Griffin Evan Huber was born on December 19th at 10:54pm. He weighed in at 7 pounds and 7 ounces and 19 inches. And as the pictures below prove, he's quite handsome. Love to you all.
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Griffin's official press release
The public has been clamouring for the official press release, so here you have it:
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
First Lesson of Parenthood
Last Saturday Landon and I went walking around model homes. You may wonder why we chose to do this when we just recently purchased a lovely little 3 bedroom fixer-upper. My answer is twofold: 1. this is how adults 'play house' and 2. I wanted to induce labor with lots of walking. Click here for the house we voted as 'most likely to induce labor.' It has options for a possible 10 bedrooms. I ask you, who in the world has a need for TEN bedrooms? Anyway, it was a fun morning of meandering through sumptuous homes that we couldn't possibly afford. Interestingly, I got the feeling that some of these builders were waaaay desperate to sell.
Along with hiking through model homes, we ate spicy foods, delivered Christmas cookies to our neighbors, cleaned the bathroom, and walked around the mall. Additionally, I've been taking all of the herbal supplements and such that are supposed to encourage labor. Unfortunately, none of this seemed to make a difference as I was still very much pregnant on Sunday morning. And since then the pattern has not changed.
I've decided, though, that I am learning the very first lesson of parenthood: I am not the one in charge. This baby is going to get here whenever he's good and ready and there is very little I can do to change his mind. I can cajole and plead and beg and whimper, but at the end of the day, it's not up to me....who knew that parents were really that powerless?
Along with hiking through model homes, we ate spicy foods, delivered Christmas cookies to our neighbors, cleaned the bathroom, and walked around the mall. Additionally, I've been taking all of the herbal supplements and such that are supposed to encourage labor. Unfortunately, none of this seemed to make a difference as I was still very much pregnant on Sunday morning. And since then the pattern has not changed.
I've decided, though, that I am learning the very first lesson of parenthood: I am not the one in charge. This baby is going to get here whenever he's good and ready and there is very little I can do to change his mind. I can cajole and plead and beg and whimper, but at the end of the day, it's not up to me....who knew that parents were really that powerless?
Friday, December 5, 2008
Cookies and waiting
As I am currently less than 10 days away from my due date, my schedule is remarkably flexible. I am like the minute men of the Revolutionary War, ready to march at a moment's notice. Well, maybe more like ready to waddle at a moment's notice. Unfortunately, this hyper-preparedness makes me really antsy and nervous.
Anyway, lately I've been trying to do things to work off this nervous energy and distract myself from how uncomfortable and anxious I am. Last night's activity was baking and decorating Christmas cookies. Now, many people may disagree with me, but I really dislike crunchy sugar cookies. Call me crazy, but I simply believe it's impolite to slap frosting on a wafer of cardboard and call it a treat. And to this point, every single recipe I've tried has left me disappointed. So this time, after some research and brainstorming, I concocted my own recipe. And surprise, surprise, IT WORKED!!
Anyway, lately I've been trying to do things to work off this nervous energy and distract myself from how uncomfortable and anxious I am. Last night's activity was baking and decorating Christmas cookies. Now, many people may disagree with me, but I really dislike crunchy sugar cookies. Call me crazy, but I simply believe it's impolite to slap frosting on a wafer of cardboard and call it a treat. And to this point, every single recipe I've tried has left me disappointed. So this time, after some research and brainstorming, I concocted my own recipe. And surprise, surprise, IT WORKED!!
Honestly, Landon gets the prize for the most impressive frosting job of the night. He even consulted a world map to make sure it looked just right. My husband, the over-achiever.
You can't tell from the pictures, but these cookies are firm enough to hold as much frosting as you want to gob on them, but soft enough so they don't crunch when you bite them. I feel like a culinary genius. Here's the recipe, if you care.
Finally a Soft Sugar Cookie
1 c. sugar
1/4 c. brown sugar
1 c. shortening
1 egg yolk
2 tsp vanilla
1/4 c. sour cream
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking powder
2 1/2 c flour
Cream together the sugar and shortening. Add egg yolk, vanilla, sour cream, salt, and baking powder. Stir until well-blended. Add the flour and stir until you get a dough that won't stick to your fingers when you poke it.
Smush the dough into a round disc on a plate and cover with plastic wrap. Place in the freezer for about 1 hour. Preheat oven to 300 degrees.
When you take the dough out of the freezer take out only enough for the first sheet worth of cookies and place the rest in the fridge until you are ready to use it. This dough is just a little sticky and difficult to handle, so before you roll it out, get a large piece of wax paper and lightly coat it with flour. Roll the dough out on the wax paper to about 1/4 in. or a little thicker. Cut out your desired shapes and remove the excess dough from around the edges. When you're ready to transfer the dough shapes to the cookie sheet, lift the entire sheet of wax paper and flip it onto the pan. This eliminates the need to pry sticky dough off the counter.
Bake at 300 degrees for 8 minutes. (Our oven is really finicky, plus we are at a high altitude, so you might want a slightly higher temp or a couple more minutes cooking time) The cookies will be slightly underdone when you take them out and should finish cooking on the pan for 2-3 minutes or so before being transferred to cooling racks.
1 c. sugar
1/4 c. brown sugar
1 c. shortening
1 egg yolk
2 tsp vanilla
1/4 c. sour cream
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking powder
2 1/2 c flour
Cream together the sugar and shortening. Add egg yolk, vanilla, sour cream, salt, and baking powder. Stir until well-blended. Add the flour and stir until you get a dough that won't stick to your fingers when you poke it.
Smush the dough into a round disc on a plate and cover with plastic wrap. Place in the freezer for about 1 hour. Preheat oven to 300 degrees.
When you take the dough out of the freezer take out only enough for the first sheet worth of cookies and place the rest in the fridge until you are ready to use it. This dough is just a little sticky and difficult to handle, so before you roll it out, get a large piece of wax paper and lightly coat it with flour. Roll the dough out on the wax paper to about 1/4 in. or a little thicker. Cut out your desired shapes and remove the excess dough from around the edges. When you're ready to transfer the dough shapes to the cookie sheet, lift the entire sheet of wax paper and flip it onto the pan. This eliminates the need to pry sticky dough off the counter.
Bake at 300 degrees for 8 minutes. (Our oven is really finicky, plus we are at a high altitude, so you might want a slightly higher temp or a couple more minutes cooking time) The cookies will be slightly underdone when you take them out and should finish cooking on the pan for 2-3 minutes or so before being transferred to cooling racks.
Monday, November 17, 2008
The Exhibitionist in me
A good friend asked me last month if I had a blog. “No! Ew!” I answered, “It seems like such an exhibitionist-type thing to do. Placing your entire life on the internet for anyone’s perusal is like inviting a gathering of stalkers and voyeurs into your living room for brunch. It seems rather foolish.” Five minutes after that conversation, I realized that, in fact, I’ve been a bit of an exhibitionist my whole life.
I grew up in a house full of sisters, five sisters and one brother, to be exact. All of my sisters and I, at one point or another, enrolled in dance classes. I also spent a year or two of my high school career participating in local theater productions. Dance and theater are, by nature, trades that cater to the exhibitionist personality. Performers enjoy being the focus of attention, not just on stage, but off stage as well. Attend any gathering of performers, or any gathering of my family for that matter, and you will soon see that most conversations are really a simple unspoken battle for center stage. No matter the subject, everyone vies for their position as the wittiest, the most insightful, inspiring, hilarious, or shocking.
Growing up, we had a living room area that looked roughly like the diagram below:
For most of my childhood the dining room as empty. Truthfully, the idea of a dinette set in the “Dining Room” was nothing short of preposterous! My mother wouldn’t let any of her children eat over carpet until we were 18, and as such, a dinette set would have simply taken up perfectly good play space. The empty dining room, elevated about 4 inches higher than the abutting living room, provided a type of permanent stage for our family. I remember several spontaneous plays, head-stand contests, dress-up parties, and puppet shows blossoming on our in-home stage. And the dance parties, oh the dance parties that hatched unprompted there in our dining room. We danced to the likes of New Kids on the Block, The Nutcracker, Little Richard, Beach Boys, Disney, and Vivaldi. We danced with complete abandon too, because that is what you do when you are dancing in the dining room with your sisters.
One large picture window at the east end of the Living Room gave a perfect view of our shenanigans to any passersby on the street and, more interestingly, to our neighbors across the street, the Harts, who also had a large picture window into their front room. Once, the day after a particularly enthusiastic dance party, when the Harts were over at our house one of the kids said, “It looked like you guys were having a really good time over here last night. What were you doing?”
My sisters and I eyed each other, “A dance party, duh!”
That happened multiple times in our childhood. We’d have a cut-throat somersault contest and the next day the Harts would comment on how they watched a few moments of it from their front room window. We’d be making a movie with our home camera, and the Harts would ask to see it the next day. It never occurred to any of us that perhaps this arrangement had created a certain type of exhibitionist/voyeuristic relationship between us, mostly we just felt like the Harts' living room was a mere extension of our own and that we could count on them as captive and concerned audience members. And honestly, we considered ourselves fascinating people so of course the Harts would be interested in our monkeyshines; who wouldn’t?
That’s one of the things I loved about growing up in that house. There was always something going on, always someone willing to play, always some mischief waiting to happen. I remember my older sister’s friend Jake coming over to our house on multiple occasions, and because we usually had a slew of neighborhood kids running through the house, he couldn’t ever quite remember who actually belonged to the family. In a way, they all belonged. My mother had a knack for making her home an open forum for friends and fun. Our house had a strict come-on-in-the-party-is-just-getting-started policy.
And that, my friends, is why today I can feel secure in starting this blog. Sure, I’ll grant that I am a bit of an exhibitionist for doing so, but at the end of the day you’re a bit of a voyeur for reading it. So let’s just agree that we’re both a little screwy. It doesn’t matter if you’re family looking to check in on me, or if you’re a friend I’ve lost contact with, or even if you’re a complete stranger looking to bask in the glow of my literary genius—let’s everyone pile on into the nut house because, really, this party is just getting started.
*Though I am now an admitted exhibitionist, I have taken the liberty of changing a few names to protect the people who may or may not know that I’m writing about them.
I grew up in a house full of sisters, five sisters and one brother, to be exact. All of my sisters and I, at one point or another, enrolled in dance classes. I also spent a year or two of my high school career participating in local theater productions. Dance and theater are, by nature, trades that cater to the exhibitionist personality. Performers enjoy being the focus of attention, not just on stage, but off stage as well. Attend any gathering of performers, or any gathering of my family for that matter, and you will soon see that most conversations are really a simple unspoken battle for center stage. No matter the subject, everyone vies for their position as the wittiest, the most insightful, inspiring, hilarious, or shocking.
Growing up, we had a living room area that looked roughly like the diagram below:
For most of my childhood the dining room as empty. Truthfully, the idea of a dinette set in the “Dining Room” was nothing short of preposterous! My mother wouldn’t let any of her children eat over carpet until we were 18, and as such, a dinette set would have simply taken up perfectly good play space. The empty dining room, elevated about 4 inches higher than the abutting living room, provided a type of permanent stage for our family. I remember several spontaneous plays, head-stand contests, dress-up parties, and puppet shows blossoming on our in-home stage. And the dance parties, oh the dance parties that hatched unprompted there in our dining room. We danced to the likes of New Kids on the Block, The Nutcracker, Little Richard, Beach Boys, Disney, and Vivaldi. We danced with complete abandon too, because that is what you do when you are dancing in the dining room with your sisters.
One large picture window at the east end of the Living Room gave a perfect view of our shenanigans to any passersby on the street and, more interestingly, to our neighbors across the street, the Harts, who also had a large picture window into their front room. Once, the day after a particularly enthusiastic dance party, when the Harts were over at our house one of the kids said, “It looked like you guys were having a really good time over here last night. What were you doing?”
My sisters and I eyed each other, “A dance party, duh!”
That happened multiple times in our childhood. We’d have a cut-throat somersault contest and the next day the Harts would comment on how they watched a few moments of it from their front room window. We’d be making a movie with our home camera, and the Harts would ask to see it the next day. It never occurred to any of us that perhaps this arrangement had created a certain type of exhibitionist/voyeuristic relationship between us, mostly we just felt like the Harts' living room was a mere extension of our own and that we could count on them as captive and concerned audience members. And honestly, we considered ourselves fascinating people so of course the Harts would be interested in our monkeyshines; who wouldn’t?
That’s one of the things I loved about growing up in that house. There was always something going on, always someone willing to play, always some mischief waiting to happen. I remember my older sister’s friend Jake coming over to our house on multiple occasions, and because we usually had a slew of neighborhood kids running through the house, he couldn’t ever quite remember who actually belonged to the family. In a way, they all belonged. My mother had a knack for making her home an open forum for friends and fun. Our house had a strict come-on-in-the-party-is-just-getting-started policy.
And that, my friends, is why today I can feel secure in starting this blog. Sure, I’ll grant that I am a bit of an exhibitionist for doing so, but at the end of the day you’re a bit of a voyeur for reading it. So let’s just agree that we’re both a little screwy. It doesn’t matter if you’re family looking to check in on me, or if you’re a friend I’ve lost contact with, or even if you’re a complete stranger looking to bask in the glow of my literary genius—let’s everyone pile on into the nut house because, really, this party is just getting started.
*Though I am now an admitted exhibitionist, I have taken the liberty of changing a few names to protect the people who may or may not know that I’m writing about them.
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