Jon and Amber

We had some Christmas Tree Drama over the past couple weeks. Of course, I guess that’s to be expected with a three-year-old in the house…  Continue Reading »

OK, it’s time to get this thing revived! I need to make some updates and fixes behind the scenes, but I’m going to try to start making updates at least weekly if not more often.

We’ve put up our Christmas tree, but it’s dark and un-decorated as of yet. We’ve been using an extreme phased approach! First Jon pulled it down from the garage rafters, then a few days later it came into the house from the garage. Then the next day we actually assembled it. Then a day or two later we moved from in front of my desk to its proper location in the living room! Now there it sits, bare. It’s not as sad as you’d think though; something about having a pine tree standing in a room just makes things a little more festive, even without lights and decorations.

Tonight will probably be when we put the lights on, and MAYBE decorations, although no guarantees. With luck, we’ll manage to get all our decorating done before the end of the month, just in time to take it all down, HAH!

I was a working mom for 3 years, and I’ve got a few months under my belt now as a stay-at-home mom. While they are both challenging, sometimes in the same ways, and sometimes in very different ways, I hope to never forget that as a working mom I took some very simple things for granted – things like using the bathroom anytime I wanted, with complete privacy, for as long as I liked.

This morning a poem came to me as I looked at the small human and animal crowd that accompanied me to my first bathroom trip of the day. Fortunately, I only have one kid, a dog, and 2 cats, so it’s not as complicated as it can be for some moms with bigger families, but this is plenty enough for me right now!

Mom’s Potty Break

Walked to the bathroom and
sat down to pee.
Dog’s in here too,
Wants to nuzzle my knee.

Cats in the doorway?
This seems like a trap.
And now there’s a toddler
sprawled wide on my lap.

Privacy’s rare, but I
can’t really gripe;
The only small challenge
is trying to wipe.

At least they’re with me
(I’ll chalk that up to luck);
It’s better than having them
running amok!

Most times it’s not awful,
But now here’s the scoop:
What’s gonna happen
When I have to poop?

Copyright 2011, Amber Balch

We sold the Durango today. We only had it as a utility vehicle, and we weren’t getting much use out of it anymore. And besides, the new W8 Passat wagon is capable of towing and hauling just about as well as the truck, although it does lack the 4×4. But that’s OK. For as much as we were using it, we really didn’t need to keep it around.

So now we’re down to “only” the Passat, the Scion xB, the R32/Jetta wagon, the Scirocco, and the junky parts car sitting out behind the garage. I think it’s a Golf. Long Live the Balch Armada.

I’ve been interested in roasting vegetables this week, because last week I roasted some kale and made crispy, delicious chips. I had heard people talk about making kale chips, and I’d seen the recipes, and they all said the chips were crispy, which I doubted heartily. I thought they’d be fibrous or weird, but I was so wrong – they really were crispy! (And rather addictive… the salt and olive oil certainly didn’t hurt!)

So on Sunday, I diced up half a dozen beets, tossed them with olive oil, sprinkled a little of our unrefined (gray) sea salt on them, and roasted them up. They were tasty, and everyone had a big helping at supper. This was the first time Jon had ever tried beets, and Jeremy called them candy! Monday, I tossed asparagus with olive oil and lemon juice and roasted them. I also made some mock-hollandaise sauce for myself, but Jon just ate them plain with a little salt.  This was the first time he’d ever tasted asparagus, too! (Jeremy tried a bite or two but then said, “I don’t like that one.” It’s ok, I don’t expect him to like anything until he’s tried it 10 times.) Yesterday I roasted broccoli! This time I sprinkled garlic salt on it (after the olive oil of course), and then after it was done in the oven, I put a bunch of Parmesan cheese on top. And then I ate way too much of it because it was the tastiest way I have ever had broccoli, I’m not even kidding.

I’m not sure what to try next… I think Brussels sprouts might be good!

We got our first big snow of the season on Friday night – it was wet and sticky and heavy! So heavy that it was weighing down power lines, and about 175,000 people in the state of Minnesota were affected with outages at some point. Some outages lasted longer than others. In our house, around midnight, the power went out for an undetermined amount of time. It wasn’t out long, and we didn’t really care that the clock was blinking 12:00AM for the rest of the night. (Ahhh, the weekend!) But it didn’t end there… Continue Reading »

I brought home a huge stack of library books recently, most of them books of knitting patterns. I don’t like to buy a lot of knitting books because I don’t think it’s worth buying a whole book just to get one or two patterns that I actually like or would want to make. But does that mean I should never make those patterns? It takes (me) a long time to knit a sweater and I have to return library books within a couple weeks, so of course this is when I’d go ahead and copy/scan the pattern I liked before returning the book… but this week I sat down with my whole stack of library books to page through each one and find the patterns that appealed to me. Then I started copying them. And then I started to feel guilty.

I know it’s not legal to distribute copies of someone else’s knitting patterns, even if they are free patterns to begin with, and you are just giving them away. And it’s also not legal to make copies of a pattern you paid for to give away to your friends. So does that mean what I’m doing is not right? I would not sell these copies, and I would not give them to anyone else – they are for my own use only, because I would not be able to keep the library books checked out long enough to complete the patterns.

I was copying no more than one or maybe two patterns out of each book, which felt pretty reasonable for such an ethical grey area, but then I got to the last book, Classic Knits by Erika Knight, and I realized that I had marked 7 of the 15 patterns in the book – WHOA. I couldn’t bring myself to copy them. It felt like I would be crossing a line if I did. One pattern from a whole book seems to feel OK, but half the book?! I might as well just buy it!

Or, maybe Santa reads this blog…

I hope everyone got a chance to go vote today – finally the awful campaign ads are done for another two years!

We went to Jon’s folks’ neighborhood to trick-or-treat last night. Jeremy was not shy at all, he knocked on doors, rang doorbells, and said “Trick or treat!” and “Thank you!” I can’t stand it when kids just hold out a bag expecting free candy for nothing. The least they can do is say Trick or Treat! Jeremy did great, and we all had a fantastic time.

Happy Halloween!

Oh, and we carved a pumpkin on Saturday. Jeremy named the Jack-O’-Lantern “Paws” — (He actually said this when I asked what we should name the pumpkin: “He names is Paws.”