This New House

To me, what has seemed like an eternal silence on the blog has probably gone unnoticed by most of you. In the intervening days, our little family has been all abustle. For the past many months we have had our house on the market, and when it finally sold it came as somewhat of a surprise. We jumped into house-hunting gear and looked and looked and looked until we found the perfect one. After days of signing, waiting, appraising, inspecting, waiting some more, signing some more, we were finally able to close on both houses and move in to our new home a week ago tonight. As I type, I'm watching Michaela pull old Calvin and Hobbes comic books off of the second-lowest shelf of our bookcase in the living room. I just put those books there last night. That is pretty much par for the course of how my packing and Michaela's "helping" has gone the last few weeks. To be honest, I kind of feel lucky the books had a home there for 24 hours. Many thanks to the family and friends who came to help - for long or for short times - on baby patrol 2010. We wouldn't be moved in without you!! We're very excited to be in our new home and glad for Kenji to have a bigger backyard to run around in. After she calmed down, she has spent a good amount of time chasing chipmunks and birds that used to call this backyard their home. Tigra spent the first two days on the very top shelf of our master bedroom closet, not coming down for anything. I had to carry her down to her litter box on night two to make sure her body systems weren't shutting down. On day 3 we moved our clothes into our closet and Tigra had to step out into the big world. She seems to be liking it quite a bit, and is exploring all the nooks and crannies. We look forward to many visitors, and I hope to get some pics of the new house on the blog here in the next few days.

Promise of a Pie

It all began this last winter when I was a new mother, housebound much of the time, and reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. I was struck by the ideas of eating only foods that were grown or produced locally, and learning how to do so even in the middle of winter. Unfortunately, I wanted to begin by putting a garden in my backyard immediately, but it was January. Eating local produce in January apparently required getting ready for winter the summer before, so I had to put off my plan of implementation. This spring, however, we are taking some baby steps toward eating locally. We are taking our Saturday mornings to check out the local farmer's markets and compare for price, variety, and general fun-ness. Adam has graciously agreed to accompany me on these excursions, and on the first one to the Lake Oswego Farmer's Market, I told him that most likely the only things in season yet would be rhubarb, lettuce, and if we were lucky - strawberries.

If the above items were available, I promised him a strawberry-rhubarb pie, which I have never made before. This also required a little sacrifice on my part, too, because I try to get out of making a double-crust pie whenever I can by making meringue pies, or suggesting the pie was meant to be eaten with a crumb topping. Adam has begun to see through my ruse.

See for yourself the beautiful berries we found, which made for a tasty spring pie. It just may be a new family favorite. If I can make it with a crumb topping.

#1 Dominance

Kalina...This picture is especially for you. Although, it looks like we still need to work on the #1 Dominace sign so that it isn't confused with "loser." Then again, maybe Michaela knows exactly what she is doing.