In A Nutshell

We have been passing around an upper respiratory infection for the past 2 or 3 weeks! So, I missed my two night shifts at work this week...and stayed home cooking Indian food, sewing curtains, reading "Arthur's First Sleepover" and "Madeline's Christmas" over and over, baking bread, making birthday party invitations, and drinking hot ginger and sage tea. I'm happy to say that the food was all delicious. The Indian recipes are from the River Cottage Family Cookbook, the bread recipe is from Bread Alone, and the tea is from the Kripalu Cookbook. The fireplace was, of course, blazing all through this ... and today we got the gas bill. FYI, the gas fireplace insert uses a lot of gas. I did discover that placing bread to rise near the fireplace works really well if you have a cool house like us. You just need to keep the towels covering the bread moist so that the dough does not dry out.

Andrew is happy that his grant proposal was accepted. He now has money to buy a GPS and some other supplies for his bird research and to pay for gas. He has decided to do his research near Johnson City on Roan Mountain and Unaka Mountain. I plan to tag along for much of this "research" with the kids...what a great excuse to go hiking and camping this spring and summer!

I have just started to volunteer with the Johnson City Downtown Clinic, which serves the uninsured and patients with Medicaid. I will be working primarily with the Hispanic prenatal patients. I hope to improve my Spanish, gain more experience with prenatal care, and try to start a doula program. I keep mulling over the pros and cons of returning to school for Nurse Midwifery and I hope that volunteering here will help me in that decision.

Astrid is going on 1 year and 1 month and is really trying to walk and talk, but can do neither yet. Andrew thinks she's a budding birder...hard to tell. She does love eating, drawing, and putting things into and out of containers. Ramona likes to yell "Stop it!" when we tell her not do something naughty. Her favorite games are chase and hide and seek, especially when it's time to get dressed, leave the house, eat dinner, or any other timely event. She has become quite the little radio hog, listening to primarily Billy Jonas about 3 times a day, and complaining loudly if we turn it off to listen to our music. I am happy to say that she's a big fan of Gillian Welch's One Little Song, Otis Redding's Dock of the Bay, the Grateful Dead's Ripple, Old Crow Medicine Show's Wagon Wheel, Cat Steven's the Wind , and Leo Kottke's Corrina, Corrina.

I have become fascinated with the McKenzie River area of Canada and want to visit there this summer...before it has been changed for the worse by our quest for oil. On that note, Ramona, Astrid, and I took our first trip on the Johnson City Public Bus this week. It was clean, cheap fare, and the driver was so nice. We'll definitely be utilizing it more often. I encourage all of you to try out your city's public bus...it's fun!

Here are some photos of the past couple of weeks.

At the Park