Spring!

Farmer Fiona

Hoop! A popular way to warm up the soil and air temp for veggies in Kodiak is to use hoop houses. They work great!

The garlic we planted last fall. One of our favorite crops. We use a hard neck variety called Music... Granpa's favorite!

Showing off her new Ohio State outfit!

Diggin' the sand and water!

We had a busy weekend of celebrating Spring and Mother's Day around here. As you can see the garden is coming together and the hoop is up for the season. Fiona and Papa planted pototoes and we will get the rest of the veggies in the ground this coming weekend. I love this time of year. We also got some of Fiona's outdoor toys up. She played in her sand and water table for over an hour and half yesterday. Now if that isn't a Mother's Day gift, I don't know what is! She continues to be in love with her chickens. They love her back and let her hold them and eat out of her hands regularly. They love to follow her around and even come begging for food if we eat on the deck! I can't wait to get this girl her own farm... for now she'll have to settle with chickens and visiting our pigs out the road. (That is for another post!)

Papa Love! and Fiona Speak

Fiona is in love with her Papa. When he is home from work and on weekends only Papa will do. Papa must be the one to change her diapers :), get her out of her car seat, and make her lunch. Only Papa can push the stroller or the grocery cart. She often bellows "No, Papa Do It!" at any attempt I make to do anything. She is big into wrestling and doing chores with Papa. She basically doesn't let him out of her sight when he's home. I love it!! She is Papa's girl through and through. I think this will come in handy in October!

Fiona Speak:
These are some of my favorite words and phrases from Fiona. It's funny because Brian and I have adopted many of them ourselves.

tia: quesadilla
bless you: kleenex
care me: carry me
sit on my lap: sit on your lap
mealo: oatmeal
yellow butter: butter
brown butter: peanut butter
paint fingers: finger paints
MaPa: Papa and Mama... she uses this interchangeably for both of us but mostly for Brian

Farm Girl

Here is our farm girl helping with her chores. She takes the job very seriously. Feeding the chickens by hand is one of her favorite things. It's usually a job she does with Papa after work (now that it is light out when he gets home! Hooray for light!) Our last batch of chickens were pretty wild but these 4 are so gentle and tame. They roam the yard for most of the day and are often on the back porch looking in. Sometimes they peck on the door as if to say, "Let us in!" I knew I wanted Fiona to be able to hold and pet and hand feed these chickens so we handled them a lot from the time they arrived as little chicks. Success! They crouch down as soon as we walk up to them and they often follow us around the yard in a little chicken parade. I think Fiona is on her way to becoming quite the farm girl. Now we just need to find her a real farm. Until then our 4 chickens will have to do.

My favorite part of the video is the beginning where she instructs them to say cheese! "Say cheese body."

Book Storage

The Papa built book case

painted and ready to go

The book lover

The Cindy sewn book sling

Finally we have some great book storage for all of Fiona's books. We love books and we have tons of them. It was always difficult to find a way to store them where she could see the covers. We have a solution! Actually two solutions.

Brian built the wooden bookcase using plans from Knock Off Wood. We love that website! She has posted tons of great plans for free. She's also a fellow Alaskan. We knew we wanted Fiona to be able to see the book covers and this fit the bill perfectly. Brian did an awesome job on it! I'm so excited that he is getting into wood working and have given him an armoire for all of my craft supplies for his next project!

The fabric book sling came from this tutorial on Penny Carnival. I've been wanting it for a long time. Due to a defunct sewing machine it wasn't happening. Then in a stroke of genius, I invited my friend Cindy over with her sewing machine (and skills). She read the tutorial and made short work of the project! Thank you Cindy, you rock! Fiona loves it. We have a handful of books for bedtime reading just above her bed. She loves it!

We have more books in storage in the closet which we'll rotate into the mix. We also got two boxes of books from the Craig, AK cousins! Such a treat. I actually remember reading many of those books to Jeremiah and Zach. It's fun to be reading them to Fiona now!

Yeah Books!

More Birthday Fun!

We celebrated Fiona's birthday as a family. We had her favorites for dinner... tias (quesadillas), beans, and tatoes (fried potatoes). Delicious! She loved us singing to her and enjoyed licking the frosting off of her cupcake. She also had fun opening her presents. Our good friends the Barnett's got her a Mr. Potato head! Her cousins from Ohio gave her a Raggedy Ann doll. Love the classics! Mama and Papa got her baby doll sling. She opened it, tried it on, and threw it on the ground and said "I no yike it!" Good thing we also had a cool "bike" for her too! That has her stamp of approval.

Another Trip Around the Sun!

Happy 2nd Birthday Fiona Aileen!
Mama and Papa love you so much!

Relearning to bake

Fiona mixes brown rice and potato flours

Moves on to using her hands for better mixing...

And finishes by rubbing it all over her belly! I swear she did not learn this technique from me!

one of the better loaves of gluten free bread

Since figuring out that Fiona is allergic to gluten we've had to rethink everything we eat around here. Gluten is in a lot of weird places. Some things like bread and pasta are obvious. Others not so much. Soy sauce, salad dressing, vitamins, and nutritional yeast are some of the things that we have had to learn to avoid. Beer too, though thankfully we aren't terrible parents who give their kid beer to drink! Also I'm not always prepared with a Fiona friendly alternative. I've brought her own cupcakes to a birthday but never thought I'd need something for library story time. They read the Gingerbread Baby and decorated gingerbread cookies. Although Brian can obviously eat gluten I can't since Fiona is still a little nursling. I'm about 90% gluten free. She does react if I break down and eat a few slices of "real" pizza or something so I try to be really good. Otherwise I feel like a terrible selfish mom.

For the first few months the idea of baking gluten free totally intimidated me. Recipes call for about 5 different kinds of flour. What the heck is sorghum flour and where do I get millet flour on the island? And somebody please tell me about xantham gum and guar gum. I don't even know how to pronounce the last one. Is your head spinning? Mine too. So we relied on store bought things. We bough terrible bread that tasted like sawdust, frozen pizza dough, and rice flour pasta. The good news is that these things exist (even in Kodiak). The bad news is that a lot of it tastes bad or is just super processed junk food. We are not a frozen pizza family! Why did I break down and buy frozen pizza just because it was gluten free. I hated it and didn't feel that great about feeding it to Fiona.

So I'm creeping out into the world of gluten free baking. Armed with a pantry full of 5 different kinds of gluten free flour and xantham gum I've managed to pull a few things off. The priority seemed to be cookies since that was the first thing I mastered! Then brownies. I can honestly say the brownies are so good that I'll make them even if I don't need a gluten free recipe in the future. Pizza dough needs some tweaking but turned out pretty good. Bread is a work in progress. I'm sure if I can get my hands on some millet flour I'll have it down. It feels good to be taking back our kitchen and banishing the boxed junk food once again. What I really need is a good cake recipe. Brian's birthday cupcakes were only so so. It's hard to compare these things to their gluten free counter parts. Especially cake. Seriously, how can anything come close to North Douglas Chocolate Cake? It can't. So I might just leave that one alone.

I'm hoping that Fiona will outgrow this allergy in time. We'll just have to see. For now, we'll keep on experimenting. Fiona makes a great baking partner and doesn't seem to mind the misses! She loves homemade bread with "yellow butter please Mama". Yellow butter (not to confused with peanut butter) really does make some of those funky loaves go down a bit easier. Pass the butter.