Turning 33: Goals for my 30s, take 3

Well, I made it through another year. And whoa, what a year. This one rocked me, and definitely felt like survival was all I could accomplish through a lot of it. Good things can be exhausting, world rocking things when they're in their development stages... and let's just say that the development of my second son has been a doozy on me physically, both in and out of the womb. Jonas is a joy... but my body didn't handle this pregnancy well, nor did it handle recovery well... or the lack of sleep that comes with a newborn... then our family launched right into cold after flu after cold after... to be honest, I'm happy to say goodbye to 32 and welcoming 33 with open arms and an earnest hope that our family can just settle into life for a while.

Last year, when I revisited my Goals for my 30s, it had become a list of things I didn't know if I was even interested in doing, save for two big ones. One of the interesting things about revisiting my list every year is not only to see if I can check any off, but also to see how the priorities change as I get older. So here we are again, another year older, with a revised list.

Accomplished

1. ✔ Have baby #2. Jonas Emmanuel Skeene was born at the end of June. He's perfect, and he gave me with one heck of a birth story to boot. 
2. ✔ Buy a house. I still can't believe this one happened this year. It started out as a pipe dream to even put it on my list when I was 30. The Lord really blessed us with a home I hope to see my children grow up in.

New Goals

3. Go to Europe. Saving up as we speak. Chris and I plan to go for our 15 year anniversary, in 5 more years.

Outstanding

4. Learn to do wet felting.
5. Learn to sew. 
6. Figure out if I want to go to grad school, and if I do, get started with it. I still think I'm 5 years away from really considering it, and I'm still not sure it's something I need to do.
7. Complete a fine art project. I still have a project I think of every now and again that I'd like to do some day. Some day.

Rejected 

8. Become a Stay-At-Home Mom. Right now I think the working world is exactly where I need to be and want to be. Staying home with little kids is exhausting.
9. Find a place where I can get into wheel-throwing pottery again. Okay, I still want to do this. But I think it might be a goal for my 60s, not my 30s. Fun Things To Do When I'm Old and Retired.
10. Produce another film.
11. Learn to knit. 

What about this year?

I think my goal for my 33rd year is to just be. Enjoy my children and my husband. Zeke was 2 years old before I started feeling like I started to have enough freedom to do things for myself again... and then I got pregnant. So trying to have any personal development goals with a baby in the house seems silly. If I get a bit of free time and the craft bug bites maybe I'll finally finish a crochet pattern or something, but if I don't check off any goals this year, I'm okay with that. 

Turning 32 - Goals for my 30s Revisited

Okay, I'm a little behind on doing much of anything lately... I'm 10 weeks pregnant (yay!) and feeling pretty sick (boo!) so my productivity level has DROPPED as of late. I'm really hoping that turns around in January, but we'll see how that goes.

So I'm a few days late in thinking about Goals for my 32nd year (my birthday was 3 days ago), but I figure this is close enough. I looked back on my Goals for my 30s that I posted a couple years ago, and it's interesting what can change in a couple years' time.

1. Have baby #2. Looks like I'm on the right track with this one! Baby #2 is due this July.
2. Buy a house. This has actually moved up as a goal for THIS year, if we can find the right now. Actually, a goal for the first half of the year. If not now, we'll try again in a couple more years. So yes, this has moved up. We really want a yard. And a little more space for our growing family. And a place to call our own for good.
3. Figure out if I want to go to grad school, and if I do, get started with it. Still not sure about this one. I'm thinking it's at least 5 years away to even consider it.
4. Become a Stay-At-Home Mom. Okay, sure. I still would like for this to happen. But it's not really on my radar. My goals for the next 5 years revolve more around growing in my career than leaving it.
5. Learn to do wet felting. Sure that would be fun but right now I don't really care if I do it.
6. Learn to knit. I'm pretty content as a crocheter. I don't think it matters if I don't pick up knitting.
7. Learn to sew. Something else that I don't care about AT ALL right now. But who knows, maybe I'll care again before I'm 40.
8. Complete a fine art project. Even if I were to do one, what would I do with it? I don't really "self identify" as a fine artist, so I don't know that I'm too concerned about that.
9. Find a place where I can get into wheel-throwing pottery again. Okay, I still want to do this. But I think it might be a goal for my 60s, not my 30s. Fun Things To Do When I'm Old and Retired.
10. Produce another film.Nope. Don't care.

So now I'm down to 4 goals for the next 8 years, and I'm only passionate about the first two. Wow. I feel... pretty melancholy. I'm sure this will all change again in a few months. After all, I'm experiencing first trimester nausea and exhaustion as a consistent way of being right now. At any rate, I think the next two plus years of my life will be about supporting our growing family (financially, emotionally, physically), and maintaining my sanity in the midst of it. I wonder what it will look like next December?

Jesse Tree Advent Calendar project

Having a young child has really made me want to start establishing some Christmas traditions that keep us focused on the "reason for the season," if you will. Last year I learned about the Jesse Tree advent calendar from my church's Children's Pastor, and I really liked the idea on a number of levels. It seems like a simple way to introduce children to the Bible stories that lead up to Christmas, with just a short reading each day, and I love that it's reinforced with an image for each day. So this year, since my fall calendar is already pretty full, I decided to get a head start on Christmas by making my own Jesse Tree Advent Calendar that will last us for many Advent seasons.

I used this book, The Advent Jesse Tree to get the idea for the symbol for each day, as well as the Bible verses to read to children for each day leading up to Christmas. Our church uses the same book on Sundays during advent, so I wanted to stickHide all with the same thing to keep it familiar (Google searches taught me that there are a number of lists of verses and symbols to choose from). And after many Etsy and Pinterest searches, and some crafting advice from friends, I finally settled on what I wanted to do for our family. I wanted something I could make myself, that would be lasting and could help build tradition for the years to come.

There are a few components to the final result.

1. Advent Calendar - made out of stiff cardboard and purchased at Hobby Lobby; the drawers are 2" cubes. I used Modge Podge to glue 2" squares of scrapbooking paper to each drawer, and after searching high and low at the craft store for some number stickers I could use, gave up and made the number labels myself.

2. Ornaments - I made each ornament out of Paper Clay, which is pretty nice air-dry white clay. It was my first time using it, and was actually pretty easy to work with. For more of the symbols I just made round ornaments that I could paint symbols on, but I had appropriate cookie cutters for a couple of them, and a few more I decided to hand sculpt just to add some variety to the ornaments. Once they had hardened, I used water color pencils to add the symbols to each one. Then I wrote the day and symbol name on the back of each one just so it will be easy to return them to their appropriate boxes at the end of the season.

3. Verses - I typed out short verse cards to accompany each ornament in their respective boxes. Every day had a short memory verse and a longer Bible passage to read. These verse cards contain the name of the symbol, the full text of the memory verse, and the name of the other passage to be read. Verses are rolled up and tied with a bit of string.

4. Tree - so this part isn't done yet, because I haven't decided the best way to go about it. But I need a small tree that we can hang one ornament on every day. My requirement is that it be something simple and affordable (if I need to buy anything at all), and it can't take up too much space in my closet during the year. This isn't to take the place of a traditional Christmas tree, it's in addition to it. (Not that we're very traditional when it comes to the tree anyways).

5. Oh yeah... I'm also planning on one extra piece to this whole thing, but it's hard to explain so I'll just post about it when I'm done.

Ok, so I showed you mine. Now it's your turn!

What's your favorite Christmas tradition? Do you have any projects planned to make your holiday season special?

Anniversaries

This next few days are chock full of anniversaries / milestones.
Most importantly, Sunday (March 29) is Chris and my 6 year wedding anniversary! And our last child-free anniversary. How are we going to celebrate? Probably by skipping church, sleeping in, and then doing not much of anything all day, just hanging out. It will probably be our last chance for a while to not do much, so we will relish it. Last year we did the same thing - stayed home and did nothing - and it was great. A fantastic way to celebrate. :-)

(March 29, 2003 - the wedding party, left to right: Alan, Emily, Sam, Kendra, Chris, Brooke, Mike, Amy, Phil)
Sunday is also my one year anniversary of calorie-counting. (Yep, I started my diet on our 5 year anniversary. I'm weird.) I lost about 25 lbs and got to my "goal weight" in about 4 1/2 months. And right about the time I got to my goal weight and started eating enough calories to "maintain" my weight, we found out I was pregnant! Since then I've been steadily climbing back up, but this time with pregnancy weight. The thing that's funny to me is that one year later, I still weigh about 7 lbs LESS than I did a year ago, even though I'm in my 8th month of pregnancy! Calorie counting pays off big time... let me just say it's not fun or easy, but I definitely think it's been worth it to have a better idea of what's going into my body, and now, Zeke's body.
Finally, Tuesday will be my one-year anniversary of being gluten-free. Yep, a year ago I found out that I had a gluten sensitivity and started on the road to figuring out my many other food sensitivities. I think it's safe to say that even with a little Zeke stealing all my energy as of late, I feel a zillion times better than I did a year ago, when my body spent all its time attacking the food I was eating.
Celebrations abound!

The Skeene's Annual Tour de Florida

Well, the Skeenes have just completed their annual Tour de Florida, with a grand total of 7 cities over 13 days. This year's tour included stays in Jacksonville, Fort Myers, Lakeland, Fort Meade, Riverview, and Orlando/Lake Mary, with a cameo in Gainesville. Phew! It was great to see everyone and we had a good time everywhere we went... we're just a little exhausted. Next year we plan to do it again with Baby Zeke, but we're going to have to shorten it to a 3 city tour (with a cameo in Gainesville, of course).

Some highlights of the trip include:

1. The crazy seafood shack we ate at with my brother in Jacksonville - even if the waitress was evil and told me they don't accommodate food allergies - the dozens of taxidermied animals all over the place were still crazy cool.
2. Finally felting a bunch of my crochet projects, so I can get Chris to take pictures of those once we get home.
3. Cooking with my momma
4. The awesome seafood cookout in Fort Meade, where I ate my weight in shrimp and stone crab claws.

The low point? Realizing just how many allergies I have to deal with that are easy to deal with at home, but take a LOT of planning and special purchasing and whatnot away from home... kind of exhausting sometimes, but our hosts were all super-understanding and helpful about it.

Chris only thought to pull out his camera in Fort Meade, however, so other than the photos my dad took in Fort Myers, we only have some cool shots of the farm at Fort Meade. Chris will probably post some later, so I'll just leave you with a couple of my faves:

Walking off all those crab claws!


Emily and Duncan

Thanksgiving - gluten free, corn free, potato free, and still tasty!

We had a very tasty allergen-free Thanksgiving dinner at home this year. Although we were only having one guest over for dinner, I decided to go all out with making dishes because I wanted all the "fixin's," but also so I could test out some allergen-free recipes for upcoming holidays. I must say, I feel the dinner was a success! Everything was very tasty. However, it took a LOT of prep time (1 hour Tuesday night, 3 or 4 hours Wednesday night, 3 1/2 hours Thursday morning), and it certainly wasn't a low-fat meal! (Allergen-free ingredients are rarely low in fat.) But since I was so happy with how the recipes turned out, I thought I'd like to all the ones I used in case anyone else is looking for allergen-free dishes for the holidays.

Just a note to anyone cooking for someone with food allergies - if corn is a problem, check the ingredients of ANYTHING canned or otherwise packaged. Orange juice that has any ingredient other than oranges will contain corn products, as will most canned foods that have any ingredients other than the intended food and water. Same with half & half, brown sugar, butter (don't use margarine), olives, fried onions,

Kendra's Gluten, Corn, and Potato-free Thanksgiving:

Roasted Turkey

Stuffing - I added a couple stalks of celery, a couple cloves of garlic, and extra onion powder and garlic powder

Turkey Gravy - the drippings from our 10lb turkey gave us just about 2 cups of liquid for this.

Green Bean Casserole - the general recipe is one that Chris and I have adapted over time, but this year I had to make the cream of mushroom soup from scratch, and get special fried onions. Below is our recipe:

1. 4 cans (15 oz) of italian cut green beans
   
2. Cream of Mushroom soup, this one comes with an additional post of instructions to explain the technique. In hindsight, I should have cooked this longer to allow it to thicken more, and added more salt; our cream wasn't as thick as we like it for the casserole.
   
3. Thai Fried Onions (from the Asian grocery store)
4. Cheddar cheese - 1 cup
5. optional - green olives or kalamata olives
   

• In a 9 x 12 casserole dish, mix green beans and enough cream of mushroom to coat the green beans (usually 2 cans Campbell's Condensed soup, this time it took 12 oz of homemade soup)

• Sprinkle fried onions across the top to cover
• optional: sprinkle olives on top
• Place in oven at 350 degrees for about 20 minutes
• Sprinkle cheese on top, put back in oven until cheese has melted.
• Enjoy!
  

Cranberry Sauce - this I could have gotten from the can, but this recipe looked so easy, and I got some organic cranberries for cheap, so I wanted to give it a shot. Very tasty!

Chebe Cheese Rolls - super yummy! I prepared these on Tuesday night and froze them, popped 'em in the over 35 minutes before dinner time.

Pumpkin Pie - directions from the can of Kroger pumpkin
Pie crust - Pamela's Amazing Wheat-free Bread Mix (directions on the side, makes two pie crusts)

I would be mourning the loss of other thanksgiving staples like mashed potatoes and corn casserole (which I had the BEST recipe for) if we didn't already have too much yum-tastic food on the table. Our guest did bring mashed potatoes for her and Chris to eat, so they didn't miss out. She also brought a tasty sweet potato casserole that was safe for me to eat (hers just had orange, butter, and brown cane sugar), and there are plenty of recipes for gluten-free sweet potato casserole out there, but the tricky thing for me is making sure all the ingredients are corn-free too, so this year I decided not to put the time into it myself. Maybe next time.

Then this afternoon after Chris cut all the turkey meat off the carcass, I started some turkey broth for use in future recipes. It's really easy to do, and doesn't take a lot of maintenance. I followed the general idea of this recipe, but didn't add the veggies... just water, turkey carcass, salt and pepper.

Tasty fun times!

Pi day!

It's my favorite math-alicious day again, and I almost MISSED it. Luckily some random website tipped me off. So I went out looking for pi-themed crochet, and I discovered that last year's post about pi day is in google's top 10 list for a search of pi day crochet ... go figure. I'm a nerd. (For those of you who have no idea what Pi Day is, including all my coworkers, here's the wikipedia page to explain it all.)

In honor of the day, here are a couple of pi-themed crochet things I found:

Transcendental Number as Personal Chronogram (Pi)

And a little less high art: the Pi Calculator Case

Happy Pi Day!

after Christmas shopping...

So we've been really busy, between prepping for holidays, being gone for the holidays, and recovering from the holidays. There are things I've meant to post that I just haven't had time to do. Not that I have time now; I'm at work and stuff. But I just remembered that I meant to post this and if I don't do it now, I'll forget forever.

My friend Kim has an Etsy store with some great paintings that you should check out. I got a set of Christmas cards from her to send to people for Christmas, they were photographs of some of the paintings she has for sale. And she's selling stuff for super-cheap, so if you see something you like you should snatch it up soon!

crochet holidays

So between my birthday last week (I turned "too many" years old) and early Christmas gifts, it's been a very crochet holiday season. I'm pretty psyched with all the yarn and yarn gift certificates and similar crochet-erific gifts. And teas. I love yarn and teas, and apparently everyone who knows me knows it too, which is great. Oh, I also got two Oxfam Unwrapped gifts, irrigating a farmer's land and providing seeds to farmers. Pretty great! Anyways, back to the crochet.

I think the best crochet gift ever is the one that my friend Jaime gave me last week. It's a crochet hook with an LED light at the end, so I can crochet in the DARK! Why would I want to crochet in the dark? The main reason is road trips. We tend to drive long distances at night, and it kills me that I can't do anything useful in the car when it's dark. But now I can continue crocheting! Because I'm a crocheting maniac.

Pretty great stuff!

Talk Like a Pirate Day

Because it's my duty to tell you about important, oft-forgotten holidays, I must pass on what Jaime reminded me - today is
International Talk Like a Pirate Day! While it's debatable whether this is more or less exciting than Pi Day, where you get to eat pie and sound nerdy reciting the numbers in pi, on International Talk Like a Pirate Day, you get to say "Arrrrrrgh!" and, my favorite, "Aaaarh, I've seen it before!" ... and of course, it's the only day of the year you can get away with telling that awful joke... "Have you seen the new pirate movie? It's rated Aaaaaaarrrrrrh!" It's also a good excuse to wear an eye patch and drink rum. Or sing the songs on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disney. (Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate's life for me!)

So now you know.

St. Patrick's Day in Savannah

Saturday was, of course, St. Patrick's Day. And Savannah has a pretty huge parade in the morning, then an even larger drunken party at night. We went to the former. The weather was nice, and the parade was hard to navigate through, but we walked through pretty much the whole parade route. Chris took lots of photos, so I put a few up on my flickr page. Check 'em out.