Shannon Yee

It seems like everywhere I look, I’m hearing about, reading about, learning about what it means to have community. I live in a city with a pretty big community center where I spend lots of time taking kids to classes or taking classes myself. But, I don’t think taking classes is what community is really about. I think community is about belonging. It’s about sharing things in common and sharing even when we don’t have things in common. I think community is about being together – learning, laughing, loving, living. What do you think?

I’ve been seeing lots of 2wordstory.com around my community and wonder if someone’s story might be: Community? Community. Mine could be restated that way.

There are a few blogs that I follow regularly and enjoy reading about how other people live life and whatnot. Usually, I get some good ideas for things to try at home or a little laugh, but today I was a little surprised when I visited one of these blogs. After reading the entry announcing her divorce, I skimmed through the comments, which I only do occasionally, and with over 250 comments I expected at least one negative comment. I didn’t see any. Most people were appropriately very sympathetic and apologetic over the end of her marriage. Many people shared that they have walked that road. This is all very nice, but what shocked me was the number of people who said “Congratulations!” or “Good for you!” There were lots and lots of comments encouraging her in having made a good choice to walk away from a marriage that had grown cold. Not one comment challenged her to fight for it or get some help or anything like that. I know that divorce is common and even acceptable in our culture, but it hurts and it isn’t right and while she acknowledged that in her post, she is just giving up and that shocks me and saddens me immensely.

It also makes me even more grateful for my amazing husband and the marriage that we have, while not a picture perfect love nest all the time, we love each other and more so all the time.

So, for my birthday, I made myself two cakes. One for breakfast and one for dessert. It was a wonderful way to start and end the day, and they were both delicious.

The coffee cake was inspired by Ina Garten’s. Here is my yummy breakfast cake recipe:
1 1/2 cups buttermilk or yogurt (I did a mixture)
2 cups white whole wheat flour
8 T. (1 stick) unsalted butter at room temperature
1 cup sucanat
3 large eggs at room temperature
1 1/2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt

For the streusel:
1/4 cup sucanat
1/2 cup flour
1 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons cold unsalted butter, cut into pieces
3/4 cup chopped pecans

For the glaze, whisk together:
1/4 c. confectioners’ sugar
1 t. real maple syrup
few drops water

Mix together buttermilk/yogurt and flour and allow to rest covered at room temperature or slightly warmer for at least 8 hours.

After flour has been soaked, preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Grease and flour a bundt pan. Cream the butter and sugar in the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment for 4 to 5 minutes, until light. Add the eggs 1 at a time, then add the vanilla and rest of ingredients. Add the flour mixture to the batter mixing until mostly smooth.

Pinch together streusel ingredients with your fingers until it forms a crumble. It’s easiest to add nuts at the end, but it doesn’t really matter. Put 1/2 the streusel in the pan, pour half the batter on top and then sprinkle with remaining streusel. Spoon the rest of the batter in the pan, spread it out. Bake for 50 to 60 minutes, until a cake tester comes out clean.

Eila says it’s “Onolicious!”

If you know me well, you know that I enjoy freshly baked cookies over just about everything else. But for a birthday, the kids informed me that I had to have a cake, so I found a chocolate chip cookie cake that looked like it would fit the bill.

Cookie Cake
4 T. (1/2 stick) butter
1/4 cup smooth peanut butter
1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips
1 cup white whole wheat flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup succanat
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 large egg

Preheat the oven to 350F. Butter and flour 9-inch round cake pan.
Cream the butter, peanut butter, and sugar, scraping down sides as needed. Add egg and vanilla and mix thoroughly, another minute.
Add the dry ingredients and combine on low speed until just a few dry streaks remain. Stir in the chocolate chips.
Press the batter into a smooth and even layer in the pan. Bake until lightly golden and puffy around the edges, approx. 25 minutes.
Cool for 10 minutes and then run a paring knife around the edge of the pan to release the cake. Cool in pan on wire rack for several hours.

I know you must be crazy with worry about what is going on in my head and in my life. Well, do not fret. No terrible calamity has befallen me. I’m simply maintaining the same routine as always which leaves me with very little to say at times…

We are sequestered at home as a bad cold/flu bug creeps through each family member. Plus, it is so cold and snowy that I don’t know why we haven’t relocated to someplace much, much closer to the equator. On a happier note, our home is pretty clean and we have plenty of food and are playing lots of fun games.

Be Gracious.

I know that I will utterly fail in my intended lifestyle improvements, so I will be gracious with myself and simply try again.

My children will fight and whine and irritate me – a lot, but I will be gracious with them and help them to learn to feel those big emotions without hurting themselves or others. I will do this many times each day, every day.

My husband will not be my all in all and I will be gracious and look to Christ for fulfillment rather than my great man.

I hope you will be gracious too.

1. Family. I love them all. It’s just not right that there would have so many awesome people in one family and that I am apart of that family. I think I have something like 75 people in the extended family and they are all so much fun!
2. Faith. Who and where would I be without the saving grace that is constantly at work changing me and has given me life?
3. Friends. It boggles my mind to think of all the people that I have called friend and have returned that over the years. I am most thankful for those who still call me friend when I am not a friend.
4. Food. Honestly, I love to eat and create things with food. I cannot think of anything more fun that sharing a delicious meal with friends or family.
5. Games. Playing games is really fun and helps me to be at ease in a group of people when I wouldn’t normally.
6. Home. It’s where the heart is (and also the messy kids and hubby that I love so much!)
7. Computer. I really like to have all sorts of information available for me to learn and get organized, etc. It’s so convenient.
8. Health.
9. Books. So many to read, so little time.
10. Bed. I’m really tired and it’s so comfy…

Thaddeus is starting to talk and all his words end with glottal stop or vowels. He uses several different initial consonant sounds. The linguistics nerd in me cannot help but wonder why and if this is typical for early language acquisition. I know that English, especially my particular brand of English has many glottal stops. I also recognize that perhaps these sounds are slightly easier for my little guy to make when compared with the fricatives and lateral sounds of English.

Eila and Josiah both were exposed to a great deal of English and French as infants and had a some words from each language in the early stages of speech acquisition, but I don’t remember or didn’t notice if they followed this pattern as well. Maybe I’ll research it further, but for now Thad is up from his nap and wants down. “Mama, I wa duh. Bah! Mama!!!”

Our garden is finally really taking off. We enjoyed a fair bit a swiss chard, spinach and lettuce early on, but really didn’t have anything to show for all the labors of planting this spring until this week. We now have a red pepper, several peppers growing and lots and lots of carrots along with some beets. Hopefully, the first frost will be late in the fall so that our peppers will be able to grow and ripen a bit more.

I must admit that with the produce we are producing, I’m feeling pretty proud of our pathetic garden. It’s really too bad that Josiah doesn’t like carrots, because they are going to be in every meal for a few weeks.

Sunday we opened up our home to host a Bible study for the first time in a very long time. It’s fun to be able to do this again, but with kids we don’t always get to all the details of cleaning up. I forgot to put the toilet paper back on the holder when Thaddeus left, but I’m sure everyone was able to locate it and they might have noticed something else strange in the bathroom as well.

That’s just how things work when you have curious and fearless little ones. There are very few places that are out of reach of children as the bingo markers near the bathroom ceiling clearly indicate they need to be kept. For now we have three places where we store all kinds of interesting things. You’ll find the scissors and batteries above the kitchen counter, the stapler along with random screws or nails on the top of the book shelf and the bingo markers above the toilet.

During the early spring, I ordered about 12 crowns of asparagus to plant and enjoy fresh, seasonal food. I was especially inspired after reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Unfortunately, they arrived while I was out of town and sat for a few days drying out. So, I was worried about their success, especially when by the end of May, when I should’ve had more asparagus than I could ever eat, I still only had a few small shoots, which were trampled and squished by my little garden helpers.

Well, by the end of June, I am dumbfounded as I have giant plants taking over my landscaping. I also had a single whispy plant in three of the other locations where I planted the precious crowns. I had a very vague idea of how big the asparagus would grow. So, I wasn’t really surprised when some stalks got pretty tall, but I was a bit perplexed that they weren’t fern like at all. So, when they started to flower, I was pretty sure that these might not be asparagus plants after all. The tall stalks with purple-ish flowers were nice, but they didn’t look at all like the other asparagus ferns growing around my yard now. So, after an exhaustive search of the internets, my extremely intelligent husband determined the plant to be milkweed. This would explain the bountiful presence of monarchs in our yard this summer…

I’m just a wee bit embarrassed, but did introduce the kids to the wonder of milk from a plant.