Ruth's Mosaic

2007-12-27T10:49:00.000-08:00

Here's a funny video to celebrate the feast....Eggs! Meat! Cheese!

Don't send a lame Holiday eCard. Try JibJab Sendables!

17 good years

2007-07-28T00:00:00.000-07:00

My husband and I are married 17 years this Sunday. We're visiting St. Barbara's monestary to celebrate and we're staying at my Mom and Dad's house! This all sounds ironic I suppose for an Anniversary celebration, but Mom treats us real well and the Monestary is a great place to be...very welcoming. They are so good to the kids too. We love being there.

Tag you're it

2007-07-24T23:26:00.000-07:00

RULES:1. Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.2. People who are tagged need to write on their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.3. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.4. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

1. I want my kids to learn cursive before print.
2. I often get my news from Jay Leno.
3. If I had to work, I would like to teach art classes to kids in my own home.
4. I have dishes in my sink and I'm blogging anyway.
5. I would like to study Byzantine chant with an expert chanter.
6. If you like dark chocolate, I can give you some really good recommendations.
7. I like planning parties.
8. I seriously need a live in maid.
9. I'm a wannabe crafter, 'cause I rarely get to it. I want to do quilts/ mosaics/ knitting/ felting/ soap making and others.
10. I have 3 dogs, 2 rabbits, 1 bird, and 1 cat, and I'm not an "animal lover." It's amazing what we end up doing for our kids.

2007-07-24T23:23:00.000-07:00

Anybody have hints for tightening your budget? I need to make some cuts and would love to hear some creative or basic ideas.

Party food

2006-05-30T23:37:00.000-07:00

Yummy party sausage.....slit the sausage without cutting all the way through. Add mustard of your choice. Stuff each sausage with 3 pitted prunes. wrap with bacon. Broil 15 minutes turing around half way through. Cut each sausage into 3 pieces and spear with toothpicks. from Outdoor Food.

Mama's been busy

2006-05-14T23:58:00.000-07:00

Planning parties in May. We had a fun party for John. A breakfast at the beach with friends. It was really nice. We had two families with us, as well as my parents. We had boiled eggs, fresh bagels, lots of fruit, sausage, and juice. The beach was almost empty...really nice. John loves to build sand castles, Christopher and Sam had a great time body surfing, and Katherine loves the edge of the water. Happily, my Mom helps out. It was nice to hang out with a friends and family.

Katherine's party this week was at a local farm. We had snacks and spent time with the animals. Katherine was so cute when Mom gave her a dress at home. She was spreading it out and looking at it from every angle. At the party, she decided the tissue paper was a blanket for her doll.

The animals were They were just like dogs and even sort of barked. The cows scared the kids....too loud, and we saw them milk the cows. That was fun. It was a really nice day. Simple and fun.

Next...the wedding shower!

2006-03-16T21:11:00.000-08:00

John, told me this morning, "Mom, one good thing can mean many Joys. Like my trash truck. I liked it. Now Katherine likes it....one bad thing can mean many joys, like pushing out a baby. Many joys...like Katherine."

fitday.com

2006-03-14T22:00:00.000-08:00

I'm liking fitday.com. It allows you to keep track of calories/ percentage of protein/carb/fat and has a place for journaling...Cool site. It even allows you to add custom foods that they don't list. I've never been good with know about calories, so this is very helpful. Thanks Mimi!

2006-03-09T13:14:00.000-08:00

I experimented with pesto...It turned out pretty good. (Let me know if you have any ideas for improvement.)

blended in my VitaMix:

handfull of cashews
handfull of raw spinach
garlic
onion powder
one roaster red pepper from a can
pinch of salt and pepper
(Can add a little oil if needed)

Mix with cooked pasta
My husband liked it even better with hot sauce added.

Syndrome x

2006-03-07T21:30:00.000-08:00

You know how I've been going on and on about fish oil. Well, it turns out, fish oil helps with the problem of insulin resistance. With my family history of diabetes, I am probably pre-diabetic. My hubby explained that before diabetes, too much insulin is circulating in the body. Insulin is a growth hormone, so if you're past the growing stage of life, it converts that energy into fat. So then the insulin resistance gets worse. It's a bad cycle! That's why it's really important for me to exercise and lose weight now, to interrupt that process, before my pancreas gives out and I end up not being able to eat 80% dark chocolate for the rest of my life!

2006-03-02T22:54:00.000-08:00

This is something I picked up off a link from Peter's blog....Supposedly this is what my "brain pattern" is......

Your Brain's Pattern

Your brain is always looking for the connections in life.You always amaze your friends by figuring out things first.You're also good at connecting people - and often play match maker.You see the world in fluid, flexible terms. Nothing is black or white.

What Pattern Is Your Brain?

a countercultural revolution

2006-03-01T22:32:00.000-08:00

This is an article I thought was interesting. I identify with much of what it says, expecially about doing what I feel is right for my kids, and not being concerned about fitting in with the culture around me.......................... The new conservatism: It's crunchy. His new book says a countercultural revolution - led by home-schooling, tree-hugging, right-wing, family-values traditionalists - is starting to shake America05:41 AM CST on Tuesday, February 21, 2006A few summers ago, when I worked for the conservative National Review magazine, I told my boss I needed to leave early to get home to Brooklyn in time to pick up our weekly delivery of organic vegetables from the co-op to which my wife, Julie, and I belonged. "Ewgh, that's so lefty," my editor teased. She had a point. On the subway home, I reflected on how a taste for organic vegetables is a cultural marker that identifies someone as a "crunchy" liberal – you know, tree-huggers, granola-eaters and the like. In truth, we belonged to the co-op because we found locally grown produce so much more flavorful than the supermarket stuff. And we liked the idea of supporting local family farms with our consumer dollar. Still, we had crossed a cultural line. Another cultural marker is Birkenstock sandals – like, um, the pair I was wearing on my feet that day. I'd balked the summer before when Julie suggested that a pair of Birks might be just the thing for my aching feet. Why would I put on a pair of shoes that brought to mind pot, patchouli and ponytails on men? But I did, just to humor her – and, yow! They were the most comfortable shoes I'd ever put on in my life. The subway epiphany made me think about the ways my family's kind of conservatism made us an uneasy fit among mainstream Republicans. It wasn't because we were closet liberals; in fact, we were by some measures more conservative than the average Republican. Our Christian faith and cultural traditionalism meant our conservative heroes were men like Pope John Paul II, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton, not the roster of Republican Party all-stars. As a general rule, my Earth-Mother Republican wife and I prefer Small, Local, Old and Particular over Big, Global, New and Abstract. We believe big business deserves as much skepticism as big government. We believe God calls mankind to be good stewards of the natural world. Most important, we hold with Russell Kirk that the family is the institution most important to conserve, and our entire politics is constructed around that goal. Four years into marriage and two years into parenthood, Julie and I found that we'd begun to live in certain ways that seemed at odds with the Republican mainstream, but that flowed naturally from our conservative beliefs. The advent of our firstborn son made us more deeply aware of how some things we uncritically admired as conservatives – chiefly the free market – served to undermine the family and the institutions we would need to raise good children. We contemporary conservatives, with our exaltation of consumer choice and the sovereign individual, are dismantling the kind of society necessary to raise good kids as effectively as the left-wing libertines we oppose. Economist E.F. Schumacher wrote that "the essence of civilization is not in a multiplication of wants but in the purification of human character." That's a conservative truth that we on the right have forgotten. There is an emerging conservative sensibility that crosses party lines, rendering standard political labels and facile media classifications stale and outdated. I call it "crunchy conservatism," a contemporary revival of the traditionalism that, along with libertarianism, is one of the two great streams of the conservative intellectual tradition in America. Crunchy cons are people like the Hutchins and Hale families of Greenville, Christian farmers who home-school their kids and raise livestock organically, because they believe that's how God intended it. They vote Republican but often feel that they have as much in common with countercultural liberals who have adopted an adversarial stance toward consumer culture than they do with fellow GOPers. Robert Hutchins, who sells his meat at the Dallas Farmers Market, was a defense contractor on flush with worldly success when he realized that he was losing touch with his faith and his family. So he dropped out of the rat race to be more faithful to what he knew, as a Christian and a conservative, to be right. The entire Hutchins clan – 12 kids, all home-schooled, all polite and mature in a way that most kids just aren't anymore – work together on the farm. While most kids are sitting slack-jawed in front of television sets, being passively pounded into good little consumers, the Hutchinses are every single day connecting deeply to the Earth, to tradition and to each other. Mr. Hutchins said that choosing to home-school their kids was a turning point in becoming countercultural. When "you begin challenging fundamental common practices in today's society, once you challenge one, it's easy to challenge them all," he told me. I hear that loud and clear. Julie and I are doing a hybrid home-schooling program with our school-age son, in conjunction with a neighborhood Christian school. When some people, even conservatives, hear that we want to home-school, they think that we are unrealistically trying to raise our kids in a bubble. We choose a form of home-schooling not to run away from something, but to embrace the radical notion that we know what's best for our children. I want my boys to go as far and as fast as they can in learning about the world, and not to have their imaginations and intellects stifled by conformity. And having gone to public school myself, I don't want my kids socialized by a hypercompetitive and sexualized youth culture where traditional values are sneered at. Home-schooling is so common now that there are lots of kids whose parents share a common set of cultural values, and who are creating healthy countercultural peer groups for them. Being nonconformist about your kids' schooling doesn't mean you have to turn into hermits, but it does mean taking a stand outside the mainstream. To be sure, not everybody has to move to the country and become a home-schooling farm family, or take up home-schooling at all. But there are few of us who can't learn from Mr. Hutchins' example of putting the spiritual and moral interests of his family first, even at the expense of society's approval and material gain. Take Collin County, one of the most Republican and Christian places on the planet. In theory, it should be an ideal conservative society. But last year, The Dallas Morning News reported on how many residents there are living too large, driving families into bankruptcy. Sighed one minister, "They all really do feel like they need these things, this 3,400-square-foot house with three kids." That's a destructive lie, of course, but it is hard to imagine a Republican politician pointing this out to a nation strung out on a spending and consuming binge that is going to bankrupt us all. As Russell Kirk wrote, "In America especially, we live beyond our means by consuming the portion of posterity, insatiably devouring minerals and forests and the very soil, lowering the water table, to gratify the appetites of the present tenants of the country." He demanded that Americans behave more prudently to honor "the future partners in our contract with eternal society." Do today's mainstream conservatives even know what Mr. Kirk was talking about? Do we care to? Crunchy conservatism is not an ideology or a set of policy prescriptions. In fact, it's a form of what the Czech anti-Communist Vaclav Havel called "anti-political politics" – a kind of politics that seeks to renew the culture at an intimate level by making ethical choices in our everyday lives. We should start by building up what Edmund Burke called the "little platoons" – families, churches, civic and fraternal organizations that hold society together. We do this by creating a culture in which we ask not, "What's in it for me?" – but what we ought to do to live meaningful lives together. No society can long endure the fragmentation that follows a loss of vision, of idealism, of common purpose. Humankind will always seek after the good, the true and the beautiful and will not be long satisfied without it. A politics, left or right, that cannot speak convincingly to the deepest spiritual aspirations in a people cannot be sustained forever. Nor can any people who exchange spiritual truths for material gain. We conservatives know we can't keep going like this. There are honorable liberals with whom we can stand in an effort to rebuild a common civic culture. Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft once predicted that "beneath the current political left-right alignments there are fault lines embedded in the crust of human nature that will inevitably open up someday and produce earthquakes that will change the current map of the political landscape." Ten years later, one can feel the earth beginning to shake. Rod Dreher is assistant editorial page editor and author of "Crunchy Cons" (Crown Forum), in bookstores today. His e-mail address is rdreher@dallasnews.com. LEARN MORE AND MEET DREHER Rod Dreher will be talking about Crunchy Cons on David Gold's WBAP News/Talk 820 radio show tonight at 9. Today's episode of CBN's The 700 Club will air a report on crunchy conservatism, featuring North Texas crunchy cons. Additionally, National Review Online today launches a new blog to discuss crunchy conservatism (crunchycon.nationalreview.com). And Rod Dreher will lecture and sign books at 7 p.m. Feb. 28 at the Borders bookstore at Preston and Royal. A CRUNCHY CON MANIFESTO I. We are conservatives who stand outside the conservative mainstream; therefore, we can see things that matter more clearly. II. Modern conservatism has become too focused on money, power and the accumulation of stuff, and insufficiently concerned with the content of our individual and social character. III. Big business deserves as much skepticism as big government. IV. Culture is more important than politics and economics. V. A conservatism that does not practice restraint, humility and good stewardship – especially of the natural world – is not fundamentally conservative. VI. Small, Local, Old and Particular are almost always better than Big, Global, New and Abstract. VII. Beauty is more important than efficiency. VIII. The relentlessness of media-driven pop culture deadens our senses to authentic truth, beauty and wisdom. IX. We share Russell Kirk's conviction that "the institution most essential to conserve is the family." X. Politics and economics will not save us. If our culture is to be saved at all, it will be through living faithfully by the Permanent Things, preserving ancient moral truths in the everyday choices we make. From "Crunchy Cons," by Rod Dreher (Crown Forum, 2006)

2006-02-28T23:56:00.000-08:00

I always forget what I can eat during Lent. So I need to brainstorm.....Spegghetti, eggplant, hummus, morningstar, bean soup, vegie soup, paste, beans and rice, stir fry, eggrolls, chili, guacamole and chips, enchiladas, hash brown/fake meat/green beans casserole. hmm...there's a start.

2006-02-28T23:52:00.000-08:00

fish oil again. i forgot to take my fish oil on vacation...really wierd. I got super thirsty at night, and had to wake up every night to use the bathroom. What's up with that? After I got back on the fish oil, the problem went away. I guess I should probably get the kids to take it too.

Helpful prayer for Mothers

2006-02-20T13:10:00.000-08:00

A Prayer for Mothers - By an By an Anonymous Hieromonk O Lord Jesus Christ our God Who didst come into this world not to beministered unto but to minister and to give Thy life as a ransom formany. Help me, I beseech Thee in my ministry of caring for thechildren Thou hast given me. Enable me to be patient in tribulations,to instruct with a meek and gentle spirit, to reprimand with innertranquility and a sober mind, and to serve in humility of heart withlove. May I thus live in Thee alone, by Thee alone and for Thee aloneshowing forth Thy virtues and leading my family upon the path of Thysaving commandments. That we may glorify Thee together with Thineunoriginate Father and Thine all-holy and life-giving Spirit both inthis world and that which is to come. Amen.

potty training update

2006-01-31T23:53:00.000-08:00

When we got to the cabin in Big Bear, Katherine really got into her potty training book. It was the only book she wanted to look at all week. She seems to like using the patty chair, although she certainly does not do it all the time. This seems to be working better than waiting until they're old enough to put up a bunch or resistance. I think it will take a while, but at least it's not a battle.

2006-01-31T23:50:00.000-08:00

The Antiochian Music conference was amazing! Fr. Alban West's class on Sticharic chant was so helpful. I think I had at least 5 epiphanies during the class. It was great! Katherine loved being in nature at the conference center...she spent time with Nana exploring, digging in the soft dirt dug up by the moles, picking weeds, running around in the wind. The food was great! I had the best French toast I've ever had....I think 'cause it was made with real french bread. It was also great to get to know some of the musicians from my area.

2006-01-18T23:35:00.000-08:00

Gratefulness list for tonight....Dad and boys helped clean up the house. Daddy made a new chore chart with pictures and all. The boys got into it...seeing who could get the most stickers on the chart. (We get stickers when we do other people's chores too with their permission.)
I'm going to the Antiochian Music conference this weekend. My laundry pile is pretty low! Wow, it's nice to leave when things are put together. My Mom's coming along to the conference!

2006-01-16T21:43:00.000-08:00

Gratefulness in all things...that's my thought for the day, week, ...or rather for the rest of my life. I would be a much kinder, gentler, thougtful mother, wife, and friend if I would learn to give thanks at all times.

2006-01-13T23:28:00.000-08:00

Cigarettes and me. Truthfully, I get mad when I see my friends smoke........But whoohww....take the beam out of my own eye. My lack of control over weight is just as bad, but I easily excuse that away. Uh oh.....Now I have to re-think my habits and I'm scared. Don't want to give up the fun with food.

2006-01-13T23:10:00.000-08:00

Kitchen's clean....but don't look at the rest of the house! I did an entry to Martha Stewart's "Dream Kitchen" contest. I've never actually entered a contest. It was kind of fun....could have made a better video with more time. Probably won't win, but it was fun and my kitchen looks a lot better....less cluttered. I'd love to keep my whole house that way. I try to be realistic about homeschooling, taking care of a toddler, and keeping up house. How to keep it balanced? Actually probably not possible, but I keep trying.

Potty trainging is definately not my thing. I'm ready to give up at the drop of a hat, and have no clue what I'm doing, even though this is my third child. Katherine cooperated for about two days. She's refusing to use the seat most of the time. Any Ideas/thoughts?

Heard the St. Vlad's choir last night. Nice bunch of people and great music selection. They illustrated how the Chrismas fast and feast parallel The lenten fast and feast. There are parallel hymns and the time structure is the same...for example, we celebrate the forefeast for the 40 days after the feast in both seasons....Really cool. The director was saying at home their Christmas decorations stay up until Feb. 2, the leave taking of Christmas! Wow...there's always more to learn.

Favorite things

2006-01-06T00:27:00.000-08:00

My favorite things for 2005....My new French press coffee pot, fresh roasted coffee beans, (yes I need to get a popcorn popper so I can do it myself!) Baking soda...amazing bathroom cleaner, fish oil(More energy and less headaches!), house cleaning help. In a whole other category, Family and Friends....who add untold joy to my life.

time for training

2006-01-03T21:10:00.000-08:00

My one year old refused to put on her diaper today, so guess what she gets to learn! A lady I met at Soup plantation said, just put them in "big girl" pants, and bring them to the potty every half hour. She did pretty good today. The lady says it only took her kids a few days....We'll see if I hold up 'till the task is done. (I'm a potty training wimp, but I have my courage up.)

Disneyland

2006-01-03T21:02:00.000-08:00

Last night Rick and I spent a few hours relaxing at D-land. We went on the re-done Space Mountain and saw the 50th anniversary fireworks. Space Mountain has been toned down, in my opinion. It was fun, with lots of turns and ups and downs, but not as exciting as it use to be. The ending was a nice snippit of a light show. The fireworks were fantastic. They reviewed many of the classic rides that have been a part of my childhood, as well as our current favorites. As soon as the music started for each portion, it brought me right back to the memories. I didn't realize how important the music was to setting the mood for the rides! They also painted the feelings of the rides with colored lights shining on the castle as well as the perfectly selected fireworks. I saw it before, without the music. It was ok...but when I saw the whole thing next to the castle, I thought it was great. I probably wouldn't go just for that, but if you've been thinking of seeing the park, do it before the show goes away. Especially if you've grown up with the park...

why blog

2005-12-30T00:36:00.000-08:00

To process thoughts, compile lists, share stuff with friends, to charish memories. Tonight and tomorrow we're getting ready for our early New Years Eve Party....a yearly tradition for us....Good friends, maybe a few games of chess or Jenga, poppers, and of course good food. Hey...I'm excited. I figured out how to do a post on my own!...Making progress. (I discovered somehow I made three different usernames. It took me a while to figure out where I was....) Here's to a great 2006.