In My Kitchen

I thought I would share some pictures of my kitchen.  Well, only a small slice of my kitchen.  I love seeing other people's pictures of their every day surroundings.  The girls love to see older pictures of their bedrooms, and comment on how they are different now because of a, b, c.  And there is beauty to be had in the every day.  Granted some may have more beauty than others, but it's still there.  I have loved seeing some peoples snap shots of their kitchen sinks, with their dishes drying on their drying rack.  Yes, sounds silly, but it looked so quaint and beautiful.  So I decided to snap a picture of my window sill.  It's not very pretty, but it's what I've got :-)  So here it is, in all it's glory!

My kitchen window sill.  I love the light that comes in through here.  I was trying to capture the bottles illuminated in the sun light, but I found that hard to capture.  I'm still learning this photography thing.  I am proud that I am shooting all in manual mode.  It was a big learning curve, and there is still much to practice, but at least I have half way decent pictures now.

On my sill you see, left to right:  A bottle of champagne from our wedding, with an engraved wedding cup behind it.  An empty quart jar (that usually houses our water/bleach solution) with a newborn goat bottle cap on top (that we've never used!), a fake plant, some crochet hooks (I have no idea why they are there), some Dixie cups, a whole sill full of homeopathy bottles that need to be sterilized (I was keeping them in a large container under the sink, a much better place, but my container disappeared), my blade for my food processor (to keep it out of reach of little hands).  There are a few other things off to the right of this picture, that you can barely see in the above photo.  They are a figurine of a bride, a figurine of a groom (currently headless and needs to be glued), and another wedding cup.

The other day I was making flat bread.  The baby was sleeping, and the children were all playing.  I decided to take that time to pull out my tripod and practice taking some pictures with it.  It's a wee bit different when shooting in manual as you need to set the exposure right for the shot, as opposed to auto, where you just hit the timer button and go.  I had fun!  Here is some of the process of making my flat bread.

I LOVE the lighting that was coming through the window.  I think I captured it pretty well.  Here is my wooden cutting board getting ready to be re-floured.

Rolling out the dough.  I couldn't find my new Pampered Chef roller.  I am assuming a little boy took off with it.  They like to think it is "Roley" from Bob the Builder :-)  Not a problem as long as they put it back!  It will turn up soon I am sure.  So here I am using my non handled roller.

Pouring the olive oil on.  Yum, I can taste it already, or more like, again.

There it is, with the garlic, dried onion and course salt on top, ready to be put in the oven.

Taking it out of the oven, all nice and puffy.  I had originally set my exposure with the oven door closed, which is white, and had a very under exposed picture.  I could have left the oven door open to set the exposure, but I wanted to keep the heat in there, which helps the bread to puff up during it's short six minute baking.

There you have it, a slice of my kitchen.

Happy New Year!!

I hope everyone had a blessed ringing in of the new year.  I had gone to be at 9:30, with good intentions of catching up on some sleep.  I was awoken at 12:02 AM to some children yelling "Happy New Years!" on the porch.  I figured that Jeremiah's clock was off by two minutes.  Ends up that the kids were off by two minutes.  Jeremiah tried getting online to watch the ball drop, but there were computer difficulties, and they missed the new year by two minutes!!!  The girls told me the next day how disappointed they were to have missed the ball dropping.  They'll have to wait a whole year to see it again. 

We spent our afternoon shopping as a family.  It took about two hours, and I was totally worn out.  I didn't want the last of the year to be with me conking out on the couch for the whole evening.  So I prayed really, really hard that the baby would not come last night so that I could stay up and put together our snacky dinner.  Thankfully it was easy and I had help.  It took us a long while to put all the groceries away.  I have run out of room to store everything.  So it looks a little chaotic, even though I tried to make sure to organize it as I would normally.  After that I set to making our dessert, the no bake cheese cake I've made a couple of times now. Yummy!  Then Jeremiah and Saoirse worked together to making up the pigs in a blanket.  Flannery joined them half way through.  I also put together a layered bean dip to have with our lime chips.  We sat down to eat and watch a movie.  Moira had wanted to play some games, but I had to put Jonah to bed early as he was falling to pieces over trivial things.  I got up to cut up the pie, then went back to bed.  I think they just continued watching another movie. 

I think I have everything ready, except to clean out the birthing pool, for the birth.  Please do pray for me if you think of it as I am still wrestling with fear.  I have really been praying and reading over some scriptures I had printed out for some past pregnancies.  I have been begging God for peace and for this fear to leave me.  I may feel better for a few hours or so, but usually by evening (with the huge fear of having to labor during the night) I start getting fearful all over again.  It really is odd.  I remember being nervous when I went into labor with Moira as I was dreading a repeat of Isabella's hard birth.  But her labor went very smoothly and was one of my easiest.  There are a few parts of labor that I really, really dread and for some reason I am having a hard time embracing this up coming labor. I just keep giving to the Lord, and try to meditate on His goodness.  With only six days till my due date, this baby could come at any time.  I am looking forward to meeting this wee one.  I can't wait to hold him/her in my arms. 

Here are a few pictures I have to share:

Jonah helping me this morning transferring our oats to plastic buckets.  I had one bag left over from our last bulk order that we didn't have buckets for. I didn't want it to be ruined so we bought some buckets the other day while shopping.  I am glad I put them in the freezer when I did, as there is not one single iota of space for anything small, let alone a 50 pound bag of oats to fit in there.  I left our grains in our freezer for a few days to kill off any possible buggies.  We lost 150 pounds of grain a couple of months ago due to some bugs.  Not pleasant.

The pictures loaded in the opposite order I had wanted.  So here is everyone digging in to our New Years Eve dinner.  Jonah is forever pulling up a chair to 'help'.  He really can help sometimes, and other times not so much :-) 

A happy boy.  Food is on its way!  I don't know if he's ever had pigs in a blanket.  He only ate the crescent roll off of the hot dog. 

Jeremiah and Saoirse putting together our dinner.

Saoirse being a ham. 

Our snow we had last week.  You can see our garden fencing sagging from the weight. Our trampoline was weighed down as well.  The girls had to de-ice the animals' water buckets.  Since the hose was frozen they had to carry water from the house to the barn.  Not exactly fun.  But they managed.

Jonah checking out this white stuff.  The boys had a lot of fun in it.  Although they weren't sure what they should be doing.  The girls had gone out back to play.  I didn't want the boys out there for long as they don't have proper winter wear so I kept them up on the porch.  They didn't stay out for long before they wanted to come in!  The girls on the other hand.....with multiple trips in to put on more layers, a lot of water on the floor later, I had to call them in as I feared they would get frost bite or something.  They were totally fine.  But I'll tell ya, I was mighty glad to see that snow go away.  It stuck for days, almost a week. I was getting tired of all the wet clothing! I've had laundry up to my ears :-) 

Jed checking out the snow.  See, he's wearing one of his sister's pink gloves.  We did pick up boy gloves  a couple of days later.  They are so small that they get lost easily. I need to tie string to them and leave them in their jackets next time!  You can see how much snow we got if you look behind Jed.  The snow you see up on the porch railing is how deep it was on the ground.

I think it's time to come in!  Too much snow down the boots for this guy :-)

more editing fun

So I continue to try my hand at editing photos. I only have one to share today. Right now Jonah is in meltdown mode and I need to go :-) Which means I don't have the time to figure out how to make the photos lay side by side.

So I continue to try my hand at editing photos. I only have one to share today. Right now Jonah is in meltdown mode and I need to go :-)