Coffee With Elly

I made a new recipe this evening for dinner, and it was generally well received!  Here's the original:  Italian Chicken Pasta Salad But I seldom have on hand exactly what a new recipe calls for, so here's what I ended up substituting: For the cucumber - nothing, sadly I have no cucumber, currently. For the cherry tomatoes - chopped normal-sized tomatoes. For the salami - sliced pepperoni slices. For the roasted red pepper - 3 small roasted sweet peppers leftover from a batch I made last week. For the elbow macaroni - a new lentil pasta I found at Costco. 20 grams of protein/serving! For the Nicoise olives - black olives. For the red onion - nothing. I don't like raw onion. And finally, for the fancy cheese - shredded mozzarella. Basically, I had part of a rotisserie chicken left over from a post-Costco run lunch yesterday and I wanted to use more of that lentil pasta. Thanks to Google, for enabling me to enter shredded rotisserie chicken pasta salad, and come u...

Ezra frequently brings his parakeets down to keep him company while doing homework. Monica went on a field trip to the Oregon Ballet Theater. Subsequently, Monica started ballet in February. Elena fell in love and started, too. That's how these things happen. I guess I can blame Monica's teacher! ;-) Monica is very enthused about it, at least right now! When we had two snow days in February, only the girls wanted to go sledding! But they sure enjoyed themselves! It was only 1-2 inches, and as you can see, it melted quickly on the second day. It was the week of President's Day, so they had a grand total of two days of school that week. They still did Assembly though, even though I am told they were basically "winging it." It's good to have family events during the dregs of tax season, it was close to Michael's birthday, and we wanted to celebrate the kids good report cards, so Michael decided to take the family out to diner a...

We enjoy taking a day to reflect on and enjoy our relationships every year. It's good to have the reminder to do so, especially during tax season. This year's Valentine's Day went better even than usual, a function of the kids getting older, I suspect. Although, we did have an Ash Wednesday service that same day - so it was a rather odd juxtaposition of somber reflection and romantic sentimentality. :-) Michael arranged this for me to find on Valentine's Day morning. Daffodils are my favorite! Aunt Katy sent my kids all Valentine's with stickers. Ezra particularly enjoyed his - they have googly-eyes. Judah considers it his duty to bring sugar cookies to his class. My preparations for the kids' Valentine's Day morning. Ezra's 7th grade class celebrated V-Day with the kindergarten class, and he had to bring meat, cheese, and crackers. I'm told it was a fun party.

Judah, Ezra and Phinehas are all doing HOOPS basketball this year. And boy was Phinehas excited - he kept telling me how many days, and then how many hours, until his next practice! That enthusiasm was dampened somewhat when they lost their first game, but all to the good, that's what sports are for, right? His fires haven't gone out too much though, and this is what I saw this afternoon. Makes my heart happy. 💜

While people who have both sets of parents in town have to figure out how to spend each holiday with both sides of the family, we have always had the situation of having my parents 4 hours away. Even though it would be lovely to have my parents and family nearby, I am always a little thankful during the holidays that we are either here in town with Michael's parents, or out of town at mine. So we rotate, in an orderly fashion, Thanksgiving and Christmas every year, and this year we were in Eastern Washington with my parents. One upside of spending Christmas with my parents is that my dad is an amateur photographer with the patience and (tiny) bit of OCD to make all of the fiddly little preparations to take some great pictures! Here are some of his: Fancy Dresser! Sadly, the tie was too small (my bad) Judah loved his hat and his mug. He put it in the cupboard at home, facing out, and says it smiles at you whenever you open the cupboard! We got a White Christmas i...

For the last three years, Michael has instituted a tradition of having a Thankfulness Box available the week of Thanksgiving for people to note the things for which they are thankful. Then on Thanksgiving he reads through them, and sometimes prizes are awarded for the greatest numbers, but not this year, which was a little more haphazard than the previous two years. Nevertheless, I actually documented some of the "thankfuls this year" and am posting them here for posterity: From Phinehas. Translation "Thankful for parakeets" From Michael Ezra is learning to be concise. Judah's. I especially like the Star Wars one. Phinehas. "Thankful for house," "Elders preach at church," "Thankful for rainbows." Since Elena doesn't know how to approximate spelling yet, she did hers in pictographs.  Monica's somehow got misplaced and haven't turned up yet. She was thankful for many things, among them h...

In October, we took the opportunity of a firm-offered "boondoggle" to visit our neighboring country to the south. First stamp on our passports, for both of us! Michael had to spend a whole 3 hours a day in classes, but the rest of the time was, frankly, just for fun! Monica's teacher stayed with out kids while we were out of town (except for Elena who hung out with Grandma Valerie and Grandpa Howard for a few days).  Our favorite dinner out - just the two of us at Rosa Mexicana in Punta Mita. Boy, that margarita was strong, but I remember that we had a really lovely time! Guacamole and Pico de Gallo made table-side and so delicious! We went for a walk and a golf-course attendant offered to take a picture... well, what can I say! I added this to my bucket-list immediately so I could cross it off - "Coco-Loco on the beach, mid-morning" Our "authentic" Mexican excursion where Michael learned to grind corn to make tortillas li...