Next Step...

The gift of community was so enjoyable in our life today. I forgot that we are having an infertility issue. The burden that has been front and center in my mind for weeks with no signs of lifting, was suddenly displaced without warning when I began to look beyond myself.

At church this morning, we were challenged to seek God for our next step. As we took the elements for communion, Pastor Scoot encouraged us to reflect and wait on the Lord's voice. I was asking God for clarity about our family and the direction we are to go now. I was expecting adoption or IVF to start flashing before my eyes, but instead just felt a peace and a "check back again soon."

We were supposed to be meeting with our newlywed small group (I think we might have to update the name of our group soon, as we all approach our 18 month mark!) Anyway...Our group leaders had to cancel at the last minute because they and their kids had all come down with the flu and were feeling pretty rough. Immediately the thought of taking chicken noodle soup over popped into my mind. Was this my next step? Possibly. Probably. So off I went to pick up a couple of ingredients.

While at the store, another idea popped up. I should just make a huge vat of chicken noodle soup and invite the healthy component of our small group over for the evening. Jeremy had been less than heartbroken to know he wouldn't have to DVR the second half of the Seahawk game tonight to watch after small group, so having friends here to watch the game was an added bonus.

Bringing soup to our friends who were sick, and lightening their 'to do' list a little, and having people here to eat dinner, watch Seattle get into the play-off's (who would have guessed?!), laugh and care for each other felt so life-giving. It felt like the community we talk about. It is intentionally going out of our way to care for people, and intentionally asking people to be a part of our lives that brings us true life.

I have felt more myself today than in a long while. I am in no doubt that being preset in our community in these ways today was God's next step for me today. I guess you get what you ask for.

Today I was willing and obedient to step out and be who God was asking me to be. It is always more of an adventure to live life that way. I wonder what's in store tomorrow, and I hope I have the strength of faith to walk the path before me. One step at a time.

Happy New Year!!

We welcomed this new year in with wonderful friends sharing much laughter over a game of 'Quelf', toasting with our last bottle of champagne from our trip to Napa this summer. I wouldn't have had it any other way.

After sleeping in late, we woke up and connected with dear friends, Sarah, Tim and Lucy for lunch by Green lake and a brief walk in the chilly new years day sunshine! It was quite the place to be; busy with people trying out new Christmas bikes, scooters, skateboards and other contraptions with wheels and walking excited new puppies around the most wonderful place in the city - just my opinion. I love living here. (You should come visit!)

And now home. Sitting by the fire, snuggled under a blanket, Pandora playing the Glee station, learning about my camera from the book I got for Christmas (last year!), about to dig into the new Donald Miller book Jeremy gave me this year and journal a bit. Just need to make myself a cup of tea and I am set for a couple of hours. Wonderful.

Wishing you all a wonderful, blessed, and joy filled 2011.

Looking ahead

Last day of the year, last post of 2010. I'm sitting here eating leftover pizza while the hubs is out watching 'Tron' in 3D with his friends, thankful he is with people who can truly appreciate the depths of such cinema!

Lots of contemplation today. Ready to say goodbye to this year, and the sorrow and confusion. Praying that 2011 will offer some answers, so reassurance and some new direction - where ever that leads.

I feel as if the past few months have carried me on a wave of waiting. Unable to find solid ground we floated day to day, month to month. Scared to make plans because of the unknown.

The new year brings opportunity to start over, to develop a new way of thinking. I start my 3rd quarter of school on Tuesday and look forward to the new learning ahead.
We have our Doctors visit on Monday and we hope this will offer some answers and perhaps will birth a plan in that arena of our lives.

My desire to be a good student and desire to be healthy are my desire to go deeper in my faith are the three goals I want to be working on. My success in each of these will depend on one thing, Discipline. This is not the first time I have blogged about how much of a struggle I have with being disciplined, but I do believe in Christ I can find what I am searching for and in my striving I can become more of the woman I am designed to be.

I feel that in someways I have become a shell of myself. It's like when your body experiences cold, the blood all rushes to keep the vital organs alive. In our losses my emotional energy has been channeled to keeping the vital organs of life going... getting out of bed, taking a shower, eating. There is little left for the the things I love, photography, menu planning, crafts, but especially friendships. Coffee dates or dinners with girl friends have become almost a distant memory. I can see that my life is less fun, and I feel the lack of joy but it has been hard to know what to do with that knowledge.

Starting a new year, I hope to be renewing myself. Reconnecting with myself and others, and increasing my capacity for joy and hope.

Happy New Year everyone!

Update, Road Trip, Snow, and Great Breakfast

Quick update first, we got the blood test results back and it wasn't a faulty home test, the pregnancy hormone level in my blood had risen from the first draw. Not significantly, and (they tell us) not enough to turn into a viable pregnancy at this point, it is very low but they are not sure what's going on. I have to go for an ultra sound and another blood draw on Monday morning so we are actually hoping for a totally negative result - or of course we would joyfully embrace a very, very high test result too if it meant a miracle baby was going to be making an appearance but that is not something we are realistically considering as an outcome at this point.
I have already felt like I have lost this particular pregnancy twice, once with low blood tests and then again when the physical miscarriage began almost a week after that. To hold onto hope at this point and lose it again would be just too much. However, we pray for miracles and believe in God who preforms them, so it is impossible to totally get the possibility out of your mind. I am just asking God to hold my hope and heart close to His until we have more information.

Even if this is just my body taking time to fully get rid of this pregnancy, there could be some leftover tissue found on the ultra sound and the doctor said it might be possible to use it diagnostically in finding a cause of the recurrent miscarriage so at the least there is hope that some good may come from this.

Take a look at this, a note written to us from Zara the best 5 year old in the world (I may be biased) when she heard about our miscarriage she wrote this. I love it even more because it is in her 'just learning to write' writing but it says, "I'm sorry you didn't have a baby I love you" I almost lost it every time I see it because it comes from this pure place of her wanting to enter in with us, kids are amazing.



Road Trip!! Jeremy and I took a short trip over to Spokane, WA to visit some of his good friends and we drove over in same drizzle but woke up yesterday morning to 6 inches of snow!!! It was beautiful and continued falling throughout the day. However, it meant that the 'check engine' light that flashed at us on the way over the mountain pass could not be ignored for the journey home, so he and his friend Josh did some catching up while they changed spark plugs in the car! Their efforts helped us get safely home.

Last night we connected with another of Jeremy's closest friends who works as a trainer for the Gonzaga basketball team, and watched their game against La Fayette. It was only my second time attending a college b.ball game and it was really fun. Afterward we went for dinner and drinks at one of Jeremy's favourite watering holes, The Elk. It was a brief trip but we did get to connect with friends and see and experience some of Spokane's finest; including the dumping of snow.

Look at my stud hubby brushing snow off the car so we could go out to yummy breakfast at Ferguson's cafe - If you live there you probably know about this place but if you come East for a visit check it out. I have to say, on another trip over to Spokane this year we were introduced to a couple of other GREAT breakfast places. People of Spokane never have to go hungry in the mornings!





We left that beautiful snow scene behind and are now back on the west side (no snow here), watching the Huskies vs Nebraska in the Holiday Bowl; with friends on our couch and pizza in our tummies we appreciate the simple pleasures of home. At this point Washington are winning 19 to 7 but who knows how it will end?!

I can't believe our Christmas vacation is almost over already. Jeremy is back at work Monday and I am back to school Tuesday. Better start switching gears so it is not too much of a shock to my system.

I am looking forward to celebrating the New Year tomorrow, and to having a new start. I am always empowered by January 1st and this year, I want to put 3 goals ahead of me with intention (thanks Katie). I just have a feeling 2011 is going to be a good year.

I am cheating on Pumpkin...

...with Cranberry.

Seriously. My obsession with Pumpkin and squash has more recently given way to an obsession with cooking with cranberries. I think this began with the enormous bag of fresh cranberries that I picked up very inexpensively at Costco and couldn't bear to watch go to waste. Here is a list of some of the ways I used them.

Cranberry swirl cheesecake, which was so moist and so very easy to make. We had this for Christmas day dessert, but I made it the day before and it lasted well. I love this recipe. I would pay more attention to how I did the swirl because I ended up with just a red top, but it tasted good nonetheless! The crust was also crunchy which is an important factor in my cheesecake judgment, I used chocolate Teddy Grahams which worked great.

Friends over for dinner was the perfect opportunity to try out this little creation, and it didn't wail to impress. Chocolate-Cranberry parfaits. I would say that these were not the largest portions, and I mention that more so you can make the best choice for serving them. I do not have glass dessert dishes but used stemless wine-glasses for these. However, I think they would have looked better in champagne flutes, even the plastic ones if you were serving these at a party. You need a little bit of time to make the cranberries ahead but they were well worth it. I didn't have the special sparkling sugar and used plain old granulated sugar but they looked very similar to the picture anyway. Scrummy.

On Christmas day morning I wanted to make something delicious that would also tide us over until Christmas dinner but was not too heavy. Earlier in the summer I ha made this recipe for Pain Perdu, and made it for brunch with friends and it was delicious. I thought I would tweek the sauce just a bit and use berries I already had. Fresh cranberries. and some frozen blueberries and raspberries picked fresh last summer. It turned out so well, and went from a taste of summer to a taste of Christmas in the simple switch. The stale french bread makes wonderful crispy french toast and not the soggy kind that I can't stand. This is a great make ahead breakfast/brunch because you can make the egg mixture the day before and the berry mixture and then the next morning just dip the bread and cook it, and heat the topping while they cook. The powdered sugar (icing sugar) sprinkled on top makes them look so fancy! I love to use my powdered sugar spoon that I think is the cutest invention ever, but is totally not necessary to make this meal look tasty!!

Finally I saw this recipe for Meringue-Topped Cranberry curd tart and have been needing an excuse to make it so an invitation for a holiday meal with Tim and Sarah was just the ticket. This looked like such an interesting combination. I love lemon meringue pie and the combination of tart and sweet so I thought this sounded like a festive variation. I was right. It was quite an involved recipe and I am not sure it is something I would pull out every year, but it was tasty and delivered a good balance of tart and sweet. Here are a few pictures I snapped along the way.





Here is the Pain Perdu sauce, and the Chocolate Ganache Tart - oh my goodness, this was a dangerous find for me. I used orange zest in the crust and it gives it a really wonderful balance to the rich ganache. I have dreamed about this tart for the past 6 nights, it's that good!


So if you have cranberries, I suggest you try out one of these delicious ways to use them up!

Fruits and veggies and blood tests

Last night our darling friend Maggie stopped by armed with ingredients to make us all some beef stew - it was amazing, as is she. As Maggie was getting ready to leave, Jeremy noticed a big truck in the driveway and announced the arrival of our delivery from Full Circle Farm. Jeremy had singed me up as part of my Christmas present and we will get a box of local organic fruits and vegetables every 2 weeks delivered to our door. There are also options to get organic mile from a local dairy, pastured meats as well as local bread, eggs and cheese to name just a few things.

They also deliver local made chocolate, and in our first order Jeremy had included a bar of their Christmas Gingerbread flavour! He knows the way to my heart.

We just feasted on some turkey sandwiches made with some of the lettuce we got in our box! Delicious.

Sadly Jeremy came down with a nasty flu bug yesterday and is feeling pretty sorry for himself today. Have you seen the 'Man cold' clip on Youtube? It's like that in our house today. He just needs a little bell to ring! ha ha.

So he is laying next to the fire, I am snuggled in a chair about to crack open the book he gave me for Christmas and excited to just relax and let the time go by in this dreamy snuggly way.

On another note, we did have to get up early this morning to go to the Doctor and get some blood taken. On Christmas eve I took a home pregnancy test to make sure everything was out of my system but it came up with a faint second line still so now we are facing the prospect that we might need some intervention to get things out.
Geesh, feel like we can't catch a break with this whole pregnancy thing - but at least we have each other.

Boxing Day

Not going to lie, this Christmas was tough. I think I had underestimated what this day would mean. Somewhere in my mind, Christmas was the date. The date we would announce a pregnancy in some creative and festive way or the date we would be laughing and dreaming about how this year would be the last Christmas without a baby, and how different it will be next year. This day would be significant in the most joyful of ways, but that's not where life has brought us.

My heightened emotions made if difficult for Jeremy to know how to care for me. My hope for what this day would be had been dashed by life and yet my expectations were still high; impossible to meet. We survived, but not before I had a 'Dawson's Creek' -worthy meltdown. All was resolved and turkey was then consumed in huge quantities. All was well with the world again - at least on some level.

We skyped with my family which was special and it was so good to see their faces as they opened the gifts we had packaged up and sent all those weeks ago! Then we watched the Royale family Christmas special which was such a great reminder of home and Christmases past ("Mary's in the Dyson", ha ha ha)

Who knows what will happen in the year ahead? God does. And the lightness I feel after the grief of yesterday is refreshing. There is always something healing about a really good cry; it cleanses the soul or the spirit of something. I feel restored. Hopeful once again for what is ahead.

Praying your hope was renewed this Christmas season and that you are beginning the new year with a restored purpose and confidence in the goodness of our God.