The site has moved!

In case you didn't get the e-mail, I switched my blog over to a new site -- blogger was briefly banned by the government here and I couldn't get access, so I moved my whole blog including the archives to a new host. Obviously the ban was not permanent, but in case it happens again I wanted to make sure I could still get to my stuff!

The new site is www.heidiendsofearth.wordpress.com. Come and visit!

Making the farmer's market last

A few weeks ago, Danny and I tried our hand at canning for the first time. It wasn't necessarily a complete success, but it was much more successful than not, which is great for an experiment! We've now canned whole tomatoes, apricot jam, peach jam, hot pepper jelly, mint jelly, marmalade, apple butter, dill pickles, pickled tomatoes, mango chutney, and freezer jam (peach and apricot). The apricot jam, marmalade and hot pepper jelly haven't really set as well as I would like, but the peach jam is amazingly tasty and set nice and firm. We haven't opened up the apricot jam to taste it, but I imagine it probably tastes great even if it is a little runny. We also made and froze a bunch of stewed tomatoes. The mango chutney is supposed to sit and mellow for two months before we use it, so we have to wait until mid-November or so before it's really ready. The jury's still out on whether we'll actually be able to resist opening one up before then to test it out. :)

There's something so satisfying about seeing all of the pretty jars lined up in the closet with their bright colors. The pepper jelly is particularly striking I think (it's the fourth from the left in the picture above). When we taste tested it, it was a little hotter than I expected, so I will probably have to use it sparingly, but the flavor is really good and Danny will likely want to eat it with a spoon once we open one of the jars.

Canning and pressure cookers seems to be one of those things that a lot of people are afraid to try, but I have to say that we love both of them. I love that I can use my pressure cooker to make great chicken stock in an hour that would normally take half a day of simmering, or make fall-apart stewed lamb. I also love the idea that some of the great tomatoes that were at the farmer's market this summer are still waiting for us to enjoy them this winter. Not to mention that there's something so gratifying about being able to offer houseguests homemade jam with their toast in the morning!

Our stuff is HERE!!

I've been feeling highly uninspired about potential posts for this blog lately, which is not to say that we haven't been doing anything interesting. I promise to get back to more regular posts soon, but here are a couple of highlights of the past month:

- Danny finished grad school! He's done and graduated and after seven years of on-and-off school, it's really and truly done!
- our stuff got here! I realize that I made this the subject line of this post, but it's so worth repeating. It got here on Friday (the 26, so almost 4 months to the day from when it was packed out for those of you keeping count), and it appears that other than one or two very minor fragile items nothing was damaged.
- Stephen has started on solid foods, which is a messy but highly entertaining process. We discovered today that he loves zucchini, which I think is really pretty awesome.

In terms of coming attractions, in the next month we will have two separate sets of visitors (insert here another little prayer of thanksgiving that our stuff is here before our houseguests) and we're going to take advantage of our newly functional gas chip, which allows us to buy gas without having to pay the rather prohibitively steep taxes. If you think it's rough buying gas back home at 4 or 5 dollars a gallon, imagine paying $3 a LITER and you'll understand why we've been minimizing our driving for the past few months...

A Festive Weekend

We've had a great Labor Day weekend -- now that we have a deep freezer we continued our experiments in freezing fresh fruit as a method of preserving it (so far we have about five quarts of sliced frozen peaches, one quart of frozen blackberries and a half a quart or so of frozen strawberries). We also spent some quality time in the kitchen, despite the fact that the high temperature on Friday, Saturday and Sunday was at or above 100. Today we're planning to head over to Samanpazarı and Ulus to scope out stores for patio furniture and maybe some carpet stores.

Saturday night we made pizzas for the first time in forever. I made a pizza bianca with olive oil, thinly sliced zucchini (almost the last of it!), roasted garlic, fresh basil, mozzarella (sliced up string cheese, but it worked), grated aged Turkish sheep's milk cheese, and some fresh chopped arugula and truffle oil that I put on top once it came out of the oven. Danny made a pepperoni pizza with homemade sauce that he pulled together from some tomato paste, garlic, red wine and spices.

Sunday was Danny's birthday, and we hung out with Tara and Craig and their daughter Adrian, who is two weeks older than Stephen. Stephen tried his best to impress Adrian by sitting unsupported for a few seconds at a time before toppling over, but since she has been sitting by herself for a couple of weeks now I'm not sure he wowed her with that. It's funny to see how different they both are now than a couple of months ago when we first started having play dates with them, though, because they've just recently started noticing each other. They reached for each other's hair, ears, fingers, and faces, and took turns gnawing on toys. I guess the days of "mine!" are still a ways off, for which I'm grateful. Tara and Craig brought a birthday cake, so after a late lunch/early dinner of roasted chicken with adobo, sauteed zucchini with caramelized onions, steamed brussel sprouts with lemon oil, brown rice, and salad, we all sat around and pretty much destroyed the cake while the babies alternated napping and fighting their naps for a couple of hours.

Monday morning once Stephen was down for his first nap of the day, we decided to try to make Eggs Benedict, despite the fact that neither of us have ever made hollandaise sauce nor have we had much luck poaching eggs in the past. We used this recipe to help us decipher the process (by the way, check out the cool calculator function that recalculates the ingredients for different serving sizes, so helpful!) and actually ended up with a pretty successful version of one of our favorite brunch foods. Now I'm scheming about how to get my hands on crab meat so I can try to make the Eggs Neptune that I loved at Luna Grill back home...a crabcake instead of Canadian bacon.

Our first quiche

Danny and I both love quiche, and his mother makes really good ones, but he and I have never tried to make one. Tonight I was at a bit of a loss as to how to use up more of the overabundance of zucchini in our fridge (note to self: do not buy 2 kilos of zucchini. It is too much for the two of us to eat), and I proposed a frittata, but Danny wanted to try making quiche instead. We used this crust recipe, taking the "quick and easy" route of not refridgerating the dough and then rolling it out, but rather pressing it straight into our only approximately suitable pan, an 8" square metal baking dish. We used this recipe as a general guideline for the filling, although we didn't have Gruyere, heavy cream or whole milk, so we used a mixture of a Turkish aged sheep's milk cheese and cheddar and 2% milk instead.

Given all of the adjustments, I was a little fearful for how it would turn out, but it was actually quite lovely! We ate it with a green salad. Definitely not a healthy meal given the copious amounts of bacon and butter, but certainly a nice treat. I didn't get a picture of it before we dug in, so you'll have to use your imagination.

Last night I made tuna noodle casserole (at Danny's special request). I used my mom's recipe (included below, thanks Dad for sending it!), but had to make some substitutions. Per my mom's advice, I cut way back on the amount of fat...I think I probably used a tablespoon or a tablespoon and a half. We didn't have green peppers, so I grated up a zucchini (are you sensing a theme to this week's meals yet?), and I didn't have pimentos so I finely grated a carrot for color. The carrot, by the way, did not actually add color once it was cooked, but I was comforted by the thought that it added a little beta carotene to our meal. We used whole wheat spirals instead of elbow macaroni. Such a good comfort food!

1 can tuna
1 1/2 cups uncooked elbow macaroni
3 Tbsp fat (original recipe called for bacon grease)
1/2 cup chopped onion
1/3 cup chopped green peppers
2 Tbsp flour
1 1/3 cup milk
1 can Cream of Mushroom soup
1/3 cup chopped pimento
Sprinkle thyme

Sauté onion & green pepper in fat. Blend in flour. Stir in milk & soup. Cook until smooth. Combine with Tuna, macaroni & pimento. Pour into 1 quart greased casserole & bake covered 30 minutes in 350 degree oven. Remove lid after 20 min.

Just a Small Rant

I try to limit the amount of time and energy I spend ranting, but I just can't resist saying something about the absolutely ridiculous news we got yesterday about our household goods shipment. We were told our stuff was being shipped via a new, improved system that had two primary benefits: 1) we could track the status of our shipment and see exactly where our things were and when they were scheduled to arrive, and 2) the shipping time would be considerably shorter - under the old system it typically took 2-3 months, and apparently the new contract specified a 60-day maximum timeframe from pack-out to delivery.

We finished our pack-out on 27 May. 60 days after that was 26 July.

Of course, as of 26 July no one had any idea where our stuff was. NO ONE. We called the company who did the pack-out, who told us to call the shipping company. The shipping company told us that they had no record of a household shipment for us, only a vehicle. The track-it-yourself system told us that our stuff arrived in Turkey on the 21st of July, along with our car, but when we contacted the people at the port they assured us it most certainly had not.

So yesterday, we finally got word that they had located our shipment. In Antwerp. Yes, that's right, Antwerp, Belgium. Where our shipment has been sitting since 22 July. It's now scheduled to arrive in western Turkey on 6 September, and will then supposedly take another 15 days to arrive in Ankara and clear customs. Which means that IF everything goes as scheduled, we will get our things on or about 22 September. Which is, if I do the math correctly, 118 days after we packed out. And that's assuming everything goes according to schedule, which I can virtually guarantee will not happen. For one thing, Ramadan goes from 1-30 September this year, and almost nothing ever gets done during Ramadan. I mean, would you want to move furniture if you were fasting from all food and drink during daylight hours? I certainly wouldn't.

Okay, now I'm done. I swear, no more ranting or whining about this issue. I will say that even though I'm incredibly annoyed at how screwed up this whole process has been, I feel better having a timeline in mind. At least now I know not to expect our stuff before the end of next month, so it's not like I get my hopes up every week that maybe they'll find our shipment and it will turn out to be here in Ankara ready to deliver...

Sort of a pale spring green

I try to do a few "green" things, like using cloth diapers and drying them on the line instead of in the dryer, but I wouldn't say that I'm a total hard-core earth mother. Like a nice spring green or chartreuse even, not really a deep forest green. I have been experimenting with making my own nontoxic cleaners, though, both for environmental and economic reasons. Also, I like not having a ton of toxic chemicals around the house that Stephen could get into once he's mobile. Some have been more successful than others, but here are a few things I've tried that actually worked pretty well.

- 1/2 white vinegar, 1/2 water: this is a great all-purpose cleaner. I use it to clean almost any non-porous surface -- to wipe down the kitchen counters (unless we've been cooking with raw chicken or pork, in which case I use a regular kitchen spray), to clean bathroom counters and mirrors, and to spot-clean the floor. It works great on mirrors and glass, our water is really hard and this solution removes hard water spots perfectly without streaks.

- baking soda and vinegar: I use this to clean our toilets. I flush the toilet, sprinkle baking soda all around the inside of the bowl, then pour full-strength white vinegar into the toilet and scrub it with the toilet brush while it's foaming. It leaves the toilet really nice and clean.

- baking soda and dish soap: This makes a great soft scrub for really heavily soiled surfaces. I used it on our kitchen cabinet doors when we were getting ready to put our old house on the market. Put a small pile of baking soda in a bowl, and add enough dish soap to make a paste. Rub it onto the surface you want to clean. The only downside of this cleaner is that if you don't rinse it off really well it does leave slightly grainy streaks, so make sure you rinse or wipe down the surface thoroughly.

- lemon juice and olive oil: A solution of 2 parts olive oil to 1 part lemon juice works pretty well as a furniture polish for varnished wood. Shake it up and put a little bit onto a soft cotton cloth. Make sure you rub it in really well, and go over the surface with a clean cotton cloth to get up any excess oil. It leaves the wood really nice and shiny, but if you don't wipe up the excess you'll see some streaks on the surface.

- baby wipes solution: I made a wipes solution for Stephen, out of 1 tablespoon apricot or almond oil, 1 tablespoon liquid castile soap, 2 drops tea tree oil, 1 drop lavender oil, and 1 cup of water. I shake it up before using it, and it works really well to clean his little bottom without irritating it.

- borax: I add borax to our washer with the detergent, as it acts as a natural water softener. I also put some down in the kitchen where we've had some black ants coming in, as I read that they take it back to their queen and it eventually kills them. So far it doesn't seem to be working, but we'll see if eventually they start disappearing.

Do-it-yourself

I get a certain amount of satisfaction out of making something myself rather than buying it. I don't mean that I'm going to start wearing all only hand-sewn clothes made out of hand-woven fabric or anything, but within reason I like to figure out how to make things for myself.

Today, for instance, I made my own pumpkin pie spice blend. I love this spice blend, and use it in everything from my faux chai tea that I posted on several months back to fruit compotes to oatmeal. I had used up the last of my jar of purchased spice blend, though, and decided that it would make more sense to make my own blend since I had almost all of the spices that go into it. I think the results smell amazing, and I had fun customizing the blend to include more of the spices I really love. Here's the blend I came up with:

Pumpkin Pie Spice
2 tablespoons ground cinnamon
2 tablespoons ground ginger
1 tablespoon grated nutmeg (I grated mine fresh)
1 tablespoon ground allspice
1/2 teaspoon mace
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves

Most of the time I like the from-scratch version of things we make at least as much if not more than things we can buy -- my knitted dishcloths, for instance, work so much better than most of the dishcloths we bought before since they're knitted out of cotton kitchen twine so they have lots of good texture for getting food off of plates but the open knit pattern means they come really clean when we wash them. Danny's breakfast sausage recipe is so much better than any breakfast sausage we've bought.

Some things, though, are not necessarily better when made from scratch. One year we had a bunch of pumpkins around and were determined to make pumpkin pie out of them. Maybe if we had owned a really big food processor to blend them smooth enough they would have been better, but I have to say that the results were really not any better than pies made from canned pumpkin. The texture was a little bit odd. We still ate them, but we haven't repeated the experiment.

An Ode to Cornbread

Okay, so this won't actually be a real ode. I played around with the idea of trying to write this in iambic pentameter, but there's no way I could actually make it work. Cut me a little slack, Stephen still isn't sleeping through the night. :)

One of the things we eat almost every week is cornbread -- we both love it with chili especially, but also with just about anything else. Now, I may not be all that southern in a lot of respects, but cornbread is one of those things the South just does better. I realize that some of you, my readers, may be Yankees who do such things as bake sweet, cakelike cornbread. I want you to know that God still love you and so do I, but if there is an event at my house that calls for cornbread I will not ask you to bring it.

Ironically, my favorite recipe for southern-style cornbread comes from my mom's side of the family, who are not even southern. Most of them that I know of live in the Kansas City area. Go figure. But I kid you not, this is hands down the best cornbread I've ever eaten. A well-seasoned cast iron skillet is key to making this correctly, although in our last post when we had foolishly neglected to bring a skillet I did make it in a glass Pyrex baking dish. The results were acceptable but only just. To really get the full effect, it's crucial to get the pan good and hot (the oil or shortening should be just starting to smoke) so the edges are all nice and crispy and fried.

As a side note, the original recipe called for white cornmeal, my mom generally uses 1/2 white cornmeal and 1/2 yellow cornmeal, and I've done both half and half and all yellow cornmeal. The only difference is in the color and texture (yellow tends to be a little coarser).

Egg Bread Recipe

shortening or vegetable oil to grease the pan (enough to coat the bottom with no bare spots)
a 10" cast iron skillet

1 1/2 cups cornmeal - NOT SELF-RISING
3 T. flour
2 T. sugar
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. salt

2 c. buttermilk
1 egg

Put shortening or vegetable oil in the skillet (a tablespoon or two, enough to cover the bottom and a little to spare) and put skillet in oven while preheating. Preheat oven to 450 degrees Fahrenheit. (If you forget, you can heat the skillet until the oil is almost smoking on the stove-top.) Sift together dry ingredients in a large mixing bowl. Beat buttermilk and egg together in a small bowl; stir into dry ingredients just enough to moisten. Pour batter into preheated skillet (the edges should sizzle and puff slightly). Bake for 20-25 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean.

You can't get there from here

Ever have one of those you-can't-get-there-from-here days? I had one this past week...everything I thought of that I wanted to do I couldn't, either because we didn't have a car yet (which will hopefully change today, hooray!) or because our household goods (HHE) shipment is lost in space. I thought of starting a new knitting project, and then realized that all of my yarn is in HHE and I don't know where a yarn store is locally. I thought about baking something, but my mixer and most of my baking pans are in HHE. I thought about starting a new book, but all of our books are...you guessed it...in HHE.

I'm thankful, though, for friends here -- in the midst of my frustration about not having access to any of the things I wanted, I got an invitation from a friend to go check out a local yarn store this weekend. The same friend let me rummage through boxes of books they were going to donate and I scored a few new things to read. Other friends have driven us around for weeks now, loaned us their extra TV, invited us to come places with them, and cooked dinner for us. Not having our stuff is teaching me to be more gracious about accepting offers of help from other people, I will say that. I usually hate feeling like an imposition so I'd prefer to just suck it up rather than ask for help, but as we start our third month without access to most of our stuff, I'm having to swallow my pride a little bit and take people up on their offers of assistance. If and when they ever find our HHE, I will certainly be motivated to a) unpack it and b) offer assistance/food/rides/books to people who arrived after we did!

After-action menu plan for this week

One of the good things about buying too many vegetables at the market is that it forces us to find creative ways to use them up (and we thereby end up eating more vegetables). This past week, we had fresh cilantro, parsley, eggplant, zucchini, tomatoes, sweet and hot peppers, and arugula that all needed using. So here's how we did it:

- Tuesday night we made black beans and rice, with a homemade salsa (a hot salsa both in terms of temperature and spiciness, made with some of our excess tomatoes and with lots of fresh lime juice and fresh cilantro in it) with extra chopped cilantro sprinkled on top of everything. Danny made some chorizo meatballs to go with it, which turned out REALLY well (they had to be meatballs because we currently have neither a sausage stuffer nor sausage casings). For the chorizo we used an amalgam of two different recipes, this one and the "Spanish Chorizo" recipe on this page. We didn't have aleppo pepper so we used cayenne, and we omitted the brown sugar and substituted some red wine for the white wine that's called for, but otherwise we used all of the spices listed on both recipes. We also had to use a little bit of reserved bacon grease as we didn't have any fatback (I know it's not healthy, but come on, it's homemade sausage!).

- Wednesday night we made a vegetable frittata. We grated up three zucchini and squeezed out as much water as we could, then combined that with some eggs, chopped parsley, chopped arugula, sauteed onions and sweet peppers and some blue cheese and baked it all up in our 10-inch cast iron skillet. I really liked grating the zucchini, as that way it didn't take over the texture of the frittata but still added a bunch of fiber and nutrients. This was probably one of the best frittatas we've made in recent memory.

- Thursday night we were on a mission to use up the rest of the sweet peppers and our one lone eggplant, so Danny improvised a stuffed peppers recipe. We used this recipe as a guideline on seasonings, and made the stuffing out of ground beef, cooked brown rice, finely chopped eggplant, and fresh parsley. We poured homemade tomato sauce that we had prepared a few weeks ago with extra market tomatoes and frozen over the top of them and baked the peppers for a little over an hour. Okay, we baked them for 45 minutes, took out a few peppers and microwaved them because we were STARVING, and left the rest of them in to bake for another 30 or 45 minutes. We served them with green beans dressed with lemon oil, salt and pepper.

As you can probably guess from the number of times I've mentioned sort of using a recipe or two as a guide, we don't really do much recipe planning or even really follow recipes all that closely most of the time. Although I love reading other peoples' menu plans, I don't know that I'm really able to plan that far in advance, so maybe doing this sort of recap of what we ended up cooking will work better than trying to predict what we'll end up cooking!

Bragging on my boys

I hope y'all will permit me to brag just a little bit...both of my boys have hit pretty major milestones in this past week and I'm finally getting around to sharing the good news.

Danny is officially only two steps away from finishing his grad school! All three of his committee members have signed off on his dissertation as being defendable with "minor or no changes," so now all he has left is the defense and final submission. He'll go home in about a week and a half to defend, then will make whatever "minor" edits his committee requests. We're hoping he can have it completely edited and submitted before the end of the month -- thank goodness that they're requiring that all dissertations be submitted electronically now, as otherwise we'd have to figure out getting the nine jillion page final draft to them without it getting lost in the mail!

Stephen has also made some significant progress in the sleeping department. We took away his pacifier for sleeping and also stopped swaddling him last Friday, and Saturday night he slept for ELEVEN HOURS STRAIGHT. No, that is not a typo. He hasn't done it again since, but as my mother-in-law said the first time he slept for four or five hours at a stretch, the fact that he's done it once gives me hope as it's proof he can eventually do it again. Most nights he still wakes up twice to eat, but a few times it's been only once.

We ended up taking the pacifier away because he was starting to wake up just for that -- Thursday night last week he was up every two hours just wanting the paci back in, and at that point I decided that the pacifier had to go once and for all. We went cold turkey on the pacifier, and stopped swaddling him at the same time so he could comfort himself with his hands. I had been leaving his arms unswaddled for about a week already for naps, but at night he was still tightly swaddled in his Miracle Blanket. The funny thing about taking his paci away for nighttime is that now he doesn't even want it during the day -- a few times this past week we've been out somewhere and he's gotten fussy so I offered it to him, but he just chews on it and then spits it out.

So that's our good news! The bad news is that apparently neither the moving company nor our travel personnel have any idea where our household goods shipment is, so when Danny goes home to defend I will be without a computer for a week (our second laptop is in the missing shipment). Unless they find it relatively quickly, we're going to have to start buying more clothes for Stephen, as all of his 6-9 month clothing is in that shipment and although he's only in the 10th percentile for height, his torso is really long and some of his 3-6 month clothing is already starting to get a little short...

Random internet musings

I must be approximately the last person on earth to have discovered streaming online radio, but I finally did! I've been playing with jango.com for the past few weeks, and totally love getting to create my own "radio stations" to listen to during the day. In case anyone else out there actually hasn't checked that site out yet, you pick an artist to start your new station, then you can either add a bunch of other artists that you like or let the site make recommendations for artists who have a similar sort of a vibe or a combination of both. I like it because I get to hear music from artists that I may not have known I liked without having to buy a new album that I'm not sure I'm going to enjoy. Since I'm too paranoid to do the bit torrent thing to download free music, this is a good way to test out new music for free!

Also, I know I said it a while back, but I don't know how my parents lived overseas without the internet. Seriously, it rules. Last week I ordered us a new featherbed and feather comforter online. I got to customize the fill levels and such, and now in a week or so we will have a lovely fluffy cloud of a bed, all without me having to leave the house. It's also pretty awesome that we can do Netflix here or rent movies on ITunes or whatever. Especially now that our awesome friends Liz and Josh are storing their extra flat screen TV here and letting us use it, so we're not watching movies on the tiny tiny loaner TV screen that we have to sit 36 inches away from to see! We just upped our Netflix subscription from 3 to 6 movies at a time, and are really looking forward to having a steady stream of new movies coming in. We've even started adding some TV series to our list.

As a side note, I find that assembling our Netflix list is almost as entertaining as actually watching the movies. Our current list is something line 150 discs, and we've barely scratched the surface of anything other than the new releases and action adventure genres. Part of that is probably because for the past two years we've hardly seen any movies thanks to our remote previous post and Danny's grad school work, but it's paying off now because there are so many movies we're excited to see. Also, not having had cable except for the few months we were home between posts means that almost any of the cable TV series are new to us. I really sort of love having the option to watch one episode of a one-hour show or three of them, depending on how much time we have and how into the series we are that day.

On Cars and Socks

One of the great things about living here with an infant is that Turks LOVE babies. We can't go anywhere without hearing "Mashallah!" or "Çok Tatlı!" Mashallah literally means "God has willed it to be so," but it's basically the way to say something or someone is awesome without calling down the wrath of the evil eye on said object or person. (Çok tatlı means "very sweet.") Men and women alike come up to us all the time and fuss over Stephen, kissing his feet and rubbing his fuzzy little head. Happily, he loves any and all attention so he doesn't get upset when strangers get in his face making kissing noises and fussing over him. In fact, he usually smiles for them.

One of the funny things we've noticed is that Americans and Turks worry about very different things when it comes to babies. Turks, for instance, don't usually let their babies stand up or even sit up much at all until they're like a year old, for fear of hurting their backs or legs. They also seem to think that babies should be fully bundled even in the summer, or at the very least be wearing socks ALL THE TIME. The fact that we let Stephen stand up on our laps all the time in his naked feet has garnered us more than our fair share of dirty looks from concerned grandmothers.

Apparently, however, being mowed down by an oncoming vehicle is not an issue of great concern here. Not because it's not a risk, mind you. There are no stop signs here, and a red light here is approximately equivalent to a flashing yellow light back home. Drivers might slow down for them, but stopping is certainly not mandatory (and will in fact get you honked at).

To get back to the issue of babies, the other day Danny and I were taking Stephen over to a friend's house (incidentally, the temperature at the time was no less than 90 degrees Fahrenheit). Stephen was in his lovely new (bright red, very visible) stroller, and we were walking down Çankaya Bulvarı, which is a very large, very busy street. Of course, the sidewalk was under construction so we had to walk on the side of the road, between the parked cars and the cars that were careening down the road. We passed a group of middle-aged Turkish women.

I'm not kidding, they tried to stop the stroller. In the middle of the street. With buses whizzing by no less than six inches from his stroller. To fuss over his chubby little cheeks and tell him how sweet he looked. I paused just long enough to be polite, but refused to linger in the street any longer than was absolutely necessary. And the best part? When we moved past I heard them muttering to each other about his feet being bare. Danny and I had to bite our lips to keep from laughing about the fact that they apparently thought nothing of stopping his flimsy umbrella stroller in the middle of a busy road during rush hour, but were seriously concerned that he would catch his death of cold because he wasn't wearing socks IN JULY.

Adventures in Babysitting

We have now officially left Stephen with two different people who are not related to us, and both babysitters apparently survived unscathed. Stephen, of course, loved it as it meant he had their undivided attention and was being adored the whole time.

It's weird to find oneself in a familiar situation but in a completely different role. This past week, for instance, was the first time we hired a babysitter. I used to babysit all the time in junior high and high school -- overseas it was pretty much the only source of income other than bagging groceries at the commissary or doing the Summer Hire program. This was definitely the first time, however, that I had to choose, hire, and pay a babysitter.

It wasn't the first time I had left Stephen with someone else -- technically we had a babysitter watching him during Danny's brother's wedding ceremony as Danny and I were both in the wedding party, but the girl had been babysitting for Danny's niece for three years so she was hardly an unknown quantity. Plus they were right downstairs and the ceremony lasted less than an hour. Danny and I also left Stephen with his parents for a couple of hours one night before we moved here so we could go to dinner, but we were a mile down the road and grandparents hardly count as babysitters in my mind.

On Saturday of last week, however, we had a real live babysitter. I was introduced to her through a friend here, and hired her to watch Stephen while we went to a birthday party a few miles away. It worked out great -- Stephen loved her for the half hour or so he was awake while she was here, she and I put him to bed in sort of tag team fashion (I swaddled him, she gave him a bottle, then I sang to him and put him down in bed), and he slept the whole time we were gone. I actually think she was a little disappointed she didn't get to have more time with him awake, although I assured her that after about 7:30 his awake time is not fun time for anyone involved.

It was really strange, though, trying to figure out how to find a babysitter, how much to pay them, how to get her home, meeting her parents, the whole thing. I mean, it's been four months since Stephen was born but part of me still can't quite fathom that Danny and I are parents who can expect to be taken seriously when doing adult things like hiring a babysitter.

Today I left him with one of my friends for almost two hours in the middle of the day, during which time I got my hair cut (a whole 'nother adventure that, trying to explain what you want to a hairdresser with no mutually intelligible language to utilize). It was great to be able to relax and enjoy being pampered, especially since I had really been itching for a way to update my 'do. He had a great time and even laughed for her, which even Danny and I only get to hear once or twice a day as it's a pretty recent development.

I realize that there are lots of different opinions on when it's okay to leave your child with someone other than a family member, but I have to say that having a brief little respite was really nice. I'm thankful every day that I am able to stay home with Stephen, but this really made me understand why my mom used to say that she felt like getting a break every now and then made her a better mother to my sister and me!

A Few of Stephen's Favorite Things

I figured I should document this periodically, because it's cute and also so that I can look back and remember what Stephen loved at four months versus six months (I can't think much further ahead than a couple of months from now...it's too weird to imagine him being a toddler, let alone a little kid). Here are a few things that Stephen loves right now:


- Ring Sling: Stephen has loved being carried in a sling since the very beginning, and I still use one or both of my two beautiful slings (one is red and yellow, the other blue and white, both made by Stephen's Auntie Margo) every single day. Right now I mostly use the vertical carry (with his legs tucked in or hanging out, depending on how hot it is and which he seems to prefer) and the front facing carry (aka Buddha carry, aka kangaroo carry).


- Swaddling: I tried letting him sleep unswaddled for two days again this week after I found him scooted all the way to the bottom of the crib and got scared that he was going to flip himself over in the middle of the night, but after the 48-hour trial period decided to go back to swaddling. It was definitely better than when I tried it a month ago, but got progressively worse over the two days instead of better and we were all exhausted by the end of of it.


- Pacifier: He mostly just has it for sleeping, but it also helps calm him down when he's a little tired. We tried the Avent and the Soothies, and he prefers the Avent hands down (gagged on the Soothies every time I tried to give it to him).


- Singing: He LOVES for us to sing to him. Danny makes up songs all the time about whatever he's doing (especially if Stephen is crabby and needs distracting), and I usually end up singing them later. Stephen especially loves when Danny bobs his head along with the song as he sings. He also has a special game he plays with Stephen in the mornings called "Diggery Do" after the Australian aboriginal instrument, in which Danny sings in a deep voice while Stephen rests his head on Danny's chest to feel the vibrations. I also sing to Stephen all the time -- for naps and bedtime I usually sing one of the following worship choruses: "Here I am to Worship," "Blessed Be Your Name," "Pass Me Not O Gentle Savior," or "How Great is Our God." During the day, I sing him a lot of folk music; he particularly likes Joan Baez ("Where Have All the Flowers Gone"), Simon & Garfunkel, Peter, Paul & Mary (he really likes "Leaving On a Jet Plane"), and the Beatles (especially "Penny Lane").


- Sitting: He can't sit unsupported, but he loves to sit up with one of us behind him for support. I'm kicking myself for not putting his Bumbo chair into our air freight shipment, because I think he would really like sitting up in it now, but chances are when it gets here next month he'll still like it.


- Toys: Up until about two weeks ago he didn't really pay much attention to his toys, but now when I'm burping him he'll see his little play mat with the toys on it and freak out talking to them and trying to get over there. He especially loves the abacus his Grandpa Bogie made him, as he can sit up to play with it. He also loves this little four-inch plastic ring rattle, and flutterbug teether that one of my friends gave him. He likes to listen to the wooden rattle his Grandpa Bogie made him (with black-eyed peas inside to remind him of his southern heritage!), but he can't quite get the hang of holding it himself just yet.


- Mirrors: He loves watching himself and us in the mirror. He has a free-standing (unbreakable) mirror that his Grandma Tene gave him, which lives on his play mat and is a constant source of entertainment.


- Fabric: He loves biting on fabric right now -- burp rags, shirts, whatever. He also loves to look at interesting fabric, like the beautiful quilt that his Auntie Margo made him (currently serving as his play mat) and the cloth block she made to match it.


- Fans and chandeliers: He's totally obsessed with the chandelier in our living room, and will practically fall over backwards arching his back to try to see it if he's on one of our shoulders.


- Talking: In addition to the "ooh" and "ah-ooo" noises he's been making for a couple of months now, Stephen has recently discovered how much fun it is to squeal, and experiments with different tones and volume levels. He can now also make a "gh" sound, complete with rattly sound thanks to all of the extra drool that he's making lately.

There's a Reason They're Called "Boy Bands"

If you had asked me yesterday which music video I was most obsessed with, without hesitation I would have told you it was the video for "Beautiful Liar," with Shakira and Beyonce. Seriously, it's just a freaking cool video. I will admit that I have a total girl crush on Shakira, because between her voice and her awesome belly dancing moves I just think she's the bees knees. And I personally think it was a stroke of brilliance the way the video for "Beautiful Liar" was put together, it's just a beautiful video.

Now, however, thanks to my beloved friend Shannon, I have a new obsession -- the "Summertime" video by NKOTB. Not for the same reasons AT ALL, mind you. "Beautiful Liar" is a piece of music video genius. The fascination with "Summertime" the video is really more like trying to avert one's eyes from an intoxicated co-worker making a fool of themselves at the office Christmas party. You know you should, but at the same time you just can't resist observing the bizarre behaviour. I mean, I loved NKOTB as much as anyone in 1991 -- in fact, other than one Oak Ridge Boys concert at Busch Gardens, theirs was the first concert I remember going to. I had the nightshirt, the tapes, and would have had the set of action figures if my parents hadn't put their collective feet down about shelling money for such ludicrousness. But a boy band full of teenagers (I think Jon may have been in his early twenties maybe, but as I recall when they started Joey was only like 13 or 14) is a very different thing than a boy band full of men in their thirties.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I have to admit that I actually paid money to watch the video, that's how badly I wanted to see it. I tried to find it online, but thanks to the court order banning YouTube in Turkey (click here for more information) and to VH1 disallowing users outside the U.S. watching videos on their site, I had no choice. So I am now the proud owner of the video through ITunes. Any time I start thinking that I'm still young and cool, this video will be a useful tool to remind me that I am in fact getting perilously close to 30.

My Name is Heidi, and I Have a Diaper Problem

When I decided to use cloth diapers, I did it for a mixture of reasons: environmental, financial, and because I figured it would be better for Stephen. Almost four months in, I still love using them and am really happy I decided to go this route. I feel better about not throwing away hundreds of disposable diapers, and other than a few days when he was about two weeks old, Stephen has never had diaper rash to speak of. The financial part of my motivation, though, has been severely tested by the sheer number of options for different kinds of diapers that I'd love to try out (pockets (with hemp or microfiber inserts), prefolds (cotton or hemp, with or without liners), fitteds (cotton, hemp, fleece, wool, bamboo), covers, etc.). I know it sounds stupid since we're still talking about diapers here, but seriously, there are some really cute ones and it's very difficult not to want to keep trying all the different options out there.

I had just made a resolution not to buy any more diapers for Stephen after I got all excited about testing out the pocket diapers I bought last month, when I discovered this website: http://www.greenacredesigns.com/. I mean, who doesn't want a diaper with a truck or a lizard embroidered across the tushie? Especially now that it's so hot and half the time Stephen just wears a T-shirt and his diaper, think how adorable it would be! For now, I'm restraining myself. The triple frog pattern, however, is so tempting.

A Different Kettle of Fish

When people made comments about Danny and I being crazy for moving to Turkey, one of our most common responses was to point out that I had not only lived overseas for a good portion of my life (11 out of 29 years) overseas, but that I had actually lived in Turkey before. After having been here for a month now, I would like to officially admit that although we lived in Turkey for two years, living on an American military base and living "on the economy" out in town are two very different animals. As families on our base went, we were very proactive about getting out -- my mom was one of the very few spouses I knew who actually went shopping in the local produce market, for instance, and we travelled all over the country by bus and automobile. That said, our day-to-day lives were spent surrounded by other Americans, and even though we learned a bit of Turkish we got through two years just fine without really ever becoming conversant.

That thought occurred to me today, as I was in the middle of exaggerated sign language with our landlord's handymen. They had come over to fix our shower, which leaks water all over the bathroom floor every time we use it. When they showed up at the door, I immediately busted out the sign language as well as two of the Turkish words I do know, "baby" and "please" to warn them that the baby was sleeping and request that they please speak quietly so as not to wake him. I then used more sign language to demonstrate that when we turn the shower on, water goes all over the floor, and we suspected it was due to one of the doors having come unhinged. The workmen then discussed among themselves, and very respectfully reported their findings back to me, none of which I understood at all. More sign language, and one other Turkish word that I know (Monday), led me to believe that they are going to replace the shower doors on Monday in order to stem the flow of water onto our floor. I nodded, repeated "Monday," thanked them and wished them a good day. Of course, for all I know they may have been saying that since the office hasn't paid our rent for this month, on Monday they will be selling Stephen and me into indentured servitude...

Does that DVD come with Dramamine?

We just watched Cloverfield the other night, or rather we tried to watch it. We got through about half an hour of it before Danny and I were both so nauseaous that we had to stop. We fast forwarded through the last hour and a half of the movie so we could see what happened, and even that was pretty rough. I never saw the "Blair Witch Project," which I understand was sort of similar, and now I'm glad I didn't. It's a shame, because the idea of the movie was so awesome and we had been looking forward to seeing it forever. That, and we committed one of our three precious Netflix slots to it, which considering it takes two weeks to turn around a movie actually is a commitment...

More adventures in marketing

One of the things we really love about living in a new place is exploring the local food. Most Turkish food is pretty familiar -- kebabs in various forms, bread, rice, grilled and stewed meats, and a fairly standard assortment of vegetables. In the open air market, for instance, we can get pretty much any of the same fresh produce you could find in an American farmer's market. In fact, the one thing that I have yet to find here is fresh ginger, and I'm pretty sure that with a relatively healthy population of Asian and south Asian expats living here there might be somewhere in town to find it.


Last week at the market, we noticed a couple of vendors selling small bushes with green pods on them that we couldn't identify. When we asked what they were, we found that they were "taze nahot" or fresh chickpeas. This is not a picture of the actual bushes in the market, which were considerably smaller, but it at least gives you an idea. What they were selling was basically the entire uprooted bush, with roots (and dirt) still intact.


We chickened out on actually buying them, but went home and promptly got on the internet to find out how they're served. Of course, once we found out that they're not poisonous unless soaked in lye or something (sounds silly, but one never knows...), we were dying to try our hand at preparing them. Yesterday we went back to the market and discovered the down-side of fresh, in-season produce, as it took us a good ten minutes to locate the one stall that was still selling them this week. Apparently the window of freshness is pretty small. We bought five bunches so that we'd have plenty to experiment with even if they were completely gone from the market next week.


For anyone who hasn't tried them, the flavor of fresh chickpeas is essentially just like peas. They are, however, considerably more work than snap peas. Wikipedia says that they grow "two or three" to a pod, but the ones we got were one and sometimes two in a pod. To be able to prepare them, Danny first had to pick all the pods out of the bushes, then we washed the pods in a diluted bleach solution. We froze some in the pod for later, and decided to steam half of ours in the pod to eat like edamame and shell the other half. The shelled peas we sauteed in a little butter, green onions, garlic, a small hot pepper, fresh mint, fresh parsley, cumin, coriander, lemon juice, salt and pepper.


I will not win any food photography awards for this shot, I know, but at least you can see how they turned out. The steamed in the pod peas were good, and a beautiful bright green color, but were definitely not as easy to eat out of the pod as are edamame. Despite the fact that they tasted pretty good, we decided they were probably more trouble than they were worth when cooked this way. Part of the problem is that the chickpea pod is a sort of an airtight pouch, which makes it impossible to judge the size of the pea from the size of the pod, so the small peas got overcooked and turned to mush in the pods. The sauteed peas were delicious, although we did notice that the color didn't stay quite as bright and vibrant.


Next week, we're planning to buy some of the deniz börülcesi ("sea bean"), which is pictured on the left. We've seen it a couple of times in the market, and finally looked up how to cook it. The recommendation that sounds the best to us is to boil it about 15 minutes (without adding salt to the water, as it has a good deal of salt in it), drain and toss with olive oil, lemon juice, crushed red pepper and garlic.


We also saw some fresh pistachios, which we may buy next week to experiment with. Eaten right out of the pod, they taste like a sort of crunchier, watered down version of unsalted pistachios (so nothing all that thrilling in other words), but it could be fun to play around with. Our experience of having to scour the market for the fresh chickpeas this week has also taught us that when it comes to interesting newcomers to the market, we should just buy first and google later lest we miss out!

Playing tourists

Before we came to Ankara, Danny and I had decided that we would use our first long weekend in country to take a short trip somewhere, just to get out and see something of the country. As it happened, our first long weekend happened before our car got here, so the weekend away turned into a weekend touristing around our new home town (for the next few years anyway). We set Friday aside to explore a few different areas of the city, and in the process to get a good long walk in as we were both feeling a little sedentary after a few weeks without running shoes or the opportunity to really do anything with them.


We had a leisurely breakfast and let Stephen take his morning nap at the apartment in his crib, and just before lunch we set out on our great adventure. We took a cab down to Kuğulu Parkı (Swan park) at the south end of Tunalı Hilmi Caddesi, and went to an Iskender kebab restaurant. For the uninitiated, Iskender kebab is basically a plate of flat bread with thinly sliced lamb on top and yogurt on the side. What really makes it special in Danny's eyes is the saucepan of clarified butter that comes to the table and constitutes the "sauce" for the kebab. No joke, the waiter pours melted butter all over your plate. It soaks into the bread...Danny decided he was allowed to have it again on Friday as he hadn't eaten it since Wednesday. He proposed going to a different Iskender restaurant for lunch today as well, but I vetoed that one. I will say that the Iskender kebab is good, but if you didn't like butter it would really not be a great option.

After lunch, we walked up a good portion of Tunalı Hilmi Caddesi, which is about as swank as Ankara gets. I was personally excited to see the Nine West store, and there was of course a Starbucks and a McDonalds, but as if to balance out all of this sophistication there was a mostly destroyed simitçi cart (simitçi carts are sort of reminiscent of carnival popcorn carts but selling sesame seed studded bread rings called simit). It looked as though the cart had gotten into a fight with an oncoming car and had fared poorly in the altercation.


We made our way over to the Kocatepe mosque, which is huge and can be seen from most of the major roads leading down into Ankara. I'm not sure if there's actually a direct correlation between the size of the mosque and the number of minarets, but this is a four-minaret mosque and it's massive. Since it was Friday and all of my headscarves are in our household goods shipment that's not arriving for another month, we didn't go any closer to the mosque than across the street, but it was really cool to see it up close. And lest you wonder why I have a collection of headscarves, I would point out that a) I've lived in the Middle East for a combined four years, and b) if you don't bring your own headscarf to mosques they give you the gross communal use ones at the door, which is really just a good way to catch some head lice.


We also checked out Kızılay, a massive pedestrian shopping area that was a bit overwhelming for us so we sort of walked straight through, and found a street full of used book vendors that we had read about in one of our guidebooks. Unfortunately, the only English books were a couple of Cliff's Notes and some English textbooks. Interesting, there were also TOEFL prep books in English. Call me crazy, but I feel like if one can read and understand a whole TOEFL prep book in English, one probably doesn't have much to worry about when it comes to the test.


On our way up to the citadel (which is supposedly the most noteworthy thing to see in Ankara, and we never actually did see it), we walked through the university but were thwarted in our attempt to find the bookstore and score an Ankara U hoodie by some security guards who apparently thought we looked too suspicious to allow onto the campus. I'm pretty sure it was Danny's beard that did it, given the recent turmoil over religious symbols on university campuses. Shortly thereafter, Stephen decided it had been far too long since his last meal, and was really rather insistent that we rectify the situation immediately. I picked out a nice shady patch of grass in a mostly out-of-the-way area, and only after Stephen had already started nursing did we notice that we were sitting at the edge of a mosque's courtyard (may I remind you that it was Friday). Oops. Luckily, I was fairly discreet and other than the mosque custodian picking up litter, no one even came near us. International/interfaith incident avoided.


We continued in what we thought was the direction of the citadel (basically straight uphill), and found an awesome area of tiny cobblestone streets filled with antique stores, carpet sellers, and sundry other shops catering to the few tourists that make their way to Ankara. We ended up talking to an English-speaking kilim seller for a good long while, drinking tea and showing off how adorable Stephen is. Turks LOVE babies. We also checked out a couple of carpet stores, including one that had some pretty phenomenal kilims, carpets, and embroidered pieces from Iran, Iraq, and Turkey. Once our things get here and we can get some good measurements of our rooms, we definitely want to go back there, because he had some really unique pieces.


By that time, despite the fact that we still hadn't found the citadel, we were ready to head back in the direction of home. We took a cab to Atakule (the tower sort of similar to the one in Seattle, on the right side of the picture), which is a shopping mall and tower with a revolving restaurant at the top. I was hoping to find a swimming suit, since mine is in our household goods shipment and our apartment building has an indoor pool. We didn't find the suit, but we did walk by a street vendor selling mussels. Somehow, that did not seem like a good idea. I mean, shellfish from a street vendor in general is pretty scary, and when you factor in how far it is to the nearest body of salt water...yikes.


We walked from Atakule up to Kolay, a so-called outlet store that advertised their "Bikini bazaar." Outlet store my foot, their bikinis were all $50 and up, but after a full day of walking around in the blazing heat, I was desperate and Stephen was quickly losing patience. I guessed what I thought would be my size (38? 40? 42? what do those numbers even mean?) and we walked the rest of the way home.


We changed into our suits, put Stephen in a makeshift swim diaper (read: disposable diaper we got for free on Lufthansa), and headed down to test out the pool for the first time. Stephen was, shall we say, less than impressed with the giant cold bathtub. In fact, the minute I lowered his legs into the water his lower lip stuck straight out in a pout, and when I handed him to Danny and his bare belly left mine and hit the water, he let loose with a full-out wail. We took that as a sign that it was time to bring him upstairs for an abbreviated warm bath and bedtime.

It truly is a miracle

My "miracle blanket" arrived on Friday, and after three days and three nights of using it, I can honestly say that if I could find the person who invented it I would kiss them. And buy them a steak dinner.

In fact, Stephen's nap this afternoon has been so long and peaceful that I had time to swiffer the floors, do two loads of laundry, and write this haiku:

Inner, outer wings
Oh how snugly you swaddle
Houdini contained

Swaddling wars continued

My little Houdini has gotten even better at breaking out of his swaddling - but unfortunately NOT better at staying asleep once he escapes. Last night I put him to bed at 8, and had to go in at 12, 1 (fed him this time), 4, 5, and 6 (fed him again) to reswaddle him. Waking up five times in the night is not my idea of a good time, especially since he's been sleeping at least 4 hours at a time for over a month now! I ordered a Miracle Blanket several days ago on the recommendation of one of my friends and a fellow mother of a baby Houdini, but it has yet to arrive and clearly the SwaddleMe is not containing my rowdy boy.

I think I have come up with a pretty sweet interim solution, though. For his morning nap today I improvised something that I think is similar to the Miracle Blanket (click here for a video showing how the blanket works). I used both of his SwaddleMe blankets - I put one on him, tucking the wings over his arms and under his body (like the inside wings on a Miracle Blanket) and then put the second SwaddleMe on as per normal. So far he's been asleep for 1 1/2 hours without waking up needing to be reswaddled, which for daytime is pretty much a record (usually about 1/2 an hour into his nap I have to go in, reswaddle and repacifier him). So I'm still hoping my Miracle Blaket arrives soon, but in the meantime I'm feeling rather clever for coming up with a way to make what I have work.

Experiments in cloth diapering

I've been using cloth diapers on Stephen since his umbilical cord fell off, and up until now have only tried prefolds with waterproof covers. We tried Thirsties covers, the Bummis Super Whisper Wrap, and Bummis Super Brite, and hands down my favorite is the Thirsties covers. I usually change his diaper every time I feed Stephen, so about every 2-3 hours in the daytime and every 4 hours at night or so (he has done 5 and 6 hours stretches at night, but it's not every night yet...sigh). With this changing frequency, I usually have no problems with leaking even though he's a pretty heavy wetter.

Just in the past week or so, however, Stephen has started getting really upset when I change his diaper at night, so I'm looking for ways to not have to do that. We have some disposables left over from the ones we bought to use our last few days in the States and our first couple of days here, so I've been using those at night partly to use them up and partly so that I don't have to change him. I started looking into some of the one size pocket diapers, though, because I figured that might be a good way to get him through the night without a diaper change and not have to buy disposables once we use up what we have. Plus, the pocket diapers are a lot easier for babysitters, which we eventually hope to have.

Since I haven't used anything other than prefolds, however, I was really pretty overwhelmed by the different options in pocket diapers. I was pretty sure I wanted to try the one size variety so that I wouldn't have to buy larger diapers in a month or two, but even in that sub-category there are several different brands. Like so many other things with babies, different brands/styles seem to work really well for some people and really poorly for others, depending on the baby's build, the hardness/softness of the water in a given area, the detergent used, etc. etc. I was so happy, then, when I found the One Size Pocket Diaper Sampler package at www.nickisdiapers.com (here is the link to the sampler package)! I got four different one size diapers, so I can try all of them and see what works best. Assuming they work pretty well, I will probably end up getting some additional liners to stuff them with, but this way I get to really test out the different types.

I realize that this makes me a big nerd, but I'm looking forward to trying out the different varieties and evaluating which ones work best for us...I'll keep you posted!

To Market, To Market

I walked to the closest open-air market this morning, which is about a mile from our apartment. After the experience of trying to navigate our neighborhood's sidewalks (and especially the 12-inch curbs) with our bulky infant stroller I decided just to put Stephen in the sling and carry a backpack for whatever produce I bought. Last week I chickened out at the prospect of having to bargain and therefore bought only two melons for which I probably paid way too much, but this week I was determined to come home with some produce.

Here's what I got, all for 19.50 YTL (Yeni Türkçe Lirası, or new Turkish lira), which is $16.20:

Clockwise from top left: "black cabbage" (looks similar to collards or cavolo nero to me), walnuts, mystery green (more on this later), spring onions, spinach, mystery herb (marjoram?), basil, apricots, tomatoes, plums, peaches, peppers, cucumbers.

Thanks to my stellar (read: nearly nonexistent) Turkish skills, I ended up with two unidentified items. The first is the aforementioned mystery green, which we ate for dinner and may or may not cause us to see visions later tonight. I'm including a detailed picture below...extra cool points for anyone who knows what it is. The texture of the leaves is sort of similar to watercress, but it has pretty much no flavor at all:

The mystery herb (picture below) we think might be marjoram. It looks like tarragon, but smells like oregano. Combined with the basil, mystery green, tomatoes, cucumbers, and some oil and vinegar, it made a lovely addition to our salad tonight.

To be on the safe side, I did wash all of our produce in a diluted bleach solution. Of course, as Danny is already sick I'm really only protecting myself at this point. And in the end, isn't that what it's all about?

...or maybe not

After two straight days of more screaming and wailing than I've heard out of such a little person in a while, I think I might have to admit that unswaddling/thumb sucking is not going to work right now. Stephen ends up knocking his pacifier out of his mouth but is still not totally able to keep his thumb in long enough to soothe himself, resulting in much frustration for all involved. I'm trying not to feel guilty for putting both of us through the past two days by telling myself that trial and error is the only way to learn, and at least it was only two days...right?

The good news is that our air freight is getting here Tuesday, so Tuesday night Stephen can have his bath in his own baby bathtub again and he can sleep in his own crib! Even better, Danny and I will have our knives and cooking utensils and spices back. Because of Turkish customs regulations we couldn't put anything electronic in our air freight shipment, so our nice coffeemaker and our food processor and such are making their way here in our regular household goods shipment and will take another couple of months to arrive, but having our own pots and pans will keep us happy for a good little while.

Baby steps

Yesterday was definitely not a complete success, but neither was it an unmitigated failure. The morning nap, during which I wrote my last post, went relatively smoothly -- it only lasted about 45 minutes, but sadly that is not entirely unusual with Stephen's resistance to naps. The afternoon nap, however, was a different story. Stephen cried from about 11:30 on and off until almost 2, sometimes sleeping for fifteen minutes but mostly fussing and crying and occasionally screaming his head off with reckless abandon. When I tried to give him the pacifier, he pushed it out of his mouth when he tried to get his fingers in there, but then when he did get his thumb into his mouth half the time he cried harder. Finally, about 2:15 he fell asleep. He even woke up at 2:50, cried briefly, and put himself back to sleep without me intervening (I stood outside his door, which was cracked open, for a couple of minutes before rushing in and happily he soothed himself!). I decided he had the right idea and crashed myself for an hour, and when he woke me up at 3:50 we both felt much better about the world in general.

He napped again from 5-6, and went down without much of a fight. At bedtime, he actually fell asleep with his thumb in his mouth without crying at all, but then woke up two hours later at 10 and was immensely frustrated when I tried to get him to suck his thumb to go back to sleep. After about fifteen minutes, I decided that maybe swaddling is still a good idea for nighttime for the time being, as the prospect of three hours of crying in the middle of the day is very different than the same three hour period in the middle of the night. As it is he's back to only sleeping four hours at a time (after three glorious weeks in which he slept a six-hour stretch followed by two shorter stretches and twice only woke up once in the night), so anything I can do to get him to sleep a little better at night is still worth it.

This morning's nap went pretty smoothly so far -- he only took about ten minutes to fall asleep. I had to prompt him to get his thumb in his mouth a few times by rubbing my finger along the inside of his upper lip, but he's definitely getting the idea better today than he did yesterday. Maybe next week we'll try again to leave his arms unswaddled at night, depending on how he does with that during the day.

It's a Process

There are two types of people in this world, process people and goal people. Danny is a process person -- he enjoys the process of doing things and learning things, and even if he doesn't achieve the objective can see what he gained from going through the process. I am not such a person. I enjoy accomplishing things and meeting goals, but do not generally enjoy the process of something for its own sake. This can be very frustrating when it comes to something that is more process than achievement, like learning a language or, as I'm learning, raising a child, and I'm trying to overcome my tendency to fixate on the goal to the exclusion of the process.

This week, for instance, I'm trying to help Stephen learn to self-soothe. I've always hated his love affair with the pacifier, not because I feel so strongly about pacifiers per se but because I want him to learn to calm himself down and get himself to sleep, not to be dependent on this bit of plastic that can be lost. Especially with all the traveling we've been doing and will continue to do, I don't want to be worrying about whether we packed enough pacis or constantly attaching the pacifier to his clothing so it doesn't fall on some gross airline floor or sidewalk somewhere when we don't have a spare. I also don't love that he's just figured out that if he spits the pacifier out, we have to come back into his room to put it in, thus granting him a temporary respite from sleeping alone in his crib. He's finally to the point where he can get his thumb into his mouth, and loves to suck on it, but has not yet figured out that he can put it in his mouth when he's upset or tired and wants to suck on something to go to sleep, he's still looking for us to stick his paci in his mouth for that.

I know there are downsides to him sucking his thumb as well, but the way I look at it right now he's going to suck either the pacifier or his thumb, and of the two of them I personally would rather him be able to calm himself down without needing an external prop. It will be another few months before he can pick up a pacifier and put it in his mouth, but his thumb he always has with him and he can do it himself right now, so for me it's the lesser of two evils. I sucked my thumb as a baby (I think) and so did my sister, and both of us turned out to be healthy responsible adults. We both needed braces, but that was not related to the thumb-sucking.

So today begins the training. For the first time in a month, I put Stephen down for a nap without swaddling him. I noticed that after the first few times I put the pacifier back in his mouth when he inevitably knocked it out, he started moving his hand toward his mouth to grab my hand (which was holding the pacifier). So the next time, I didn't pick up the pacifier but rather just put my hand near his mouth, and when he grabbed for it I moved my hand out of the way so that he could get his hand into his mouth. He sucked happily on his thumb for a few minutes, and then flailed his arms as he is wont to do and lost his thumb. I again put my hand down near his mouth as if to insert the paci, and with a little gentle nudge he got his thumb into his mouth again. We're now going on ten minutes of silence, so maybe it worked this time!

To bring this back to the process/goal thing, I had to realize that if I want Stephen to learn to self-soothe, I'm going to have to temporarily accept that it will take longer for him to fall asleep at naptime (thirty minutes this morning versus the standard ten or fifteen) but that eventually it will pay off. This was initially a little hard for me to swallow as it's been a struggle for the past week or so to get him to fall asleep at naptime without histrionics, so part of me just wants to get him to sleep as quickly and painlessly as possible, but I really think the drama has been because he's outgrowing the swaddling/pacifier routine and needs help to figure out a new routine that will work now. So we'll see.

Starting Over

I contemplated creating a whole new blog and truly starting over, but then realized that I didn't really want to lose all of my old posts. So I've contented myself with changing the layout and colors to make it look different at least, even if the name is the same!

We're starting over in more ways than one -- our little family of three moved to Turkey almost two weeks ago now. I wouldn't really call Ankara the ends of the earth per se as it's a big metropolis with pretty much all the comforts of home, but in terms of distance it's still pretty far away. 14 hours of travel time, give or take an hour, to be precise. Mercifully, Stephen slept almost the entire way here, even through take-offs and one landing.

Our apartment here is fabulous -- three bedrooms and a study (which we will be turning into a combination guest room/office once our extra bed arrives to accommodate what we hope will be a steady stream of visiting family and friends). For the first time in our married lives, we have more than one bathroom, which is also tremendously exciting. We also have a massive living room and a nice big kitchen, complete with a big American dryer (we have a smallish Turkish washing machine), a full-size (meaning American-size, not European) refrigerator/freezer, and a dishwasher. We're located about four miles from Danny's work, in a neighborhood chock full of restaurants and shops within walking distance.


Below is a picture of the view from our living room:


We're both enrolled in a Turkish language class that meets twice a week, and given how few people here speak English we're doing our best to learn as much as we can as quickly as possible. One of the benefits of our apartment building, for instance, is a kapaci (pronounced "ka-pa-ji") -- basically a doorman/handyman who gets to live here rent-free in exchange for running various and sundry errands for other residents like dropping off and picking up dry cleaning, delivering bread and/or groceries, etc. The only problem is that our very nice and very friendly kapaci speaks no English and we currently speak next to no Turkish, so although he has clearly attempted on a couple of occasions to offer his services, we haven't really been able to take him up on it.

So far since we arrived, Stephen has almost mastered the art of sucking his thumb (he still has some trouble getting it into his mouth and keeping it there, but he's getting better!), Danny has successfully figured out driving himself to and from work (no small feat...there are no set lanes on most of the roads here and driving is sort of a free-for-all every-man-for-himself experience most of the time) and I have been getting to know several other stay-at-home moms. We won't have our car here for another couple of months, and although we plan to buy a second one to use while we're here we can't do that until our temporary resident paperwork processes through the Turkish government, which will take at least a couple of weeks. So for now Danny can use the office duty vehicle for his commute, and I take a taxi when I need to get somewhere that I can't walk to until I can figure out the bus system.

Buttermilk Bread Recipe

I've made this bread a couple of times now, and really like how it turns out -- it's good for sandwiches and toast, but is also really delicious right out of the oven and as rolls. The recipe comes from The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book, which is all whole grain bread and muffin recipes. The one thing I would stress is to make sure that the whole wheat flour you have is milled from hard wheat berries (spring is ideal but winter would also probably work). Most whole wheat flour is milled from soft wheat, which doesn't have enough gluten to make good bread, and if you use that you will have to add vital wheat gluten to make it work. I used King Arthur whole wheat flour the first time I made this, and it came out really well, and the second time I milled my own flour with organic wheat I bought at our local organic market in the bulk section.

Also, since I hardly ever have buttermilk on hand I used powdered buttermilk following the package instructions for substituting it for fresh, but that didn't seem to hurt the results.

2 teaspoons active dry yeast
1/2 cup warm water

1/4 cup very hot water
1/4 cup honey
1 1/4 cups cold buttermilk

5 1/2 cups whole wheat flour
2 teaspoons salt

2 to 4 tablespoons butter

Dissolve the yeast in warm water.

Mix the hot water with the honey and add the buttermilk. The temperature should be just slightly warm.

Stir the flour and salt together, making a well in the center. Pour the yeast and buttermilk mixture into the well, and stir from the center outwards, incorporating all the flour. Test the dough to see whether more flour or water is needed and adjust accordingly (I would recommend letting the dough rest for five minutes before making this decision so the flour can absorb more of the water). The bread is lightest if the dough is slightly soft. Knead about 20 minutes, adding the butter in cold bits at the end of the kneading time.

Form the dough into a ball and place it smooth side up in the bowl. Cover and keep in a warm, draft-free place. After about an hour and a half, gently poke the center of the dough about 1/2 inch deep with your wet finger. If the hole doesn't fill in at all or if the dough sighs, it is ready for the next step. Press flat, form into a smooth round, and let the dough rise once more as before. The second rising will take about half as much time as the first.

Press the dough and divide in two. Round it and let it rest until relaxed, then deflate and shape into loaves or rolls. The recipe makes two loaves for 8" x 4" pans. For rolls, one loaf's worth of dough makes 9 large or 15 small dinner rolls in 8" x 8" or 9" x 13" pans, respectively.

Place the shaped dough in greased pans and let rise in a warm place until the dough slowly returns a gentle fingerprint. The dough makes a very high loaf when properly kneaded, so be a little bold about giving it time. Bake the bread in a preheated 325 degree (F) oven for nearly an hour. Rolls take 15-20 minutes, depending on their size, at 400 degrees (F). Brush the rolls with butter when they come out of the oven.

Baby Steps

In my continuing efforts to get completely separated from government service (or "The Man"), I have finally managed to sort out health insurance. It may surprise some of you that it took over a month from my separation date (30 September) to finally get myself transferred over to Danny's insurance, but if it does then you have clearly never had to work through a government HR office, and for that I envy you.

Before resigning, I filled out the paperwork to notify my insurer Blue Cross Blue Shield (BC/BS) that I was quitting my job and wanted to end my individual health plan and be transferred to my husband's plan, also with BC/BS, which had to be changed from an individual to a family plan. Seems fairly simple, and required only two forms to be filled out. That was 26 September.

On 30 October, as I sat in the offices of the Washington Radiology Associates about to have my 20 week sonogram, I realized I didn't know if I should submit my old BC/BS card or give them Danny's card. I called BC/BS, who advised that they still had received no paperwork from my insurer telling them that I had resigned, and that therefore my plan was technically still active, but really only until the end of that day, which was the 31st day of my 31 day grace period. Not good news for someone in the middle of maternity care, which only gets more expensive as it goes on...

Thankfully, I have always found BC/BS representatives to be very helpful, and they assured me that since I was just switching from one account with them to another account, they would make sure that one way or another I did not end up paying for any of my allowable medical expenses.

My HR department, however, was a different story. After several increasing nasty phone calls to the insurance branch of my HR office (getting an outside phone number for them alone took a couple of hours), I convinced them that they did indeed need to take care of the situation IMMEDIATELY. This was, of course, once I finally got them to a) answer my calls and b) call me back when they were not at their desk, which appeared to be most of the time.

This literally took weeks of calling, and Danny finally advised he would be more than happy to sue the entire U.S. government for any unpaid expenses, pain, suffering, and mental anguish suffered by his pregnant wife if they did not sort it out. Miraculously, it was at exactly that moment that they managed to find my form and locate a working fax machine to get said form to BC/BS, since the form they claimed two weeks previously to have mailed had yet to traverse the expanse of Washington D.C. I barely managed to refrain from observing that I could have WALKED the form across the city in less time.

*Deep breath.*

This leaves only my retirement funds and my Thrift Savings Account left to transfer over to some sort of private sector account, and I will finally be really and truly separated from the government. Since I think that both of those things require no action on the part of my former employer, I'm hoping maybe they'll be slightly less painful.

Pay Attention to What You're Doing!

I can't tell you how many times I heard that expression growing up. I think that most of the time I wasn't a willfully disobedient kid, but I have always had trouble keeping focused on the task at hand -- I daydream and space out and generally don't pay attention more than most people I know. It's worst when I've been reading for a long stretch of time, but it happens on a fairly regular basis even when I haven't been reading.

One of those times when I really should pay attention and not zone out? Baking bread. I've been trying to make a whole wheat sourdough bread for weeks now, but those plans have been delayed several times for various reasons, usually involving me not planning ahead or not reading the instructions far enough down to realize that some stage or other had to sit for a day or three before moving on to the next step.

This morning, however, was going to be the morning. I had the sour starter all ready and fermented, had taken it out of the fridge yesterday and mixed it with additional flour that I ground myself, and ground the rest of the flour I would need to add in to make my first loaf of sourdough as well as the first loaf I've made with freshly ground organic flour. I got up, mixed it all together, kneaded it until it became supple and elastic, and was preparing to set it aside for the first rising.

That was when I noticed that I had forgotten to add the yeast, carefully dissolved in lukewarm water to activate it, into the dough during the mixing phase, before kneading it for the required fifteen minutes. In a panic, I tried to add the yeast and water mixture to the dough, which proceeded to splash all over the counter and slosh around in the bottom of the mixing bowl but which did NOT combine with the rest of the bread dough.

Sigh.

I threw away the ruined dough, and since I didn't have more starter at room temperature premixed with flour and didn't want to wait ANOTHER twelve to eighteen hours for my reserve starter to sour properly, I made up a batch of whole wheat buttermilk bread instead. I did grind additional flour (not having any preground whole wheat bread flour), so this will still be somewhat of an experiment, but of course I was infuriated that my carefully laid plans were thwarted.

I did manage to channel my frustration at the ruined bread into an energetic cleaning of the kitchen, so I guess it wasn't a total loss.