Such devoted sisters

 Last week my mom fell down and broke her arm. It's not good.

Mom is 90 years old; she suffers from missing my dad (who died four years ago), osteoporosis, and from...just age-related issues. We were told that the break is a clean break—which sounds kind of good, but I didn't know exactly what that meant so I looked it up just now. Basically a "clean break" means that the bone broke, but didn't shift out of place. So, theoretically, if it was in a sling and immobilized, then gravity would help it to heal. But most likely not in a woman my mom's age and with osteoporosis. To put a cast on it, though, they would have first had to put in a surgical plate, and because of Mom's age and health, they couldn't do that. So she came home with a sling on her arm, lots of pain-killers, and a home-nurse to attend to her...every other day? or maybe every day.

That's the backstory for today's post. 

Bruce and I came to Salt Lake on Saturday to see how Mom was doing; my sister, Melanie, was worried that she was going downhill fast. When Bruce and I arrived at her house my Aunt Helena (Mom's sister) and my cousins were all here visiting. Mom was mostly awake for that visit, but slipping between speaking English and Portuguese, and sometimes talking to people who weren't there.

On Sunday she seemed to rally a little bit. At least she was able to say a sentence or two to most of the family who came to visit that day.

But Monday was scary; Mom was in terrible pain. She would be lying back, with pain written on her face and in her body, then suddenly she would jerk up, trying to sit up, because of the pain. She would plead, "Please. Please. Por favor," over and over again. She was talking to people who weren't here—many of them had already passed away. She kept trying to get out of bed, but she's not able to, and we had to try to keep her in the bed. It was so hard to watch, and we felt helpless to know what to do.

Here is where today's story really starts.

Aunt Helena on the left, and Dolores (mom) on the right
(a colorized photo)

When Mom left Brasil to come marry my dad, her parents sent her sister, Helena, with her...to act as chaperone, and make sure everything was on the up-and-up. It was. Dolores married Orlin, and later Helena married Orlin's brother, Norman.

When I was growing up, Aunt Helena's family and our family were like siblings rather than cousins. We probably went to each others' houses weekly—sometimes more often than that. And through the years Mom and Aunt Helena were always there for each other. They had times when they'd get really mad at each other, but they always made up. And in these late years, with both Orlin and Norman gone, they have been even more important to each other.

So on Monday morning, Mom's really bad day, Aunt Helena came over, not knowing how bad Mom really was. She walked into the house, straight to Mom, and tried to give her a gift of a little fleece blanket. She told her she loved her and asked her to please get better. Within minutes Mom started having one of her big, painful struggles. As she thrashed in her reclining chair, and cried out, "Please. Please," Aunt Helena instantly switched from begging Mom to stay with her, to begging God to take her and release her from this suffering.

Aunt Helena asking the angels to come help Dedé .

Here are some other things I saw my sweet aunt doing that day:

Aunt Helena leaned over Mom as she was talking to Papai (dad) and Mamãe (mom); Helena looked up and told them, "Dedé is so tired. Help her rest." Then she leaned over and, stroking Mom's hair, sang a ...I guess it's a lullaby or a nursery song...to Mom. (It's a song I recognized that Vovis used to sing to us: "Na na nene, na na bonitinha..." It translates to something like "Na na baby, na na pretty [one]"—or maybe cutie.)

In between Mom's spasms she kept talking to people; sometimes to Aunt Helena, and sometimes to others. At one point Mom asked (in Portuguese), "Are they here? Is it true?" And Helena, holding her hand, still standing and leaning over her says, "Yes. It's true. Si. Ta certo."

Later Mom asks for Papai and Mamãe again and, covering her with the little blanket she brought, Helena says, "Mom is here. See? She's covering you with this blanket. And Dad is sitting in this chair next to you." Mom asks for Sebastiana, their maid, and Helena says, "Sebastiana is here; she's in the kitchen."

And as my mom cries, pleading for help, Aunt Helena keeps praying, asking God and anyone else who might be listening to relieve her from this terrible pain. Mom kept talking to people from her past, and Aunt Helena kept reassuring her that they were there, and they were helping her; she would tell them, "Say 'hi' to Dedé." It was beautiful, and she was breaking my heart.

The good thing is that the nurse arrived in the mid-afternoon and increased Mom's pain meds, and got her to sleep. The sad thing is that Mom is declining pretty quickly; we are just trying to keep her comfortable as she moves onward.

But the beautiful thing is those two sisters...how they've always been there for each other—even through disagreements. They have always loved each other.

Oh, how I love my sweet mother and her sweet sister!

Look at this!

 It has been a thirty-year process, with the final month of work seeming like thirty years in itself (hm...kind of like pregnancy.). But I have a hardcover copy of my cookbook!

Look at that! Right there with my other cookbooks!

When I was a cute, little newlywed...  

I started collecting recipes and typing them up on my electric typewriter. I drew little pictures to go with some of the recipes, and put each thin, white page into a three-ring binder—with no page protectors. (Sadly, I don't have any of those original pages any more. Which is surprising to me, but they do seem to be gone forever.)

Years went by. I added more recipes—and added more. I bought page protectors; my binder got more and more full. I started copying the pages onto colored papers—White for Main Dishes, Green for sides, Pink for Desserts, and Yellow for Miscellaneous recipes. This made it easier to find each section of the book.

Later I retyped all of my recipes on the computer, and added more; my binder got bigger and bigger and bigger. Then, with my cookbook now saved on the computer, I decided to store my original pages in a very, very safe place. You  know, a place where even I couldn't find them again.

In 2010 I drew new pictures for the divider pages, and colored them in Photoshop on my computer. It may have been at this point that I quit using colored pages for the recipes (it was getting hard to find colors that matched what I already had.)

Old vs. New. When I first started drawing these pages (in the dark ages) stripes were pretty trendy. But it was hard for a self-taught, Photoshop newbie to draw the diagonal stripes evenly; I had to give them up. 

You can see the colored pages behind the old dividers
in the 3-ring binder. I did away with the little, scattered
food pictures on each divider page. Those pages were all drawn by hand and colored with...
...Crayons!

A lot of those little, bitty pictures made their way into
the main body of the cookbook. I have to say,
I do like the new, cleaner look a lot better.
(Hmm. Why was the "Helpful Hints" page
a "surprise"? I don't remember.)

For my 25th anniversary I spent a year editing my cookbook. Man, it was a headache! At one point my computer decided that I had a corrupt file, and would delete the entire cookbook every time I worked on it. So I had to borrow Melanie's copy of my cookbook...

...OK. I'm not sure why I had to borrow Melanie's book, because I should have had the copy that I used every day. Hm.

 Anyway, I borrowed Melanie's book, and retyped the entire thing, and jumped through a dozen hoops so that I could save it on two separate thumb-drives. At that time I'd also bought a wire-o binding machine (a craft one that I got for an entirely different project). So I got my pages printed professionally, and bound them myself. I even sold a few copies to friends and family (as a fund-raiser for Michael's mission).

the 25th Anniversary edition of Loralee's Cookbook, ©2015.

And I announce that I was done. No more adding or editing recipes!

My family laughed at me for saying that; they had seen, for twenty-five years, that this book was a living, growing, work-in-progress.

And, sure enough, I typed up more recipes within a few weeks of publication, and I had to edit things like "heat oven to 35°" or "add 1/2 cinnamon".  So I printed myself a newer copy in 2017. And then I was done. DONE!

Well, we all know how this turned out, don't we?

the 2017 edition of Loralee's Cookbook
I created the super-cute endpapers, and even found a way to bind the whole thing all together. I took this picture today (01/20/2021). The book has broken apart from the outer cover. You can see how worn the pages are—it is the most used book in the house. And all those loose papers in the back? New recipes.

Yes. In the intervening three years I started collecting more recipes. I typed them up and added them to the computer version of my cookbook. But, since my computer is in another room, I had to write or print the new recipes up when I wanted to use them. I couldn't add them to the existing book because the wire-o binding is permanent—it doesn't reopen. (Well, it would, but eventually it would break.) I would scribble recipes on Post-It notes and stick them to my cupboard doors. My kids found them a little aggravating because I didn't put the names of the recipes on the Post-Its. I didn't need to! I could tell what they were, and even how to prepare them, by reading the ingredient lists. 

I took this picture on Jan. 21. These are some of the recipes I've collected over the last three years.

Those are the recipes on the other side of the kitchen—the side I don't work at so much. (Maybe I should take all the Post-Its down now...)

And these are some of the recipes I found when I organized my spice cupboard the other day.

This is the very last page of the 2017 cookbook.
The new, hardbound copy has 524 pages.

About a year ago I found a website that would make my lifelong hobby into a hardbound book for a reasonable price. I recruited my family to check recipes whenever they made them, to make sure that they were written correctly, and I started editing again. (Again, not without a lot of trouble from writing and drawing programs.) The kids figured this would be just one more iteration of my ongoing hobby, but I was planning to give each of them a book for Christmas 2020. 

And I did! I did it! And I am so excited! Loralee's Cookbook is a real, live, hardbound book! 

Are there typos? 

Um, yes.


But it is finished—no more additions or reprints! ;-)

Christmas 2020

 Well, it's New Year's Eve, so I guess it's time to talk about Christmas. Or at least to show off my kids' Christmas gifts. 

This looks like Christmas morning, but it's not.
This is what it looks like the week before Christmas when you have seven kids at home,
all buying gifts for each other.

This year the kids drew names in April so they'd have lots of time to plan and make their gifts. And in October or November a few of them got started. We still spent the week before Christmas madly working on the homemade gifts...but they were pretty cool. And, fortunately, Bruce was able to help quite a bit this year.

The first photo of Christmas morning.
These girls get up an hour or two before everyone else every Christmas so they can hang out in the great room and talk,  and admire the tree with all the gifts around it. Also so they can make themselves look cute for photos...unlike some of us.

This candy jar, and the dolls, belong to Jessica. Santa wanted to fill her jar with candy for Christmas, so he got about a gallon of chocolate kisses, peanut butter cups, and other chocolates. Then he thought to ask her what kind of candy she likes best. Reeses Pieces and M&Ms because they are crunchy. So Santa bought a bunch of those to fill up the jar, and left the other candies for the rest of the family. We still have some.

Leaving filled stockings hanging on the mantel is an iffy proposition. This year Santa placed them on the piano. They had lots of chocolate candies in them.

I was the last one to enter the great room before we started opening gifts so I snagged this picture on the way there (at 8:00 a.m. We've never done it this late in the day before!).

And then I snapped this pic right after I sat down.
Merry Christmas, everyone!

OK. On to the fabulous gifts:

This year Jessica made Kaylie a turtle-duck (all by herself!). It is a character from a cartoon that Kaylie likes, and she loved her little duck.

Kaylie gave Rachel a lap desk. She needed a little instruction, but she did the work herself. The symbol inside the lid is one Rachel designed. She guessed right away that Kaylie had made the desk, because Kaylie is one of the few who's seen that symbol.

Brandon got a set of building blocks from Jason. But not just any building blocks; these are sized to work with a role-playing-game board. They (will) have magnets in them to hold Brandon's buildings together when they play RPGs.

And Brandon made Ryan some Q-tips.
No! That Q-tip box has a leather pouch that will hold earbuds and charging cables when they're not in use, or for travel. (Although it came with candy in it, so I guess it could also double as a candy-holder.)

This is not a homemade gift.
Bruce got a melodica for Christmas—you blow through the tube while playing the keyboard, and it sounds something like an accordion or a harmonica.
I think it was his favorite present this year.

The kids all made me a present this year, too!
They decorated four aprons for me. I particularly like the T-Rex wearing a fez.

About halfway through opening the presents we paused to have our amazing, traditional breakfast. This is also something we've never done before.

Then, back to the unwrapping!

Michael made a fancy gaming box for Jason.
Covered in velvet and lined with satin and brocade, it will hold a deck of cards, and all of his RPG dice. Or, if Jason ever gets tired of gaming (not likely) it could also be a trinket box.

Rachel was one of the first to finish making her gift. She got Michael's name, and she designed some T-shirts for him. I don't know if you can really see it, but the black one has a snake draped over a tree branch and it says "Wake me up when it's less hot."  The gray shirt has a symbol and a saying from one of Michael's
favorite books.

Ryan made Lindsey a knitting bag. It's pretty fancy...made with two inside compartments—one for holding the yarn and one for holding the project. And a pocket to hold knitting needles, too.

And Adreanna's gift from Lindsey was the very first one to be finished this year: a succulent fairy garden, complete with a little bridge. Lindsey sneakily hid in on my plant shelf back in August.

The kids all really liked their homemade presents; it's our best Christmas tradition.

But, you say, what about Jessica? 

Nope. This jacket is not Jessica's homemade gift.
This is something she asked Santa for.

What was Jessica's homemade gift? 

Well, that was the question of the season! 

Adreanna drew Jessica's name, and she had a really great idea. But she was in Vernal Theatre's production of "White Christmas" and didn't have a lot of time to work on it. Because it needed a lot of woodworking (and Adreanna has never done that before), Jason came here to help her out with it. And Brandon helped, and Bruce helped, and I helped, and it floated around our house for a month. Everyone knew it was a homemade Christmas gift, but nobody could guess what it was or who it was for.

Sadly, Adreanna wasn't able to finish it before Christmas (she only had about two days that she could have worked on it). And, even sadder, no one took a picture when she presented her mystery gift to Jessica and everyone tried to guess what it could be. (We couldn't even reenact the presentation, because I've already put away all the Christmas decor. 😉 )

But here are the pictures I took of it this morning:

You can see that it's a flat box, with a hole in the middle. There's also an open space which a drawer fits into. (I didn't get a pic of the drawer.)

I don't think I'll tell you what this is going to be. I'll just leave you to guess, and then write about it when it's all finished. It will be cool, though.

And there was one more homemade gift this year:

Can you see what it is?

I made one of these for each of my kids this year. Rachel was the first one to open hers, and when she saw it she said, "I guess this means I have to move out now." Yes, I served each of my kids an eviction notice for Christmas. Or maybe I just gave each of them a copy of my cookbook—which was my most exciting present this year. The most exciting one I had to give. (I have a lot more to say about this, but it will have to be another post.)

the aftermath
(Oh, look! You can see Jessica's mystery gift
under the left side of the tree!)

Well, we had a really nice Christmas day, and I hope you all did too. And we are hoping for a great new year and wishing the same to you!

Fame is Fleeting

I was just realizing that I didn't ever write about the fate of our prize-winning gingerbread house. Well, I mentioned it briefly on facebook, but didn't show pics.

Lindsey and I went to retrieve our house at the Uintah Heritage Museum (where they'd held the gingerbread house contest) one week after the competition. The museum smelled wonderful after displaying twenty or thirty gingerbread houses for a week, by the way. But when we got there the lady at the museum was very apologetic because our house looked like this:

The candies and frosting had slid off of one side of the roof when the museum staff moved the table the house was sitting on. I think the lady we talked to was afraid we'd be upset, but...whatever.

We thought we'd take the house back home and replace the fallen candies, but when Lindsey and I tried to lift it up, more candy fell off, and the wing separated from the rest of the house. We were OK with that, and when we said we'd just throw it away the museum lady (I should have learned her name!) said she would just take care of it for us.

If you look closely you can see the two roofs (rooves?) coming away from each other. Also the little roof over the front porch fell off.

I thought maybe we'd just take the tower home for a Christmas decoration, but when I touched it the two halves slid apart, the candy slid off of it, and the roof fell off. At this point we decided to collect the foil-wrapped candies from around the house, and the lights, and call it good.

The back wall fell off first. You can see it, intact, in the trash can below my arm as I dismantle the lights.

The funny thing is that the cookies didn't break and the frosting was hardened, but the house just slipped apart at the seams. We have never, in seventeen years of building these houses, had this happen. Usually they last for-ever! When my kids quit wanting to eat them, but before we started giving them away, we once had a house that lasted until late in February. Then I had to smash it in with a hammer before I could throw it away. Not this year's house!

And now you can see straight through the whole thing. No tower; no back walls. Just a condemned home, surrounded by a pile of rubble.

And that was the end of the 2020 gingerbread house.
Fame really is fleeting!

Thanksgiving 2020

Well, it's only a week after Thanksgiving...

We had a lovely holiday. 

Although I enjoy having people over, and I like cooking for people, I had pretty much decided not to invite anyone. Initially this was mostly because I couldn't decide who to invite—our new friends who have kids the ages of my older kids, or our dear friends who have a lot of little kids (and a few who are the ages of our younger girls). But then we were all being told we couldn't have more than ten people in our homes because of...

Well, despite that, I thoroughly intended to have Jason and Adreanna in our home (duh!) which brought our count to eleven, and I invited Bruce's dad, too. 

I never know if anyone will want to make the three-hour drive to come for dinner (we are three hours from everything), so I was delighted that Dad accepted our invitation. He came out on Wednesday, just in time to see our finished gingerbread house before we whisked it off to the contest. (Which reminds me—again—that today is the last day I can go retrieve it. I wonder what I'll do with it now. ?)

I did manage to make all the pies, and the baklava on Wednesday after the gingerbread house was turned in. This is largely due to my family cleaning up the gingerbread mess, and Dad buying us dinner from Subway that night. In fact, things seemed to be going so well that I ignored my planned schedule and got started on the turkey a little late on Thursday. So dinner was about an hour later than I had intended, but it was all good. We enjoyed the time visiting together while the bird was in the oven.

There I am, doing the last-minute stuff.
Or maybe just washing my hands.
Notice all the post-its on my cabinets?
Those are new recipes I've used
in the last year or so.

This year's menu was a little simpler than usual. For the last...three years or so I've thought that Thanksgiving dinner, while yummy, is soooo laden with ultra-rich foods that it's almost too much. So this year instead of a veggie tray accompanied by a creamy dip, I opted for a salad of spring greens, apples, bacon, and toasted pecans with a maple-dijon vinaigrette. Delicious! And instead of the traditional green bean casserole (which is always home-made, none of that canned stuff!)...instead of the casserole I made roasted green beans. It was just right; it lightened the dinner up just enough to make the desserts in the evening a little more enjoyable. At least I thought so.

Our table only seats ten. So we set up another table in the great room and seated six people at each table.
(You can see Dad in the top left corner, visiting with Bruce and the kids while they wait for dinner.)

After dinner Dad told us stories about when he was younger, and about his mission to Peru. And we sang (mostly Christmas songs) together. And then pie, and a little more visiting.

I fell asleep as soon as I got into bed that night. And slept in until ...maybe 8:30 the next morning. Dad stopped by a little later, before he headed back home (with some pumpkin pie and some turkey, of course!). We really enjoyed having him with us.

Traditionally the day after Thanksgiving is our "Decorate the House" day, but I think this year we were all a little tired out. We managed to bring the boxes up from the crawl space, and we got some nativity sets put up, and that's about it. We may have played some games; we may have watched a movie. Bruce and I did walk to Cobble Rock Park (about four blocks from our house) to pick up our prize for the gingerbread house. We had leftovers for dinner, and more pie for dessert, and I went to bed early that night. 

I think we finally finished getting the tree put up and decorated on Sunday. :-)

After going to bed around 9:30 Sunday, and sleeping in until almost 10:00 on Monday, I was fully recovered. Thanksgiving week was filled with long, long, busy days, but it's worth it. 

I love to spend time with my family!