart- here we go....
Now wash the bones, season them and put them in the oven. Make gravy, pour over bones and bake some more. Sounded easy and they were looking great!.
Side dishes included rice, roasted brussel sprouts and a cucumber salad.
Only the oldest, 5yr old and I knew what we were serving up for dinner, so when the others sat down at the table to eat, they had a big surprise.  A lovely dish full of browned bones and gravy! My son had an uplifting eyebrow moment and plowed forth, piling some on his plate and speculating how to best partake of the road ahead.
The two youngest had to have the meat scraped and pulled of of their bones so as not to provoke choking. (We actually like them, you know!)
The 11 yr old had the biggest smile since this was a hands-on meal and she is all about getting her hands messy.
Mr. didn't say much for a few minutes because he was surveying what to do next. He placed some on his plate and dug in too. After about 4 minutes, there were questions of " Where is the meat on this?, I got a bone!, and "When is the dinner coming???" There was lots of laughter and passing around of napkins and choking on over salted brussel sprouts. Baby Dear wanted more meat and with a shuffling of hands and rattling of bones, someone produced a tablespoon of meat to top her rice.

 Where's the meat???

                                                       
Mr. broke the silence with, "Bacon brings vegetarians back to meat, neckbones drive people away from it!". The son says, "Is this what happens when Dracula is the butcher?"
By the time we finished eating them, we figured we had burned more calories than we ate! Too much work for so little meat. "If we wanted to trick folks into having a near vegetarian meal then you should have said something!"
We had a good laugh and had to eat something else to make up for the deficit!

"The Tower of Bones"as interpreted by Wyn

Not just abandonment- a touch of neglect......

This was originally written in February.........

I should be and am ashamed of myself for not blogging. I gave my time and moments of my of life to letting people have a piece of my mind on this blog and apparently I have had no time to share my thoughts with anyone.
I guess I couldn't come to grips that moving back to the states would somehow mess up my rhythm of checking my email, facebook and blogging between the hours of the first shift of children going to school and the second shift of children waking up.
 I had a great and cushy life before Mr's retirement and now it seems as if the world is spinning on overdrive for me. I have so many things going on besides looking for a house and working at a lovely little Montessori school. I didn't plan on working until we settled in a home but an offer came up that I couldn't refuse. I had expected to be done with my Montessori certification, but between family illnesses and deaths, I couldn't focus and get anything done.
I have gained a significant amount of weight and seem to find food comforting, so there is a vicious cycle to that saga. Never mind that!
God has plans for us and somehow things work out to his glory even though we stand here with our mouths wide open and looking as if we were knocked off of our feet by a sudden gust of freezing wind.
Things will fall together eventually..... Patience!

Ciao,
Misty

Been locked out lately......

Dearest folks,
 I have been trying my best to get back in the blogging seat and it has not been easy. Nope, not one bit easy one you have figured out why your blog was deleted from the blogger account and still it is online and you can't break in so you can fix the problem!
Do I hear a resounding "Technology stinks sometimes!" So, since May (off and on), I have been periodically trying to fix this problem and write again to my hearts content, but "NO" says technology! And off to some other project I go.
And now, here we are again-together!
Celebrate with me!

Milk and cookies for all!

Ciao,
Misty

The Misspelling of Amerika (And How did Santa get a stake in his mouth?)

Good Morning Chilrens!
Todays' topic is "How English Has Gone Downhill Since Texting and Twitting Took Over!" or also known as, " The Misspelling of Amerika (And How did Santa get a stake in his mouth?)"

If you feel how I do, then the current status of American English makes you grow hair out of your ears! It all began a few years ago .......... I noticed that many words on billboards and posters began to pop up with mysterious punctuation misspellings; mainly apostrophe marks in silly places. No, wait, it actually started somewhere back in the 1950's when folks were making signs for doughnut shops and ran out of space so they spelled "Donuts" instead. (Do you see where I am going with this already?)
So back to the signs of today with their misplaced apostrophes',(do you see that one back there? That's what I am talking about!) Words like kids', Wedding's, birthday's, you know, bad punctuation like that. I am a little OCD when it comes to things, but it tears me up when I receive a text like this, "I'm tryna c wat time yall goin 2 cum ovr?"
Do you see that?? That is the type of English that makes teachers jump off ledges!!! What is going on in the education system today that stifles the encouragement of correct English? Is this just me or what? Tell me I am not just paranoid?
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So the reason I came up with this post is that while picking up my niece from school, I passed a couple of signs that had me gasp at the inability to proofread. One sign was on a Dairy Queen billboard and it said, "Stake Basket Sale $4.99. Now we happened to be talking about Santa when we passed this sign and seeing that it pertained to food, someone in the car shouted out, "Here Santa, have a stake in your mouth!". Oh, the laughter that ensued after that!
I wasn't going to turn around a take a picture right then- I would do it when I passed by in 2 days, but someone must have noticed the misspelling and fixed it by the next drive-by.

Now the second sign is a true insult to Hispanic culture. I can't believe that it has remained unfixed for at least 4 months! This one you really had to see to believe. How can you misspell tamales???

I know that you have to cut back on the quantity of words you use when texting and twittering, but does the quality have to diminish also? With these unlimited calling/texting plans, can't you just send 2 or three texts??

So, there is my gripe of this week.
What do you think about the current state of spelling? In my opinion, it sux!

It's been two months already?

I really should be ashamed of myself for thinking that I could keep up with all of the things going on in my life and try to blog about it. So many things to juggle and so little time in which to do them.

You would think that since I have no real "home" to live in and maintain, that I would have more time on my hands to do the fun things that I like doing, say like, sewing, crafting and blogging. But in reality, I have less time. Our days are spent driving around looking for houses and apartments, dropping off children to school, picking up irresponsible adult-like teenagers from school, Dr appointments, and searching for food. Yep, searching for things to eat.
You see, the little hotel room in which we have been inhabitating for the last 3+ months has no oven and only 2 tiny burners in which I cannot put a large skillet and a good sized 2 qt. pot on it and cook at the same time. There are some heavy eating teens in our family entourage and they have to be fed a couple of times daily (at least), so a meal with us is not just a salad, buddy! I used to be a-cooking and a-baking more often so we would normally have a good amount of leftovers and an ample supply of things to cook in the pantry. Our current pantry can only hold about 3 half full grocery bags of food before the doors bulge out.
Hmmmmmm, I lost my train of thought........
Oh, add to that the lack of an oven or bbq grill and you can see that half of the meals we would normally cook can't exist in our repertoire anymore!
Now with all of that coupled with a nearly self educating preschooler, one lazy home school 15yr old, an almost college student, a partial seeing, new-to-Montessori-school student whom I have to transport to and fro, house hunting, lonely older relatives, high maintenance adults, needy relatives, OCD family members, long distance family members, loved ones from overseas, an upcoming wedding and a toddler with destructive tendencies, then you can see that I have little time for myself.

Most likely you have called me and I was driving, so my handy personal assistant took a message and I was supposed to call you back, but didn't. I have to say that it might take me 3 days to 6 weeks to get back to you depending on the level of busyness that I am drowning it at the time. My handy assistant will remind me multiple times until I actually contact you back. I am so sorry!

Each week I think of all the things I could write about but when my body touches the bed, there is a mental eraser that hits me and BAM!, I forget what I was thinking about.
So feel free to remind me, call me, nag me and/or email me till you get the results you meant to acheive!

Anywho, we are alive and have been busy lately. Eye surgery for the preteen and hernia repair for Mr, all within 8 days of each other.
 I think at this rate and level of stress, I might need a wig for Christmas!

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