Dear Woman in the Hobby Lobby Parking Lot,

Today I jumped ship. Abandoned my post.
Headed north with Jacob and Beau and didn't look back.
This last week, although not even half way done, has been a doozy. I've felt lost, unsatisfied with what I've done at the end of the day, upset at myself for loosing my temper with my kids, more upset for not enjoying my God-given gift of motherhood.
Inspired by the Hobby Lobby coupon in my inbox and needing a picture frame, I headed up to crafter's heaven and children's hell. It's never fun for them, no matter what you do.
That store will put horns on your angel child faster than cotton candy.
While waiting for the lady to cut all of my fabric at a snail's pace, Jacob discovered measuring tapes that have a button to instantly rewind the tape. He wanted it and seeing it was a dollar, I relented. We picked out a blue one for Jacob; he said Bekah would want one later and it would have to be purple.
At the check out lane he fell out of love with his measuring tape and wanted a candy bar instead.
"Jacob, if you don't want this measuring tape I'm not going to buy it for you.
"Do you want it?"
No, he said, convincingly.
"You can't have any candy, though."
I paid for the rest of my things and then tried to leave. Jacob realized he was leaving empty handed and had a fit. Sometimes when he has a fit he cries so hard he can't breathe. Then his lips turn blue, his face loses all color, his eyes roll back and he falls on the floor. Then I blow in his mouth and he breathes, and an awesome cry welcomes color back to his face. Not this time. This time he was yelling bloody murder and I was grateful.
No passing out is a good thing.
I buckled Beau in the van, loaded my goodies, and miracuously kept my cool as Jacob managed to get in his seat, yelling, "I NEED TO GO BAAAACK!".
My insides were feeling super defeated, like this is exactly why I feel trapped sometimes.
As I walked around the van to get in my seat, a woman parked adjacent to me, and obviously a witness to the whole thing said,
You're doing a good job.
You're so patient.
This will pass.
You're doing a good job!
She might as well have been an angel. That was just what I needed to hear. I got in the van and cried, but not sad tears, grateful ones.
I am well taken care of.

Camping in Northern NM

"MOM! I haven't been camping when I was five yet!"
That was pretty much the argument that Bekah gave Rus and I for needing, having to go camping this weekend. So we cleared our ultra busy schedule...if cleaning the church and garage sailing (yes I did spell it like that on purpose, why not) qualify for "ultra busy"...and we loaded up the pop-up and headed north.
And drove.
And drove.
And drove.
It took us about four hours, actually. Crazy, huh, for just an over-nighter.
We got to our campground, set up everything in the dark, and enjoyed hot dogs and marshmallows by the campfire.
Bekah and Jacob loved it. Beau did too, as long as he was sitting on my lap or Rus's. We told stories, ate too many marshmallows, and did a thorough job of making ourselves smell like a fire.
It was delightful.
Then we headed off to bed in our cozy but not airtight (and thus cold) pop-up, where I froze half the night, Rus worried about the kids freezing half the night, and the kids all slept, the whole night.
The next day we all woke up too early (thank you Bekah), had breakfast, and headed out fully bundled up to go fishing before the sun even touched the frosted floor of our canyon. Rus was able to catch a fish in the stream right by us before we completely lost the kids' interest, but my attempts at catching one were too much for them. Whining ensued (I know. Shocking.) and so we headed back to the jeep to adventure out on a drive.We wound up later at the Salman Raspberry Ranch and found it to be a picturesque, energetic little place with rows and rows of raspberry bushes and all sorts of people, young and old, with hats, canes, walkers, and umbrellas, filling up their buckets and baskets with fresh raspberries. The air was warm, the sun bright, the company friendly, and the raspberries delicious.
And let me tell you, Beau loved it.And loved it.And loved it.Eat raspberries much?I'm sure he ate at least a half a pound all by himself. In fact we told the lady to charge us extra, he ate so much! He would pull off a raspberry, and if it was ripe he'd eat it, but if it wasn't he would spit it out.
Bekah and Jacob had fun too, but they found holding the buckets and letting us fill them up much more enjoyable than actually picking very many themselves.After we picked our fill we walked up to the Salman Cafe and Salman Ranch Store. The whole place was beautiful. It's located right next to an old mill and the adobe brick construction was simply fascinating. Go there. I'm serious. Just for the pictures you can take.
Then we came home. The kids slept for almost three hours on the drive home. We loved it, although we didn't really acknowledge it because, well, you know. Then they would have woken up.
It was a wonderful trip.

I Am a Pirate

"Here, hold my sword!" said Jacob. "Bad Guys!"
Pshoo! Pshoo! "I shot them!" he says.
"I have poison!" I said.
"Good! Throw it on them! When they step on it, it will kill them!"
"Captain!" Jacob means me of course. "There's another pirate! Throw your water on him!"
"But I want to drink it," my weak non-pirate blood cries. Then I see the desperation in Captain Jacob's eyes (yep he's a captain, too) and I throw a splash of water overboard.
"Good! You got his eye! Get his other eye! Get the rest of him!"
Again my cold water goes overboard.
"Good job!"
Then he gives me a consoling look. "Mommy, we're good guys, okay? We're good guys," he says, as if to reassure me of our status despite all the recent killings.
Later our Pirate Ship Playhouse seems to be meeting a more favorable wind, so I meet Jacob at the railing and order a hamburger.
"I don't have any."
"French fries?"
"Um...No," he says without remorse.
I give in. "Okay, Poison?"
His eyes light up. "Yeah!"
I go to take it from him and he gently chides me, "It's a dollar."
I go on to order more poison, a cannon (which was only available after the brief explanation that it blows things up), and several rockets.
Later we ventured to distant islands and used our sword to chop down old cornstalks. We also gathered more poison (basil blossoms). It rained a lot though (according to Jacob), and each time we had to run back to the ship for safety.
Can I just say I love being a pirate with Captain Jacob?
Arrgg!
Oh, and in case you forgot, this is what our playhouse looks like, courtesy of Bekah.

To Do List.

How To Can Chicken, for Caryn.

(click on pic to enlarge)

An Artist's Sketch of My Day

Because my camera is kaput. That's why. And we have been up to important things. Really important. Like the whole blogger world should know about my chicken venture. (Canning forty pounds of chicken. It sounded like a good idea, Rachel!) Anyone have any good chicken jokes? I'd love to hear them.

Caramel Apple Sopaipilla Cheesecake Bars

So...have you ever tried Sopaipilla Cheesecake Pie??Cheesecake. Cinnamon. Buttery, flaky crust. Crisp cinnamon and sugar topping.
You are missing out, seriously, if you haven't. Go HERE for the recipe.
And then try my variation...the addition of cut up apples sprinkled with cinnamon and these delightful little buggers:So yum. So almost fall. It made my house smell like all of those wonderful autumn things...apple cider, brisk air, changing leaves...
Here is how I did the variation:
After putting the cream cheese mixture on the crescent dough, put 1-2 diced apples (depending on your taste) and then sprinkle with 3/4 cup Kraft Caramel bits. Cover with remaining crescent dough and follow the rest of the recipe.
Mmm Mmm Good.
Let me know what you think.

On Yellow

It happened. What I'd been dreading since the first day of school.
Bekah's class has a green-yellow-red behavior system. All the kids start school everyday on green. If they have to be warned twice about something, then they go to yellow. If they continue to be disruptive then they go to red and their parents are called.
Here's the kicker...if they stay on green all week then on Friday they get to pick something out of the treasure box. Bekah shows me her green stamp everyday, and she tells me all of the kids that had to go to yellow and what happened.
Like the kid that spit on someone. He went to red.
I went to pick Bekah up yesterday and when she saw me she instantly melted. Dissolved into tears. A little puddle. She was so sad! But she told me she couldn't remember why she went to yellow.
Later on at home I told her that she could tell me what happened or she could wait for Daddy to come home and tell him.
Puddle time again.
"I'll tell you! I don't want daddy to come home and say 'Bekah'! I don't want him to ask me about it! I'll tell it to you and you can tell him!"
So the story goes that there was a boy in class who wouldn't show his picture he drew to anyone else. Bekah apparently told him that no one would like his picture. Not very nice. And bam, the little paper version of Bekah moved up to yellow.
I kept my promise and told Rus myself, out of range of little yellow ears.
What did we learn from this?
Now at the insistence of Bekah we have our very own green-yellow-red system in our house so we can practice. We have a little Jacob, Bekah, Beau, Mommy, Daddy, and even Bekah's bear, Kristy. We have the rules written next to each pocket, and if you stay on green all week you get a dollar.
I'm not sure how I feel about it yet, we'll see!

Tent Rocks, and a link to our new Adventure Blog!

Rus and I decided to do some more exploring this weekend. Jacob agreed, as long as he got to bring his sword. It was for the bears. Yep. Bear country. Jacob was our protector. We decided to head up to Tent Rocks in the Cochiti Pueblo. It is north of us between Albuquerque and Santa Fe.
We hiked about a half mile and Jacob decided he really needed a rest.
That was when Rus said he saw a bear just rounding the corner of the trail in front of us.
There were arrows marking the trail and we convinced Bekah and Jacob that the bear had left the arrows for us to show us where he went. Those arrows took us into a beautiful sandstone slot canyon...sandstone walls coming up on both sides, brush growing in odd places, and an incredibly tall ponderosa whose roots had been completely exposed so that you could walk under the tree. Bekah's favorite part of the trail was where a huge boulder had blocked the path and you had to crawl under it to continue on.
We covered over three miles through that beautiful scenery minus a bear, and just finally making it back to the truck seemed to counter-act the disappointment of never actually seeing that darn elusive bear.
Our camera broke a while back and the one we borrowed for our last trip had been returned, so Rus and I were both sincerely regretting not having a camera for this hike. So I have taken the liberty of, um, borrowing a pic from the google image search... I also wanted to announce that Rus and I have started our own Adventure journal/blog. We have posted several of our old trips, complete with pictures, maps, and directions...We want those of you who live here to have a resource for awesome places to take your families, and we want to convince the rest of you that your lives will not be complete if you don't come visit this amazing state.
Our blog is www.nmadv101.blogspot.com
We are hoping to explore all over New Mexico so that we can eventually have 101 different adventures on our blog!
We hope you enjoy it and definitely hope you will give us your feedback about how the site looks and if the descriptions and directions are clear.
Just a note...Rus and I are doing this blog together, meaning he actually posts a lot of the content, so if the spelling is bad or the writing isn't quite as elaborate, you know it's him! (Love you, hon!)

Stargirl

I got swept off my feet by a wonderful little book today,
Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli.
Have you read it?
Let's just say that it embodies the wonderful idea of non-conformity.
Of having vision and not caring if your vision is not like every one else's.
And then suddenly caring.
And then realizing that worrying what every one else thinks doesn't really change anything.
Changing yourself to fit it doesn't put more rocks in your wagon.
Or get you the guy in the end.

Reading it made me want to do little wonderful nice things for everyone.
And read the newspaper more often.
And buy Rus a porcupine necktie.

Quirky.
You should check it out.

Garden Volunteers

Rus decided that we should make our own compost. So he bought a big black plastic trash can and drilled holes all over it. Then he filled it with some dirt. Then he placed a lovely little bucket in the house right by the kitchen sink, for me. I fill up that bucket daily, he adds it to the compost bin daily (or else it stinks up our kitchen/house) and thus the world goes round. Every month or so he'll take a shovel, move stuff around in the trash can, and if he's lucky enough to find wonderful rich black dirt at the bottom of the bin, he'll distribute it among our garden.
Such was the story back in May when we started our garden. We planted everything from seed...an experiment to see what would really grow. We planted romaine lettuce, spinach, corn, carrots, basil, okra, roma tomatoes, green chiles, watermelon, cilantro, cucumbers, and...I think that's it. Then we fertilized it with our compost that had been...um...composting since last summer.
We watered everything.
The sun shone.
Stuff sprouted.
Everywhere.
And by that I mean everywhere. Stuff that we hadn't planted. We called them volunteers. The main volunteers were basil, watermelon, a wonderful canteloupe plant, a potato plant, and a couple of green chile plants. We also had a funky red flower sprout up faithfully along every inch of our drip hose on one of the garden beds. I don't know what it's called, but I like the color!
So here, take a tour around our garden (caption above each pic)...My Mother's day flowers which are thriving. Go Rus! The tall plants with the flowery tops are my romaine lettuce. They are out of control. And while we did enjoy them for about two whole months, they are now in fact kind of bitter tasting. The heat does that to them.The tree in the corner is our peach tree. It is also thriving. There are strawberries beneath it with beautiful little runners sending little baby plants all over the place. Behind that tree is the canteloupe plant and a huge volunteer tomato plant (in the shadow to the right). (Which incidentally has yet to produce any tomatoes. Very Suspicious.)See those pretty red plants? And the mass of tomato plants? And the watermelon spilling off to the left side?And here we did plant that tomato plant on the right, but it was supposed to be a container size cherry tomato plant, not a huge obtrusive yummy monster like it is.
The basil on the bottom left? Volunteer.
Watermelon in the top right? Volunteer.Hi rabbits! Please don't make babies...I'm not ready!This watermelon started before we built the playhouse and Rus was sure it would die. It didn't, and the one watermelon it has produced was delicious. The plant should be proud to be the baby of a seed that someone spit.Some of the bountys from our garden are seven quarts of pickles, 3 1/2 pints of diced tomatoes with basil (and one with green chile) and three eight-ounce freezer jars of pesto. Yum. We're on a roll and lovin' it!