Cast-Away

Anybody ready for a party? I am. I want to throw a "Cast-Away" party. Alexandra gets her cast off tomorrow July 1st! We are so excited but at the same time not sure what to expect. Anyway, my party would require a dress code of leis, grass skirts and LEG WARMERS! I feel like we really have something to celebrate since my baby has been in a body cast for 12 WEEKS!!!

I think her legs will be in this spread-out position for a while. It will help though when it comes to trying out for cheerleading... It will probably be pretty painful when she gets the cast off at first as well. Hopefully, she will adjust to life without the cast as well as she did to life with the cast.

She loves her peas just like her sisters did at her age. I can't wait to put her in a REAL high chair so her peas don't drop to the floor so easily.

She can't get enough of her sisters. The cast hasn't stopped Abby from holding her and carrying her all over or Sammy from playing all sorts of games with her.
But life without the cast will make all these things a bit easier.

Alex has made up all kinds of games she plays with us. She sucks anyone around into playing them too. She is quite a joker and easy to get a laugh out of.

We can't wait to give her a bath and cuddle her again. Abby can't wait to put her ladybug swimsuit on her and take her to the pool. Sammy has been counting down the days. Forget July 4th at our house, July 1st is FREEDOM day....

Summer Dinners

Homemade Pita Bread
2 1/4 c. warm water
3 c. all purpose flour
3 c. white wheat flour
2 tsp. salt
2 TBS. vegetable oil
2 TBS. sugar
1 TBS. yeast
Add water, sugar and yeast, and mix. Let sit for 10 minutes until foamy. Add remaining ingredients and mix well. Knead with machine or by hand for 10 minutes. Place in oiled bowl, cover with warm cloth and let rise until doubled in size.

Preheat oven to a piping hot 500 degrees! Turn dough onto floured countertop. Divide into 16 pieces, roll each piece into a ball, and roll out into a 6-7" circle. Set on floured counter, loosely cover.

Place 2 pita circles on a wire cake rack. Place the cake rack directly on oven rack (or on top of baking stone) and bake for 4-5 minutes until lightly browned. Remove and immediately place in a brown paper bag to keep steam inside of bag. Once the pitas are soft, cut in half. Store in plastic bag in refrigerator for several days, or in freezer for up to 2 months.

You start with this...

...after a 500 degree oven you put them in a paper bag....

and then you get this! Aren't they lovely? You can watch them puff up in the oven. They are very good too.

Using these lovely pitas, I then made the following:

Beef Pitas with Yogurt Sauce

1 cup (8oz.) plain yogurt

1/4 cup minced fresh parsley

1/2 teaspoon minced garlic

1/8 teaspoon salt

grated cucumber

Pitas:

1 teaspoon dried oregano

1 teaspoon minced fresh rosemary

salt & pepper

1 pound boneless beef sirloin steak, cut into thin strips

1 large sweet onion, sliced

olive oil

4 whole pitas, warmed

For sauce, in a small bowl, comine the yogurt, parsley, garlic, salt and cucumber. Refrigerate until serving.

Saute onion until golden brown. Remove and keep warm. Saute beef strips in remaining oil until no longer pink.

Serve beef and onion on pitas with yogurt sauce.

And since I am at it, here is one more recipe that is an easy summer dish:

Sausage Veggie Grill

1 pound italian sausage links, cut into 1/2 inch slices

1 medium zucchini, cut into 1 inch slices

1 medium yellow summer squash, cut into 1 inch slices

1 medium red pepper, sliced

1 medium onion, cut into wedges

1 cup quartered fresh mushrooms

(I also added gently boiled red potatoes, diced)

1/4 cup olive oil

1 tablespoon dried oregano

1 tablespoon dried parsley flakes

1 teaspoon garlic salt

1 teaspoon paprika

In a large bowl, combine the first six ingredients. In a small bowl, combine the oil, oregano, parsley, garlic salt and paprika. Pour over sausage mixture; toss to coat. Divide between to pieces of heavy-duty foil. Fold foil around sausage mixture and seal tightly. Grill, covered, over medium heat for 25-30 minutes or until meat is no longer pink and vegetables are tender. Open foil carefully to allow steam to escape.

Enjoy!

Tea, Anyone?

The girls had some friends over and wanted a tea party in the club house. We are so lucky to have this huge club house hooked to our swing set. It makes for a fun place to play. It can be arranged for playing house, throwing tea parties, space ships to the moon, or a pirate ship out at sea. There is a whole other room that you can't see off to the side as well. Anyway, I am grateful for our little club house and the hours of fun it provides.

Of course, in order for the girls to play up there, I have to climb up and rid it of any spiders they see, no matter how small.

Hooray for afternoon tea with friends!

Hip Baby Update

Today Alexandra had her cast changed, her first REAL bath in six weeks, and an x-ray of her hip.
This is her old cast. She loved putting her hands in the cast like some secret hidden pocket.

The girls and I had fun decorating her old cast. Now we will start again on her new one.

The cast is very useful when you don't want to hold your banana.

We finally found a chair that Alexandra can sit upright in at the table! Hooray!

I love her leg warmers (baby legs). We have so many pairs to choose from. She wears different ones everyday. They really make an outfit.

So proud of her new seat.

This is minutes after putting her in her new seat. She gave me the biggest smile. I think she is happier eating upright instead of lounging back like before.

Hiding in her sombrero

We now have another six weeks in the cast and then we will hopefully be cast-free! The doctor said that her hip is in place and does not click or come out. Now the cartlidge and bone just need to form around the femur more and she will have a normal working hip.

Alexandra has done remarkably well. She has not been grumpy at all about her situation. She is much better than I ever would be if I were in the same kind of cast. It looks painful but it doesn't even phase her. We have become so used to life in a cast, that I can hardly remember what it was like without the cast. I must say, my back, arms, neck and wrists do ache from carrying her. However, her new cast seems to be a bit more sleek and not as heavy. That will be a nice change. We are so proud of her for getting half way. She did much better coming off the anesthesia this time too. She settled herself fairly quickly.

One nice thing we have noticed about the cast is that she never wakes up at night. The cast does not allow her to move therefore, she never wakes herself up. She has been sleeping completely through the night since she got it on. We also get a lot of attention with a baby in a cast. Some days when I pick Abby up from school with Alexandra in the stroller, it seems like everyone I see in the neighborhood stops us to either ask how she is doing or ask about the cast. It has been a great way to get to know people. One particular day, we had a crowd of people all staring down at her asking questions about the cast and Alexandra just stared up at them all with big smiles, amused at everyone staring at her. Everyone comments on what a happy baby she is. We are lucky. Here is hoping the next six weeks go as smoothly as the first six!

Birthday Bash

Abby's birthday was at the end of April but I am just now getting around to posting the pictures of it. It was a very fun party JUST FOR GIRLS! We made purses, necklaces, bracelets and flower headbands. They had pizza for lunch and lots of sugar - pink donuts, chocolate covered pretzels and strawberries to go along with the pink and black theme. I am sorry you can't see the adorable Happy Birthday sign on the window. It was very fun to decorate and go all out for this special occasion.

Abby and Sammy couldn't wait for the party to start.

Birthday girl's throne
A chocolate cake with chocolate buttercream.

We never can get too much chocolate in this house.

Happy Birthday to my big six year old Abby!

Three Great Books, So Little Time...

May and Pearl, two sisters living in Shanghai in the mid-1930s, are beautiful, sophisticated, and well-educated, but their family is on the verge of bankruptcy. Hoping to improve their social standing, May and Pearl’s parents arrange for their daughters to marry “Gold Mountain men” who have come from Los Angeles to find brides.

But when the sisters leave China and arrive at Angel’s Island (the Ellis Island of the West)--where they are detained, interrogated, and humiliated for months--they feel the harsh reality of leaving home. And when May discovers she’s pregnant the situation becomes even more desperate. The sisters make a pact that no one can ever know.

As President Bush is preparing to invade Iraq, Wall Street Journal correspondent Asra Nomani embarks on a dangerous journey from Middle America to the Middle East to join more than two million fellow Muslims on the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca. On a journey perilous enough for any American reporter, Nomani is determined to take along her infant son, Shibli -- living proof that she, an unmarried Muslim woman, is guilty of zina, or "illegal sex." But Nomani discovers she is not alone. She is following in the four-thousand-year-old footsteps of another single mother, Hajar (known in the West as Hagar), the original pilgrim to Mecca and mother of the Islamic nation.

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a mother of five, a poor African American migrant from the tobacco farms of Virginia, who died from a cruelly aggressive cancer at the age of 30 in 1951. Doctors took her cells without asking. Those cells never died. They became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first "immortal" human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. If you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they'd weigh more than 50 million metric tons. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb's effects; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions. Yet, Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave. Henrietta's family did not learn of her "immortality" until more than twenty years after her death.

Don't ask me why I am reading three books at once (it's a long story) but I am sooo excited about each of them. Nothing beats a great book! What are you all reading these days???

Auntie Susi Visits...

We were privileged to get a visit from Auntie Susi in April. The girls had so much fun with her, as did I. Susi and I got a lot of nights out together. It was great. We saw Alice in Wonderland, went to my favorite New Orleans restaurant, shopping, lunch and last but not least, our traditional sushi pig-out.

This time we invited Abby and Sammy to their first ever sushi-tasting. Abby has been asking me for a year now (I really did want to take her sooner but never got around to it) if she could go for sushi. This was a very important event for me because Charles does not do sushi and so my only hope is that my girls will be my sushi buddies (and Susi, of course.) Negative comments about sushi is absolutely not tolerated at our house. I also made sure Susi did not say too much about what we were eating. I did not want them to refuse trying it. Everything was positive, fun and upbeat. Abby was very brave and tried some tuna rolls. She seemed to like them. I was very proud of her. Abby and Sammy loved the edamame (but that is because we have it at home all the time) and loved eating with chop sticks. The waitress rigged up their chop sticks to make it easy for them. They also ate fish eggs which we called "cake sprinkles" and they loved them! Ha!
(I could not get the sushi pictures to load-up for some reason so I have given up. Sorry no pictures of the big event.)

Abby and Sammy enjoyed one day of "Arts and Crafts Susi." They collected and painted rocks and then searched through piles of magazines and created beautiful collages. Afterward, they just piled on top of her and played so she couldn't escape them.

Susi gave the girls each some wings. Here is Sammy, the ladybug flying around the yard.

Cheese!



Thanks Susi!!!!