Working on music for tomorrow’s service – an actual arrangement, or a song that we love from a favorite CD

Two custom designs, goldstone and fancy jasper. Trying a different way to photograph earrings. Looks ok, but trying to figure out what to do to make it look great.

Several online friends of mine decided to take a picture every day for a year and post them on their blogs. I figured I’d join in, or at least give it a try. They’re calling it Photo365.

I’m not the best photographer in the world, so hopefully this will help me improve my skills!

My camera is a Fuji FinePix 5.2 megapixel camera. Nothing fancy, but more than adequate for what I use it for.

Here’s my starting photo (taken last night): 4 jars of freshly-canned dill pickles.

This is my first attempt at making pickles. The recipe I’m using is my grandmother’s recipe – one she remembers her grandmother using years ago. The pickles are in the canner right now. We’ll see how good they taste in a few weeks.

What I like about it is the recipe is per jar. It was nice to go outside and pick the dill from the garden, and then make just enough jars of pickles from it.

Dill is so pretty, but I like growing it for the scent too. It’s just so, um, summery. After I picked it, I set it in a jar of water so it wouldn’t wilt before I had a chance to make the pickles.

Here’s a shot of the salt, alum, and dill in the jar before I added the cucumbers.

After adding the vinegar:

Three jars I sliced the cukes into spears, the other I left whole. Grandma always left hers whole, but I wanted mostly spears.

In most of the pictures you can see all the tomatoes on our counter. I’m trying to decide if there’s enough of those to can a batch yet!

Well, my sourdough experiment didn’t work. I had such high hopes for it!

When I mixed up the dough today and left it to rise, it didn’t rise very far before it started to crack. It was sitting for several hours, but I was concerned it would dry out too much. I preheated the oven and baked it.

Yuck. It smelled good, and the first bite tasted ok. But it was too dense, the crust was too crunchy, and was way too sour.

I’ve been trying to figure out where I went wrong with it. Some things I think should be fixable. The others will probably take more experimentation.

After my sourdough rose so much the first few days, I dumped off most of the liquid that had formed. That might have been my first mistake, because after that, my starter barely rose at all. I considered dumping the starter and starting over, but figured I’d keep feeding it to see how it did. Now I’m thinking I should’ve just tried again. Oh well.

The really dense texture I know was caused by not enough rise time. That’s easily remedied. Maybe covering the dough with plastic wrap next time will help with it not drying out so quickly.

The really crisp crust I think was caused by over baking it. That doesn’t make sense to me. The instructions I followed said to bake it at 350 for an hour. Most breads I bake at 350 for a half hour, so I checked the bread at 20 minutes. Firm crust, soggy middle. I put it in for 20 minutes more. Crisp crust and still a soggy middle. I took it out at that point because I was afraid of how crunchy the finished loaf would be.

The sourness I knew would be a gamble. I now know that we don’t like our bread quite so sour, and will work on making a thicker starter as Laura described.

So now I have three loaves of very sour sourdough bread that I’m not sure what to do with. Stephen said to slather it with butter and jam and eat it that way. I’m wondering if it’s good for much more than croutons. If only we ate croutons more often (almost never around here!). Anyone have any suggestions? There’s so much flour invested in it that I’d hate to just throw it out.

That said, I’m debating how long to wait to try making the starter again. I kept this starter, but I’d like to try starting from scratch to see if the outcome is any different. I sure hope so. The bread smelled SO GOOD baking that it’d be a shame to not be able to figure out how to make it the right way!

It never ceases to amaze me how God uses some of the most unlikely ways to encourage me.

The other day I was searching the internet for something. I clicked one of the link results, and ended up at a blog post titled “Encouragement for mothers of young children”.

God’s timing was perfect. That’s not remotely what I was searching for, but was a nice reminder for me anyway.

My quiet time lately has been a struggle. For a long time, my favorite time of day to spend with the Lord has been first thing in the morning. It still is. Now that Caleb is getting older though, he is becoming more and more of an early riser. It’s been a struggle for me to get up early enough to be able to have my quiet time before either of the boys get out of bed. It is definitely motivation to get in bed at a reasonable time at night though!

What really stood out to me though was a comment the author made about how we can still have our quiet time, even if it’s at odd hours. My quiet time never seems to be the same if it’s not first thing in the morning, but it doesn’t have to be any less sweet at another time of day.

I’m still going to aim to be up before the kids, though I’m wondering how that’s going to work once Little Miss makes her appearance. Either way though, the reminders in that blog post were wonderful.

If you’d like to read the post, it is here. I don’t know anything about the blog author and haven’t read any of her other posts, but that particular post really spoke to me.

Encouragement for mothers of young children

The almost eight years I’ve been married, I’ve heard many women complain about their mother-in-law. While mine isn’t perfect (whose is?), I’m so thankful for her!

When we put our garden in this year, I told Stephen I was going to need help with all the canning and preserving of the produce. I knew it would be close enough to my due date that I wouldn’t have the energy to do as much as I did last year.

A week or two ago, our beans were finally ripe enough to start picking. We asked about borrowing Mom’s canner (we borrowed her pressure canner last summer) and I forgot about it.

The only thing is, she didn’t send the canner over to our house, she came and got the beans, took them to her house, and canned them for me there. She did all the beans for us. If I remember right, there were 17 quarts of beans. We went and picked them up Monday afternoon to get them out of her kitchen so she wouldn’t have to figure out a place to store them. We left some there at the house for Mom and Dad since she did all the work, but she wanted them out of her way so we went and got them.

I enjoy the process of canning, but it was quite the relief knowing it was one less thing to find energy for. I’m so thankful for a Mother-in-law who doesn’t mind helping me like that!

Now we’re just trying to decide whether to plant more beans or not. The plants we had reached their end sooner than we expected this year. It was strange – they were covered in tiny, spiny-looking yellow bugs (caterpillars, maybe?). We’ve never seen any like them before, but I know one thing about them. They eat bean plants. I’m just happy we got as many as we did before they took over!

One of my recent kitchen projects has been starting a new sourdough starter. The sourdough I’ve mentioned here on my blog is absolutely phenomenal, but is high enough in sugar that I don’t like to make or serve it as often as my family would like to eat it.

After doing some searching around the internet, I came across some wonderful sourdough instructions at Heavenly Homemakers. Her instructions were so thorough that I figured it would be interesting to give the process a try.

The only thing is my starter didn’t react the same way hers did. Mine acted like it was on steroids or something. She mentioned that she was starting hers in Nebraska in January – and since I’m making mine in South Carolina in July I’m assuming that’s why mine went nuts.

The first day, a dark liquid formed on the bottom of the starter and it started smelling sour right away. I would have poured the liquid off, but since it was on the bottom, there wasn’t a way that I could figure out. I stirred it back in, and added the second batch of flour and water. When we came home from church Sunday night (day 2), this is what we saw:

It had bubbled up and completely filled the cheesecloth at the top. That surprised me – I thought it would just go through the cheesecloth. Apparently not. LOL! I stirred it some and this is what it looked like the next morning (day 3):

By Monday afternoon (still day 3), the liquid had risen to the top enough to be able to pour it off.

Wow – it was seriously SOUR smelling! After pouring off the liquid though, the smell is much improved. It still smells sour, but isn’t nearly so overpowering.

This morning the starter doesn’t look very alive at all. I don’t know if I should’ve left some of the liquid in it or not. We’ll see how it goes. It’s day 4 of the process, but I won’t feed it until later in the day.

I’m getting kind of anxious to get through the entire seven-day process to make the bread. Even though the sourness isn’t my favorite smell in the world, I can only imagine how good the bread made with it will taste. I also like how it only uses a few ingredients!

After my last visit checkup, I was really concerned with my weight gain. Granted, I hadn’t been overly careful with my eating, but didn’t realize just how much it was truly affecting me. My weight gain had been fine the first part of the pregnancy, but at my last visit I found out I’d gained too much that month.

The only changes I really made this past two weeks were to limit my sweets and cut back on the carbs. The way I’ve been eating isn’t quite as restrictive as when I first started trying to go low carb, but it’s still been a challenge. The hard thing for me is adhering to specific carb counts for each meal. What I do like is the later meals of the day have enough carbs in them to allow more freedom than I expected.

My next checkup was this morning. When the nurse weighed me, I found that I’d lost 4 pounds in the two weeks since the last visit. Don’t get me wrong – I wasn’t trying to lose weight at all. I was actually hoping for no more than a 2-pound gain (one pound a week). Maintaining would have surprised me – so a loss, especially here in the third trimester, was quite the shock. Since the only changes I made were healthy ones, I’m not worried about it. It does make me curious how my next appointment will go though.

I wasn’t trying to eat a lot of junk food, but I certainly wasn’t being as careful as I should’ve been. Hopefully this time my weight gain will be more manageable. What really amazes me is just how much seemingly little changes can make such a difference.

This year we’ll be using the My Father’s World curriculum for Samuel. While I like the content of the A Beka curriculum we used last year, the way it is set up didn’t work as well as I would have liked for our family. After a considerable amount of reading and research, we finally decided on using My Father’s World for Kindergarten.

The box arrived today, and it was so FUN to look through! I’m really excited about getting to use it this year. I will admit – I’m a little bit nervous about the ant hill project. I keep getting mental images of the ant farm container getting knocked over in the house.

Right now our tentative plan is to start some time in August (I’m just now starting to map out lesson plans and trying to figure out a good start date), rather than wait until after the baby’s born to begin. By starting a little early, we’ll easily be able to take a break for a couple weeks when Little Miss makes her appearance.

It was really fun to watch Samuel as we went through the box. He even asked if we could start school today, and was disappointed when I told him we were going to wait a bit longer.

I’m excited about this coming school year!