Turkey day with family

When we first came to America I was amazed that people would ask me if I was going home for Thanksgiving.  I wanted to ask them really? Me?  There are so many problems with your questions.  Can you spot the problems?  If not, let me point them out to you.  1) NZ does not celebrate Thanksgiving and 2) it takes me at least 20 hours to get home by plane (and a $2000 airfare) and it's only a 4 day weekend.  If you get Friday off.  So no.  I will not be going home.  

But you know, in those days I was dreadfully homesick and would have liked to go home for good. They just didn't realise who they were asking, it's just the common question to ask at this time of year.

Actually, all our Thanksgivings here in the States have been really fun.  One year was spent in Texas, another in Virginia Beach, and two at my friend Ashley's place since we've been in Bloomington.  One of those years we had two meals at two different people's places.  Another we had three.  It really is a killer meal, and has convinced me to forever more say "yes" to only one invite.

This year is the first year that I can reply Why yes! I am visiting family for Thanksgiving!  We have driven north five hours to Kalamazoo to have Thanksgiving with my brother, his wife, and her family.  My brother is very happy to have his niece around, she has grown so much since he saw her last. 

It's been half a year

BabyBird is six months today.  I recently watched a few videos from when she was first born and she was so different then.  Her head was huge, her arms skinny, and she had a little pot-belly.  She would sit in her seat all squiggly, moving without meaning to.  My newness at being a mother was obvious in these videos.  When I burp her, I look like I'm  whacking her on the back, and I didn't hold her with the ease that I do now. 

A lot has been going on with her in the last few weeks.  We had a few tricky early mornings with daylight savings but I also think her recent developments were affecting her sleep.  She is very good at getting up on her knees now, though she still moves backwards rather than forwards, but she mostly just rocks up there.  She is able to balance while sitting but only when we place her in the position, and we have to watch her carefully, she also holds herself up in her bath.  However, today I looked over at her after placing her on her tummy and she was sitting on her bottom! She'd got there all by herself, what a surprise, she had a surprised look on her face too. 

We've been slowly introducing her to solids.  Did you see the carrot video?  I introduce a new food to her every four or five days and now she eats egg yolk, steamed carrot and brocolli sticks, peas, cucumber sticks, cooked apple with cinammon, banana, and pear.  I am introducing it all as finger food which is mostly fine except for  banana which is a complete mess.  I had been feeding her in my lap but I got out her high chair in the weekend and she's very good at sitting in it.  In her bumbo, she'd arch her back pretty quickly.  I think being on the floor and far away from all the action was a problem for her.  She will sit in her chair just watching me cook and we have a pretty nice time in the kitchen together.  My sweet, sweet girl.

The last of the garden

We had enough snow to kill the plants which hadn't been able to stand the recent cold.  Luckily I remembered to grab the last of the green tomatoes the night before, only missing a few.  Jbird and I spent just an hour clearing away the debris left behind.  I didn't bother to prepare it like I did last year with Mum, I don't think I'll have such a garden next year as our plot is too small and annoying.  Do you remember?  It was one of the most fun days with Mum.  We made lasagne layers of paper, leaves, compost, and soil, laying down seeds I had collected from the garden that year.  Some lovely sunflowers grew out of those seeds but nothing much else survived.  Without proper protection from critters, planting seeds doesn't really work in this garden.  I swear a couple of bunnies have been living behind the big corner bush.

The last of the tomato crop has been fun.  I made two batches of green tomato salsa.  It's sugar-free so the flavour isn't very intense but it's nice to use as a chutney.  Unfortunately I made a spicy batch and a not very spicy batch and the spicy batch felt TOO SPICY so I ended up combining them both.  Pretty boring of me, I know.  I guess I was doing things in between BabyBird naps and was too rushed to think about it and retaste.  Anyway, I have jars and jars of the stuff so I'll have to give some away.  Next I'll make spaghetti sauce and soup out of the tomatoes as they turn red.

Further into the going sugar-free journey

In March I wrote about going sugar-free here.  I didn't last very long at the time - maybe only one or two days.  Going cold turkey felt too impossible.  But slowly, slowly, I have been extending the reaches of my sugar-free-domain.  It helped that I decided that rather than being sugar-free, I would be 'refined white sugar-free'.  As other sweeteners are expensive, I am sure to think twice about baking and I end up baking a lot less than I used to.  Although I am not sugar-free by any means, I consume much fewer sugary foods and the ones I bake don't have white sugar in them any more.  

My main difficulty is trying to get the sugar substitute in good proportion.  I start off with a normal recipe and make substitutions as I see fit.  One biscuit* I baked ended up being more of a chewy scone because I guessed an amount of dates to put in and also added 1/4 cup of raw sugar.  So next time I used molasses as well as good quality dark chocolate chips and it was really really sweet (and really really yummy, like a fudgy chocolaty brownie bikkie*.  I got the thumbs up from Jbird).  Also either the molasses or the dates burn quicker than white sugar so I needed to watch them very carefully.  The date ones smoked nearly as soon as I put them in the oven, setting off the fire alarm.  I'm also careful to make sure there are lots of savoury snacks available as between meals is my weakest sweet-tooth time.

*cookie

Warm soup on a Fall night

We had lentil soup and wine on this cool Fall night.  Jbird's sister came home and it felt friendly and relaxed.  Although it didn't look very appetising, the soup was a hit and I love that I could throw it together in about 10 minutes.  It reminded me of the very early months of our marriage when I made it often.  In fact, it was this lentil soup that brings this story to mind.  It's  easy, yummy, and seemingly very healthy so I thought I'd share the recipe.  I had Jbird pick up some crusty bread and white wine while Soph and I played with BabyBird. 

Ingredients;

A splash of olive oil

1 Tblspn curry powder (whichever kind you have in your pantry)

1 Tblspn chopped garlic

1 Tbspn grated ginger

1 chopped onion

1 cup chopped carrots

1/2 cup chopped celery

1 or 2 bay leaves

1 cup brown lentils

1 litre or so chicken stock

salt and pepper to taste

chopped cilantro (coriander if you're in NZ) to garnish

sour cream to garnish

Heat olive oil in a heavy pan/pot (I used my cast iron pan).  Add onion, cook until it starts to soften, stir every now and then.  Add curry powder and cook one minute, stirring with a wooden spoon.  Add remaining vegetables and cook with onions to distribute curry flavour.  Add stock, lentils and water as needed.  Bring to a boil then lower heat and simmer covered until cooked.  Around 40 minutes.  

Blend with an immersion blender.  Serve hot with bread, garnished with cilantro and sour cream.

What a price

Jbird bought me a pair of $200 winter boots today.  TWO HUNDRED DOLLARS.  We never spend that much on clothes.  Every winter I look and look and look for a pair.  But I don't like any of the shoes in my price range ($50 tops) so I decide that I'll wait until the Black Friday sales*.  Only during the sales, I'm often all caught up in the holidays, travelling and visiting people, and I forget about the boots.  Then my birthday comes in January but I decide that winter is nearly over and I will just make do and I choose something else for my birthday.  So once again I survive the winter with a pair of flats (too cold), some old high leather boots I don't really like (the leather is saggy at the ankles), and a pair of ugly sneakers (they are so ugly).  

But today I got some boots and they are lovely lovely lovely.  I sat around with the babies all day thinking about them sitting at home waiting for me.   And wondering if I hadn't spent too much on a pair of shoes.  When I finally got home I went online and found the same pair for $100 less*.  ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS.  What a discrepancy!  So I bought them and I'll take the other pair back tomorrow.  Phew.  Now I don't feel so bad.  I hope I wear them happily for ever and ever and ever.  We'll see. 

*the most extreme sales day in the US is the day after Thanksgiving, known as Black Friday.  I will do all of my Christmas shopping online at this time as the online sales are normally about a week long. 

*I chose the black pair but the pair I first bought were grey.  Which I may have liked a bit more.  Too bad, it's ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS IN MY POCKET. 

A narrow miss

Two weeks ago I discovered that I could not find any of BabyBird's original photos from birth to three months!  Can you imagine the panic that ensued?  I spent hours trying to recover them, dreamt about them all night, and eventually discovered them the next day on a hard drive I thought I had checked but hadn't.  Phew.  

I remember doing this once before in Bangladesh with one of my favourite albums {The Flaming Lips: Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots.  It's really a very very good album}.  That time I was mortified.  Even though I owned the cd and it was back home in New Zealand.  The loss made me feel really far away from home.  Alana introduced me to windows search and I found it dumped into another folder.  Thank you Alana.  Meanwhile Alana could not even use her entire hard drive full of travel photos and music because she lost the specific USB chord and I was crying about an album of music?

This time I told myself Annabel...you don't need those photos! You'll be able to get a ton of them offline because you're always uploading the ones you love.  You have all of the memories...etc. etc. etc. but I felt sad anyway.  I'm beginning to think I spend too much time with those photos.

Stretching and growing

Here's a clip with some snippets of BabyBird playing with me on the bed.  She's just learning to push her self up here so it feels like I must have filmed it a long time ago.  Now she spends most of her time on her tummy, holding herself up and even getting up on all fours.  We have regular wrestling matches when I'm trying to change her nappy because she flips herself onto her tummy and will not stay on her back.  I've even had to have Jbird help me hold her down so I can change her in a hurry!  I've learnt that if I let her have her play first, she will lie happily on her back afterwards.

Really? Culture shock?

I can't remember if I wrote about a conversation I had with my Korean friend regarding my culture shock.  She was at BabyBird's dedication where I mentioned the culture shock I had on moving to the States.  She really couldn't believe that moving here would be a culture shock for me, she kept suggesting that speaking the same language made all the difference.  She even implied that my culture was very similar to an American culture.  I saw her again today and she said she had realised that when she is in a room full of Chinese people, she becomes very aware of the differences in their cultures, even though they look the same, and so now she can understand where I was coming from.  Anyway, I wish I told her, there are Koreans everywhere.  I know four kiwis in Bloomington.  One of them is my daughter (who doesn't even have NZ citizenship), one is my husband, and one is my sister-in-law.  There are Kiwis everywhere, but not so many here!

Speaking of cultural differences, Jbird and I come from the very same city and consider ourselves to have the same ethnicity (Pakeha/European on the NZ census).  You would think this would make our marriage easy but even he and I experience cultural clashes.  For example, his family are late to bed.  Mine are not.  We often spent Christmas day at the beach.  His spent Boxing day there.  Seemingly little things, but they all add up to make very different people. 

A little overthinking

When I first started writing this blog my idea was to literally write a thought every day, just as the title suggests.  I wrote short posts that would hopefully grab the reader's attention and were easy for me to write well.  I wrote nearly every day of the week for over a year.  No pictures, just words.  Then I dropped my deadlines and decided I'd continue writing but not as frequently which led to last month with only eight posts.  I also started adding photos and found I didn't need to write as much.  A picture says a thousand words, after all.

Without the deadline, I will think of a good thought to share and grab onto it but I don't feel the pressure to write it immediately.  Instead, it sits inside my head for a couple of days.  During that time I might start writing a draft but I not bother to finish it.  So it gets more head time.  By the time I try to seriously write it, the thought is too big and I no longer know where I want to take it or which parts of the thought are relevant so I end up scrapping it altogether.  

The deadline was a good idea, even if it was only important to me.  It got me writing, editing, and publishing often.  A small thing perhaps, but it gives me so much satisfaction, this tiny bit of sculpted writing.  I have no solution that I'm happy with, just this thought.

Did I show you these?

 

They are Aurora's passport photos and were taken when she was about 7 weeks old.  They took quite a bit of re-taking and editing to get right so we could send in the application.  We used the bottom middle one.  We have them stuck on our fridge now and I think they are adorable.  Expressions she didn't know she was giving me that she'll probably always have.

Will you crawl soon?

BabyBird has been rolling over for at least two months but she has only just realised that she can use this wonderful skill to be mobile.   All of a sudden she can get to the other side of the room all by herself.  I guess she's much stronger now too.  In fact, she's started to get up on her knees and does mini push ups and planks all day long.  It looks exhausting.  

Play has become prolonged and much more enjoyable (especially for me) as she is immersed in her happy exploratory activities.  She lasted THREE HOURS without needing many cuddles or even a nap yesterday.  I couldn't believe it.  Not that I can just leave her to it - she hates being alone.  Here's a wee clip where she shows off some of these skills. 

It's that time of the year again...

Not only has Halloween been and gone - as is made evident by the stores already setting out Christmas decorations - but I have a second Christmas fruit cake in the oven.  And it smells delicious.  This one is a gift for a certain somebody who may or may not read this blog so I can't say his name. Okay, it's my brother, a true lover of Christmas cake.  Jbird loves Christmas cake too so the first is for us.  To be honest, I'm pretty sure he loves anything sweet.  Except for the evil American candy: dots which may or may not be made out of plastic.  They are a definite no-go for him.

So.  Thanksgiving in Michigan, Christmas (and wedding) in Seattle, New Years in Portland, and my birthday in Bloomington.  Then: here I come, Auckland baby!  Note to self: stop counting away the days. 

A Bird and her Daddy

This is the special smile BabyBird saves for her Daddy.  I love watching them play.

Can I make it mine too?

Here is a wee taste of an American holiday.  We didn't dress BabyBird up this year, and I have not been much of a team player in the past - although I've carved a few pumpkins - but the decision I made this year is we will make it a family holiday soon.  As soon as BabyBird can Trick or Treat and know what's going on.  While it's not a holiday at home, I like the community feeling Americans create through this holiday, walking around their neighbourhoods and visiting their neighbours.  And though I have always rejected Halloween before, it makes more sense to me now.  Like how Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy were part of my childhood.  I guess these are things a new mama questions all the time.