Sale!

I'm having a shop sale - MyBUG. If you'd like to follow sales and updates on my shop, you can check out MyBUG's Blog at www.mybugonetsy.blogspot.com!

WE'RE EXPECTING!!!!

We're expecting! This came just in time, we were going to start a round of fertility treatments this next cycle, but it looks like Heavenly Father had other plans for us! Our expected due date is Nov. 25th. We are super excited and still a bit in shock and disbelief. I'm only about six weeks along, so your prayers for a safe pregnancy are appreciated.

We still don't know what we're doing with Jesse's work, we'll let you all know as soon as we have some idea of where/when. It will probably be a few more months before we know what's going on with that. We hope to be out closer to family, but we do love it out here so we'll be happy where ever we get planted.

Recipe!

I've been trying quite a few new recipes lately and thought I'd share what my family has enjoyed here and there. Not necessarily a regular column, but definitly something that will be repeated. I thought I'd start with my bread recipe. I got it from "America's Test Kitchen CookBook" and have adapted it to fit my ingredients and kitchen. It's yummy, and now that we are exclusively on homemade bread we eat it all the time - literally.

In 2 C. glass pyrex measuring cup:
1 C. Milk
1/3 C. Water
3 T. Butter/Margarine

Microwave for 1 min. 30 sec.

While liquid is in the microwave, add 3 T. honey to your mixer (mine's a KitchenAide, LOVE IT, and recommend it to those who make a lot of bread).

Pour liquid over the honey in your mixer. Add 2 1/2 tsp. yeast, 2 tsp. salt and mix with the bread hook dough. Slowly add 1 C. all-purpose flour and 3 C. bread flour (bread flour is the secret to good homemade bread, took me a few years to figure this out, but it does make a HUGE difference). Mix thoroughly until dough pulls away from sides of the bowl.

Flour your counter top and pour your bread dough onto the counter. Knead by hand on the counter, adding more flour until dough is no longer sticky and to desired consistency.

Spray bowl with cooking spray, put your dough in the bowl and cover with plastic wrap. Let rise until double (about an hour).

Punch down, shape into loaf and put into sprayed metal loaf pan. Cover with plastic wrap and let rise, again 'til double in size or to desired size of loaf. Heat oven to 350 degrees, along with a bread pan that's half full of water. This keeps the humidity in the oven high so the crust isn't too hard or over cooked. Bake for 35 mins.

Remove from oven and from bread pan onto a wire rack. While still warm, rub the outside of the loaf with butter/margarine.

This recipe freezes well, see my previous posts abour freezing bread dough.

This May Not be Kansas, but it's Still Scary!

The threat of tornados is still scary to me here in the midwest. We had these in Alabama as well, but the weather man there was AWESOME and you could turn on the news and know where the tornados would hit if they came down. Here in Indiana it's just pretty much "A storm is coming TAKE COVER!"

We also get straight line winds that make me nervous and wishing for a basement. A couple of nights ago the wind was just howling, and the next day I was picking up some toys scattered around the backyard and found some shingles. Uh, oh! Yep, a few had been ripped off the roof in the night. We were really blessed that some shingles had been leftover from a back porch area that the previous owners had added onto the house, and the fact that they left the leftovers was so amazing. We didn't have to go hunting for matching shingles, but Jesse was out on the roof until well after dark last night trying to get them attached. Of course the weatherman predicted rain today, so it HAD to be done yesterday...then it didn't rain at all.

Good news though, we have a fund raiser this year that I think will be a success. The YW are selling ward cookbooks for $5 each and we've had a ton of Relief Society sisters making multiple orders. There are 95 recipes in the books, they were all submitted by the RS sisters, most by email, so it wasn't terribly hard to put together and they only cost $1.62 per book to make. Meaning the majority of the funds raised will go to the girls. I'll post again if it's as big of a success as I'm hoping.

Jesse also got two raises this week, he got a merit raise AND a cost of living raise. I told him this meant we had no excuses for date night anymore :). We just can never seem to justify the cost of dinner and a movie, plus the cost of a babysitter...but once a month shouldn't hurt, especially since we only go to the dollar movies.

We've also discovered RedBox rentals. We had been limiting our movie watching to the dollar theater then just buying the movies we wanted at Christmas. For the cost of seeing a "real" movie, we figured we could just own it. Now that we have found Red Box, we can 'preview' the movie for cheap and decide if it's worth the $15. Of course movies that we KNOW we'll like we go ahead put it on our 'to buy' list (like Star Trek, Narnia, or the Bourne movies), but this just gives us one more option. The only bad thing is the RedBox we go to is in McDonalds and those fries are SO, SO TEMPTING!

Is it Spring yet?!

Isaac today said "It's been MORE than six weeks of winter!" and I agree! He of course was talking about the whole groundhogs day thing, but I am READY for spring to come. It's just a rainy, yucky day today. We spent the morning at the library and now I'm being lazy on my computer instead of mopping my sticky kitchen floor.

I've found a powdered milk solution for our family. I've been trying to use our powdered milk, so we can rotate it and actually use the milk. I honestly can't stand the taste though, so I've been using it in my Slimfast breakfast shake and occasionally for baking. Some nice lady at church gave the suggestion of adding non-fat dairy creamer to it to make it more rich, so I tried it and it worked! I make the milk in 2 qt. batches and add 1/4 c. creamer (the dry kind) and it is good. Definitly cheaper than "real" milk, and in a pinch we could drink powdered milk with minimal moans at house. Jesse would probably still complain, but he's spoiled :).

My "house" plants are dying. We bring the outside potted plants inside every winter, and by spring they are a miserable mess. They always make a comeback once they put back in their natural habitat though. I like living in a humid environment that rains frequently. I don't have to think about taking care of the plants.

I'm starting to think about our garden this year. I say "our garden", but really it's Jesse's. We have a five foot square patch of dirt we plant a few tomatoes and few other veggies every spring and Jesse takes care of it all summer. I have a gardening friend at church that has volunteered to give us a shoot from her blackberry bush. She says it grows like a weed and it's domesticated so it doesn't have thorns. I love blackberries, so I'm really excited to see how it does in our back yard.

We still don't really know what we're doing come August. Jesse's contract is up with Lilly then, but his research hasn't been going as well as he expected, so it's kind of "wait and see" for us. I'm hoping he'll either get offered a permanent position or get his contract extended for another year. There are a few finishing touches on the house to have it be ready to sell and another year would be awesome. BUT, if he ends up finding a job somewhere (hopefully closer to family) we'll take it and hopefully sell the house.

We've started seeing another fertility specialist! We aren't in a rush mode to get pregnant again (although we've been trying for the last two years), but we'd like to have some answers if there are any. I really like this doctor we're seeing, he's on the same page as us with getting a diagnosis if we can find one and tweeking the hormones as necessary. He agrees that it's probably my pituitary tumor messing around with my hormones a little. In fact, this doctor's sister has a pituitary tumor, so he's familiar with these tumors and feels comfortable being my endocrinologist for the remaineder of the time that spend here in Indy. I'm really excited to see what's up, even if the diagnosis is that we're done having kids. It's the not knowing that's hard part. The economical side of me is wanting to hold onto the baby stuff "just in case", but if we're done I'm ready to get rid of things. I'd definitly like to purge our house of a lot of "stuff"!

It's a Jungle Out There!

Last Thursday the Young Women in our ward has their annual New Beginnings/Young Women in Excellence night. The theme was "It's a Jungle Out There", a hodge podge of ideas my presidency got off the internet. It was FABULOUS, we got tons of great feedback and there were tears shed by many (always a good sign)!

To start, the girls had been working on learning the YW Theme in sign language, and it was a little rough around the edges, but they did it and it was really cute. The Mutual Theme is "'Be thou an example of the believers, in word, in conversation, in charity, in spirit, in faith, in purity' (1 Timothy 4:12)" - and we talked about how each girl's example is like their own light. Then each of the parents stood up with their daughter and told what kind of a light their daughters reminded them of. One was a lava lamp (bright, cheerful, full of energy and bouncing around), another was the light of the moon (gets her light from 'The Son', reflection of Christ), we had a sunflower (light like the sun), a beautiful candle painted by her grandmother, an energy saver bulb (she saves her light, and even after being switched off still has a little 'glow' about her), and many more. This was the time the most tears were shed.

Then the parents were taken on a "jungle tour" where they went around the church and the YW talked about the value experiences and projects they have been working on throughout the year. Then back to the "watering hole" for refreshments.

It was a very nice night and honestly the stress of planning, preparing, a fretting was very much worth the effort. Everyone had a great night!

Bread Dough Update

Just an FYI, you CAN freeze bread dough! I just let it rise once, punch it down, wrap in saran wrap and put in a bread pan and freeze until hard. Then wrap it again in tin foil and put in a freezer bag until later. When I notice I'm running low on bread I take the dough out of the freezer, leave it wrapped up and put in a bread pan to thaw in the fridge. I usually do this the night before, so the next morning I put the thawed dough into a greased bread pan and let it rise covered lightly with saran wrap. This is really good to do on Saturday evening, so when we head to church on Sunday morning, it's all ready to cook when we get home. Then we can have a warm loaf of bread with our "Sunday Meal", which is usually some good comfort food.