Happy Easter

Rich and I spent the week of Easter at church every evening preparing for the Easter musical. The kids were there, too, and had a blast. The program was a giant undertaking with something like 150 people involved, including costume design, makeup, choir members, drama, set design, orchestra, childcare, tech crew, etc... Rich was working on the lighting crew and I was a choir member.

Last year I helped as a stage hand and longingly watched the choir with my voice down to a whisper. I have nodules on my vocal chords and have made quite a bit of progress in letting them heal, but a whole week of singing and losing sleep strains it beyond what it can handle. So I was just thankful to have any kind of voice by Easter morning. It was scratchy and I couldn't hit every soprano note I wanted to, but it was still there. Praise God! I found myself praying for everyone with solos and drama parts and simply asking God to let me have a voice to add to the choir. He was so faithful. As each song started, I had just a little more to give :)

Our church does an Easter egg hunt every year on Saturday of the holiday weekend and our girls are there, rain or shine!

This year I let the girls pick out their own Easter dresses, in the hopes that they'd actually want to wear them for the rest of the spring/summer season. I like their picks :)

We headed to my mom's house for Easter dinner. We actually had some sun for just a bit and the kids got to hunt eggs in Nana's yard.

This is my sweet niece Olivia. Seriously, SO cute!

Got a fun pic with my sister in law, Jana. Yay for SUN!!!!!!!!

Hummus Recap

The first step on my hummus recipe was to saute two large sweet onions for 30-40 minutes. I just didn't have the time this week for any extra cooking adventures, so I just now got to it today. Did you catch the amount of onion the recipe called for? Two large ones. And I combined it with only 1 can of garbanzo beans. That's a whole lot of onions with not a whole lot of beans. It also called for quite a bit of lemon juice, garlic, and the famous tahini. I don't even have a food processor, so I had to use my blender. So, it was a hassle to make and in the end, I didn't love the result. I liked it pretty well, but it wasn't any better than the yummy store-bought stuff. So there's my verdict: I'm probably sticking with the no-effort, cheaper version!

Bedtime Theology

Tonight as we were going to bed, Avery asked me a question. "Mom, how is it that God is so perfect that He doesn't sin? I mean, if He can do anything He wants, why doesn't He want to sin?" ummm.... That took some thinking on my part as to how to answer her. I told her that God is so perfect that He hates sin. Not sure how to expand on that, I was interrupted by my very intuitive little seven year old. She said, "So it's kind of like if I hated pickles and someone tried to give one to me, it wouldn't be hard for me to say 'no' because I hated them so much?" Wow, what a great analogy! I couldn't have explained it better myself. God hates sin so much, it doesn't look the least bit appetizing. Which brings me to another thought: some of the best talks with our kids are at bedtime. Some nights we are just anxious to get them to bed and be done with our jobs and hang up our "parenting hats" for the night. Yet if we were to do that every night, we'd miss out on some deep theological discussions that happen when the lights are low and bodies are worn out from the day. It takes a little effort to be patient at that point of the day, but it's worth it!

Fishing for memories

My Dad found out about the Klineline Kids Fishing day at Salmon Creek pond in Vancouver, WA and decided to take Rich and my kids. The girls have talked about fishing with Papa ever since they can remember and haven't gotten to yet. For five dollars each, the girls got a t-shirt and a really great fishing pole! I guess it's a huge event and with the help of the WA Dept. of Fish and Wildlife, 7,000 fish get dumped into the pond for the kids to catch. Each kid gets a 2-fish quota and 45 minutes to fish. There were even volunteers there to clean the fish for each kid! My girls both caught their two fish and had a great time. They didn't allow catch and release, so Papa has the fish and is going to cook them up for us sometime soon :)

Rich is in the middle of the picture in the orange sweatshirt with the girls on either side of him. Papa shares his expertise with Allie :)

Allie carried her bloody catch proudly!

Hummus endeavor

I've decided I love hummus. It has to be especially flavorable hummus, but I love it. I don't remember the brand from Costco that is so delicious, but I walked by it yesterday and didn't buy it for $5.99 because I had a recipe for "Lick the Bowl Clean Hummus" from my Taste of Home magazine and was planning on trying it out. I thought, "I'd better try to save the money and make my own." So today I went to Winco for my big shopping trip and looked for one of the ingredients that is evidently very important for good hummus. Tahini. Ever heard of it? I had no idea it existed, but evidently it is sesame seed paste. I guess Winco usually has it, but they were out today. I figured that out after I looked all over the store by myself and then asked someone and we discovered it was missing. So I decided to go to Safeway before I went home because I really wanted to make that hummus. Instead of learning my lesson and asking before I started looking, I combed the store and couldn't find it. By the way, if you need to find tahini, both Winco and Safeway have it stocked with the peanut butter. So a lady helped me find it and then came the extra-discouraging part. It was $6.99! Maybe you don't think that's a bid deal, but I was trying to save a few bucks. I had to buy the garbanzo beans and a few other ingredients and now I'm out much more than the yummy no-effort Costco stuff would have cost me. I know the tahini will last for several batches of the homemade hummus, though, so I hope it ends up being cost-effective! It's what I get for trying to save a buck. BTW - I'll let you know how the hummus turns out. I was way too tired to actually make it after all my shopping today.

What I want to do

A few days ago, after I had made time to play Memory and Disney Rumikub with Allie, and was in the middle of changing sheets and cleaning bathrooms, Allie exclaimed something in frustration. Before I share her statement, I'd like to point out what she was doing at the moment she said it: she was jumping on her cool indoor trampoline. So as she was jumping without a care in the world, Allie said to me, "Mom, you always do what you want to do!" Her sister was gone at school and I guess she was feeling a little bored. Of course my reply was, "Do you really think this is what I want to be doing right now?" I'm sure I probably felt the same way she does when I was her age. I'm glad my kids see me working hard. Avery often comments on how hard I work around the house and recognizes how much I need those foot rubs twice a year (Mother's Day and my birthday). And I guess I'm glad that it at least looked like I wanted to be doing what I was doing. Honestly, I was happy to be taking care of my home and family. I get a lot of joy out of providing a comfortable and clean home for the three most important people in my world. But let's face it: if I had been doing exactly what I wanted, I'd have been... hmmm... what would I have been doing??? reading a book? ...watching a good movie and eating pizza and drinking a milkshake? ...sitting on a cruise ship in the sunshine with some strawberry lemonade? ...at a spa resort in Greece getting some sort of exotic mud massage? Now that's something to think about.... :)