Wow, I haven’t updated this in forever. In a nutshell, this fall has been insane. My son started preschool and he loves it. He attends Nature Preschool and it is really fantastic – they learn a lot about biology and ecology and stuff like that… and they spend half their morning outdoors no matter what the weather. The teachers are really wonderful with the kids, very patient and gentle, just amazing! This is such a good fit for him. I have volunteered a few times and my daughter loves it too. When she is old enough, I hope to consider that school for her as well.

In October, both kids had what I’m certain was H1N1. They both had the symptoms, right down the list. I felt a little bit sick and had a really deep, itchy cough, but maybe I am old enough that I might have encountered a similar virus along the way. In any case they both came through that without any problems – no need for the doctor at all. There were tons of kids out of school during that time in Midland and the news said 99% of the flu here in my county was H1N1.

Then, just when both kids were done with the flu, we started remodeling the kitchen. We do all our own work and our cabinets came in the first week of November. We did a couple of marathon weeks of demolishing and putting the new stuff in – it is not totally finished, but it is totally functional.  We still need to do the flooring, backsplash and painting.  But I am moved in, and it’s a pleasure to work in such a beautiful kitchen.  I’m really pleased with how well it’s turning out.

After all of this, unfortunately I had a mono flare up.  I talked with my doctor about this and she said that it might not even show up on a blood test, but it’s enough to make me feel unwell.  We talked about some supplements to try and I’m going to give it a go here in earnest and see if I feel any better.  It doesn’t help that I have gotten so little uninterrupted sleep over the past 5+ years.  I was reading about chronic Epstein-Barr virus and it sounds like it is not common – most people get it and don’t even know it – some people get mono from it but most of those people don’t ever get mono again.  Not me, lucky me!  I guess if I’d have gotten it in high school my mother would have made me stay home in bed until I was better.  That won’t happen with a 38 year old mother of a newborn and a 2 year old.

I am looking forward to spending some time with my family over Christmas.  It will be so good to see my mom, my dad and step-mom and my step-mom’s family.  And I hope to do some skiing and snowshoeing as well.  I hope all of you have good holidays this year.

Today I bottled the beer, with a little help from my husband who learned to use the bottle capper. It sure goes faster with two people working! I tasted a little right out of the carboy and it sure has a good flavor, even now when it’s young and newly in the bottles. I am very excited to taste it around October when it should be ready. I might like it even more than the English brown ale I made in the spring.

We had a pretty good weekend. I unfortunately caught a tummy bug my son had. It was weird, because he puked one time at night, then didn’t puke again – but his appetite was terrible and he kept saying his belly hurt. A few days after that, I got very nauseated. I am not a puker and have to be quite sick to puke (the house will be having dry heaves and I have only puked once), but I just sit there feeling nauseated and miserable. Unfortunately since then, I have had annoying (not bad, just annoying and slow to go away) nausea and a poor appetite… some foods have tasted all wrong too. But I think it’s finally getting better.

We went to my husband’s parents’ summer home on Lake Huron for an overnight Saturday night. Had a canoe ride, a bonfire, caught an art and craft show the next day and went to some cool little shops. I talked to a man who had his loom set up, he was making rugs. Got a lead on weaving supplies although I prefer to support my local shop. Went out to lunch, then back to the beach house where I did some reading and took a nap. Got a bunch of knitting done too. It was a good weekend. Just wish I hadn’t been feeling so pukey! Then the weekend could have been just about perfect.

I just started another batch of beer today, this one is Scotch ale, from a Brewer’s best kit. I learned the hard way about making sure it doesn’t boil over… and it can happen in a flash, I had my back turned literally for 2 minutes and suddenly it was going on the floor! And it all stuck hard to the top of the stove. What a mess! Luckily I was right there and got the flame down fast. Otherwise no mishaps – can’t wait to taste it! We are still enjoying the English brown ale I made at the beginning of summer.

Two months since I’ve blogged! I am not sure what happened exactly. I just haven’t really felt much like blogging. Now that the end of summer is here, we have been getting ready for my son’s preschool. He is going to be attending nature preschool which has us all pretty excited. I am looking forward to volunteering, I am able to bring my daughter with me so that will be really nice. His school starts mid September so we have a couple of weeks yet.

I have been trying to implement some aspects of the Flylady program here at home.  It’s a system to help keep one’s home clean and organized.  I do not follow it to a “T” but there are a lot of things I am trying here to see if they help.  Now that I am finally getting better sleep and not feeling so run down, I want to get this house in order.   It is taking a while for the house to really look OK but I figure if I keep picking at it, it will get there.  One of the biggest problems is the toys.  We are talking about taking most of the toys to the basement and setting up a play area down there.  I am a little concerned about friends being here, because there are things down there that I don’t want anyone getting into – such as my husband’s electronic and computer stuff, the Nordic track, the trim we have been staining, etc.  I am sure we will be able to work something out.  I would LOVE LOVE LOVE to have my living room back!

We have also been talking about gutting the kitchen and putting in new cabinets and a new floor.  It needs it badly – half of the drawers are being held together with glue and nails, but the cabinets now are so cheap, they are all particle board and that is just falling apart.  However, it is very expensive, even when we are going to do the work oursevles and we will be frugal with materials.  I do not require new appliances or the fanciest of expensive materials.  I do however want to put cabinets in that will not fall apart like the ones in here now!  When you look at the expense and the time, we really owe it to ourselves to at least put in midgrade cabinets.  We do have a plan drawn up and have gotten some quotes but the cost of it all turns my tummy.  This house does desperately need a new kitchen, should we need to sell at some point, including if and when we build out at the dirt (which is now weeds).

Health wise we have done OK this summer.  I am continuing to not run, because I still have plantar fasciitis pain.  I do miss running.  I plan to get back to it as soon as I can.  I have managed to lose about 10 pounds, because my daughter has slowed up enough with the nursing that my body is finally letting go of some of this weight.   I have a very long way to go, but it is a start and I am feeling very positive about it.  I did get my blood checked at my last doctor’s appointment and that showed no signs of active mono (yay!) and everything else was normal and squeaky clean.

It has been very cool here this summer and that’s great for me, even though gardeners/farmers are probably quite distraught.  In July I had the lowest power bill ever for July.  I am expecting August to be better still.  And that is great, considering we have to keep finding ways to do more with the same salary.   Everything is expensive, food prices have not really improved, except perhaps the price of milk.  Otherwise, it’s the same old thing, with unemployment being 15% now in Michigan.

Sophie is talking up a storm, but continues to be a pretty typical argumentative and tantruming 2 year old.  She has never been easy and she is still not easy.  But there are many times when she is delightful and very loving and sweet, so I try to focus on those times.  I think having a break when Will is in preschool will be good for both of us.  They fight constantly!  Ugh.

Maybe I can keep up with this a little better.  The beer I blogged about a while back turned out great.  I have a kit for Scottish Ale waiting but haven’t gotten a good day for making beer recently.  Now that I’ve done one kit, it shouldn’t be so difficult to start another.  I just need a good chunk of time to do it.

I have not been able to run for a long time, not since the end of May, due to having a very small but very sore spot on my arch. I have foot “issues” – they are almost nearly flat (found out about that when I had pain from running track in high school), I over pronate, I have bunions. My shoes have been fantastic and really had prevented the ankle pain I always had when I’d run before, or even walked. I’ve had arch pain before but this time it was just not really getting better. It got to the point where I couldn’t walk on it in the morning and when I put shoes on, it felt like I was walking on a lump!

Off to the doctor I went. It turns out she is a runner too and had just been to this big conference. She gave me a bunch of exercises and stretches – plus motrin for 10 days and rolling my foot on a frozen water bottle. One of my exercises is an activity I enjoy anyway – picking up objects with my toes! I saw her less than a week ago so it’s hard to tell yet if it’s helping. I think that it’s pretty inflamed, and it will take a while to go away. I am not allowed to run at all right now, but I can power walk, which I did the other day. That went well with a lot of icing and stretching. She was also not at all alarmed about my weight gain, she said it was muscle and encouraged me to keep going!

I also had a bunch of blood tests. I have suspected that I never got rid of the mono I got two years ago, and now have chronic Epsteinn-Barr virus. I will find out early this week what, if anything, turned up. It could be still fibromyalgia and it could also be that I just need more time to recover from 5 years of never having enough sleep. Will update on that later!

This month, it’s Coxsackie virus – otherwise known as hand, foot, and mouth disease. Not to be confused with hoof and mouth disease, which is a disease of cattle. This one starts with a really high fever, then progresses to a child with sores in his/her mouth, and the whole thing is nicely decorated with extreme fussiness. Sophie went from fairly OK to suddenly screaming Thursday evening, and we didn’t know why. Then Saturday I saw the blisters in her mouth. She never did get a hand/foot rash but she did have 1-2 spots on one hand. Not much you can do except tylenol/motrin and benadryl. By the way benadryl does not make my kids sleepy. It does not wind them up, but it doesn’t make them sleep either. Lucky me right?

Yesterday Will had a fever and was puking but he went to bed, stayed there all night and was fine this morning. Appetite not the best but he’s nibbled a little here and there all day. Sophie seems herself for the most part but I can see spots in her mouth, including a big one under her tongue. No wonder the poor thing has hardly been able to nurse! And it is crazy contagious… so we’ve all been staying in.

I was feeling OK, tired, but today my throat is sore. However it could be mono again, which flares up whenever I don’t get enough rest. Before the kids got sick, I was up several nights coughing from a mild cold. It’s always something…

My beer seems to be doing well. After 48+ tense hours of wondering whether it would start fermenting, suddenly I had lots of foam! It’s still going strong and once it’s done I’ll get it bottled if the specific gravity looks good. I know I said I’d take a picture of the bubbling airlock but there really isn’t much to see, just a blurp now and then. I’m excited that things are going along like they should. What a fun biology/chemistry experiment!

This is my first of hopefully many adventures in beer making! I used a Brewer’s Best kit, English Brown Ale. Here are the contents of the kit:

And here is some of the equipment from my brewing set I used:

The first step was to make a “tea” out of crushed crystal malt. (The unfermented beer is called “wort” and this is the first step for this kind of beer.) First the crushed malt is put in a stockinette bag, while a pot of water gets its temperature taken. (Note my beautiful 1970 harvest gold cooktop. It’s an original!)

Then as the water heats, the bag of malt steeps.

It is a lovely color! And the smell! SO good.

You could get a good steam facial with this!

Once the crushed malt steeps for 20 minutes, the “tea” is brought to a boil and the malt (sugars) and bittering hops are added. Here are the hops, processed into pellets:

The hops are added to the boiling malt sugar solution and continue to boil for a total of 55 minutes. At that time, the flavoring hops are added (a different variety to give another layer of flavor). I had two types of malt in this kit – a can of syrup and a bag of powder. The powder malt made some crazy foam when I added it and it was a little bit scary! Eventually it all settled and happily boiled away. Made every room in the house smell good!

Once the wort was done cooking, into an ice bath to cool to 70 degrees.

After the wort came down to temperature, I poured it out of the pot and into the ale pail. The sediment left at the bottom of the pan actually has a name – it’s called trub!

Water goes in after that,then we check specific gravity. Just like chemistry class! The specific gravity will go down once the beer is done fermenting.

After that, yeast is added…

Temperature is checked again… (can’t see it well but it’s about 75)

Then the pail is lidded and fermentation lock applied.

Notice the order. That was my first mistake. I put on the lid and pushed in the fermentation lock, and the little rubber grommet went into the wort. This was followed by much swearing and fishing in the wort for the grommet. Once it was located, the fermentation lock went in the lid BEFORE applying the lid, then lid was applied and water was added to fermentation lock.

Now the beer is in its resting place for 3-7 days. Will take pictures of bubbling fermentation lock. Once bubbling has stopped, and specific gravity has decreased to stated number, then bottling process can begin.

It was my birthday last weekend and I turned 40. I don’t understand why people get all upset about turning 40 (or 30 or whatever) because I really don’t feel any different than I did at 39. Besides, I don’t give a crap what people think about me anymore and that’s very freeing! Here’s to turning 40! It’s good!

The birthday festivities stretched out over a week. Last Friday night I went to a friend’s house (My Big Blue Comfy Couch) for mojitos, then out to a bar for some dancing. Stayed up way too late and was very tired the next day! On Saturday, because it was Memorial Day weekend, we packed ourselves up and drove to my in law’s summer home about an hour away on Lake Huron. It was a nice overnight up there with the family, but for some reason I cannot sleep up there, so again a second night of not enough. By Sunday (my actual birthday) I was pretty tired! But we got home and I opened my gifts – the most interesting being a beer making kit. All the equipment I need to make beer except the ingredients! I’d asked for this because it’s something I’ve wanted to try for a while. I just picked up a kit for brown English ale and I’m excited to get started. Hopefully we have enough bottles, guess we need to finish up that 12 of Bass so I’ll have enough of them!

That evening we had dinner at a local Japanese steakhouse that has good sushi and they cook dinner right in front of you. The kids enjoyed that even though they fussed through dinner! We bribed them with ice cream which helped a little bit! We were too full for cake so the next day (Monday) we had cake. It would have been a lot of candles so I asked my husband to figure out how to do it in binary – which you can see here.

On this past Friday, the girls who couldn’t make it had a brunch for me. I got some wonderful gifts – a nice selection of Bath and Body Works goodies, a gift certificate, and another goody bag filled with incense, candles, candle holders, earrings… wonderful things! I have been wanting to burn more incense and candles and have been trying to create little pockets of things that make me feel good in this house of chaos! It’s time for me to dig out all those things I packed away when I started having babies and put them back out. Anything to create a little corner of serenity. My kitchen window is now a work in progress. I still need to stick some hooks in the soffit so I can hang a few things up. I love windows with glass things hanging in them to catch the light.

I had a very, very good birthday this year. 40 is good and all I can say is that life keeps getting better. It should be fantastic by the time I’m dead!

An Adventure in Home Construction has been updated with planting news. Fun! It will be nice when we are actually living out there and we can actually maintain a garden.

Things have been going well here. My husband and son went off to help his parents with some house work this weekend so Sophie and I had some girlfriend time. Except for her couple of bouts of extreme crabbiness at inopportune times, we had a pretty good time. She has been sleeping well (all night long in her own bed – GASP!) and I’ve been feeling a little better. It is taking a really long time for me to actually feel good. But I finally feel like I am coming out of the baby fog and wanting to do little things like wear more jewelry and accessories (now that little hands aren’t always yanking on them) and do more things to make our house look better. It’s a huge undertaking, though, because I have a lot of cleaning to do and that always takes up way too much time!

On the running front, I ran a mile a couple of weekends ago for the first time and this past weekend, I ran our side street two full loops. I was pushing S in the jogging stroller and took a lot of walk breaks but we went about 1.25 miles. (It’s 1.5 miles round trip to do it twice.) I am at a point where the novelty has started to wear off and this is WORK!!! I know I will get stronger and get past this point, and get to a place where a little run down the road feels good and doesn’t feel so much like work. But, I am enjoying the results – I have a little more energy, I am sleeping a little better, I am looking a little better. It’s helping so I’m going to keep doing it. Sometimes I really have to kick my butt out the door but I know if I keep going, I won’t always feel like that.

I have been working on trying to get the flower beds cleaned up here. Boy are they a mess. They have suffered from 4+ years of pregnancy/infant/sleep induced neglect. There is a ton of work to be done but I keep picking away at it and hopefully by the end of the summer (if I don’t totally crap out from the heat) they will be looking OK.