Things are humming along at our house.   The past week has been full of loving on Kimberly, as she broke her collarbone.  Here she is under a big blue ice pack.  I saw her fall and you know how it is for mothers.  I am convinced it happened in slow motion.  The kind where the brain says “Oh no” a million times before the event is complete.  If I had not seen it, it would have happened in real time. 

She was absolutely precious after the fall.  “I’m OK.  I’m OK, Mom.  I’m OK.”  All said while she was crying her eyes out.  I think she was trying to convince both of us that she was OK.  Perhaps a warning should come from recliner manufacturers that says on the tag:  Warning: A fully reclined recliner that is rapidly closed while your child is gingerly balanced on the foot rest may potentially catapult your child several feet up into the air, enabling a catastrophic fall with the clavicle reaching the floor first.   Or maybe it could simply say, This chair has thrust.  Somewhere in the recesses of my brain I recall ejector chairs either in science fiction or on space craft or somewhere.  I just did not know that we bought one for our living room. 

She now knows how to say clavicle and looks rather cute in her navy blue sling.  Popsicles are the comfort food of choice.  Broken collarbones are the most common breaks in children, so to think we have lived through 23 years of parenting and waited until our little caboose was five must mean that we have missed out on at least one of the common experiences of child raising.  Until now.

Also in the mix are three birthdays in a ten day span.  One down, two to go, and then fireworks for the Fourth of July.  We also have a day trip to an alpaca farm scheduled for these girls who are into fiber and spinning.

The temperature outside indicates that it is truly summer here on the prairie.  From J.R. Miller:  “Our days are like beautiful summer fields as God gives them to us.  The minutes are blooming flowers and silvery grassblades and stalks of wheat with their germs of golden grains.  The hours are trees with their rich foliage of vines with their blossom-prophecies of purple clusters.  Oh the fair, blessed possibilities of the days and hours and minutes as they come to us from God’s hands!  But what did you do with yesterday?  How does the little acre of that one day look to you now?  What are we doing with our time?  Every moment God gives us has in it a possibility of beauty as well as something to be accounted for.  Are we using our time for God?”

Karen still has her head in the clouds.  She really enjoys her camera. 

Hard to believe Kathy is now 21.  The Wooley Ewe, a yarn and knitting store, had nice circular knitting needles that Kathy had chosen for her birthday and she is well on her way to knitting a scarf out of some alpaca she had spun.   It was a joy to see the friendship between Kathy and Karen as they went off shopping for the afternoon, making sure to stop in at The Cheesecake Factory.   I heard that the white chocolate raspberry truffle cheesecake is too good to be true, but that the one with caramel, Butterfingers, and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups in it is even sweeter.  The raspberry lemonade glasses sported glass-tops frozen in sugar.  Must have been a tough afternoon for the girls to live through.  (Why doesn’t anyone ever choose the tiramisu?)

The younger girls put together a treasure hunt for Kathy’s gifts while she was out shopping and cheese caking.  They had wrapped four collector’s Winnie-the-Pooh animals in the miniature size (ebayed weeks before), and of course the hunt was in the woods a few miles from our house.  Here, in the One Hundred Acre Wood, as we affectionately have called it for 17 years, is Kathy and Kimberly finding the last little box which had a bear with fluff in it.  Kimberly was not deterred even in her sling.  Kathy, a Pooh collector, now only has the LARGE Pooh to secure for her collection. 

 James finished teaching Philemon to us and I learned many new things.  We are near the end of a short study in Phillippians and also working on the big (and I mean big!) Bible study question test.  The questions are getting harder.    We also did a time line of the Apostle Paul’s life and have a general map in our heads of where and what.  These are quiet, calm, and cool studies for the evening when James stretches out about half-way in the clavicle breaking chair recliner.  He is very much feeling the lasting life-time effects of the medication he was on last summer and the recliner is the most comfy place to be.  We are thankful that his brain is engaged even when he is tired.

In the past few days I have realized more and more how much I love him.  If only I could lighten his load.  If only I could eliminate the things that stand in the way of his heart’s desires and his vision.  If only I could reverse road blocks and generate resources.  If only.

One thing I am thankful for and that is his job is going rather well, particularly in a down economy and with many stresses in the business world.  His staff has been doing a great job and yesterday he was included on the Millenium Project Committee list.  Now I am sure there is some spiffy name for the committee but I’d never remember it.  Probably something like Innovative Millenium User Engagement Metrics.  If you browse through the 2009 corporate buzzword list at the end of this post, you can use them singularly or put any of them together and sound like you are really with it. 

Every once in a while I get a re-charge on the food menu and that hit me like a ton of bricks last week.  One of those I gotta, I gotta, I gotta do this kind of thing.  I ran across a new-to-me cookbook on discount last week and within its pages I found “My Mom’s Best Meal” and “Editor’s Meals” and “Meals on a Budget.”  It was an easy overview and with just an hour on the computer to come up with a master list … wha-lah! out from my printer came a six month menu.   We are also going to eat through the United States this next year.  More on that later.  Gotta pick a state first.  Got 50 choices. 

The math books arrived.  My middlers walked off with them before I even cracked them open.  What?   A Spangler picking up a math book?  We must be in for trouble.   James came up with a math sheet for them to do the work on that I wish I would have had years ago.

Emily is back on eye-patching for hours each day.  She is discouraged.  She has the ability to see one-eyed and it must be two, not one.  When she is two-eyed, she sees double.  Her 12 years have been filled with much confusion from visual disability.  I am praying for her every day as the patch goes on.  The new blue contact masks the coloboma well.  Her new glasses are a pretty shade of pink or rose or lavendar.  Not sure which.  She loves them and the shop was able to lessen the thick lens somehow.  A much better look.  There are signs that she will have to use a vision therapist, something new to us.

At the same time, if you ask Em what she is doing this summer, she will reply “Growing my hair.”  We stopped off for a quick haircut last week and I did not communicate correctly with the Asian haircutter who was English deficient.  English deficient means three inches too short.    Em has a good attitude towards this error.  Says it is cool for the summer and that she has reverted back to her pre-school Pixie days. 

Both dollhouses are almost complete on the exterior.  It’s nice to have the roofs and trims on.  If hoof becomes hooves, then why doesn’t roof become rooves?  Well, I guess that would not work because then goof would be gooves and that would be ridiculous.

My prescription continues to be rest and prayer.  From it has sprung up wells of gratitude for things I had not seen before.  Thank you, my precious Lord. 

Here’s the fun list of the 2009 corporate lingo.  It makes me crack up when I read this stuff.  At the same time it is a sad commentary.   From www.marketing-jive.com.

1. Value Justification – this was a hot buzzword/phrase in late 2008. We expect that this “buzzword” will continue to be on the lips of many marketers and business owners in 2009.
2. User Engagement – engagement was #9 on our list a year ago but has jumped up into the number two position this year as companies will be working that much harder to get users to engage with their content on their websites.
3. Business Objectives – in 2009, you can expect to hear a lot about defining business objectives as organizations proceed with lean initiatives.
4. Lean – you’ve probably already heard that 2009 is going to be a lean year from the economy to budget spend. After a tough 2008, many organizations will be looking towards lean initiatives to ensure that their organizations remain competitive and profitable.
5. Benchmarking – rounding out the top 5 is benchmarking as companies will be focusing on their direct competition to try and measure their own success.With that here is how the rest of the top 100 play out:
6. Personalization
7. Incremental Improvement
8. Success Metrics
9. User Intent
10. iPhone App
11. ROI
12. Blended Search
13. Value Add
14. Lead-Gen
15. Brand Identity
16. Twittering
17. Bail-out
18. Visibility
19. Digital Marketing
20. Strategy – one of the most mis-used buzzwords out there.
21. Conversion Analysis
22. Online Budget
23. Value Stream
24. Social Networking
25. Actionable
26. Usability
27. Viral Marketing
28. Consumer Appeal
29. Merger
30. Off-line vs. Online
31. Low-hanging fruit
32. Share of Voice
33. Content Optimization
34. Integration
35. Re-skilling
36. Quality Score
37. Long-tail
38. Wiki
39. Head (keyword)
40. Online Marketing
41. Blogging
42. Best Practices
43. Cutbacks
44. Benchmark
45. Torso (keyword)
46. SEO 2.0
47. Business-to-Everybody a.k.a B2E
48. Site Architecture
49. Buying Funnel
50. Mobile
51. Brandstorming
52. Below Zeros
53. Webmaster Tools
54. Loyalty
55. Demand Creation
56. Web Analytics
57. Simplification
58. Restructuring
59. Corporate DNA
60. Dollarization
61. Downtrending
62. Video Optimization
63. Web Conferencing
64. Semantic Mapping
65. Bounce Rate
66. Alignment
67. Keyword Research
68. Lifelong Value
69. Online Evangelism
70. Recession Proofing
71. Mobi
72. Consumer Retention
73. Organic Search
74. Segmentation
75. Online Video Ads
76. SEM
77. The Obama Effect
78. Deferred Success
79. Win-Win
80. Calls to Action
81. Website Re-design
82. Emotional Economy
83. Greenlining – the process of going green in the office as a method of improving the working environment
84. Mobilization
85. Facetime
86. Waste Identification
87. Measuring Value
88. Trended Analysis
89. Enterprise Marketing
90. Voice of the Customer
91. Empowerment
92. Holographic Conference
93. Google Recession
94. Employee Surfboarding
95. Work in Progress
96. Re-engineering
97. Budget Checking
98. Redeploying Assets
99. Return on Invested Capital (ROIC)
100. Embedding

For mushroom lovers, portobellos get the edge.  As they mature, their flavor intensifies.  And while the little white mushrooms compete for attention as party food or a side dish, a huge portobello demands a knife and fork for one large mushroom per portion.  So, armed with a parcel of portobellos and a loaf of homemade white bread, I ventured into the kitchen to see what I could make with these giant brown umbrellas.  I also kept my copy of “Cook’s Illustrated” by my side with its words of wisdom in my attempt to make the ultimate stuffed porto.  The side dish would be fried rice with scallops and snow peas, and I think my associate threw in some almonds and who knows what else.

The portobellos freshly wiped…

…and the ingredients for the stuffing.  Olive oil, salt, fresh spinach slightly steamed, chopped mushroom stems, crumbled white bread, diced onions, minced garlic cloves, rose, chopped fresh thyme, crumbled feta cheese, heavy cream, toasted walnuts, lemon juice, and black pepper.   Somehow there was no room for chocolate.

To avoid a soggy filling, moisture had to be extracted from the mushrooms.  One of the reasons that mushrooms hold moisture so well is that they have a layer of water-repellent proteins on their surface that keeps moisture from going out.  At this point I requested an assistant who scored the mushrooms to break apart the surface so that moisture could be baked out. 

Baking the moisture out, 10 minutes each side.

In the meantime, my associate checked out the facts.

And he threw together the fried rice.  Cooks are like pianists, some throw things together with a creative flair while others produce exactly what is on the printed page.  My assistant is the thrower, both as pianist and cook.  I am the one that produces a replica of the original with cautious variance.  In the kitchen this also plays out in the clean-up process.  One of us cleans as we go in an orderly fashion, the other creatively re-decorates the kitchen as we cook.    We make a funny team, at least that is what our children report. 

In the meantime I cooked the stuffing in a skillet, stuffed the now drained mushrooms, and topped them with buttered bread crumbs. 

The broiled mushrooms.

The fried rice.

The happy chefs.  And it was yummy!