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Monthly Archives: November 2012

Company’s Coming! Ten Hurry-Up Tips to Help You Through the Holidays

It always happens. Just when you’ve decided to bake twelve dozen of your grandmother’s Norwegian Christmas cookies and clean the entire house down to the baseboards, somebody gets sick.

Or you need to make an angel costume. Or your kid’s basketball team makes it to the play-offs (no one really expected them to get that far), and on the weekend you had set aside for cleaning and baking, you wind up making a team banner and driving half-way across the state. It’s always something.

And so I’ve compiled a list of “mom-tested” tips guaranteed to make your house “company ready” in a hurry. (My thanks to everyone Continue reading

Unplugging the Wild Turkey

Not long ago I caught a glimpse of the new American family. They were eating out, Mom, Dad and two adolescents, all four fixated on their cell phones. I wanted to shout, “Hey, why don’t you look at each other? Talk, for God’s sake.”

But I subdued the inclination, the same way I managed to quell the urge to shout in church when I was little. I just never got around to trying it.

One thing I am grateful for this Thanksgiving is that my children did not grow up on cell phones and computers.  They grew up being outside and reading books. We weren’t a Continue reading

Hungry Mom Kitchen Makes Alicia’s Beet and Carrot Latkes

Root veggies are in season right now. The produce department at my natural food store has three different kinds of beets, and their bin of squash is literally brimming with colorful winter varieties. What to make, what to make?

As I followed my list through the store, Alicia, the assistant manager, came over to say hello. I met Alicia the first week the store opened and always enjoy seeing someone so enthusiastic, who obviously enjoys their job.

Alicia wanted to know what I would substitute for corn syrup in pecan pie. I was just about to answer “brown rice syrup” when she said, “How about brown rice syrup?”

I said that if she wanted a sweeter taste, she could always add a bit of agave. But molasses, Continue reading

Share the Love With Operation Christmas Child

They say ‘tis better to give than receive.  But Sheila Cain and Ina Hodges of Colorado Springs believe both acts can alter lives. As a teenager in Georgia, Russia, young Ina – then Ina Kharaishvili – received an Operation Christmas Child shoe box from America, a country she’d never heard of.  Now the mother of a 3 ½ year-old daughter, Hodges still remembers the necklace with a dangling pink pen and the box of crayons she was almost too afraid to use. “At that time, to get anything from America was impossible. It was a miracle,” she said.

Always on the giving end of the Samaritan’s Purse ministry, Cain has been filling shoe boxes since 1997. In 2010 she went on a distribution trip to Ecuador. What astonished her Continue reading