Check out my other blog

If you are a follower of this blog, I would like to invite you to check out my other blog, "Bettison Adventures". There is where I journal some of the fun things our family has been able to experience over the past several years living in Africa. You can view it at www.bettisonfamily.blogspot.com.

The Art of Cooking

I think too many times today's generation has been short changed. They are so often growing up on fast food and pre-packaged food items, and running from one activity to another, that they never learn the skill of cooking, especially young girls. I was blessed somehow in my childhood to learn some of the basics from my mom in cooking, like making a white sauce, and making many of our family's favorites, but over the years much of what I learned was from trying out many recipes. After moving to rural Africa, where I could not get a lot of ingredients for recipes that called for "canned this" or "1 package of that", I found some wonderful cookbooks that taught how to make many things from scratch. 20 years later I rarely use anything packaged and most of these recipes are ingrained in my mind, I rarely use a recipe. These are the things I want to pass on to my children. I believe passing on life skills is one of the most important roles of a parent.

My oldest daughter, Katie, will soon be 13 and has shown an increasing desire and aptitude for all things cooking. I have thoroughly enjoyed spending time with her in the kitchen showing her the ropes, and letting her put a recipe together herself, or plan a whole meal. Among her recent culinary adventures have been making cheese sauces, chili, deviled eggs, fruit tarts and various baked goods. She has also demonstrated an artistic flare in things like organizing vegetable trays.

Valentine's Weekend with 10

This past weekend we had the chance to play parents to 8 kids, while we hosted the 4 kids of fellow missionaries as they went out to do a medical clinic, making a total of 10 in our house. We've done this before, and it was great - I know a lot of people think I'm nuts, but I actually find it easier sometimes with more kids, because they all have someone to play with, and I never have anyone come up to me saying they are "bored". We tend to do things in a more organized way just to get everything done in an orderly fashion. Maybe some would call it the "assembly-line" mentality - call it what you want, but it works. I am a creature of routine and order. This weekend we decorated Valentine cookies (around 150 altogether) and they disappeared by the end of the weekend. We also had other friends drop in, the more the merrier! I think there is something in me sometimes that craves the crowd of kids, as if I was made for a large family. I love the special closeness everyone feels, and the sense of belonging to something special that only exists in a big family. I love seeing the older kids pull together to help the little kids along, and everyone sharing a little piece of the bigger task, getting it done faster. It's the same special feeling we get when our whole extended family gathers for the holidays. It is a feeling of community and togetherness, sharing the knoweldge that together we are something more than merely the sum of each individual part.

35 funny things my kids have said

Over the years we have had the habit of writing down the funny or things that have come out of our children's mouths. Here are some of them:

Katie:

1) age 1 ½ “See, I can book!” (See, I can read a book!)

2) age 2 – “ook boys, I’m pretty!” (to some boys as she pulled her dress over her head)

3) age 2 - “Sometimes it takes two” (when asking for mom’s help)

4) age 2 -“Koombah-yah, N’ord” (Koombah-yah, my Lord)

5) age 2 1/2 - “it’s de’icious!”

6) age 2 1/2 - “the cookie-bread man” (the ginger-bread man)

7) age 2 1/2 - “it’s the princess plane!” (when she heard us talking about the president’s plane flying over head)

8) age 2 1/2 - “you have to drink your memomade to make your toe feel better” (said to Mommy after Mommy hurt her toe)

9) age 2 1/2 - “you have to ask nicely” (said to Daddy who asked for more tea in a make-believe tea party)

10) age 2 3/4 - “Are you guys making pie for the Katie-nator and the two guys-nators?” (after we called her younger brother Joshua the “Josh-inator”)

11) age 3 - (anxious to finally start eating breakfast) “Let’s pray...Mommy, will you do the honors?”

12) age 3 - After Mommy came into the room to see why Joshua was crying, I asked Katie, "What happened? Did Joshua fall down?" and Katie replied, "Yeah, and I broke his crown."

13) age 3 – “My shoulders are too high, right here and right here” (pointing to her two shoulders)

14) age 3 -“it’s not a big hot, it’s only a little hot”

15) age 3- Said “busketti” for Spaghetti, “buzzert” for dessert, and “buzzanya” for Lasagna.

16) age 3 - "There are a lot of bees in the forest, and they are very very nice and they can very very sting ya.”

17) age 6 – “When you’re grown up, then you’re getting old.”

18) age 6 - “Can you photocopy me doing it?” (playing the piano)

19) age 6 - Daddy asks Katie, “Don’t you feel good when your room is clean? Doesn’t it look clean?”, to which Katie replied “Yeah, like a leaf.”

20 ) age 8 - “Grandma is a saint because she lives in St. Louis.”

Joshua:

21) age 1 ½ - called chocolate milk “goppit”, somebody “buh-ee”

22) age 2 - called oatmeal "uckmeal", strawberries "strawbabies"

23) age 3 - called a certain person's hairy armpits "a beard"

24) "There’s fire in the hole!” (after sticking a hair pin into an electric socket)

25) age 4 – “Grandma’s name is Grandma Cathi, because she has curly hair; that’s why she’s called Grandma Cathi.”

26) age 5 – “I’m true!” (I’m telling the truth)

27) age 5 - "It’s in the saloon” (It’s in the salon/living room

28) “Let’s go fly a kite and send it snoring!” (from Mary Poppins)

29) age 6 – “The garden is a very hide-iful place.”

30) age 6 - (before bed one night, after having nightmares) “Lord God, help me only have dreams about diamonds sparkling all over the place" and "help me not bleed when I fall down on my bike."

31) age 7 - (Joshua was asked to choose a Bible verse to write out and share with someone to encourage them. After awhile he brought me a paper with Proverbs 5:3 "For the lips of an adulteress drip honey, and her speech is smoother than oil." Trying not to show too much alarm at the verse he had chosen for me, I asked him, "Joshua, do you know what an adulteress is?" He then looked up quite matter-of-factly at me and said, "Yes, you are; you are an adult, and everything you say is so sweet."

32) age 10 - "reverse physiology" (was supposed to say "reverse psychology", in a story he wrote)

Aisha:

33) age 6 – “Gabriel is not cropolating” (cooperating)

34) “OK, Daddy I scluded Gabriel” (excluded)

Gabriel:

35) age 4 – (sitting on the slowly deflating air mattress he is about to sleep on for the second night in a row while guests were staying with us) “Mommy, my bed is going downer and downer and downer!”

My Daughter the Negotiator

Our youngest daughter, Aisha, who is 6 years old, is a negotiator. She likes to be in charge and dictate to others the way things are going to be. She has an uncanny knack for cunningly orchestrating things to go her way.

Today Aisha wanted to play a computer game, which Gabriel wanted to watch, but the older kids had the video camera out on the tripod near the computer (as they were editing their most recent stop-motion movie), and so we couldn’t permit Gabriel to be there because he is too prone to messing with things and breaking them.

So Jim told Aisha that she either needed to play something else with Gabriel in a different room, or she would have to exclude him from the computer game.

She looked at Jim and said with a questioning look, “Exclude?” to which Jim replied, “Yes, exclude, meaning he will have to play something else while you play the computer game.”

So right away she said, “Okay!”, and then hopped down, ran out, showed Gabriel her Barbie dolls, and said, “Here Gabriel, play with my Barbies.”

Gabriel, overjoyed at this prospect (since they are usually off limits to him), easily complied, “Okay!”

Then Aisha ran back into the room, sat in front of the computer game and said, “Ok Daddy, I sclooded Gabriel.”

A Tribute to Joseph Federer

Who we are is determined by many things: who are parents are, where we grow up, our experiences, and how we respond to God’s shaping the events and movements of our lives and history. But in spite of our immediate environment, so much of our personality often comes from our ancestors, many of whom we have never met. God puts something in us that we can’t put there ourselves, a unique blending of personality traits from our genes that make us uniquely us. It’s uncanny how you can think you are your own person, but there are character traits about you that keep presenting themselves which you can’t explain.

If someone were to ask “who in your family do you most take after”, I would have to say my grandfather, Joseph Federer, who died in 1980 and whom I really did not know very well at all. Yet ironically many of his same interests, talents and giftedness seem to have resurfaced in me. I would like to dedicate this entry to this man who fascinates me because I find that I am in so many ways like him, yet in so many ways different.

My grandfather was born as Johann Joseph Federer in the town of Berneck, Switzerland, August 3, 1891, he grew up in a huge old timber framed house in Berneck which I had the privilege to visit twice in my life. Berneck is a small village situated in the beautiful, gently rolling hills of the northeastern corner of Switzerland near Germany’s Bodensee and Austria. It is the same village where many notorious Federers have come from, including mayors, poets and Roger Federer, the famous tennis player.

As a teenager my grandfather decided he wanted to be a pastry chef after seeing beautifully decorated cakes on display in one of the little pastry shops in his town. He served an apprenticeship in Paris, where he specialized in cake decorating and sugar sculpture, and became rather fluent in French. Shortly after that he worked for a while in London. But he didn’t learn to speak English until he immigrated at the age of 29 to the United States.

After he died in 1980 at the age of 89, 70 letters were discovered by his family in Switzerland, which were letters he wrote home to his parents, all written in German. These letters reveal many fascinating facts about him, his thoughts, and who he really was. These letters also reveal his motivation to immigrate to America – it was a land of opportunity, and there was high unemployment in Europe.

One of his brothers and a cousin, who were also chefs, had come to America before him, and helped him find as job as a pastry chef in Atlantic City at $100 a month. After two months there, he followed a lead to a better job in Los Angeles, California, which he described as the “land of milk and honey”.

In Los Angeles he worked for two years as a pastry chef for the Ambassador Hotel, where even in tough economic times he was able to hold a job because of his specialized and rare skills in sugar sculpture.

After two years at the Ambassador, he went to work in a pastry shop in Hollywood where his specialized skills were required. At a later time he got a job working as a pastry chef for United Airlines, creating many masterpieces for various celebrities who traveled with the airline. Among our favorite photos is the head chef presenting one of his cakes to Bob Hope.

While in Los Angeles, he met my grandmother, Elizabeth Martin, through the Swiss Society. They had four daughters, their youngest being my mother, Catherine.

Besides having inherited his artistic inclinations, I also seem to have inherited his love of nature and farming. Even though he worked in the huge city of Los Angeles, he mentioned that he once wished he had a job as a farmhand. He kept many close friendships with other Swiss farmers in Southern California, and one of his favorite activities was milking the cows on his friends’ farms, something he knew well from growing up in Switzerland. My mother tells me how embarrassed she was that he tried to raise chickens and grow potatoes right in the middle of Los Angeles. I remember him years later, when he had retired to Arizona, growing citrus trees in his yard, and teaching me how to catch and pin butterflies. Ironically here I am today living in Africa, with a citrus orchard and a huge butterfly and moth collection that I have helped my children to put together.

My mother taught me many cake decorating techniques that she learned mostly on her own, inspired by her father, and I in turn learned a few more. From a young age I have always loved decorating cakes, and I continue to do it for my children and many friends. Even my daughter Katie, who has natural talent, has taken an interest in cake decorating, and was already making pretty decent roses at the age of 8.

Among the family memories we still have of my grandfather are some of his now antique cake decorating tools and supplies, as well as his collection of recipes, many of which are in his own handwriting, in four different languages: German, French, English and Italian. I hope to learn more of his recipes and in some small way carry on the legacy he started, creating the incredible art that he so loved and which brought pleasure to so many people, using the talent and gifts that God put in me, and passing that on to my children.

Holding the family together on a "bad" day

For me a "good day" or a "bad" day is defined most often by my physical health and how few crisis arose. On “good days” I get up early, get in a 15-20 minute quiet time before everyone is up, I am able to cook, do a little cleaning, keep the kids’ homeschooling going, check email, do a little internet browsing, take a walk outside, read stories to the children, get in a little sewing, and relax in the evening watching a tv episode with my hubby. If I’m really lucky, I’ll get a few hours in working on a language project, like the grammar book I have been editing.

But today was not one of those days. Yesterday I forgot to take my thyroid hormone supplement, and didn’t remember till this morning. I have taken a supplement since four years ago when I had a partial thyroidectomy due to three pre-cancerous tumors my doctor found. Whenever I don’t take my supplement, I usually pay for it the next day. Such was the case today. I slept in and didn’t have the energy to get up in time to have quiet time. I got through breakfast and even read the kids a few stories, but then school started. Now for me on a “bad” day, when my thyroid hormone levels are not where they should be, my brain shuts down. If that happens at the same time as any crisis, I’m in trouble. Multi-tasking demands are the first thing to trigger it. It is almost like a switch goes off. Once I am in the middle of one thing, and another thing presents itself, I get confused, forgetful, and suddenly cannot process anything, even the first thing I was doing. That is what happened today. I was doing school with my 6-year-old, when I remembered I needed to make a phone call. While making the phone call, listening to it ring on the other end, my 11-year-old comes to me with a question about how to attach pictures to an email to his friends for an assignment he is writing for school. I look at the clock and realize that it was getting close to lunch time and I hadn’t even begun to think about what to fix for lunch. Suddenly realizing that four things were now presenting themselves which only I could do, I felt tired, weak, confused, and needed to lay down. I did so, realizing that if I didn’t get my “act together”, no one would eat.

This is the interesting dilemma I am sure many a mother faces on a “hectic” day. For me, it is complicated by my hypothyroidism. Some days it just seems that if I can’t keep it all together, keep everything organized, keep everything running smoothely, everything will cease to function, things will come screeching to a halt, everyone will starve to death. I am thankful for my older kids who can help out. So I asked my kids to stop school and, one step at a time, I walked them through turning our leftover cream-of-wheat from breakfast into corn fritters, and making the left-over bread into toast so they could eat something for lunch. I quietly lay down in bed, drank some “triple greens” (which I have found to be brain food), and let my brain recover a little and get past the tangled “knot” in my brain so I could think clearly again.