Insect Camouflage

On Our Front Porch: Looks Like a Piece of a Plant!

Greg's Aunt

Greg's aunt is visiting for three weeks - all the way from Paris!  She's staying at Greg's parents' house, but we have gotten together a few times and plan to take her to a couple of our favorite local attractions.  Her first language is Romanian, and she speaks French, but all the burden is on her to communicate with me in English, poor thing!  She does a really great job and can usually think of the word she needs.  Greg can't speak his native tongue, but he can understand it.  So she can talk to him in Romanian if I'm having trouble understanding.  She is the sweetest lady!!

Greeting Aunt Ioana at the Airport

She brought us all presents from France!  One of them, she gave to Kylen at the airport.  It was a box of "macarons," cookies that they take great pride in making there.  They have a slightly odd taste but were pretty good, crunchy on the outside and soft on the inside.

Greg's Dad with His Little Sister

An Old-Fashioned Graduation

We attended a cousin's homeschool graduation on Saturday. Quaint, rustic, and trimmed in yellow and blue, it was a sweet ceremony overflowing with personal touches. I thoroughly enjoyed catching up with family I hadn't seen in years and realized how much I'd missed them! The old schoolhouse was a charming location. There were scrapbooks on the tables and centerpieces displaying her pop can tab collection (for a good cause). Everyone was invited to leave memories on the chalkboards that lined the walls. One particularly touching moment came when her father presented her mother with a breath-taking bouquet of pink roses and expressed his heartfelt appreciation for all her hard work. (Greg better be taking notes!) They sure do grow up fast, don't they?

Word Magnets

Our theme in the main living area during May and part of June is black and white, which is great for Greg's birthday, graduations, and Father's Day.  Word magnets get put on the fridge, and we all work at composing silly, whacky, philosophical, and poetic lines.  If we have company, sometimes they'll get in on the fun.  My favorites are usually those with humor:

Man, horrible black galoshes like my bed.

Dogs do their time with family.

Toward the end, we start getting a little desperate to use EVERY word (which we accomplished this year!), and the sentences aren't always correct English:

Kid said, "This woman want my candy."

I am silent if she ask us for live skin.

I love this one, because Greg often says I'm on the "puter":

She was on the puter.

And we had a good laugh over:

They cry when you play ball.

All our lines were on the right fridge door; last year, they were more spread out:

Sugared Gold

When Greg was washing the pan, he noticed the hardened sugar looked like gold in the light!

Leche Asada ~ Flan

Soon after we started sponsoring a child through Compassion International, we had a potluck at our church where the meal consisted of dishes representing our children's countries.  Variations of flan can be found all over Latin American, and it turns out the recipe we chose ended up tasting very much like Greg remembered from his childhood in Romania.  He's been pestering me to make it for weeks, and his birthday was the perfect opportunity to indulge him.

1 (14 oz) can of sweetened, condensed milk
1 (12 oz) can of evaporated milk
1 cup sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
8 eggs, beaten 
 
Mix the condensed milk, evaporated milk, 1/2 cup of sugar, vanilla, and eggs.

In a saucepan heat 1/2 cup sugar over med-high, stirring constantly until it becomes syrupy and slightly tan.

Pour the caramel in a glass baking dish (8x8x2 or similar) and pour the milk mixture on top.  (We used an 8 x 3 round white casserole inside a larger square casserole and cooked it 20 minutes longer.)

Place the dish with the milk mixture inside a larger glass dish.  Fill the larger pan with hot water to come halfway up the sides of the inner baking dish. Cover everything with aluminum foil. Cook in a 400-degree oven for 45 minutes or until the custard is completely cooked.

Cool a short time, run a knife around the edge, place serving dish on top, and flipping the entire deal so flan falls into serving dish.  Serve slightly chilled. 

(I was just looking back at recipes I've posted in the past and found out I already did this one before!  Oh, well.  That one didn't have pictures!)

Star Trek Catan

Star Trek Catan plays almost exactly like Settlers, and we enjoyed the change of theme.  The only criticism we have is that with three players, it's easy for one to gain a strong advantage in resources by being first to claim a starting area red would have occupied.  We have a couple of "fixes" in mind and have tried one of them, but I look forward to playing in a game with four people.

Greg won both games we played!  I guess he picked the right birthday gift!  ;-)