Paleo Sausage Bake

This is a recipe my husband created and I wish I had a picture to go with it! Alas! Oh well, the proof, as they say, is in the... er... sausage (?) so go ahead and try it before you decide. The kids loved it and so did I! I could almost guarantee you will, too!

Ingredients:

1 lb. Italian Sausage

2 onions, chopped

2 zucchini, chopped

2 red bell peppers, chopped

4 roma tomatoes, chopped

1 cup white wine (we used Chardonnay)

1 tbsp. oregano

Salt, pepper, red chilli flakes to taste

Cook the sausage, then deglaze the pan with white wine after the sausage cooks. In the meanwhile, caramelize onions on the side. Add onions to the sausage. In the same pan that you cooked onions, saute the zucchini and add it to the main pan. Cook the bell peppers on the side in the same way and add to pan. Add 4 roma tomatoes directly to sausage pan. No need to cook those beforehand.

Season with red chili flakes, oregano, salt, pepper.

Cover, bake at 400 for 35 minutes.
Simple as that! And so good! The kids DRANK the "juice" at the bottom of the pan - after they finished their seconds.

Another One Bites the Dust

(With apologies for the fact that the song is now going to be stuck in your head.)

We've gone paleo. I mean we've gone completely, head-over-heels, eat nothing but vegetables, some fruit, nuts, very limited amounts of dairy (my husband has quit even that for a while), no grains, no sugar, no flour paleo. You've heard of the Paleo diet haven't you? If you haven't, just google it. I have been, for about the past two weeks and learning quickly that I could really, truly eat like this for the rest of my life.

But why give up so much other good food? you ask.

Reason #1: I'm in week 31 of my third pregnancy and about two weeks ago, I had to deal with the sad fact that although my blood sugar was normal before I got pregnant (read: while I was eating meals heavy on protein, light on carbs), as soon as I added carbs to my diet, my blood sugar started to go haywire. At first, it was fine, but especially around week 24, the mood swings, the tiredness and especially the irritation with everyone around me began to get to me. We also had a string of celebrations - wedding anniversary, birthdays, you know, reasons to eat sugar. Ugh.

Reason #2: My husband has this shoulder. For months now, he's been taking glucosamine and chondroitin in hopes that it won't hurt. But it does. Constantly. And it gets stiff and unyielding. For someone who likes weight-lifting, it's debilitating but more than that, when your inflamed shoulder won't even let you get your hands on your hips to show how angry you are, you have to rethink something in your diet.

Enter Paleo. And it has been a Godsend. In just a week, I have seen changes in my blood sugar, blood pressure and I actually have energy to do more than swoon into the couch and say, "I'm tired." For so long, my tiredness went under the garb of pregnancy-related conditions (and, yes, the high blood sugar and blood pressure are pregnancy-related but through this way of eating, the effects are greatly reduced), I wish I had done something sooner. My husband has noticed changes, too. His shoulder "feels pretty good" according to him. (Hey, he's a guy - what you want him to do? Write a blog post about his shoulder?)

I'm also reminded of something I read on someone's blog that stuck with me. She said before she eats something, she asks if she honors God in eating it. At first, I thought the idea silly. After all, isn't man given dominion of everything on earth, I thought. But lately, I've come to think there was truth in what that blogger wrote. If what I eat leads directly to me being irritable and angry with the people around me constantly - my husband, my children - whom God has given to me, if what I eat causes me to disrespect my body and causes it to reflect a lack of control, then how am I glorifying God by eating it? Am I not dishonoring Him while paying Him lip service by thanking Him for providing my meal?

Paleo is here to stay, at least in our family. I might even have some recipes! My husband made one the other day I wanted to share, but this post has already gotten pretty long, so I'll write it next week. It was so good, I was sorry it was gone. And the best part, my blood sugar barely noticed it. So, yeah, I guess you could say another one bites the (Paleo) dust, and another one's down, and another one's down...

A Visit to the Zoo

Whoever thought a visit to the zoo would be so much fun? Not swollen, pregnant me. But we did! We did! Yes, yes, we saw tigers...

 and giraffes...

 flamingos...

 even orangutans!

But most of all, what I went to see and the sight that filled me with the greatest joy the world has to offer was this one:

  

We came home our eyes full of the sights we'd seen...

 thrilled/shocked (what IS that expression anyway?)...

 and tired.

Yes, we'll be back. Often.

Ten Years of Marriage - A Reflection

I sat up from the couch yesterday after a two hour afternoon nap with much difficulty as my husband watched indulgently. I was sporting a 25 week pregnant belly and carrying all the pains and aches and other lovely conditions a third pregnancy brings with it.
"That's quite a look for a ten year anniversary," he remarked.

We laughed. 

I guess we're at our happily ever after after all.

Alphabet Flashcards

We made these fun flashcards today and thought I'd share. No, I'm NOT a fan of flashcards and neither am I trying to replicate a classroom environment at home. However, the kids had so much fun making these and Bombie is getting to where she's soaking up large amounts of information. I'm thinking it's time to teach her to read. She knows the sounds letters make - thanks to Leapfrog's Phonics DVDs - but she knows only her uppercase letters. So, this is what we did!

We bought some plastic separators from the office store and stuck plastic letters on them. Then I punched holes in the side and tied them with ribbon. I thought about binding them together, but that was not such a great idea because this way, we can focus only on the ones they're having trouble with as well as break them up and make words later. So fun! And, because they made them, they love them!

Pretty soon, they'll be reading! Hey, look at us... we're homeschooling. :)

Big Shoes to Fill

Some of you know that I'm working on a book called Big Shoes to Fill. What you perhaps didn't know is that I had stopped writing for a long time. (By "long time" I mean a few months, huge by my standards, someone who can't not write. I finished the first draft in October and even through that, I had felt a certain need to shrink away from it.) Why I had stopped was not really clear to me. Part of it, of course, was just the time necessary between the first and second draft. Most writers will create the first draft in a rush, as ideas come, not stopping even to check spelling, then leave it "to simmer" so to speak. They will come back to it refreshed a few months later. And sure, some of my reticence to continue working on my book could be traced to the fact that I needed some distance from it to write a new draft and develop it further. But that was not the entire story.

Part of the real reason was the immensity of the task. As a work of Christian non-fiction, not only do I have to be true to my own reality of how I have grown as a result of being a wife and raising my two babies, but also to the fact that none of this is my own doing. God is the one at work and I can only perceive Him in my limited way. Sometimes I clearly see His hand at work, sometimes I have no clue. Sometimes I call to Him for help and I feel completely abandoned, some days seem tailor-made for me. What am I to make of this? How do I fit this into a book? And what if I'm wrong? What if, in a year or two, I realize God had thought of something completely different and, in my inability to understand, I had written something else? Books can't be erased like so many pencil markings; they have a life of their own. Although stamped with a date, they can be timeless. Was I comfortable with the idea of possibly misrepresenting what God was doing in my life? More importantly, could I live with it?

If how to write about such a big subject was my first concern, my second concern was even more metaphysical. Should I write? Everyone has an opinion. Every person on earth has a book inside him, if he just sat down and wrote it. Do I really need to add to the babble? And more importantly, had God indeed called me to write, as I had begun to believe? Was I even meant to write? Wasn't I clearly called to be a mother? To teach my children, to watch and pray? Wasn't that enough? Theologically speaking, what was I here for? To raise my children, right? Was it necessary then to stick my neck out about my beliefs? Because, of course, I could be wrong.

The fear of being wrong can be incredibly debilitating. And if, like me, you have mistakes in your past, regrets you wish you could erase right off, the fear or being wrong can be downright paralyzing. I was paralyzed. Each time I thought about the book, I banished the thought. I moved the first draft document off the desktop and hid it. I prayed about it, handing it to God forever. I convinced myself I didn't know enough theology, I didn't have enough time, (what mother has time to write for goodness' sakes?) enough information, enough piety, enough prayer. I wasn't enough. And I told myself I wasn't going to write until I was enough.

Well, you can guess what happened, can't you? There paraded in front me instance after instance of people who didn't know theology, didn't have information, didn't have time, didn't hold day-long prayer meetings, people who were never, ever "enough" in any sense of the word but were enough for what God had chosen for them. I know I sound incredibly flippant here, but I'm not saying anything Scripture doesn't hasn't already said. Just read 1 Corinthians 1:27: But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty.

As regards theology, as soon as I delved into that study, the very first thing the Bible impressed upon me (there's lots, lots more - more than I will ever know!) was man's utter and complete depravity followed closely by man being made in the image of God. Yikes. Talk about a sorry, sad state of affairs! On the one hand, we are made with creativity, with the desire and divine command to rule, to make, to subdue the earth and all that is in it and, on the other, nothing, but nothing we do has ever any hope of being pure or untainted by sin. Wow. Is it any wonder that I stopped writing? Is it any wonder that I simply must write?

I will probably be wrong. A few years down the road, I will probably look at my work and cringe because God's footsteps will be so apparent to me later, so obvious I will slap myself and shake my head that I didn't see them. I will be appalled at how little I knew, how rudimentary my faith seemed. I will, very possibly, make huge leaps in theology that will embarrass me in the future. I will want to blot out entire pages in my book. I will appear naive, stupid, even sometimes a little loony. I will seem overly pious, stupidly moralistic, self-consciously holy, annoying, paradoxical and nothing if not a tad hypocritical. But that is what I must do. It has taken me a while to understand that the desire to write, to create beautiful things, to sing, to run, to take joy in God's blessings and shape and build and create and mold is part of being made in His image. To be overly pious, to sit and pray for hours on end, to refuse to enjoy God's gifts is not. And yet, even as I write this, I worry that I may be wrong. I may well be.

I suppose I really do have big shoes to fill. My feet will always be two sizes too small, the shoes always two sizes too big. They will always bite. And yet, fill them I must.

Random Musing

My husband and I have a silly game we play with each other. I don't really remember how it got started except that he started it. It goes something like this: any time I complain about something I don't like about what he's doing, he says, "Yeah, you're husband's a jerk/insert-expletive-I-refuse-to-use. Why did you marry him anyway?" And then I'm forced to say something sappy but very, very true, which is I married him because he was (still is) the most honest man I knew. I married him for his character.

Now, anyone who knew me then must think I'm lying because I am not proud of how I was living at the time. I have repented for much of what I did. However, this one shining moment of recognizing what I wanted in a man I would call my husband stands out for me clearly in my memory and it brings to mind much of what I'm learning about having faith.

Having faith in something or someone is, in its very essence, a spiritual act. It is placing your self in something or someone else. There's a story that circulated on Facebook recently about how a little girl and her father came upon a rickety bridge they were about to cross. The father said to his daughter, "Hold my hand." She said, "No. You hold my hand, daddy. Because if something happens, I might let go of you but I know you will never let go of me." That girl is exercising faith. Faith in someone. 

Daily, it is this kind of faith I seek. Daily, I am reminded of how far short I fall of it. Just yesterday for instance my Bible reading was about the Israelites coming to the Jordan river and Moses sending twelve men of the twelve tribes to go scout out the territory of the land God had promised to give them. They come back with a bad report. They look at the people there and are terrified. Instead of placing their faith in God's character, they place it in their present circumstances. They lose focus.

Last week, my husband talked about complimenting someone at work. Now, don't get me wrong. I have no problem if the "someone" he compliments is a man. But it was a woman. And wheels began to turn in my head. I was about to get seriously upset about it when he said, "Sweetie, why did you marry me?" He wasn't playing the game this time and he wasn't teasing. He was saying, "What do you know about me? What is my character?" I had to laugh. My irritation evaporated. I was at peace.

And then another thought came to me. God often asks me the same thing my husband articulated. He is often asking, "What do you know about Me? What is My character?" Isn't that why I read the Bible? To learn more about His character? I really, really must take time to remember, to reflect; I need to take time to answer Him. Because this is exercising faith. This is turning to Him and saying, "No, You hold my hand, because I know You."