In Which Connor Is Eight

Happy birthday, Connor!

It's been a busy couple of days around here!  Yesterday Eden had a friend over to spend the night for the first time ever, which was pretty awesome.  They spent some time engaged in the time-honored adolescent traditions of hanging out at the mall and the movie theater, and then they stayed up in Eden's room giggling and chattering away until past midnight.  I'm really glad that she's made such a good friend, and that they get along so well!

This morning after a bit of a rough start (I forgot to tell the night nurse that the kids were on spring break, and Connor was unappreciative when he was dressed for school and then discovered that he was not, in fact, actually going) we took off for downtown and favorite local coffee shop.  Connor wore his birthday hat proudly, and accepted everyone's birthday greetings with a regal air.  He worked his way through a decent amount of whipped cream while the rest of us ate a leisurely breakfast, and then he was presented with a candle-bedecked, freshly-baked cinnamon roll and serenaded by the staff.  He thought the icing was pretty tasty!

After that, we ran a couple of errands and while Connor had his quiet time, the girls (Eden's friend stayed on until early evening, which was nice) and I made his birthday lemon bars for the evening.  Connor isn't a huge fan of cake, but is madly in love with lemon curd, and I secretly love making the shortbread base for the bars because I get to squish up all the butter, flour and sugar for the cookies by hand and it's tremendous amounts of fun.  Once the bars were set out to cool, we took off for Connor's AFO casting-- not the most fun activity in the world for a birthday, but necessary all the same.

Connor picked out the colors for his new AFOs, and this time they're definitely going to be a bit more flashy!  He picked his usual blue-and-black foam for the bottoms, but chose a neon rainbow-colored strap.  He was so excited about the straps that when he saw them, he gave them a round of applause.  I'm glad he's taking more of an interest in picking out his own things out; we'll see if he still likes them when we see the finished product in a few weeks!

After that we went home, my parents came over with a delicious dinner in tow, and we all ate a hearty meal (or in Connor's case, his weight in lemon curd) and then Skyped with Jeremy while we sang the birthday song yet another time and then opened presents.

We ended the day snuggled up on the couch watching one of Connor's new movies.  Overall I think it was a pretty successful birthday or at least a tiring one; by halfway through the film I had Eden asleep with her head on my knee and Connor passed out on my shoulder.  I think snuggling with my kiddos at the end of the day was probably my favorite part.  I can't believe how big they're both getting!

~Jess

In Which Eden Has A Birthday

Eden turned sixteen today!

She requested lasagna and lemon bars for her special birthday dinner-- is this kid American or what?  She specifically requested made-from-scratch lasagna, though, so I spent about half the day making it, because I am insane.  It tasted delicious, but I have to say that lasagna out of the freezer section is pretty good too and doesn't involve a ridiculous amount of preparation time.

Also since I made the sauce first and then cooked the noodles before assembling everything, it smelled like lasagna in my house for the entire day and I basically wanted to forget putting it together and simply stuff the pot directly into my mouth.  Garfield and I have a lot in common.

So after school and physical therapy, my parents came over and we ate, chatted, opened presents and then played a rousing game of Chicken Foot before bedtime.  Overall I think she enjoyed herself.  We'll be having a birthday party for her on Saturday and we're bringing a snack to her swim practice tomorrow, so it's like a whole week of birthday celebration for her!  I don't think she minds.

I spent a little quiet time thinking about Eden's birth parents last night-- that's the one day when I can be absolutely sure they're thinking about Eden too.  With the time difference between here and Thailand, Eden's birthday technically happened yesterday over there.  I'm sure that day holds a lot of painful memories for them.  I think of them often-- especially Eden's birth mother-- and hope they somehow know that our shared daughter is safe and growing up well.  It's not likely we'll ever meet, and it's entirely Eden's decision whether or not she chooses to seek them out at some point in her life, but I wish them peace, wherever they might be.

So, onward and upward.  Here's to sixteen!   I can't wait to see what amazing things our girl does with the next year.

~Jess

In Which We Cook All The Things

The kids had a half-day of school today, which I spent picking up a few Christmas presents so I'd have something to wrap and put under the tree on Friday, when we start setting up for the holiday.  Then I picked up Connor, dropped him off at the house to hang out with my mom, and went to the doctor's appointment I was supposed to go to on Monday.

After I had respite care for Connor, and while he hung out in the living room listening to Irish fiddle tunes, drawing on his iPad and charming the nurse, Eden and I spent pretty much the whole rest of the day either cooking or making crafts.  I showed Eden how to string cranberry garlands for the Christmas tree (yet more sneaky fine motor skills therapy) and she worked on that while I tipped the green beans and grated unripe papaya for the som tam.  We're having a nontraditional Thanksgiving dinner this year: som tam (green papaya salad), coconut sticky rice, cranberry-orange relish, a vegetable dish that our friend is bringing and a Japanese-style bourbon pumpkin cake, which is made with mascarpone cheese and a whole bunch of frothy egg whites.  So it's kind of a vegetarian Asian fusion Thanksgiving, which works for me.

My biggest problem today was not wanting to eat all of the food as it came out of the oven instead of waiting for tomorrow.  I'm very proud of the amount of restraint I showed-- particularly when it came to the pumpkin cake.  Of course, it helped that the cake had bubbled over and I was forced to cut off and eat all of the pieces where it had puffed up on our baking stone.

But they totally don't count because they weren't part of the main body of cake anymore, so I can still be all self-congratulatory about not stuffing the entire thing in my face the second it came out of the oven, and also I have the added advantage of knowing the cake turned out beautifully.  Now I just have to keep myself from telling everyone it's terrible and they don't want to eat it so I can have it all myself.

Anyway, I don't have much else to report!

~Jess

In Which Connor Stays Awake And We Try Some Down Home Cooking

It's nearly one in the morning right now; looks like Connor's seriously considering pulling an all-nighter.  It doesn't happen as often as it used to anymore, but it does still happen.  Unfortunately it's the weekend for our night nurse too, so it looks like I may need quite a bit of coffee in the morning.

Connor spent some quality time with the grandparents today while Eden and I went out for a while.  We ate some lunch and then tooled around the mall for a couple of hours.  It was fun getting the chance to spend a little bit of time with my girl, even if we did have to go into every shoe store known to mankind.  This kid loves looking at shoes.

After that we swung by and picked up Connor.  After his quiet time, we piled back into the car and headed for the grocery store, where I picked up the ingredients for the jambalaya I planned on making tonight, as well as fixings for the pumpkin pie and the green beans I was making for tomorrow.  We're having a slightly early Thanksgiving celebration with my parents this year, which was nice because it meant I didn't have to fight my way down the aisles like I would have if I'd been doing this shopping the day before the real Thanksgiving.

Anyway, Eden and I cooked a big ol' pot of jambalaya together tonight.  She's really interested in cooking, but I think she was fed up with the whole mess after about fifteen minutes of stirring the pot.  Basically in jambalaya (at least the kind I make) you end up stirring everything for about half an hour total before you stick the pot in the oven and bake it.  "Why we not get the kind in the box?" she asked.  "It easy."  Luckily she changed her mind and decided it was worth all the stirring after she tried it.  She's developing quite a taste for Cajun and Creole food; I think it's all the seafood and spice that she appreciates.  Oh, and the sausage-- the kid is in love with andouille.  We've got plenty of leftovers (it's pretty impossible to make a small batch of jambalaya) so it's a good thing she likes it!

Connor spent the time we were cooking hanging out on his rocking horse.  He's borrowing a full-sized hobby horse from his therapy center-- one of the kind you don't see made any more because kids kept getting their fingers caught in the springs-- that's been modified to provide extra support.  Not only is it great practice in torso control for the little guy, but he also absolutely loves it.  It's difficult to find toys that will motivate him to work hard in physical therapy, so this is a sneaky but effective way to get him to do some work.  He seems to be feeling a lot better and was pretty perky today.

Now if I can just get him to go to sleep!

~Jess

In Which My Computer Works Again

My computer has been on the fritz recently, which is what happens when you combine an old laptop with a kid who has motor skills issues and a mom who has a tendency to drop bits of chocolate on the keyboard.  But it's been given a thorough cleaning now and will hopefully last us a while longer.  I got it back in 2009, so it's not like the thing is geriatric or anything; just a little worn on the edges from some rough handling.  Kind of like the rest of the house-- every time we get a new wheelchair for Connor I bang up the walls for a while until I get the hang of the new size/shape of the chair, and I've now got another kid who leans on everything, leaving hand prints on all of the slightly dented walls.  But it's a happy, cozy kind of bumped up.  So that's good.

Yesterday Ellen asked me to make her some tom kha gai soup.  We were headed to the Asian grocery store and I thought I might try out a new recipe, but she was insistent.  "I love it when you make me tom kha gai" she chirped, turning on the charm.  Ellen being charming is a powerful motivator; I was instantly willing to make her tom kha gai every day of the week for the next year.  I'm so, so glad I'd taken the time to learn some Thai cooking before she got here, and now that she's home cooking together has become one of our favorite activities.  Not all of our experiments turn out (did you know that if you run out of all-purpose flour for pizza, replacing it with bread flour is NOT a good idea?) but we're having a blast trying.

We set off the smoke alarm for the first time this week.  Huzzah!

Connor had his first talent show practice this weekend, and it looks like it's going to be pretty cute.  Out of the four families there, three of us had adopted kids.  So we felt right at home.  Connor seemed largely indifferent to the idea of dancing-- apparently he was not enamored of the musical selection.  That's okay!  As long as he has a good time overall it doesn't matter how much he participates.

Connor's birthday is coming up so soon!  How can my little guy possibly be seven?  Seriously, that is Not Cool.  Connor must stop getting older immediately.  Of course we have no idea what to get him, but we'll figure it out.  His birthday is the same day as the start of Spring Break, so while we won't have a party (Connor hates parties) we'll have the chance to spend an entire fun-filled day together.  The downside to it being spring break is that everyone else will also be trying to spend an entire fun-filled day together.  We may try to avoid the tourist hot spots; neither of my kids do well in crowds.

My little guy isn't so little any more!

~Jess

In Which We Marvel At Abundance

Connor had another rough day, I'm afraid: four more seizures.  Seems like he's getting into a bit of a seizure cycle right now.  Hopefully we can break out of this and get him back on track; that's about four more seizures than I'd like him to be having per day!  At least these seem to have a really quick recovery time. 

Ellen had a doctor's appointment today so I had a shorter time than usual to get my errands done.  So I popped off to the grocery store shortly after I dropped off the kids.  I'm having to seriously change my grocery shopping habits.  Now I'm making a lunch for Ellen to bring to school, and the child is going through an amazing amount of food.  Whenever we come into the house, practically the first thing she does is check both the fridge and the pantry.  I think she's still delighted by the idea of having access to food at any time of the day. 

Ellen wasn't malnourished when she came to us and she ate three balanced meals a day at her orphanage, but she's definitely got some wiggle room when it comes to her weight.  She's not gorging herself or eating until she throws up (which some newly adopted children do) but she's chowing down on some seriously large portions right now.  I suspect she'll eventually slow down once it really sinks in that there will always be food readily available whenever she wants it, but for now I'll be grabbing a cart instead of a basket when I go to the grocery store and stocking up on easy-to-prepare snacks so she's able to feed herself whenever she's hungry in between meals. 

Sometimes when she comes home and sees that I've bought more food, she gives me a huge hug and exclaims in a delighted voice, "Oh thank you, Mom!"  It makes me smile and breaks my heart a little all at the same time.  When I was growing up, I took it for granted that there was plenty of food whenever I wanted it.  Now that I have a kid who is overcome with gratitude when she sees that I've restocked us up on peanut butter, I realize what a luxury that truly was. 

Connor's weight seems to be relatively stable right now, though he needs to go for another weigh-in soon.  I suspect he's in the middle of another growth spurt; certainly he seems heavier to me when I'm carrying him around!  Or maybe I'm just losing my muscles since I'm not playing roller derby right now, and he just seems heavier.  If he has gained a significant amount of weight that might be what's causing the seizures-- his medication levels might need to be adjusted up.

Guess we'll have to see!

~Jess

In Which We Say Adieu To Friends And Look Forward To Our Adventure

Ruth and the baby took off this morning to head back home.  It was so great to get to spend some time with them!  I calculated it out this morning and realized that she and I have known each other for going on 22 years now.  This makes me feel kind of old, but it also makes me happy that I've been able to be friends with such a fantastic person for so long. 

Connor had a good day at school today, and then when we got home he kind of crashed.  He may possibly be coming down with something, or he might have just been tired from the busy weekend.  I guess we'll see.

I hit the grocery store while he was at school and snapped up some lovely ripe Fuyu persimmons, which I was delighted to see.  My grandparents had a persimmon tree in their front yard, and I remember eating them straight off the tree like apples.  I ate a few fresh today, and then peeled and cut up a couple, cooked them in coconut milk with a bit of palm sugar and salt and then ate them over sticky rice.  They were pretty tasty like that.

It seems crazy that I can officially tell people we'll be traveling to Thailand next month!  The days are just flying by.  I heard back today from the travel agent we'll be using to help us get around the country, so that's one more thing crossed off our list. 

In just five short weeks we'll be meeting our girl!

~Jess

In Which We Have A Better Day And Get A Bit Of Adoption News

No seizures today!  Connor seemed perkier and enjoyed his school day.  I'm happy he felt better and I hope that this will be the trend for a while! 

I had a pretty good day too; I picked up a big basket of ripe figs today, which automatically makes it a good day in my book as figs are one of my favorite Odd Looking But Amazingly Tasty foods.  I made a dinner out of them with a hunk of bread, some locally-made blue cheese, honey from a friend's hives and a mug of carrot ginger soup. 

This is why fall is my favorite time of year here; the sunny-but-cool weather and spectacular trees are nice and all, but the meals are fantastic. 

In other news, the Department of Homeland Security sent us a notice a few days ago (how did I forget to mention this?) letting us know that our I-800 paperwork for Ellen made it to them and they've passed it on to USCIS.  So with any luck we should hear something on that end some time in the next two or three weeks.  That will put us one step closer to Thailand and our daughter!  The

Jer and I have started looking heavily into our travel arrangements, so if any of you lovely readers have been to Thailand I would love to hear your recommendations-- especially in the way of hotel accommodations and things we really need to see.  We'll probably have three or four days during the trip where we won't have big things we need to do, so we'll be seeing the sights in and around Bangkok during that time period.  Obviously Ellen will weigh in once we get there, as she might have a few favorite places she'd like to visit, but I'd still love any suggestions you'd care to make!

~Jess

In Which Connor Tries On Shoes And I Have More Cooking Adventures

I picked Connor early from school today so he could go in for his first fitting on his ankle-foot orthotics (AFO's).  The outer shells and inner foam of the AFOs has been made, but they don't have any straps yet and the final trimming still needs to be done.  The shells go quite a bit higher on his calves than his last pair, so he'll get some more stability with them while he's standing at the expense of some of his flexibility. 

The fitting went well, and they only need to make a few little tweaks to the AFO shells.  His next appointment will be for his final fitting, and then we should be able to pick them up.  I'll be sure to post a picture of his cool new shoes when he's got them!

After that we stopped by the house to discover a package on the door-- a care package I'd sent to Ellen this past summer.  Apparently it got all the way to Thailand before they decided the postage was wrong, and then it sat there for a while before it ended up being sent back here.  I'd sent almost all of her previous care packages via priority mail, so I think I'll be going back to that.  So I'm combining this package (or portions of it, anyway) with the current package I'm working on and she'll just get two letters in it instead of one, written several months apart.  It's suddenly become much more urgent to get this next package out; I'm worried she's going to think we've forgotten about her.  I'm going to try and get this latest letter out to the translator tomorrow so I can get the package back in the mail and on its way to her again.

Then we stopped by the adoption agency to drop off a bit of paperwork.  On the way home we hit the Asian grocery store to pick up ingredients for Yam Kun Chiang and discovered a new favorite food.  I'd never tried dried Chinese sausage (lap chong) before, and it's not something I would have taken home on a whim without a specific recipe in mind.  But after slicing it up and pan frying it for this recipe, I was tempted to skip the rest of the salad and just eat the stuff directly out of the pan.  It's really sweet, so when you sear it (or in my case, half-burn it) it tastes sort of like meat candy. 

Which doesn't actually sound very appetizing when I write it out, but trust me when I say that the stuff is delicious.  It reminds me a little bit of what I call Death By Bacon, which is where you take a big ol' mess of bacon, brush it with maple syrup and dip it in brown sugar before popping it in the oven.  Lap chong isn't quite that sweet and the flavor's a bit more complicated, but it has that same sort of overall effect, and while it's probably not great for you it's got to be a lot better for your arteries than Death By Bacon is. 

I did end up making the rest of the salad too, and that only made it better, but I think I'll be adding lap chong to my growing list of foods I'll be using in the rest of my non-Thai recipes.  My kitchen is becoming this weird food fusion place where I've started mixing Thai spices and ingredients in with my regular cooking, where I do things like use smoked red chili paste on my turkey sandwiches and put coconut cream in my hot cocoa. 

Yum.

~Jess

In Which Connor Plays Hide And Seek With His Medical Equipment And Gives Me More Gray Hair

I'll be making a trip to our local Asian grocery store this week because I'm almost out of palm sugar and I'm running dangerously low on Thai peppers.  I've been in a big Thai food cooking kick as I try to work out how to make a lot of the dishes Ellen might be eating right now. 

It helps that the orphanage website posts a lot of the menus and that I'm able to take a look at those, but occasionally the translations don't work out very well.  Today she's apparently having something called "Prikking Fried Morning Glory."  After a bit of detective work I'm pretty sure this is Pad Prik King (a green bean curry), but it's hard to be sure.  I've been working my way through Leela's recipes over at She Simmers, and while I have no idea whether or not I'm doing them right I'm at least eating well in the process. 

So now I find myself incorporating a lot of Thai flavors into the rest of my cooking as well.  It's been fun playing with flavors like galangal and tamarind pulp in my sauces and marinades.  Connor seems to enjoy the intense flavor of a lot of the spices, but that's not really a big surprise.  This is the kid who likes to literally suck on lemons.  He's a flavor extremist.

Speaking of Connor: he went back to school today, which was pretty exciting.  He's mostly over his cold, and seems to have gotten through the entire thing seizure free.  Hooray!  Today was pretty much without incident, though he did pull his right hearing aid apart and throw the super-expensive computer portion of it over the side of his wheelchair; something I discovered once we returned home from running errands.  This prompted a frantic phone call to the grocery store and the coffee shop and a search of the whole house, driveway and van.  I finally found it when I deployed the ramp, apparently it was hidden under the vehicle when the ramp retracted and it rolled down when I put it down to take the little guy back to grocery store to search the parking lot. 

He likes to keep me on my toes.

~Jess

In Which I Am Not Top Chef

Today was a Crock Pot Surprise sort of day, which is when I am cleaning the kitchen and making dinner consists of throwing a whole bunch of things into a pot and hoping the result is edible.  I actually make most of my meals this way, come to think of it.  I've managed to come up with some pretty tasty stuff every once in a while, though I've also served some pretty spectacular failures.

The problem with cooking like this is that you never end up with the same meal twice.  There have been a few times that I've made really tasty meals that I've never been able to duplicate because I don't measure anything and I never write any of the ingredients down.  I've considered writing up some recipes, but that never works out both because of the whole not-measuring-anything issue and also because I get off on huge tangents and my recipes end up being three pages long.  Take tonight's dinner, which is something I'm calling beef stew because it happens to have beef in it.  I liked the results and tried writing it down, and I ended up with this:

1.) Peel and chop 1/2 onion, a parsnip, some carrots, a few small potatoes or substitute whatever root vegetables you happen to have in your kitchen and 1 apple and put in crock pot.  Cut up a whole mess of beef chuck, dust with a heaping spoonful of sweet rice flour (regular flour will work too) and add to pot.  Pound a couple of garlic cloves, a smallish chunk of palm sugar and a piece of fresh ginger about as big around as your pinky together in a mortar and pestle and then add to the other stuff.  Brown sugar will work too if you don't have palm sugar, but don't use plain because what's the point. 

Add a generous dollop of fish sauce, a pinch of pepper and a heaping spoonful of Thai roasted red chili paste-- that kind made by Thai Kitchen that comes in the little glass bottle with a black lid. It's mild enough to eat right off the spoon-- it adds just a bit of a kick and a nice smoky flavor. Yum!  If you don't have roasted red chili paste for Pete's sake don't use more than three fresh Thai chilies unless you really like spicy food or you will sear the roof of your mouth right off. 

Stir up the whole mess and then throw in a single bay leaf, because it's a rule that all meals identifying as stew have to have a bay leaf in them.  Pour in plain apple cider until you're halfway up the ingredients and then top off with water until all the stuff in the pot is covered.  Toss in a packet of mulling spices and a small hunk of frozen beef stock (if you are out of homemade beef stock you can use the paste, but skip this if all you've got is the cubes because they're too salty).  Throw in a shot of Tuaca or Fireball for added flavor.  Shot for the cook optional.  Cover and cook until done.

Just realized I put all of that as one instruction.  Whoops.  Anyway, this goes really well with a big ol' hunk of dark bread with lots of butter and a glass of milk on the side. 

After reading that, not only is that meal kind of bizarre (Mulling spices and fish sauce?  Really?) but it's pretty well useless as a recipe because unless you speak Southern Cooking Dialect you probably have no idea what a 'whole mess' or a 'generous dollop' would look like.  I don't speak with a southern accent, but apparently I cook in one. 

So yeah, I don't think a recipe book is going to be happening any time in the near future. 

~Jess

In Which Connor Has A Rough Day And We Have A Cheeky Visitor

We took it easy today; Connor had a pretty good sized seizure about five minutes into his stander time and spent most of the rest of the day dozing.  I think that other than the ones he has on the highway, seizures in his stander are my least favorite because I have to race to get his straps undone so I can lay him on his side before he has major aspiration issues.  Luckily he doesn't have them in the stander very often.

So I spent the day in the house, piddling around the kitchen and the living room while the kid snoozed away on the living room couch.  I made a big batch of papaya salad and ate almost all of it immediately because that stuff is delicious.  It's Ellen's favorite food, so once she's home I'll have to make a couple of batches at a time or between the two of us we'll go through it too quickly.  Unless she doesn't like the recipe I use, in which case, well, more for me. 

We probably won't be sharing with Jer because he mostly cooks his own food so he can track his caloric intake.  He's into powerlifting in a major way now, and in order to be able to lift more weight but still be able to pass the army physical fitness test he goes through bulking and cutting cycles.  This lets him build more muscle but not put on a lot of extra fat.  He's got it down to a science, so I've learned to let him do his own thing-- as hard as it is to turn my Feed People gene off. 

Since Connor gets most of his nutrition through his g-tube I usually end up cooking just for me, and I find that a lot harder to do, for whatever reason.  So it will be nice to have someone to make meals for! 

I was worried that with all the sleeping he did today Connor would be up until the wee hours of the morning, but he actually crashed shortly after I put him down and (knock on wood) it looks like he'll probably sleep through the night.  Since he was completely out, I took the monitor outside with me and sat on the porch for a little bit with a cup of tea.  It's light outside until past nine in the evening this time of year, so it was still a couple of hours before sunset.

I sat out there long enough for the wildlife to forget about me, and I was delighted to see my first chipmunk in the garden!  He spent quite a bit of time at my profusely blooming rose bush, and it didn't take long to figure out why.  He would stand up on his hind legs and reach as high as he could to snag buds, delicately nip them off at the stem and then sit back to nibble them down to nothing but the golden centers.  I didn't begrudge him a few as the plant was loaded with more than he could possibly eat, and it didn't hurt that he was so ridiculously cute to watch.  After he'd eaten his fill he scampered off, holding his tail straight up in the air behind him like a bushy exclamation point.

I hope I see him again as he was very fun to watch, but my house is a favorite hangout for our local barred owl (I heard him out in our big tree at dusk) so that chipmunk is living dangerously if he decides to spend very much time over in my neck of the woods!

~Jess

In Which Connor And I Keep Our Cool

Today got hot enough that I left the house with Connor and took to the mall.  There's a huge mall up the highway from us that's a good air conditioned place to hang out.  We're still getting price quotes on having the AC installed in our house, but the sooner, the better!

After we spent some time circling the mall we ended up in Seafood City; the huge Asian supermarket near the foodcourt.  I picked up all the ingredients for som tam (green papaya salad), which I've made enough now that I don't need a recipe anymore.  And I picked up a large bunch of lemongrass too, which I'm going to try to make some sachets from.  I've discovered I really love the sweet citrus scent of lemongrass, and Connor doesn't seem to react to it.  I think using it to make my clothes smell good would be rather nice.

I bought a large package of Thai chili peppers too, but that was less because I think I'm going to be using that many in my cooking over the next week or two (one or two of those goes a long way) and more because you couldn't buy them individually.  I think I might have to get out the dehydrator and see whether or not I can dry them to store them longer.  If that doesn't work, then I can always pop them in the freezer.  With a few exceptions (like som tam) dried peppers should work fine in my recipes.

After our expedition to the mall, Connor and I dropped the groceries off and then headed to his physical therapy appointment.  We're doing some trouble shooting right now; the little guy needs a new TLSO (Torso Lumbar Sacral Orthotic-- basically a back brace) for his scoliosis, but we have to figure out a way to make one that isn't going to cause him to overheat-- a real danger in the summer time with this kid.  Hopefully we'll be able to figure something out that he can wear enough to help slow down the progression of his scoliosis.  We'd like to hold off on surgery for a few more years!

~Jess

In Which I Cook With Coconuts And Connor Goes Through Laundry

I decided to jump right in today on my Thai cooking quest, and made a pot of tom kha gai soup.  Basically it's a coconut-based chicken soup, cooked with a liberal amount of coconut cream that made this probably the least healthy thing in the entire cookbook I could have chosen to try.  Coconut cream is not exactly low on the calories or saturated fat.

Anyway, despite a slight mishap where the soup boiled over onto the stove (did you know burning coconut cream still smells delicious?) the soup ended up being surprisingly easy to make.  Some of the ingredients weren't things I was going to find down at the local Top Foods, though.  Luckily we live in an area that has a large Asian population, so I had a plethora of Asian grocery stores nearby to choose from that carry everything I needed to make the soup.  I even picked up a few things for recipes I plan to try later-- like some tamarind paste and some smoked chilies. 

Oh, and I couldn't resist grabbing some lychee just to eat by themselves.  I have fond memories of gorging myself on lychee at my next door neighbor's house when I was growing up, so whenever I find them ripe in the store I tend to snap them up.  There's no way I can grow them here in the Pacific Northwest, but believe me when I say that if I could, I would.

The one thing I couldn't find that the recipe called for was straw mushrooms; my guess is that they probably had them canned somewhere and I just didn't see them.  So I picked up some king oyster mushrooms instead, which aren't used as much in Thai cooking but are incredibly delicious. 

So the soup was delicious, even if one bowl of it probably had my caloric and saturated fat requirements for the entire day.  Next time I'll try cooking something a little bit healthier, and maybe a little more complicated too, like some kaeng som (a sour curry).  We'll see how it goes!

Connor tried a little bit of the tom kha gai and wasn't terribly impressed, but then he hasn't been terribly impressed with food in general lately-- he keeps throwing it up.  This weak stomach thing has been going on for about a week and a half now, which is long enough for me to think he probably needs to go see his doctor.  So first thing tomorrow morning I'll be calling and making him an appointment.  Hopefully he's not becoming allergic to his enteral nutrition or anything; that wouldn't be very good.  At least he isn't having any seizures or fever accompanying the issue.

Hope we can get this figured out soon.  It's sure as heck not fun for Connor, and it's not too great for me either.  You wouldn't believe the amount of laundry I'm doing right now.

In Which Connor Loses A Tooth And I Stock Up The Pantry

Connor lost another tooth today-- his last lower incisor he had to lose.  He's got a glorious gap-toothed grin right now, and he keeps putting his fingers in there to feel around.  It's very cute.

We're pretty much skipping the tooth fairy in this house; Connor wouldn't get in the least excited about being left any money under his pillow (if he slept on a pillow, which he doesn't) and Ellen should already have lost all of her primary teeth.  If things go well we do plan to adopt one more child four or five years down the road-- this time younger than Connor-- so maybe we'll end up starting the tradition then.  But for now we just congratulate the little guy and leave it at that. 

Ellen has an absolutely gorgeous smile; apparently the orphanage has a pretty good dental hygiene program.  She eats pretty well too; the orphanage website posts her daily lunch and dinner menus.  Today, for example, she's having pineapple soup and fried squid with basil for dinner.  They eat ice cream a lot-- probably coconut based ice cream, since most Thais are lactose intolerant and there aren't a whole lot of dairy cows wandering around there anyway. 

I've started writing down entrees that I see appear fairly frequently on the orphanage's menu, because I've decided to start trying to find Thai recipes for them.  Obviously the odds of me coming up with exactly the same recipe the cooks at her orphanage use is pretty slim, but I'm hoping that with some of them I can at least get relatively close.  I think that in a stressful situation, having familiar foods can be tremendously comforting, and so while I won't be cooking Thai food every night I do want to incorporate it into our meals a couple of times a week and have some recipes at hand that I know she's relatively familiar with. 

My kitchen pantry is slowly filling up with ingredients from a traditional Thai kitchen, like palm sugar, galangal, fish sauce, kafir limes leaves and tamarind paste.  My collection of mortar and pestles is growing.  And I've started throwing Thai spices into many of my regular recipes; it's amazing what a little fish sauce will do for a steak marinade or a pasta sauce.

That being said, some recipes are going to be easier to recreate than others.  I bought a book of Thai recipes recently and want to start working my way through, but some of the recipes look incredibly intimidating.  At the beginning I had to look up half the ingredients because I had no idea what the heck they were.  I'm slowly starting to understand what most things are, but that doesn't mean I'm going to be whipping up something like "Lotus Root Soup With Pork Short Ribs, Peanuts And Jujube Dates" (page 139) any time soon. 

I think I'll start with pineapple soup.

~Jess

In Which We Go Grocery Store Shopping And I Go Back To Cooking School

Today after stopping by the adoption agency to drop off a letter of acceptance for Ellen's referral (whoo-hoo!) Connor, Jer's brother and I drove up to Uwajimaya, the huge Asian grocery store in Seattle.  There's a closer one in Renton, but we wanted to visit the huge bookstore that's part of Seattle's flagship store. 

I also I wanted to look for the ingredients I need to try and make Ellen's favorite dish, som tam! 

Som tam is a mouth-searing spicy salad that has a main ingredient of green (unripe) papaya and includes a tasty blend of thai chilis, lime juice, palm sugar, garlic, fish sauce, tomatoes, and long green beans.  It's served over sticky rice and usually topped with roasted peanuts or dried shrimp.  I was so excited to everything I needed there-- including the fresh green papaya, which is very difficult to find in the USA.  We're lucky that we live in an area that has such a large Thai population so there is a demand for the ingredients used in Thai food. 

I was also able to find a grater to use for shredding the papaya, which I figure was a good investment since I'll probably be making this dish a lot!  I figure trying to shred it the traditional way is a really good way to chop my hand off, given my general coordination in that department.  I like both my hands attached to the rest of me, so the grater is the way to go. 

I also picked up a few other ingredients that are commonly used in Thai dishes and are difficult to find in our local grocery store: kaffir lime leaves, some lemongrass and a box of coconut cream.  I've got a few other recipes I'd like to try out, and many of them call for one of more of those ingredients.  I think I'm going to have fun playing around in the kitchen in the next few weeks, and hopefully by the time Ellen comes home I'll have a few authentic Thai dishes I can make with confidence.

But of course I need to start with som tam, since it's the one that I know she loves.  Hopefully I can figure it out!

~Jess

In Which We Are All Sickykins

Well it was day two of Glorious Sicky-Family Bonding Time around here, and it was not particularly fun.  I don't get sick very often and Jer catches bugs even less than I do, so it's pretty unusual for us both to be under the weather.  Connor catches absolutely everything that comes down the line, so I'm not really surprised that he's sick.  Oh well; hopefully this means that we'll all recover at the same time, too.  There's nothing more exhausting than being sick and having a kid who is completely over the illness and just brimming full of health and energy.  I'd like to avoid that if at all possible.

So anyway we took it easy today; I made us some dark, extra-spicy gingerbread with lemon whipped cream and we spent the day munching on that and drinking lots and lots of soothing hot beverages.  I did make a small start on getting the backyard cleaned up for winter, but the rain drove me indoors pretty quickly.  I spent the rest of the day balled up on the couch watching the roller derby championships, sometimes with a little guy on my lap. 

Connor basically went from one cuddle session to another today, with a brief interlude for a bath with Daddy after he threw up all over the place.  Luckily he crashed tonight, so hopefully he's getting some healing sleep.  He's snoring like you wouldn't believe either, but it can't really be helped.  The poor little guy is pretty stuffy right now.

I hope we feel better tomorrow!

~Jess

In Which I Cook Things And Almost Show Off My Underwear

Today was a Cooking Day, also known as a Holy-Crap-I've-Got-Way-Too-Much-Stuff-From-The-Farm-Share-In-Our-Fridge-And-I-Must-Do-Something-With-It-Before-It-Goes Bad Day.  So I cooked a whole lot of things.  I made cornbread, which, okay, didn't use up anything in the fridge but dang it, it's cornbread, and I made tomato mozzarella basil salad and steamed green beans (though they started out purple, they steam up green and taste just like the regular kind) and spiced rum blackberry cobbler, which is basically regular cobbler with a fourth of a cup of Kraken Spiced Rum in it for extra awesomeness.  And then I retreated from my steamy kitchen and collapsed in a little heap on my couch. 

A giant bowl of blackberry cobbler topped with vanilla ice cream went a long way towards restoring my energy levels.  Also it was delicious.

Connor spent his Labor Day (of course) having seizures.  He had three today despite a morning dose of Lorazepam, thereby confirming our he's-going-into-another-seizure-cycle theory.  Thankfully they were all relatively short, but he didn't really want to do a whole lot today and I can't say I blame him.  He played with his keyboard for a little while, we read a few books together and did some kneeling and standing work, but otherwise he mostly spent the day conked out.  I hope he musters up some energy for school tomorrow or it's going to be a long morning for him. 

So that's your usual depressing seizure report.  I swear these things are getting to be so routine that the blog is starting to sound like a broken record.  Connor needs to get back to more exciting things, like being ridiculously cute and plotting world domination.  I'm sure if he figured out how to harness his power of adorableness for evil the world's governments wouldn't stand a chance.

So anyway, I also went to the YMCA today where I did my usual weight routine.  I've been going in two or three times a week for a couple of months now, and I'm really starting to see a difference in my roller derby performance.  Derby exercises a very specific group of muscles and neglects others, which can increase the risk of knee injuries.  There's also the problem that you exercise your legs unevenly; derby involves a whole lot of "skate fast and turn left," which means that some girls who don't do any cross training actually end up with one leg much, much stronger than the other and in extreme conditions a less than flattering condition I'll refer to as UBCS-- Uneven Butt Cheek Syndrome.  I would like to avoid both injury and UBCS as long as I possibly can, so the weight room sounded like a pretty good idea.

There have been a number of embarrassing moments in the gym of course, like a couple of weeks ago when I picked up a thick barbell (the kind used for grip work) to move it out of my rack and accidentally dropped it with a tremendous clang, not only making the entire gym look in my direction but also leaving a glorious barbell end-shaped set of bruises on my inner thigh. 

Then there was the near-miss the day before yesterday when I glanced in the mirror, keys in hand, literally on my way out the door of our house to discover that the pair of white basketball shorts I'd borrowed from Jer to work out in were old enough that they'd somehow become translucent and blatantly displayed my teal undies in all their cotton, comfort-fit glory.  Whee! 

But despite a variety of near-disasters and the loss of a good portion of my personal dignity, I've continued going to the weight room, where most of the single guys of a certain variety (the ones who always do their workouts where they get the best view of the ladies in the machine room) have finally figured out that even if I'm the only chick in the free weight room (and I'm almost always the only chick in the free weight room-- at least in the squat racks) I'm there to actually lift weights and, despite their best efforts, not to make prolonged, sexy sexy eye contact in the mirror with them while they're doing their exaggerated barbell curls.  Even the persistent ones generally figure this out and drift off once I start doing squats.  Squats, when done correctly, generally make people look like they aren't getting enough fiber in their diet.  I am no exception to this rule.

I'm not sure that my cobbled-together routine hits everything I should be working out, but I just found out that the army post offers personal trainer sessions for free!  So I think I may try giving their number a call to see if I can get somebody with a little more expertise to work out a great roller derby cross training schedule just for me.  In the meantime I'll keep doing what I'm doing now in the hopes that it will make me a better player. 

And also to avoid that whole butt cheek thing.  Especially if I want to keep wearing teal undies.

~Jess

In Which Connor Revs His Seizure Engine Again And I Sleep Forever

I'm sitting here eating a big bowl of blueberries with lemon curd whipped cream on top.  I made a blueberry pie for a birthday party earlier today and the lemon curd whipped cream (basically I whipped a mixture of cream, powdered sugar and lemon curd-- hence the creative name) was supposed to go with it, but I forgot and left it in the refrigerator.  So now I have to think of things to do with it.  Putting some on top of a bowl of blueberries seemed to be a pretty good start.  I had a big slice of the blueberry pie (one of my favorite pies ever to make in the summer because it's practically no-cook and also delicious) earlier at the party, but I'm pretty sure there's no way you can ever get enough blueberries so that's okay. 

After just over a week seizure free Connor jumped back into epilepsy land with a bang-- he had a seizure that was long and violent enough we ended up using the Diastat on him.  His right side was paralyzed afterwards instead of his left, which was interesting.  Guess the kid likes some variety.

So that wasn't particularly fun.  Otherwise the day was pretty good-- Jeremy let me sleep in until my getting up time didn't even qualify as morning any more, because I sat up listening to Connor giggle to himself over the monitor until 6:30am and so I badly needed the sleep.  Once I finally dragged myself out of bed, Jer and I drove up to Fast Girl Skates in Seattle where I picked up some new roller derby pads. 

I'm on my fifth pair of knee pads now because I keep cracking them, so I switched to a different brand and we'll see how well these work for me.  My wrist guards were really starting to fall apart and my elbow pads were losing their elastic, so I replaced those too.  I also bought a new helmet, as my old one was starting to get pretty scratched up and, even if it wasn't, it was a year old and therefore needed replacing in my paranoid mind.  I've had multiple concussions and so I want to preserve as many remaining brain cells as I can!  Luckily they had a pretty good selection in today; the last time I bought my helmet the junior roller derby season had just started and so they were almost all out of my size. 

Yes, I wear a really, really small helmet, but my tiny pinhead is complimented by my huge clonker feet.  I'm built like a human pyramid. 

So at any rate, other than Connor's seizure it was a decent day.  Most days that involve making pie are!

~Jess

In Which I Am A Food Snob

So it's finally springtime in the Pacific Northwest, and you all know what this means in my household.

Yep.  It's food snobbery time.

We participate in a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program year round and absolutely love it, but in the winter time after a while we get really, really tired of root vegetables and apples.  So when spring hits our CSA suddenly there are all these wonderful fresh greens, asparagus, rhubarb, and (soon!) strawberries and about the same time our weekend farmer's market opens up five minutes from my house.  Somehow the big influx of ridiculously tasty freshly-picked produce goes to my head.  That's when I go a little nuts and suddenly start announcing the dinners I make to Jeremy like I'm running a fancy restaurant instead of slapping something together before roller derby practice.

Like tonight, for example.  Tonight I made a mixed greens salad with smoked salmon, rosemary-dill sheep's milk cheese, apricots, sunflower seeds and spiced blackberry vinaigrette, served with a slice of fresh honey wheat berry bread and garlic butter.  With the exception of the apricots, everything was either from the CSA, farmer's market or homemade.  It took me all of ten minutes because everything was already in our fridge, which didn't stop me from being tremendously proud of it and expecting wild praise for my cooking genius.  Genius, I tell you.  I chopped things!  And I put them in a bowl!  Shouldn't I get some sort of award for that? 

I know from experience that I will continue to announce the meals I make to Jeremy in capital letters until about July, which is when the CSA produce starts really outstripping what I can cook and instead of being thrilled about having so many fresh, tasty things in the house I end up in a cooking frenzy once a week, attempting to cram produce into as many dishes as possible and foisting said dishes off on other people so I can make more room in the fridge for the new delivery of fruits and veggies.  Almost all of these dishes will contain some form of summer squash, including the brownies.  I will not tell the people I am foisting the brownies off on that they contain zucchini. 

So if I show up on your doorstep around mid-July, consider yourself warned. 
~Jess