Molly Elizabeth's Granola

I like to mess around in the kitchen making up recipes and reading them out of a cookbook. This recipe I made up about a week ago because we wanted some granola, and so I made some! Here is what I came up with:

• 4 cups 6-grain (or oats if you don't buy 6-grain)
• 1 cup 9-grain (ground) (or any other grain you may have; you could also add sunflower kernals, etc. here)
• 1/2 cup flax seed (ground)
• 1 cup peanuts (chopped)
• 2/3 cup coconut
• 2/3 cup craisins
• 1/4 cup butter
• 1/4 coconut oil
• 1 1/2 TBSP cocoa powder
• 1/4 cup honey
• 1 cup molasses
• 1/3 cup of peanut butter

Pre-heat your oven to 350. Mix your dry ingredients and fruit in a large mixing bowl. In a small bowl mix your melted butter, coconut oil, cocoa powder, honey, and molasses. Pour your wet ingredients int0 the large bowl and mix until moist. Pour your mixture into a 9x13 pan and bake for 20 minutes.

Enjoy!

We like to eat it in milk, yogurt, and just by itself. It is very healthy, but if you are on a diet you can see that it has a lot of calories :). Sometimes you have to sacrifice for healthy and delicious to be mixed into one, but I'm just here to tell you that this one is not a sacrifice.

Have fun in the kitchen!

Molly Elizabeth

Strawberries!

Yesterday, Mama, Clay, and Molly Elizabeth decided to go pick strawberries at a local u-pick farm just up the road. All of our cars were in use somewhere else, so that only left us the stick-shift, yard truck bumping down the dirt roads. We really felt like hicks from the sticks with the three of us crammed into the small cab, but it was fun! Clay drove us there so that he could practice driving the stick shift. I must say, he's a very good driver; we only stalled out twice.

The day was warm and the strawberry field was beautiful and green. There was no one else there except a man working in the field. We each took a row and within just a few minutes our baskets were overflowing with beautiful berries. The hardest part of picking things you love is knowing when to stop. We try to be finished, but, as we leave the field, it is so hard not to notice berries that are just begging to be put in our baskets and taken home with us! It didn't take long to pick three baskets full of beautiful, red, ripe strawberries. What a fun little excursion!

Those beautiful strawberries reminded us of a favorite children's book, The Big Hungry Bear, that we all loved as children. Benjamin read it MANY times to my cousins last week and Evan,who is three, had it memorized by the end of the week and was "reading" it to himself.

"Hello, little mouse. What are you doing?

Are you going to pick that red, ripe strawberry?

Don't you know the big hungry bear loves red, ripe strawberries?

Especially ones that have just been picked!"

Those strawberries are so delicious that we will probably have to pick every few days. In the last 12 hours our family has eaten over half of them....!

Photo shoot

Clay was having fun with the camera while we had Celesta, Audrey Kate, and Evan here this past weekend and made some fabulous pictures of Audrey Kate. Here they are. The baby pink dress she is wearing in the 3rd picture, was the dress that Susan Liana wore in her portrait that was painted when she was 5.

Braces

Tuesday, Molly Elizabeth got her braces on! Her teeth still hurt a little, but, according to experienced people, the pain will ease soon. Celesta, Audrey Kate, and Evan were here when she got her braces on, so the kids stayed in the back with "Aunt Randi Jane" reading and playing little games. What was supposed to be an hour and a half appointment turned into two and a half hours. It was fine, though.

We met Benjamin in a park for lunch and ate our corned beef sandwiches there. Thrift shopping at our favorite thrift stores rounded out the day. It was such fun to bargain shop together.

Rearranging...again!

Periodically we get the urge to rearrange ...This week we got the urge and nothing will do until we change everything. You get a new house without having to move.

We moved the library/school room to the room with Clark's computer. Susan Liana spent hours getting our books back into place! While unloading books from shelves we thought often of our dear friends, the Rustines, as we handled so many of their lovely books that they shared as they left for the mission field. Those books are like having a little part of our friends with us!

The TV left the room above and moved to the old school room that also doubled as a guest room...we kept that room as a guest room with a sleeper sofa where we also watch TV.

What was our dining room a week ago is now our living room. Of course, it was originally designed as the living room!

The dining room relocated to the old living room, which was originally the dining room. Are you confused yet?

We brought Clay's portrait from the stair wall to this one and it seems like a brand new painting to us!

Don't you love the new coffee table that we found at Blessingdales while thrift shopping with Celesta?

The shelves below were in the sitting room, but make me think of a Welsh cupboard so we moved them to the kitchen. They replace a makeshift cabinet we've used for years that used to hold the children's legos. This is much prettier and saves so much space yet stores the same things.

We had a whole week of fun sifting all of this until it all finally fell in place...