It's a gray day

Today it is gray and it is raining. Two things that I do not like together. So I'm trying to think about all the things that make me happy today.

Like these....




My favorite cookie, snickerdoodles, my mom's recipe.


And that my kitchen counters are clean. I'm focusing on how clean they are, not how ugly they are. And that I have $15 in my purse to get gas with since I'm on empty. And daffodils, I LOVE daffodils. I don't have any daffodils but I am picturing them today and this is the picture in my head. And that's me and the ground is dry and warm and there are no snakes lurking by. There are no snakes in my world today at all.


And I'm thinking about Irish Dance this afternoon and how much I look forward to taking Emma every time. It never feels like a chore and that makes me happy.

And I'm grateful for my family. Every one of them. Especially for my sister today who listened to me this morning and just let me talk and talk and talk. Which I needed.

And for friends. A very sweet friend who I love and adore invited our family over for dinner last night. It was very appreciated by all of us.

I'm grateful for the quiet of my house. Except for the whirring of the dishwasher and the sound of the keyboard it is quiet here. Sam must be asleep.

What makes you happy today?

Emerald City Feis February 14 & 15, 2009

Today was Emma's first Feis. A feis is an Irish Dance competition. Don't worry if you didn't know that it was called that because until a few months ago I didn't either.

I am so proud of Emma. My heart was leaping out of my chest with mama pride today. She danced beautifully and for only being with the Murray School since September she did incredibly well. Here are Emma's results.

Reel 4th place

Slip Jig 3rd Place

Reel Trophy dance 7th (out of about 20)

Poetry contests in the 10-14 year-old category 1st!!!!

Since this was her first feis she danced in the "First Feis" category for each of these dances. She will automatically move up to "Beginner" now. Now that she is in the Beginner category she will need a 1st, 2nd or 3rd place to move up to "Advanced Beginner". There are more levels afer that.

When I first read Emma's poem that she wrote for the Feis I was very moved. It is beautiful and she captured the emotion of the history of Irish Dance. So I wasn't surprised that she won 1st place for this. The guidelines for the poem were that it could be anything to do with Irish dance and it could not be more than 20 lines. Here is her poem:

Dance Partner

by Emma May

Step by step, beat by beat

Dance shoes dancing on the concrete.

A tin can waiting on the curb

This is what people heard.

A jumpy tune filling the air

Two young girls dancing there.

One was blonde, fast and short

She wore a white dress, a maid sort.

The other was brown, slow and tall

She wore a black gown from a horse’s stall.

Immediately you could tell they were shirking

When they were supposed to be working.

But alas, here they were

Dancing, dancing, eyes to her

They spun and laughed, happily together

Dancing partners, best friends forever.

They leaped and stepped, black shoes matching

Never did they miss one move dancing.

And by the end of day, when they finally bowed

The tin can was overfilling, with silver from their rounds.

Hand dipped chocolates

What goes hand in hand with Valentines day? Chocolate! Whether you like chocolate or not you will like my recipe for homemade hand dipped chocolates. I have an entire handout for this that is 3 pages long and has lots of recipes. I am putting my most used one here.

1 cup butter
1 can sweetened condensed milk
2 tsp. vanilla
2 lbs. powder sugar
2 tsp. salt

Mix your butter and sweetened condensed milk at medium speed with an electric mixer. This is not a recipe to do by hand. You will see why in a little bit. Add your vanilla. Then add your powder sugar and salt. From here you can make your various different flavors.

I will give you the 3 flavors that we did at today's class

Cookies and Cream

Add 1 package double stuff oreo cookies that have been crushed really well. To do this I put the cookies in a gallon ziploc bag and hammer away. It feels good to do this. Pick a day when you feel particularly stressed. It helps. Add the cookies to your mixture and mix at a low speed. This where you need that electric mixer. It is very thick and you need the power. Roll or scoop into balls. I recommend a 1.25 inch scoop. Think melon baller and you will be good. Or just roll them by hand, that works great. Refrigerate for one hour and then you are good to dip these bad boys. I will tell you about the dipping at the end.

Cherry Divine

I call these divine because they are. For this one you are going to substitue 1 tsp of cherry flavoring from your local cake decorating store for the vanilla in the basic recipe. Or just do it to taste. The flavorings that they have at these stores are much stronger than the extracts that you can buy at the supermarket. Or you can use almond extract. It has a similar taste and smell. I also add one drop of pink food coloring at this point. Then take one jar of maraschino cherries ( I don't remember what size it was. It wasn't the huge jar, i know that) and chop them up pretty small. Then press with paper towels to get the excess juice out. Add the cherries at the end. Refrigerate for 2 hours before rolling. And then refrigerate again for at least an hour before dipping.

Maple Walnut

Substitue maple flavoring (i bought mine at Winco) for the vanilla. And add 2 cups chopped walnuts. Refrigerate for one hour before rolling and refrigerate for one hour before dipping.

Dipping

I use the smooth and melties from Winco bulk section. They are the best. I buy the dark chocolate which is not a real dark taste and the vanilla. I like the maple walnut dipped in the vanilla and the cookies and cream and the cherry dipped in the chocolate. Although the cherry dipped in the vanilla with a dash of red or pink sprinkles on top was gorgeous.

I put my chocolate in the double boiler and start melting at a low temp. When 75% melted turn donw to the lowest temperature possible until completely melted. I use a dipping tool but you can use a fork and a toothpick. Set your center on the fork, dip in the chocolate and use the toothpick to run underneath to get the excess off. Put on wax paper or aluminum foil to set.

Some tips about chocolate:

Do not ever get water into it, it will ruin the chocolate
Do not melt too quickly or at too high a heat. It will start breaking down and look curdly.
You should be able to touch it. If it is too hot to touch it is too hot to dip.
If you get pools of chocolate around the bottoms of the chocolates you can just trim away with a knife.


Rolling cookies and cream
This is my friend Sarah getting ready to dip the cherry ones in vanilla.

This is Diana and Sarah dipping in chocolate

mmmmmm, maple walnut dipped in vanilla.

Feast your eyes on this

Later this week I'm teaching a class on hand-dipped chocolates. I realized in preparing for the class that I didn't have any center combinations that were valentiney. I wanted something pink. Cherry came to mind because I love chocolate covered cherries. I mean I REALLY love them. I can eat a whole box of those 99 cent liquidy center goodness. So I decided to try and make my own combination. This isn't really like me. I don't experiment too often in the kitchen. I hate spending time on something and then being disappointed with the results. Which is why I typically order the same thing in restaurants too, but that is for a whole other blog. So I looked at the center recipes I had and decided that it didn't look too hard to experiment with. Here is my result:



How much more valentine can you get? A pale pink center with splashes of red? I LOVE IT! And it tastes divine. I used a cherry flavoring from the cake decorating store, 1 drop of pink food coloring and a small jar of chopped maraschino cherries, pressed with paper towels to get the excess liquid out. The only thing better? When they are covered in chocolate!

Results to come soon.

Emma's Percy Jackson Party

Emma had a Percy Jackson birthday party today. Who is Percy Jackson? Apparently you have to read these.

This series of book is all the craze for kids in the 10-14 range i would guess. Emma loves them and when I asked her what kind of party she wanted she came up with this. The only problem in doing this party was that I had to come up with everything on my own. It's not like I could walk in to a party store and buy the matching cups and plates. And in my searching online I only found reference to one other party. But thankfully there were some very creative PE teachers out there that had posted some games that had to do with the books.

So today for Emma's party we played "Quest for the Golden Fleece". This entailed me buying a $2 sheep, spray painting it gold and hanging it from a tree. Chris wrote a bunch of clues and they were divided into teams and sent on various quests to find the golden fleece. All the quests had to do with things from the books. The kids seemed to love it.
Emma's team acting out a scene from the book for one of their quest.


Another game was "Capture the Flag" this is exactly as it sounds. Apparently this is one game that they play in the book. Fortunately the weather was perfect for us today and we were able to have a great game outside.









Then there was all the blue food. Percy Jackson and his friends really like blue food. It has someting to do with them being half gods. I thought it was that they got more power when they ate blue food but then someone told me today that wasn't true. OK. So we had blue cupcakes with blue frosting and constellations on top. Blue jello jigglers, blue koolaid, various blue candies, blue tortilla chips.




When everyone left they were given an amethyst bead on a necklace because they survived the party. In the book the kids at Camp Half-Blood get a bead for each year that they survive. I thought that Chris and I should have gotten a bead for surviving the party as well. I think I got the best gift of all though when Emma told me she had a really good time at her party and the games were super fun and "cool".

Facebook Time

I'm sure all of you out there have heard of Facebook by now. I joined Facebook about a year and a half ago but didn't do anything with it until this past August. While attending my class reunion I found out that people there were way more into Facebook then blogging. So I dug out my login info for it and jumped on the bandwagon. I now have 257 friends. I may have more tomorrow because that's how it works. There have been some very cool things about Facebook. Like the fact that I found a childhood friend that I hadn't seen since I was 6. That's just crazy. I don't know if he remembered me, I kind of don't think so but he added me as a friend anyway. Which is a little weird now that I think of it. I have been able to get in touch with friends from my single days in Eugene which has been really neat and I have also been able to stay in better contact with my family. It seems that everyone is jumping on the Facebook bandwagon.

However, (you knew there was going to be a "however" didn't you?) it's just one more thing to distract me and give me less time with my family. And it also bugs me when people use facebook as the sole way to contact me. I still have an email address folks. I can't tell you how many times I get an email saying that I have a message from "so-and-so" and I can click "here" to see what that message is. Well, it's nice that Facebook will alert me by email that I have a message but it's just one more step I have to take to see the message. I then have to log in to my facebook account to see what the message is. I'm fine if it's a simple comment here and there but not when it's something important. And there are also those times when you don't see an important message on Facebook because it doesn't alert your email. I've had that happen too. And my thoughts have been why didn't someone call me or email me? And even more frustrating is that it seems that people want me to contact them through Facebook. I've been trying to follow the council of Sister Beck in last month's visiting teaching message and keep my priorities straight. I've been trying to spend less time with my distractions like "computer time" and more time reading with my children, checking homework, making dinner and talking with them about their day.

I'm curious how you all feel about Facebook? Are you on there? Do you like it? Do you feel like you manage your time well with it? And if so, how do you do it?

I just had to get my thoughts out there.

Emma's 11 year-old Interview

Several months ago I posted an interview I did with Heidi and decided that I would do it for each of my girls around their birthday to see how their answers change over the years. Here is Emma's.

What is your favorite TV show? Total Drama Island

What is your favorite movie? "Catch That Kid"

What is your favorite color? Lilac Remember me saying that my girls choose very specific colors?

What is your favorite food? Ice cream cake

What is your favorite thing to do with mom? Go on vacation

What is your favorite thing to do with dad? Snowboarding

What is your favorite thing to do with your sisters? sled

What do you want to be when you grow up? An author

Do you have a favorite friend? Miranda and Allie and Lauren

What is your favorite thing to do when you are not at home? Visit family and snowboard

What is your favorite toy or thing? The Wii

What is your favorite book? Basically all the books I've read but if i had to choose it would be between "The Lighting Thief" and the "Battle of the Labyrinth".

What is your favorite animal? White tiger

Do you want to go on a mission? Yes

Do you want kids? Yes

What's hard to do? Chores

What's have you learned from your primary teacher this year? We've been learning about Joseph Smith. Moroni kept telling him to wait, and wait and wait until he could get the plates.

What do you love to do? Play with friends


Thanks Emma for the interview. You are growing up so fast and you are so beautiful. I can't believe that you will be in middle school next year. I'm not sure what this next year holds for you but I'm sure that it will be amazing. Your Irish Dancing is improving so much and I love that you dive head first into everything you do in order to be the best. I see a lot of myself in you and it gives me a smile. A headache too sometimes but mostly smiles.