Writing

Today I stepped a bit out of my comfort zone. I submitted a short article to a parenting blog for potential publication. I'll hear back in 2 weeks. 

I don't know if they will accept it. I'm proud of myself for trying, though. Writing has always been a passion of mine but it's one I've mostly shelved as an adult. First to survive grad school, later because I had other priorities like frantically trying to find my husband, enjoying newlywed life, and learning to be a new mom. My raging perfectionism hasn't helped either. 

But my goal was always to write a novel, and maybe I don't need to aim so high to start. It seems much more doable to write a few short articles for websites... so we will give it a try and see how it goes. If nothing else it will get me writing again, and if no one wants to publish my stuff, I can always publish it here on my blog. 

Summer Bucket List 2021

 I used to love making these! I have so many goals for this summer that I decided to write them all down. Of course these days they are all very toddler based :).

SUMMER BUCKET LIST:

Meet my new nephew!! (Top priority!) June 13, 2021

Visit family in Utah

Feed the ducks with Matthew.  July 10, 2021 (Okay, so we fed geese. But there were no ducks at the duck pond that day!)

Take Matthew to the zoo. (Bonus: feed the giraffes!) June 15, 2021

Take Matthew to the aquarium.

Take Matthew swimming.

Teach Matthew to ride a trike (or at least push him around on one :) July 19, 2021

Run through the sprinklers with Matthew.

Set up a wading pool for Matthew. June 4, 2021 

Set up an outdoor playset for Matthew. June 7, 2021

Visit the playground with Matthew. June 28, 2021

Go stargazing with Trevor.

Ride the ferris wheel at Scheels.

When You Are the Frog in the Pot

 We've all heard that old Sunday School story, right? That if you put a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will hurt him and he'll jump right out. But if you put him in a pot of cold water and sloooowly turn up the temperature, he will stay in until he boils to death.

I recently had a scary experience that was a modern update on this for me.

Here's the spoiler: the cruise control cable in my car had come off and was caught in such a way that my car was accelerating without me pressing the gas pedal. For about a month, possibly even two. 😱

I noticed that something was wrong at first. My car sounded like an airplane and it kept gunning it even when I was stopped with my foot on the brake. My dad suggested the choke might be stuck and suggested a solution. I tried it, it seemed to work, I moved on.

A little later I had problems again. I didn't realize it was the same thing. My car was jerking violently a few times when I braked. (Turns out, that was the transmission struggling to downshift while the engine was running full tilt--or something, excuse my lack of car vocabulary :). This happened while I had Matthew in the car and I was horrified. I asked my dad to come check it out to help me figure out what was going on. But, I told him I thought it was a problem with my brakes. He drove around the block, hit the brakes a lot of times, and didn't notice a problem. I started to think I was crazy.

I should have taken it in then, but I drove around for weeks until the same thing happened again. Meanwhile, I slowly got used to my car not working quite right. I am one of those (annoying, sorry) sticklers who always does the speed limit, but I noticed that often I was going faster than I meant to. I assumed I was just distracted and pressing the gas too hard... it never occurred to me that the car was accelerating on its own. Gradually I was learning to ride my brakes and be very light on the gas pedal, but I didn't realize that it was happening.

After I finally got it fixed last weekend it was like a totally new car. One terrifying moment happened when I turned on the car, shifted into drive, and.... just sat there, not pressing the gas pedal, surprised that it wasn't moving. OF COURSE I know that you have to press the gas pedal to go... but sometime along the line I'd just gotten used to the car leaping forward when I put it in Drive without realizing what was happening, since I did go through the motion of pushing the gas pedal. The drive home was slow too and I realized I was not used to pressing the gas pedal very often. YIKES!

Among the many lessons I learned from this... I thought about other times in life where something seemed off to me, but I doubted myself because others didn't see it, only to get used to being treated in ways I should not have been treated. An important moral of the story is trust yourself, and also get your car checked out if you think there's a problem!

Secrets of the Subconscious Brain

So I had another dream last night (dang, is that all I blog about these days???).

The details aren't important, so skip this paragraph if you want to. I dreamed that Trevor and I were attending a formal dance together at BYU. Except instead of being in the Wilkinson Center, we were in the Chapel Hills Mall. And a lot of my high school peers were inexplicably there too. (Also, my red dress was to die for. Wish I actually owned something like that!)

Anyway, I ran into one of my old high school friends that I haven't seen since graduation. She said, "wow, Shelece, you seem so much more confident than you did at our homecoming dance when we were 16!"

I said, "well, I hope so! I'm twice as old now as I was back then." And basically that's the moment I realized I'm twice as old as I was in high school. I've never consciously stopped to think about that before. 

That makes me feel old, but also... awesome. Hey, I've got two high school kids worth of life experience now! I am more confident and smarter and braver than I was back then. I'm not perfect, but stopping to think about how far I've come feels good. 

Hopefully I feel as awesome about it when I'm 3 times as old as I was in high school! 

Beware of Dragons

Another crazy dream for the dream journal! 

I dreamed that my in-laws moved to a fantasy country that bordered a nation of dragons. They were planning a family trip for all of their kids/kids-in-law to visit Dragon country. It was a little tricky though because Dragons were easily offended and if humans did something wrong they would eat them. Fortunately living where they did my in-laws could teach us what to do. 

First: we had to always carry Dragon currency with us (sadly just paper money in my dream instead of gold coins!). 

Second: we had to buy fancy Dragon silk clothes to wear. Regular human clothes were disgusting to Dragons. 

Third: we needed to wear... wet swimsuits? I was baffled by this until we stopped at a Dragon store to get proper attire. Turns out, the swimsuits were tight costumes that looked like animals complete with a hooded mask to pull over our faces and built in gloves to cover our hands. I picked one that looked like a goldfish. It was so tight it made me hunch forward. I realized Dragons were so anti-human they couldn't bear to see us unless we were covered up. Of course they would smell us and know what we were. I didn't want to be in this place where it was so dangerous to be who I was. 

Word of the Year: Become

 Time to dust off this old blog to announce my new word of the year... Become!

I had a hard time picking but finally this is the word that hit me. Become makes me think of many wonderful quotes about human potential and our power to decide who we ultimately become.

Chicken Tikka Masala

So here's something new for my blog... an attempt at recording an altered recipe!

I have so many recipes on my Pinterest board that I make regularly but with substitutions for ingredients I actually have in my cupboard, or else recipes that I double for bigger groups or huge recipes that I halve for a meal just the two of us. I love the ease of tracking my recipes on Pinterest, but a downside to just linking to the original is that I never write down my alterations. Some of my favorite recipes are like a middle school math problem as I work out how much of something to substitute and how much to double, etc. etc. If I had a paper copy, I could just scribble on the side.

So this is my first attempt at scribbling down the edits we've made to a recipe! Since we've been married, we've been in search of a good Chicken Tikka Masala recipe but everything we've tried so far hasn't quite tasted like it does in the restaurant. Then last week Trevor found this one from Feasting at Home. We had to substitute a crazy amount of ingredients, but it came out absolutely delicious! This time around we actually went out and purchased more of the real ingredients... I wish I'd written our simpler take (I'll try to record what substitutions I remember from that time too!) because a lot of the ingredients like coconut milk we don't typically have on hand. If you can get together all the ingredients from the real recipe, I'm sure it would be even better than this!!!

Chicken Tikka Masala

Ingredients:

• 2 lbs chicken breast or thighs, cut into 1-2 inch cubes, seasoned with salt and pepper
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 onion, diced
• 1 14.5 oz can diced tomatoes (the first time we substituted tomato paste)
• 1 tbsp powdered tomato (a rare food storage item! :)
• 4-6 garlic cloves, rough chopped)
• 1/4 tsp ground ginger
• 1 tsp coriander
• 1 tsp whole fennel seeds (optional--I leave it out because it tastes like black licorice)
• 2 tsp chili powder (a substitution for 2 tsps whole cumin seeds, 1 tsp paprika, 1 tsp cumin, 1/2 tsp turmeric, and .5-1 tsp. cayenne.... some day I hope to put in all the real spices!)
• 1/2 tsp crushed dry bay leaves
• 1 cup cauliflower
• a dab of horseradish sauce
• 1 tsp garam masala spice (we bought some, but apparently you can google recipes to make your own)
• .5 tsp kosher salt
• 2 tsps sugar
• 1 14 oz can of coconut milk (the first time we made a substitute that involved cream cheese and milk mixed together)

Steps:

• Set the instant pot to saute. Add in the olive oil, onion, garlic, and ginger, and saute for 2-3 minutes until it smells good. 
• Add in the coriander (if whole? Ours is and I don't know if that's normal) and cook for 1 minute. 
• Add tomatoes, chicken, cauliflower, and the rest of the spices, and then finally the coconut milk. Mix it all together.
• Set the instant pot to pressure cook on high for 7 minutes for chicken breasts and 9 for chicken thighs (we often cook with frozen chicken and add a minute or two of cook time to compensate for this).
• Depressurize manually.
• Let sit for a little bit until the sauce thickens to your liking. If needed set the instant pot to saute to reduce further. Or if you reduce too much, add more coconut milk or yogurt to fix that.

This is a new favorite that I think we'll make a lot of!