With a cherry on top: Our fruit-picking summer

I'm slowly reaching my goal of hitting all the local u-pick fruit this summer and loading up with as much as possible.  (So excited to make that deep freezer work and have cheap fruit all winter at our disposal!)  In early June, we went strawberry picking at a fabulous family-owned organic farm near Plymouth and came home with 14 pounds of plump, sweet berries.  During the first week of July, we went cherry picking for the first time at Lehman's Orchards outside of Niles, Michigan (just 20 minutes away from us), where we picked over 50 pounds of tart cherries and subsequently froze them.  An added bonus from that trip was the 2 gallons of cherry juice that was accidentally squeezed from the pitted berries as they were transported in plastic bags from the farm to our house.  We added a bit of sugar and drank to our hearts' content for almost a week...I miss that juice. Two weeks ago, we brought home 14 pounds of blueberries from The Blueberry Ranch here in Mishawaka.  Last week, my parents gave me a huge bag of peaches from the tree in their backyard, which I peeled, sliced, and froze.  All that's left are raspberries, if I can find a picking farm anywhere nearby (any suggestions, South Bend area residents?), and of course, apples, which we'll pick up at our favorite apple farm on one of our fall trips to Bloomington.  But so far, we're right on track!

What do I plan to do with this abundance of fruit?  The list is practically endless!  Smoothies, pies, cobblers, pancakes, muffins, oatmeal cereal, ice cream, pure snacking on frozen goodness...these only scratch the surface of possibilities for the bags of fruit lining the door of our deep freezer!  We've already enjoyed blueberry-walnut oatmeal, cherry-almond oatmeal, blueberry cobbler, cherry pie, blueberry pancakes, and various versions of breakfast smoothies.  We look forward to raspberry ice cream, peach cobbler, and homemade applesauce.  

All of this fruit-picking has been really good for our family.  Not only have all the fruits been at extremely reasonable prices ($1.25/lb for blueberries as opposed to the $3/pint in the grocery store - hello!), but it's been both satisfying and rewarding to spend time out in the sun together, sweating for our food.  I hope it's helping Ian to have a better understanding of where our food comes from, how it grows, and that what appears on our dinner plates or in our breakfast bowls has a deeper story and that we can have a part in that story beyond our role of consumption. 

Ian and his friend J-man at our early July cherry picking adventure

Oglesbee Odes @ 20 weeks

The news about the new addition to our family never made it onto this particular venue, and for that, we're sorry.  But later is better than never, right?

Meet Oglesbee Gamma:

Gamma is a boy, much to the delight of his older brother, who has all sorts of plans for his little brother and seems to have advanced ideas about how much the little guy will be capable of once he leaves Mommy's tummy.  We're working on it so there's not a huge disappointment when Gamma comes out unable to do much more than sleep, eat, and poop. And no, we're not going to call him Gamma forever -- it's just his name (based on his rank ordering in the family) until he makes his social debut in about 20 weeks, at which point, we'll reveal whatever crazy name we've come up with.

So, 20 weeks have gone and 20 weeks are left.  Here's to hoping the last half is a bit more comfortable than the first half, during which I became very good friends with the, um, porcelain throne, if you will, and spent almost 13 hours a day sleeping.  Now that my energy is returning and food is more appealing to me, I'm looking forward to the rest of this unexpected adventure.  We're halfway there, Baby!

In honor of this occasion, our song for the day is "Livin' on a Prayer" by Bon Jovi.  Turn up your computer speakers and celebrate with us to some classic power rock on this sunny Friday morning. 

Hiatus

My goodness, things are dusty around this blog!  A two month's leave of absence seems to have brought out the crickets and cobwebs!  Well, I'm taking today to freshen things up and get things running again.

If there are any readers left out there, you may be wondering what happened.  I, myself, am not quite sure.  It seems to be a combination of a lack of ideas (What do I want to write about?), a lack of focus (What is this blog for, anyway?), and sheer exhaustion (Did I mention I'm almost 20 weeks pregnant?  Oops.). 

At any rate, I have a list of ideas again and a little more energy to go with them, but the focus is still a little unclear.  Is a blog about food, household ideas, and our specific family life too broad in scope?  There are so many good cooking and green/frugal living blogs out there, I feel no need to add my own inadequate offering to the mix. I just don't have the time or plethora of ideas to devote to such a venture.  But I do want to share what's going on with us, what we're learning, and what we've had success with.   I suppose, for today, I'll keep with the general format of what we've had going on, and see what kind of feedback I get.

So, here we go again....

Our life these days

While we were running errands this morning, Ian and I had this conversation in the car: 

Ian: Mommy, what do you do? 
Me: What do you mean, what do I do? 
Ian: What are the things you do?  You make food and check Facebook and read books and play games and clean the house.  What do I do? 
Me: What do you do? 
Ian: I do puzzles and play with trains and dig outside and watch TV.  What does Daddy do? 
Me: What does Daddy do? 
Ian: Daddy goes to work and comes home and goes to work and comes home and goes to work....(this went on for about a minute.)

Poor Eric. Thankfully, that all is about to change. I'm SO glad it's the end of the semester!!!!

4

Our Little Man turned four years old today.  I'm going to go ahead and be all cliche' and say that I can't believe it - it's going by so fast!  He's such a great little kid, and I'm excited to get to know him even better as he gets older. 

We started the festivities with a Pirate Birthday Party last Saturday with a bunch of Ian's little friends from church.  Eric even dressed as a pirate and shocked our guests with his incredible acting.  (For those of you on Facebook, there's an 11-minute video on my profile with the Treasure Hunt Eric planned and expertly executed.) Ian started the party out in a sour mood, refusing to put on his pirate gear and even attempting to hide in his room when his friends came, but being the loving parents that we are, we forced him to come out and within two minutes, he was actually having fun!  The rest of the day, though, whenever a camera was pointed at him, he quickly reverted to his sour face.  Good times.  

For his actual birthday, we did our traditional awakening by singing early in the morning, after which we gave him our present, as well as the presents from his aunt and uncle in Alaska.  Here he is cheesing for the camera in his chef's getup from Sherri and Adam: 

And since he's so into puzzles right now, one of the first things he did was put together a Thomas puzzle.  He was so proud of himself! 

The rest of the day was spent eating at Chick-fil-A for supper, making cupcakes together which we then took to Eric's night class to share, and just generally doing things that Ian wanted to do.  Everybody  needs a day like that. 

March Madness 2010

Ah, March! The temperatures get warmer and more bearable; the snow (usually) melts; crocuses, tulips, and daffodils break out from their frozen prison....and college basketball has its year-end party involving hours upon hours of nail-biting, pulse-racing, bracket-checking, good-guy-vs.-bad-guy, I'm-so-stuffed-I-can't-eat-another-bite games. It's a thing of glory.

For the first four days of the tournament, this is a little what our living room looks like:

Brackets taped to the doors of the TV cabinet, TV on CBS HD showing one game, iMac on streaming online video of another game, and the fireplace sporting a cozy roaring fire. Sometimes Eric's laptop is streaming yet another game if there are three that need our particular attention. We're in the living room from noon to midnight for four whole days, being careful not to miss a single important moment. Ian brings his toys out and plays the day away, we eat when we get hungry and when friends come over to join us in our celebration, and everything gets shut down only when the last second of the last game of the day has been ticked off the game clock.

It's a beautiful and special time of year.

Oglesbee Odes

For pure silliness' sake, here's a track from Ian's "Songs from the Street" CD by Sesame Street (thanks, Adam & Sherri!). It gets Ian singing every time....and us, too, for that matter.



And here's another one from the same CD. It's Eric's favorite. :)

Menu Planning: A Modern-Day Fairy Tale

Once upon a time, in a land not so far away, there was a young married girl who was juggling work, college, friends, and a new husband on an extremely limited budget. She used to come home from a long day at school, stare into the depths of her refrigerator, emit a sigh of lamentation, and resign herself to either spending too much on take-out, or making spaghetti or frozen pizza yet again. Something had to change. There was a wealth of good, healthful, cost-effective recipes out there that just weren't getting used. She needed a plan and a little bit of organization.

One fateful day, the young woman was visited by a Beautiful Idea. The Beautiful Idea whispered in her ear and on that day, she met a new and valuable friend: the Oglesbee Meal Planning Routine. It saved the young woman's life, and probably that of her husband and her future children.

The Routine was simple. Step One: one or two days a week, look at the next 4-7 days and figure out some meals that might work. If necessary, get out one's trusty recipe book and sift through for help when the brain is stumped and clueless. Step Two: Write the meals down on a sheet of paper to be referenced throughout the week.*

Step Three: Using the recipe book, make a list of the ingredients that are needed. This particular young woman made her own grocery shopping list, organized according to the aisles in her favorite grocery store for ease of finding said ingredients.

Step Four: Go shopping for the necessary ingredients so that the kitchen is fully stocked for the meals on the menu.

Now, almost nine years later, when the not-so-young woman needs to make a dinner for her family, the ingredients are all there, ready and waiting. It's a fairy tale come true.

*PS: She also saves those menu lists, using one sheet of paper every four weeks, so she can see what she's made lately, thus keeping her family from having to eat the same meals over and over again.

So how do you plan your meals? What's your strategy?

Valuable Mommy & Son Time

We haven't been feeling well this week. On Tuesday afternoon after J-man left, we had run out of things we felt like doing and were in need of a boost. Since Ian had spent the entire afternoon pretending to make cookies with his play cooking tools, I suggested we make some real cookies together. This offer was met with much enthusiasm, as you can imagine.
I let Ian choose the filler ingredients, and here was his list: chocolate chunks, Craisins, oatmeal, walnuts, and coconut. Those bad boys were fully-loaded...and quite delicious! I was thankful I didn't have to talk him out of anything weird (like the black beans he had recently talked about putting into an imaginary pot of "orange juice soup," complete with jelly beans and gummy bears).

We sure love our baking time together.

Oglesbee Odes: Be Unto Your Name

As we've talked about before, Lent is a time for recognizing our need for God and adjusting our perspective such that we remember who and what we really are: dust, vapor, here for a moment, broken vessels. But with that comes the acknowledgment that God is forever, eternal, the Healer, and mighty enough to save us.

I first heard this song and learned to play it on the guitar while I was in Honduras in February of 2007, so it has an extra-special meaning for me.