Welcome to Mathias Daniel!

The time finally came and our first son made his appearance on September 30th at 2:20 am. He was 9 lbs 8 oz and 23 inches tall. Everyone is doing well and we are all happy to be home!

Anna seems to be doing well adjusting to her baby brother, but we'll see how long that lasts. She does, however, often ask to hold him.

Like Mother Like Daughter

Before Anna was born, my mother gave me a dress my grandmother had made me when I was two. Along with it, I received a picture frame with a picture of me wearing it as well as an empty frame in which to put a picture of Anna when the time came. A week or so ago, I happened to be putting one of Anna's dresses in her closet next to this dress and realized that they were the same size! That very next Sunday, Anna wore my dress to church. Isn't she cute?

Now, I think this is a pretty cute picture of me, but my husband says that Anna is much cuter. What am I supposed to think of that?

An Acceptable Addiction

I have a confession: I'm addicted. Badly addicted. And I don't feel bad about it. And don't tell me that I need to stop knitting, or so help me...

So, you might ask, what is a good little Mormon girl doing justifying an addiction? Well, knitting is such a release for me and I love being productive with my time. I just love knitting. To see my hands creating garments, toys, and anything I want from needles and yarn gives me such a sense of accomplishment. My knitting makes me feel special and different; it is something that brings me joy.

The other day, I was reading on Ravelry forums (a knitting geek website) about knitting and feminism, and Ravelry member leTonBeau had the most beautiful retort to those that consider knitting anti-feminist, despite the poor wording. She said "My personal feminist/ craft rant is that to consider in “traditional women’s work” is anti-feminist is to deny the worth of the women who came before us and did it out of necessicity rather than choice." I certainly don't knit because I have to and I don't knit because it is considered a "womanly" thing to do. I knit because I enjoy it.

Ok, I need to stop rambling, so I'll just end with a few pictures of projects I have finished recently.

This is Hitty, a doll Anna will be getting for her birthday in a few weeks. I'm working on making some more clothes for her.


This is a poncho that I made for a friend and her new baby. I've made this poncho several times and absolutely love it. I made a few changes this time just to make it more interesting.


This was my very first lace project and I was very pleased with how it turned out. Unfortunately, I just used yarn from my "stash" and I didn't have any good colors to choose from, so it is a nice, lovely brown.


Thanks for letting me rant and show off my knitting!

For the Bounty of the Earth

We live in such a beautiful world! Last Thursday, I picked up two bundles of basil from the farmers' market (Oh, how long I have waited for this day!) and picked at least a bundle's worth from a pot in our garden. That night, we had pesto for dinner, and even better than that, made seven more batches of pesto to put into our freezer for the winter.

While Hubby worked on the pesto, I took a large bowl out behind our building with a stepstool and got to work picking blackberries. Since they hadn't been picked since before I left on our vacation, there were tons of super ripe berries just falling off into my hands. I ended up with twelve cups of blackberries and about half that much in juice and puree after I had seeded them, just enough for two batches of freezer jam.

The whole time that we were working on making pesto and picking blackberries, I couldn't help but be grateful for the bounty that the Lord puts on this earth and for the desire that I had to take advantage of it. Once again, we won't have to buy jam for another year (especially since I've made another batch since and have enough juice for one more) and I certainly won't be tempted to buy pesto, or even basil, from the grocery store. We'll certainly be making more pesto while the market still has basil and with the jam and pesto, we'll be eating summer all year long.

A Week to remember

For the past week, Anna and I have been off galavanting in Oregon while Hubby stayed at home to keep down the fort. And quite the week we had!

First, Anna's favorite single aunt wanted to take her to the beach. There we enjoyed lots of wet sand, cold water and good company.

Anna "helped" her aunt by demolishing all the sand towers she could possibly make. If you listen hard to the video, you might just hear Anna say "Helping!" while scurrying from tower to tower.

Anna got some sand on her leg. While that might be normal for the beach, Anna did not think so and held her leg up hoping that we would clean it off for her.

After the beach became too cold to handle, we went back to Grandma's house, with a short stop at a farm stand that had a few goats, bunnies, and chickens. Anna had a lot of fun feeding the goat.

Here's our little sunflower!

After the weekend, Aunt, Anna and I went to the Portland Children's Museum, which is next to the Zoo (Can I just say I love Cultural Passes?!). There, Anna got to color, play with clay, trains and balls, "drive" an ambulance, and dig. All the while, her aunt and I were running trying to keep up with her. Well, her aunt was running; I was trying to sit down as much as possible. What a great time she had.

Digging!

Our last day there was the opening day of the County Fair and we just had to go. We had a busy day looking at all the cows, goats, sheep, poultry, llamas, and rabbits. And that was after getting cheesecakes ready to enter into the daily contest (we didn't win, but we did get in for free!). While the highlight for Anna was probably all the animals, or the ice cream, my highlight was seeing this:

This was the very first year I have ever entered anything in the fair, and I won! I entered a sourdough loaf (Thank you to the Bogardus family for the recipe and the sourdough start!) that I didn't think turned out that well, but it won. Of course, I had entered it into the sourdough section and there were only two other entries. I got to taste the other two, and mine certainly was the most sour of the group and my mother-in-law just raved about the texture (I thought it was a little lacking). To say the least, I was very proud of my accomplishment and maybe I'll be able to enter more in the future. I am getting better at making 100% whole wheat hearth bread...

So, now we are home and glad to be there. But it was a wonderful vacation!

Green Thumb

Because of pregnancy and the distance we had to travel to garden, we decided to garden at home this summer. This, of course, is rather limiting since we live in an apartment and have to use containers to garden. However, we have a few containers up on the roof deck of our building (it certainly is nice to have an "in" with the managers) and we are very proud of our plants.

This is our garden.

We have three tomato plants (one cherry, two larger), a pot of basil and parsley, a bell pepper, arugula, Swiss chard and chives. As you can see, the tomatoes are doing quite well, especially the cherry which is covered with baby tomatoes.

Our pepper has 13 peppers growing, according to my husband's count. I haven't bothered counting. They seem innumerable.

Our cherry tomato is huge. We can't even fit all of it in the tomato cage! We lost a few tomatoes while we were gone for the Fourth of July, but it is still covered.

This is one of our other tomato plants. See how many tomatoes it has?

Before I took the pictures of our garden, I had pretty much decimated our Swiss chard to make dinner. But look how much we got out of a little container!

Growing this garden has been very good for me. I've always loved fresh produce (thanks, Mom, for spoiling me) and I like to see success. Gardens, while they don't provide instant gratification, certainly progress fast enough to be either very satisfying or very discouraging. I'm feeling very satisfied this year.

Growing up

Anna certainly is growing up. Just this morning she did what every other toddler girl does at some point in her life: insist on wearing a bathing suit, just because. Granted, I did just buy the suit yesterday, so when she saw it this morning, she insisted on putting it on.

Doesn't she look cute! It sure was hard to get her out of it though!

Anna is also enjoying trying on Mommy's shoes. She got the zippers on these boots done by herself.