Turn Around

I can’t say I didn’t know this was coming. I started losing you the day you were born. But everything was still so new then. You had just arrived! Your leaving was the last thing on my mind. Besides, I had 6,700 days to prepare for you to go. I had all the time in the world.

Holding you as a newborn, I picked up those 6,700 days and looked at them like a telescope turned the wrong way, with your leaving a tiny dot that seemed a million years away. Now I turn the telescope around, and see our time in minutes, magnified up close.

I look at the calendar and have to blink a few times. “Move out day” is one of the tidy entries on the calendar 10 days from now, sandwiched between “vet appointment” and “payday.” There it is in regular black type.

How can it look so ordinary? It should be a foot tall, maybe in bold, red letters. A heavy slash between one day and the next. One day you will be here, and the next you will be gone. It's just the reverse of the day you were born. Within 24 hours, our lives change forever. Boom.

So. What do you say we rethink this moving thing, put it off a year? There’s no way I have taught you everything you should know before you leave home. I need more time to teach you how to sew on a button. Cook something besides burritos and frozen dinners. Budget your money. Read a bus schedule. Flirt. Check your oil.

Believe me, there’s so much you don’t know yet. I can make a list that goes on for pages. In fact, I'm thinking another year may not even cover it.

But no... That’s not how this works. I had my chances. It was just hard to remember on each of those 6,700 days that those chances were happening in every second. I know, some part of me realized that someday you'd leave and that every day that passed subtracted one off our time together. But still, I always thought there was plenty of time left to do all those things I meant to do.

So I guess you’ll have to figure out everything I didn’t teach you. Luckily the internet can show you how to do a lot of them! And don’t forget you can call your mom too!

What’s next for you? Your path is uniquely your own, so I can’t say for sure. But I am guessing that there will be times coming soon when your heart is so filled with joy that you’ll want to sing a jaunty Broadway song at the top of your lungs. Times when you are so stressed out that you’ll feel like your brain can't contain one more thing as you finish studying at 2 am. Times when you are sick and sad and wishing more than anything your mom could be there to stroke your head while you throw up. Times when your heart is breaking because someone you loved fell in love with someone else. Times when you desperately wish you could talk to somebody, but your parents don’t make that list anymore.

All of those and more incredible, hard, wonderful, stretching things are coming. You can almost see them from what feels like a million years away if you squint through that time telescope the wrong way. But turn it around and you can see what matters: today. A hint of tomorrow. Each day is a wonderful bundle of opportunity and learning and even joy, just waiting to be unwrapped.

There are 10 days until you move. So today, we go grocery shopping and compare prices of generic and brand name canned beans. We bought you a Crockpot, so I’ll teach you how to make Swiss steak. Then let’s check your tire pressure. Or iron a shirt.  Or even sit on the couch and watch PBS "Nova" together. We’ll keep spending our precious days, as always, one moment at a time.

I feel the weight of these measured minutes with you. As you come into my home office while I’m working, I’ll stop and look you in the eye every time. When you want to vent about work or school, I’ll listen for as long as you want. Or let's dance ridiculously in the kitchen, belting out "The Greatest Showman." In 11+ days I'll be so glad we made the most of this time.

Each of us gets 24 hours every day. How many days does anyone have left? 6,700 days. 10 days. Maybe 30,000 days. Who knows when a chapter will end—when those thick lines will come that separate a life into Before and After? If I taught you nothing else, I hope you’ll try to remember to cherish each precious, fleeting day. Don’t look back with regret. Every moment is a gift.

Turn around, my darling, and walk toward the sun.

P.S. This. ==>

Decadent Fudgy Flourless Brownies, 2 WW Smartpoints

I've been searching for a delicious brownie I could eat while on Weight Watchers Freestyle and not feel deprived. I found a couple of good ones (and several that made me feel like something died inside me in fear that this was the best I could do for a "treat").

I love to bake, and I eventually decided I needed to come up with my own take. I used a few recipes for inspiration and came up with something that satisfies the sweet tooth with one brownie but doesn't "break the points bank" even if I eat a second one. I'll admit it: I need me some chocolate every day!

Without further ado, here is my brownie recipe... in image format as well as text, so you can save it the way you like. The ingredients seem pretty funky until you put it all together and see how good it turns out. I really hope you enjoy these awesome, gluten-free "healthy" brownies as much as I do!

Decadent Fudgy Flourless Brownies

I'm not a photographer or a
cooking blogger :)
just a pretty decent baker. 

by Jennifer Hughes, WW Connect: @jenhues
Per serving: 2 WW Smartpoints (Freestyle program)
83 calories each
Don't tell your kids what's in this crazy recipe and they'll never know that these are actually healthy!

Puree in blender:
1 can black beans (15 oz.), drained and rinsed
2 Tb. water
3 eggs
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1/3 med. avocado, cut into pieces

Combine these dry ingredients in a mixing bowl:
5/8 c. sugar (yes, real sugar!)
3/8 c. Splenda granulated sweetener (you can play around with these ratios if you prefer more Splenda and less sugar)
3/8 c. baking cocoa powder
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. baking powder

Additional optional ingredient:
66 Lily's sugar-free chocolate chips

Puree the wet ingredients, then stir into dry ingredients and mix well. To boost the chocolate flavor without increasing Smartpoints per serving, you can gently mix in 66 Lily's chocolate chips (about a heaping tablespoon).

Spoon the batter into a 9X9 baking pan sprayed with nonstick cooking spray. Bake at 340 degrees for 23-25 minutes. The brownies should be set up but still appear soft when you take the pan out.

Cut into 16 pieces. You don't have to wait for it to cool. Why should you? You want a brownie now!

WW Freestyle Smartpoints:
1 brownie = 2 Smartpoints
2 brownies = 5 Smartpoints
3 brownies = 7 Smartpoints

Note: These are the Smartpoint values my WW food tracker app calculated. Feel free to enter the ingredients as a custom recipe in your app to come up with your own Smartpoint values. 


My Background
I'm a Weight Watchers success story twice now. In 2005-06, I lost more than 40 pounds and kept most of it off for several years. However, several difficult life events (including middle age) about five years ago created the perfect storm for gaining weight, and I quickly ballooned up to even more than my previous highest weight. I knew WW had worked for me in the past, but I kept thinking I could take off that pesky 15 pounds "the easy way" with some fad diets--and instead just kept yo-yoing. (Note: fad diets are actually the hard way!) I decided maybe my metabolism had just changed and I needed to resign myself to being overweight.

Luckily, I decided to give WW another try.  I've lost about 35 pounds in 5 1/2 months and plan to be back at goal within a few months. I'm feeling healthier and back in control of my life, and my self-confidence keeps increasing. I appreciate how WW is a sustainable eating plan that lets me eat real food while retraining my brain to eat treats and snacks in moderation.

I Pledge Allegiance

I know you know the words by heart:

"I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

I've been thinking a lot about America lately and what it means to me. I've said the Pledge of Allegiance truly countless times over my life. I've proudly displayed the flag that stands for one indivisible nation under God. I've taken my responsibility very seriously to teach school children and scouts the great heritage of this country and the meaning of and history behind the flag, national anthem, and Pledge.

I've considered myself a patriot, grateful for the freedoms we enjoy, honored by the sacrifices of the many who have served our country and even died for it. I have done my best to teach the next generation to love their country.

But the times, they are a-changing. There's a tumult in America that can't be ignored. This doesn't feel like the "land that I love" anymore. If I pledge my heart and my loyalty to someone or something, I need to mean it, or I shouldn't say it.

So I am asking myself the hard question: When I say the Pledge of Allegiance, what exactly am I swearing my loyalty to?

• Not the police who practice brutality instead of following due process 
• Not people who believe that some lives matter more than others or who create an environment of terror by retaliating against those sworn to protect us
• Not a broken two-party political system 
• Not the unrelenting campaign to secularize America and strip away its underpinning moral values
• Not an electoral college that discounts my vote since I live in an "unimportant" small state
• Not a 2016 presidential election where my only choices are a candidate who is a delusional bully and another who is a lying crook 
• Not those who shout that "some are more equal than others," and their beliefs are more important than others' freedom of religion
• Not elected officials who refuse to perform their lawful duties, including those who deny nominations of Supreme Court justices just because it's an election year
• Not endless, meaningless wars in the Middle East
• Not a country where mass killings are so common anymore that they often don't even make the front page
• Not a congress who is so divided it's deadlocked, who is quick to shut down the country instead of resolving issues, where officials are more concerned about covering themselves and getting reelected than making the difference they were elected to do
• Not the zillions of dollars in debt that citizens have been saddled with
• Not a country where there's so much senseless mob violence--even just over a sports game--that the teams have to play in an empty stadium to avoid the city being destroyed
• Not a land where our freedom of expression is denied, and the only allowable "truth" is what's defined and sanctioned by the government

So if that's what I don't believe in, where is the America that I have loved? Does it even exist anymore?

I'll be honest. It causes me great turmoil to say I don't know if I can pledge allegiance to what America stands for now. So, here's my "title of liberty"--similar to what an ancient prophet said when making his declaration--of what I can pledge.

I pledge allegiance to:

• God
• My religion and its leaders
• Our unalienable, God-given rights and constitutional freedoms
• My family
• The ideals behind America that our forefathers fought and died for: a land of liberty and justice for all

That is a pledge I can give with my whole heart. 

It pains me to witness the collapse of my once-wonderful country. I truly don't know if we can Make America Great Again unless there is a giant shift by all of us working together at once--like after 9-11, when so many of us felt unified as a nation. I pray that this once "sweet land of liberty" can rise from the dust. But if not, I know where my deeper allegiance lies.

A Wonderful, Slow-Cooking Oven

I stumbled across the Wonderbag recently. It is basically an old-fashioned slow cooker, requiring just a small amount of fuel/energy. You must initially heat food to a boil, and then you move the pot into the insulated bag for several hours to let the food gently cook as it very slowly cools down. I've seen food come out hot--not warm--after sitting in the bag for eight hours. This is good for your energy bill and also makes for a low-effort, one-pot meal that can cook while you are at home or even while you are transporting it elsewhere. It also is great for emergency cooking or camping.

If you need something kept cold instead of hot, the insulating material is reported to keep ice cream cold for about four hours. Other items may stay frozen even longer. Again, this is great if you need to take something cold to an event and you're transporting it in a hot car.

The Wonderbag company donates one bag to a family in need in Africa for every bag sold in the U.S. While I loved this generous idea, the $54 price was beyond my budget, so I wanted to make one for myself that was more economical.

Then my sister randomly mentioned that her LDS ward was making "wonder oven boxes" and asked if I'd like to go in on a group order of bean bag pellets! It was serendipity. Apparently, the wonder box was created by a group called Compassion in South Africa in 1978. It is a totally different design from the Wonderbag, although the concept is the same.

The wonder box is a great place to start for those who are not confident sewers because it's very basic. I used a pattern provided by my sister's ward, but there are several copycat patterns on Pinterest if you search for wonder oven, wonder oven box, or wonder box.

Cost
I used a free pattern, purchased a $5 flat sheet at Wal-Mart for fabric, and spent $5 on the bulk order of bean bag pellets. Out of that I made a wonder box, then, wanting to try the bag style, I made three bags that fit a three-qt. pot with a handle. I still have lots of bean bag pellets left over and could make several more with scrap fabric. Can't beat the price! Take that, slow cooker!

Recipes
I will include recipes in a future post, but you can also find these on Pinterest. I was concerned that I had to use actual Wonderbag recipes, but this is a forgiving slow cooker. You can use different types of recipes, like:

• Standard crock pot recipes
• Anything with some liquid in it that you can bring to a boil before moving your pot to the wonder box 
• Dishes that you don't want to stew in liquid all day, by putting ingredients in an oven bag or slow cooker liner bag (I've even read of using an empty, plastic cereal bag from boxed cereal). Put the closed bag (with the ends hanging out of the pot) in some water in your pot, cook it at a hard boil for 15 minutes, and move it to the wonder box. This technique is good if you have something like a whole chicken and vegetables that you don't want to turn into stew.

I've found that unlike a slow cooker, the wonder oven will not burn or overcook food, which is a major plus. Vegetables don't get so mushy because they are cooked too long, while the meat gets very tender and juicy. It's such a convenient way to cook.

Wonder Oven Box Tutorial
I found a tutorial online, contributed by Kathryn Pratt, that uses the same instructions I was given at my sister's super Saturday Relief Society event. I was worried as I was cutting and sewing that I was doing something wrong, but I found that this really is a forgiving pattern if you make mistakes. It requires fewer pellets than I originally thought, because if you put in too many, there is no room for the pan. The point is to put in just enough that you have room for the pan in the center and then the pellets can create a nice layer of insulation around it. You may need to adjust the final amount of pellets by experimenting with a pan you plan on using before you sew the hole shut. The lid should be firmer than the bag.

And I do not have a good way to move bean bag pellets that are lightweight and full of static electricity! The best way I found was with some kind of a scoop and a funnel made out of newspaper, but plan on doing this step outside because you will end up covered in styrofoam pellets! I have heard that you can use any kind of insulating material from packing peanuts to even old rags but I have not tried any different kinds of insulation. If you've had success with other materials, please leave a comment!


Here are pictures of the wonder box from the blog Our LDS Family. You can see that it is essentially just a square bean bag that has a spot in the center that can be smushed around to create a hollow for your pot. It is covered with a square piece filled with bean bags pellets.


It is pretty shapeless, so if you want it to have more structure or hug your pot more closely, you need to first put it in a box or laundry basket, make a hollow for your pan, and then snuggle the pan down into the hollow and cover it with the bean bag lid. It helped that my husband was pushing the insulation around and out of place when I was trying to put the pot in since the hollow tended to fill back in just as I was setting the pot in. The entire pot needs to be nestled within the bag to be able to cook the food properly.

I think that Kathryn Pratt's wonder box is actually pretty cute. Mine turned out kind of homely and without such a firm shape.

When I tried it out I tried it first on the counter and then in a laundry basket and felt like that was the better way to go since it nestled the pot better. I put a kitchen towel around my pot first to protect the fabric from stains, although it can be washed by hand. I just felt better thinking that I could preserve its appearance longer by not putting it directly against the fabric. Also, I was worried that the pot would be so hot that it would burn the fabric, but that has not seemed to be the case any time the metal has come in contact with the fabric, so I don't think that should be a concern for you.

The wonder box can fit many size pots, including my largest Magnalite dutch oven, which I believe is seven quarts, but it's key to use a pan without a handle because the handle will stick out of the bag and create a gap where air can get in.

Due to the fact that most of my pans have handles, and because I wanted to try something cuter (vanity) as well as something that did not require setting a laundry basket on my counter for the entire day, I decided to try using my plentiful bean bag pellets to create a new one. I took pictures of the second one I made with purchased fabric with a cute kitchen print. I'm going to write about it in my next post to keep these two patterns separate. Happy wonder-ful slow cooking!

Tradition

A small group of our friends that does a regular dinner and book club had been reading Strings Attached, and our presenter wanted to give us a little taste of "the mother country" since the subject of the book was Ukrainian. I had no idea there would be a demand for authentic Russian food in our very "white bread" area, but our host found a little Russian deli not too far away. We feasted on borscht, meat dumplings, a creamy potato/vegetable salad, Ukrainian bread, and cabbage rolls with meat and sour cream filling. I felt like I was eating a dinner of Russian comfort food even though many were delightful new flavors to me.

Why do we crave tradition--the familiar tastes, customs, music, culture, dress? When I moved away from my home state there were a few familiar things I constantly craved: Nielsen's custard, eclairs from Dick's bakery, pizza from Robintino's. I ached to recall the gorgeous rainbow of clouds as the setting sun reflected off the Great Salt Lake and then darkly dipped behind Antelope Island. I missed the familiar roads and views. Although these weren't necessarily traditions, they were customs and familiarities that I felt were a part of me.

Christmas is the time of year we seem to pull out all the traditions along with our boxes of stuff. One little treasure passed down to my family was a cd set of a radio play from 1937, "The Cinnamon Bear", that was a favorite of my mother-in-law as a child. She gave it to us when my kids were small, and every year after Thanksgiving we'd pull it out and listen to the cute and goofy stories of Jimmy and Judy bungling their efforts to find their Christmas tree's silver star in a magical fantasy land. We don't listen to it every year, but the little references have become part of our family's vocabulary, like a joke we all get while saying hardly anything.

I think women often seem to be the keeper of the hearth with passing down traditions. Growing up, our Christmas had a very reliable pattern. Christmas Eve was the dinner for baby Jesus, complete with an angel food "birthday" cake, a nice Thanksgiving-type meal, and a full day of grumbling kids having to polish the silver flatware and dishes--and then wash and wrap them back in tissue and plastic before bedtime. This is a tradition I've felt impressed to continue, even though often my husband and I are the only ones eating the angel food cake. And I won't make my kids polish the silver all day!

Christmas morning was a carefully choreographed event that I didn't appreciate for some years. While I didn't believe in Santa-the-big-red-guy, I also certainly didn't realize everything my parents were doing behind the scenes to pull off The Big Event. My mom would apparently stay up most of the night creating the perfect scene. It was one part interior design, two parts Las Vegas excess, one part controlled chaos.

We each had our own chair that was draped with gifts and a stocking. The room was created with the care of a lovely Christmas store window display. Even if we didn't really need something--even if she had to get stuff from a garage sale to fill in the cracks--what mattered was the perfect presentation that would elicit just the right "oohs" and "ahs" from us as we entered the living room that was softly illuminated by the tiny multi-color lights on the tree.

Thanks to her health-food kick at the time, we did not get to eat cold cereals of sugary goodness and crunchy little marshmallows until Christmas. But each year, we counted on finding in our stockings the little Kellogg's boxes of wonder that were treasured and traded and eaten with glee later on.

How do we decide what we pass down? Why is it important? Why does it matter if I give my children little boxes of cereal in their stockings each year? (And yes, I do!) How does that become part of our identity? Do I lose a link between generations if I don't pass down great-grandpa's this or that?

Over time, traditions change. Something my parents passed down may stop at me. (The window-dressed living room, for one.) But every year we put up the stockings, put each kids' collections of ornaments on the fake tree, eat the angel food cake on Christmas Eve. We keep enacting these rituals because these common experiences tie us together. And that is what we have--and who we are--in the end.

Book Review: NeuroTribes by Steve Silberman

Perhaps this is not so much of a book review as a life review as a result of this book's powerful affect on me. You decide.

I went to a school concert recently. As the teenagers leisurely tromped onstage, I idly scanned the crowd. My eyes stopped instinctively at one young man—then a second. Who knows, maybe everyone else in the audience was doing the same thing: something about these boys just caught the eye for some reason. Perhaps it's because it's such a strong part of our human nature to notice, categorize, and analyze why someone else is different.

 These young men who caught my attention looked ill at ease in their own skin. They weren’t chatting with their neighbors like most of the other kids. Without knowing anything of importance about them I could tell they were socially awkward. Geeks. Nerds. I could even armchair psychoanalyze these kids as being on the autism spectrum.

How could I tell? How can any of us sense, even from a distance, that someone is just “not quite right”—in other words, not like us? I’ve seen this same analyzing stare from strangers for many years as they watch my kid, who is also on the autism spectrum. I know it well. In a way, it bothers me—“Just let him be who he is without your personal judgments on what kind of a person he is or what kind of a parent I must be.” And yet I find myself at times, like at the school concert, doing the same thing.

Are we instinctively programmed to value human symmetry? Are our personal worlds not right until we homogenize everyone around us? It seems true. And yet there’s something so “ugly American” about the thought. Many of us would probably reject the idea on its surface—but then go right on staring.

Before I could write a review of NeuroTribes by Steve Silberman, I’ve had to digest it for the last month. I’ve had to reconsider everything I’ve thought about autism and do some soul-searching as I’ve examined our family history “on the spectrum.” This is a long book, a comprehensive history of autism and the development of the field of psychology in the 20th century, and although I think it's fascinating reading, I'm not sure if a casual reader would want to read in its entirety or would benefit from just reading excerpts.

LDS General Conference Makes Me "Happy"

This Saturday and Sunday it's the semiannual General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I love this awesome opportunity to hear counsel from living apostles of Jesus Christ! I think this video can't help but make you feel "happy" too!