Caitlyn's Birthday

We survived our ordeal last night on our trip home from San Diego and have a packed schedule ahead for us. Caitlyn was very understanding and patient throughout the day with us which really impresses upon us how very special she is to our family.

We all woke up a bit late since we did not sleep until the wee hours of the morning. We didn't have time to have a nice birthday breakfast...so she chose to have just peanut butter and jelly sandwiches because she knew how busy we were. The girls gave themselves a bath as we did not have time when we got home. Meanwhile, I was already working on lunch in the kitchen.

We did make a few minutes to measure to see how much Caitlyn has grown. She has always been our petite one. Emily is quite tall and has always been taller than Caitlyn at the same age. But I think Caitlyn is determined to catch up to her sister. Emily has grown about 6 inches in the past 3 years since we moved to this house. On the other hand, Caitlyn has grown 8 inches at the same time! Emily was still taller at age 7 than Caitlyn is now, but not by much. The gap is closing!

Christian had to stop by the church in the morning but would be missing most of his meetings because we agreed to take a friend to get her patriarchal blessing. So we picked him up on the way to her house and were off across town to make her meeting with the Stake Patriarch. The girls were very quiet and sat very patiently and respectfully for us. We had just enough time to come back home afterwards to serve some lunch and head back to church.

After church, we got home and rewarded Caitlyn with presents followed by cake. She requested a carrot cake as it is one of her favorites.

She's very neat and meticulous as she opens her presents. Putting aside and cleaning up each wrapper as she goes. After we cut and consumed the cake, Christian worked on her birthday dinner while she went around with her sister and delivered slices of cake to a couple of neighbors and has just enough time to peruse her gifts before dinner.

We got her a little drawing book by Joy Sikorski. I love her drawings. they are so simple and fun and just easy enough for the girls to work on without getting frustrated. So the girls sat and drew pictures while I helped Christian finish dinner.

After a somewhat quick dinner, we gave her a choice of what to do next. She has been waiting for the recital and dedication of the Grand Avenue organ. A Tabernacle Organist was coming to play it for us and she has been looking forward to it for weeks. But we had been running around quite mad for the past couple of days and gave her the choice of settling down for a nice family movie together or playing with her presents some more but she chose to go to the organ recital because she realized that she would not get another chance to see something like that.

So we had to cut dinner short and race across town again to make sure that we were able to get a good seat in the chapel. It was already mostly full when we arrived. I have to say that we were looking forward to it as well but was a bit tired and was hoping she would opt for just having a quiet evening at home, but we are sure glad that we went. It was spectacular. I like the organ but am not as big of a fan of organ music as Christian is, but I have to say that it was very special and moving. The girls got to go afterwards to touch the organ and say hello to Dr. Linda S. Margetts, the Tabernacle Organist that came to play for us. And she wished Caitlyn a Happy Birthday too!

And again, the girls were patient while we visited with friends afterwards. We were a bit late in coming home again and had to put the kids to bed as soon as we could. Unfortunately, with all the craziness, lack of sleep, other sick kids and/or too much junk food at some of these past events, Emily woke up 6:30 this morning and got sick. She is home with me now but CST testing starts this week and she needs to get back to school!

Eagle

Our nephew attained the rank of Eagle in the Scouts Program. We drove down to be at his Court of Honor on Saturday.

It was a pretty big deal for the family but I was pretty shocked at how little support they got from leaders. I think the night only happened by the shear will of the family. Don't get me wrong, nearly a hundred people showed up for the event, but only two other women in their ward was right there with us helping out.

Christian's dad played the National Anthem on one of the boys' electric guitar, which was pretty neat, especially for the kids.

It was after 9:pm before we finished cleaning up the church. As it was late, we left directly from there. We did not have any problems with our little up-chuck princesses, so we were doing pretty good that day. Everything went off without a hitch.

Then before we could get to Temecula, the roads turned into a parking lot. Apparently they were doing some road construction (although there was no warnings or signs). We had no idea what the problem was until we were in the thick of it. It took us an extra two hours to get through something like a 13 mile stretch. The kids took a short nap but the stop and go traffic woke them up. They were tired and wondering why we were not hardly moving.

That's when we got rear ended! The driver in back of us fell asleep and rammed into the back of my truck. The girls were so scared. They were tired and crying and at the edge of being hysterical. It was a nightmare. Luckily, my vehicle is pretty tough and only suffered a little damage. You can't really see it without really looking but basically the back spare tire got shoved into the car. So there is a big dent under the spare but the door still works fine.

Of course the driver was driving her parents car and the insurance was lapsed a whole month. It was just too much.

We didn't get the girls in bed until just after 1:am. We did't get to bed probably for another hour after that. The family will have to excuse us from going down again to visit any time soon. It was a nightmare and it will take us some time to recover from it!

Mail

Caitlyn got mail from her Grandmother (Christian's mom) on Thursday so she got to open a letter and more gifts. It's always special for them to get something in the mail but it's extra special from Grandma Cheri as they only see her but maybe once a year since she lives so far away.

She got to open it right before bed so she couldn't really play with it until after school on Friday. She didn't seem to mind too much. She is a very patient little girl.

Early Birthday post

We celebrated Caitlyn's birthday a little early this year to accommodate the schedules of some of our guests. Not to say that we had that many people over, but it is always hard to schedule get togethers because everybody has other things going on. Really, it was just Caitlyn's grandparents on both sides and Auntie Marian.

Also, since Christian's dad's birthday is tomorrow, we usually celebrate his birthday together with Caitlyn's.

It was a really hot weekend. We had planned to make paella and toast some fresh bread to go with it on the grill. Christian pretty much got a case of mild heat stroke doing it!

Luckily, Marian made it early enough to bring an EZ-Up to give him a little shelter from the sun. I'm sure it would have been worse otherwise. But, boy was it tasty! Marian was the one who got us the paella pan after a trip she took to Spain with her sister.

We did stay outside to eat on the porch as there really isn't enough room in the dining room for everyone, but when we were done, we had to retreat back into the house for presents and cake.

Auntie Wendy sent a present over with my mom as well so she scored quite a few presents so far and it's not even her birthday yet. The most memorable though, was Marian's. She did a whole "lady bug" theme including a red and black dress for the occasion. She had everything wrapped in many nested boxes. The present started out in a gigantic beanbag sized bag that was blown up so that it looked huge. Caitlyn had lots of fun searching for all the bits and pieces of her presents.

Grandpa had his own kind of fun with the leftover frosting of the cake!

But all the lady bug stuff just reminded me of when Caitlyn was just a wee little one. She used to have a lady bug Halloween costume that she was so cute in.

But, that was 5 and a half years ago now...sniff.

A Reminder

To remind us that summer is just around the corner, it is scorching hot today. It is nearly 100 degrees in the shade on my porch. Even the hummingbirds are parched from the heat.

I can't believe the kids will be out of school again for the summer in just over a month. I'm not ready...for them or for the heat.

Five Years ago...

Five years ago, we went to the Redlands Temple to be sealed together for time and all eternity.

We usually make a special trip to the Temple with the kids. Unfortunately, the Temple was still closed for maintenance!

Food Storage - FHE

We borrowed a canner last week during Spring Break but never got a chance to use it. You get it for a week and our week was just about up, so we decided to have a food storage FHE.

The kids love to help can and were extra disappointed that we could not do it at the storage center any more.

We eat a lot of rice, but we don't use long grain rice except for special dishes that call for long grain rice. We ended up buying a bunch of calrose rice from Costco and canned that. We also experimented with a few other things (split pea, barley, etc.). In the end, we found that we didn't really get enough cans and things because we were unsure of how many cans you would get from a 50 lb bag of rice!

Also, since we checked through our inventory, we pulled out a few cans that we needed to rotate and use up. They are the short term supplies that we purchased previously. We've been experimenting with the instant refried beans and the powdered whole eggs and butter for the last couple of weeks.

It's been kind of fun and interesting. We've made pancake mixes, cookies, quick breads. The powdered egg and butter work pretty well in baked goods but they have their limitations. For instance, reconstituted butter does not actually melt. You can make it creamy and add it to vegetables and things but you can't melt it and pour it over popcorn or anything. You can, however, sift powdered butter straight onto your popcorn. And while reconstituted scrambled eggs really do taste like eggs, you wouldn't want to eat it straight like that unless you were really hungry (I'm sure it would taste pretty awesome then). It seems to have a consistency that is a kind of mix between scrambled and hard boiled eggs.

We've been experimenting with different kinds of beans as well to see what kind of things we want to can and what we can do with them.

I even made a couple of different recipes of whole wheat crackers. I am not quite happy with either recipe. I think I want to make a hybrid of the two.

The most interesting item we have tried is actually TVP (textured vegetable protein). It's a soy by-product. A lot of vegetarians use it as a meat replacement. It has a decent amount of protein and fibre. It's actually not bad. It has a good storage life and is cheaper than real meat. I think I will experiment more with it and can them the next time around. So far we have tried it with spaghetti and chili with good results.