OK, so I’m at home doing my regular rigmarole with the boys and I get this interesting phone call from Conan:

Conan: Hey Love, do you know where my passport is?

Melissa: Of course. What for?

Conan: Well, I’m being sent to a conference for work, and it’s in Florence.

Melissa: Ha ha ha… Florence…Michigan?

Conan: No, seriously, Florence. Italy.

Melissa: No way!

SO, despite the fact that finding a way for me to come too was not something Conan even thought of, I of course immediately began scheming to find a way to make it work. I mean, come on, if we can’t take the opportunity to go to Italy when the hotel and Conan’s airfare are covered… when would we EVER go together?!  So as it happens, we just refinanced our home to lower the interest rate and save $26,000 over the life of the loan (hey, we’re one of those crazy people who actually intend to stay in one spot and own our own home), and as a side benefit, we get to skip a mortgage payment. So, I’m thinkin’ that looks a lot like a plane ticket to me! Now we just need to find a way to convince some one (or some ones) to take three little boys for a week in April… any ideas? What would you do?

I’m not exactly sure where "there" is, but I’m pretty sure it’s more organized and attractive than "here." We actually completed this phase of this project on the 11th, but life has been busy, so here it is. We’ve been prepping the materials for a long time, and finally assembled the whole thing one Saturday. Poor kids were sequestered to the upper quarters while we worked for a few hours to really bring the thing together. Except for Keane. He just slept through it all on the couch. Power drills, saw, expletives, didn’t phase him a bit.

No, we’re not finished yet. We plan to install pull-out towers on the sides and perhaps shelving or drawers at the bottom. We were going to put out all our media, but without the shelving/drawers it would just look pretty messy, so we just have the basics out and available, and the rest are still in boxes. Our VCR is broken thanks to two little people who thought it should be filled with papers and such at one point, so the majority of our kids’ movies are unusable anyway. Truthfully, I kind of like it that way.

Ah well, we’re getting there. 

I just had to share an interesting conversation I had with Neils this morning:

Me: Hey Neils, we should make some birthday cards and gifts for Great-Grandma Holben because it’s her birthday next week and she’s turning 90!

Neils: 90?! Woah! Do people automatically die when they turn 90?

Me: No, we never know when someone is going to die. People die at all different ages.

Neils: Wow. I’m going to live to be a thousand! I want to preach the gospel to everyone all over the world until everyone knows the gospel!

Me: That would be awesome!

Neils: Then we wouldn’t even need missionaries anymore… oh but I guess we would always need missionaries, in case sometimes we forget. I’m so totally going to do that.

(And… Don’t you just love his self-portrait?) 

So, for most people eating from food storage is, well, an I’ll-do-it-when-I’m-dying-of-starvation experience.  In other words, not so tasty.  However, that just doesn’t happen at our house.  I don’t know what the green thumb-equivalent of cooking is, but Missy’s got it.  Who knew that you could make so many really tasty dishes out of rocks, dirt, and twigs?  

My favorite things about not store shopping:

1. Whole wheat homemade tortillas – Wow. Who needs fresh vegies when you’ve got those. Really, I never knew tortillas could be amazingly good. Of course, it’s probably mostly just Melissa’s amazing cooking magic. One of these days I’m going to be a good husband and buy/make her a tortilla press.
2. Bread. Good (really good) bread. She’s moved to making more of the skip-the-pan-artisan-style breads. so tasty & fancy. I think that may partially be a product of having a short toaster oven and that bread in pans gets burnt on the top because it rises too much, but still.  Delicious and beautiful.

But most of the time I don’t notice we’re "roughing it." Melissa just makes such good food no matter what. Shift to vegitarian? No problem. Vegan? Sure thing. No groceries? Piece of cake. How does she do it? I have no idea. Amazing. Simply amazing.

So I heard a great idea from my sister Carrie about doing an experiment and living impromptu on your food storage for 6 weeks. No last minute stops at the grocery, just START. So I offered the challenge at the Bare Necessities of Motherhood site. Well, despite the lack of enthusiasm, I decided to try the six week challenge for myself. I am currently on week four of the official challenge, though really, I hadn’t been to the store for a week or two before that.

I just thought I’d share what I’ve learned so far:

You can make cake, cookies, brownies, pancakes, breakfast cake, and scones without eggs.

Snack foods are important.

Cleaning supplies are also important.

You can never store too many spices.

I love my deep freezer– it is like an endless resource of "fresh" vegetables.

Potatoes are my friend, and carrots, too.

I am grateful for Macaroni & Cheese and Ramen Noodles.

I really like baking bread. Just not every day.

Canned tomatoes make all kinds of things possible.

We eat a lot of sugar and refined flour in this country.

Soy milk from scratch rocks.

To elaborate: We don’t eat cold cereal, so I’m pretty used to having something else for breakfasts anyway, so at least that was not an adjustment I had to make. Some things we’ve eaten over the past 4 weeks: Spaghetti and Meatballs with homemade sauce, scones, burritos with homemade flour tortillas, curry and rice (varying types), fried potatoes, Indian Fry Bread, garbanzo picadillo and homemade masa tortillas, soup and crusty homemade bread, "Snobby Joes" (sloppy joes made out of lentils), french fries, stir fry (varying types), some fancy cornmeal-coated tofu thing, and various boxed meals for lunches. I can’t say how that church dehydrated soup tastes because we’re not that desperate yet. Though, I have realized I don’t even like the fancy Bear Creek Soups, so I’m not optimistic about that. I’d rather just take several different kinds of canned veggies, some dry cooked beans, and make my own soup. Conan says we should do this more often! We’ll see what he’s saying in two more weeks… we’ve run out of pretty much all fresh produce except carrots, beets, and potatoes (thank goodness for long keepers!) and we’re totally out of snack foods except popcorn. I guess crackers will have to be next on my list of things to learn how to make!

OK, I just think it’s hilarious. I’m a California Summer Baby, so August is my favorite month, hands down. Six months of winter is not my ideal climate. Neils is in my boat, apparently, because no matter how bundled he gets, within ten minutes he’s ready to come back inside. Ah well, I am so glad that at least someone is enjoying this!

Nope, they aren’t falling down in either of these photos. They just like to crawl around in the snow. They seriously look like little polar bears out there rolling around! So fun. This was a "warm" day, by the way (see how the grass is peeking out of the snow?) It must be at least 25 degrees out!

Okay, so I’m two months late. What can I say, his birthday is three days before Christmas, for Pete’s Sake! I’m gonna have to see if we can reschedule these in the future… So we did celebrate on his big day, here are some photos for proof. My camera apparently was not prepared for the event as we ran out of batteries before we even got to the cake and candles bit. Thanks, Bente, for filling in for me! Sorry some are sideways, I figured I’m late enough as it is already, you can handle it.

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