Has it been that long?

Mama mentioned that I hadn't put anything new on my blog and when I looked, I said, OMG, has it been that long?

So let's catch up....

My three "grandchildren" are healthy and growing quickly - Jackson is now 2, Molly Kathryn is 7 months old and Isabella is 4 months old. There is a new grand-baby in the making - Stella Reese Stoehr is expected September 9th or there abouts. So I have been working away on baby things for all my beautiful grand-babies!

February, first, I got my new car for the next 3 years - Town & Country van with a bunch of bells and whistles (2 DVD players, Bluetooth, Navigation system, etc). Tim and I drove it when we went to Hilton Head to visit with Mother and Tina and Mary-Ruth and Peter were there one day with us also. Tina had brought her Wii so I got to try it out and now I have one of my own which I use at least 3 times a week.

March we flew down to Florida for a long weekend to celebrate Mike 's (Tim's Brother) 60th birthday but the afternoon we arrived, he went into the hospital with a possible heart attack so we had to party without him. Luckily no heart attack, but some blockage so he had to have a stint inserted. Doing fine now.

Kathy (Tim's sister) and her hubbie David came up the end of March for the DC tour at the perfect time for the cherry blossoms. It was great to visit.

The end of March and early April were taken up with activities for the Ladies 9 Holers - I'm now the Treasurer as well as the secretary. I played duplicate bridge 3 times with my friend Rosemary and been playing Mah Jongg just about every week.

May has started out busy as well. I'm on the Social committee at the Country Club - and we are starting a Ladies social group called the LILIES - Ladies Involved with Like Interests, Efforts, and Specialties - I worked really hard for that acronym! So I have been working very hard on getting that started (I was named the Committee chair) - getting a list of topics for the gatherings (I don't want to call them meetings) and then finding speakers or experts to talk about the topics. Our first gathering is June 22nd!

Lastly, on the catchup scene, I went to the doctor about my back again, and I have been sent to the Pain Management specialist. Next week I will be starting some special injections into my back to try to relieve the near constant pain in my back. Keep your fingers crossed for me and a few prayers might help.

Needless to say, I have been reading all along, and currently have read 42 books for 2011. If you are interested in what I read, check out my book blog at Cheli's Shelves.

I'll try to do better from now on keeping up with what's happening.

Bella's Here!

Little Miss Isabella Noelle was born today to Christopher and Melanie arriving at 7:16am , weighing in at 6lbs. 9 ozs. and measuring 19½ ins. in length (when does it get to be height?) She has auburn hair. Both Mel and Bella are doing fine.

Nana and APapa are on their way to Louisiana for the big event.

Pictures as soon as they come!

New Pastry Chef in the Derry Household!

This year I was really worried that I wouldn't be up to making the traditional fragunas on Christmas Eve but Tim promised since he had the day off (and the Country Club was closed) that he would help me. However, he insisted that he would only help on the condition that he could experiment a little. He had some strange ideas including lemon juice instead of butter which I nixed. I made sure that I had all the ingredients including those for his unusual variations and as we prepared to start the assembly of the fragunas, mixed the dough in my mixer with the dough hook and set it aside to rest while we gathered all the other items, we realized that there was no ROLLING PIN in the house. My old rolling pin had severely cracked last year and Tim had thrown it away and not told me. So we set to work trying to locate a rolling pin to make our pastries - we called Mary-ellen, no luck, called Ron Preller - his was in use, Giant and Home Goods didn't one either. We tried to peel the label off of a bottle of wine but that didn't work so we ended up using my tiny little pastry roller.


Tim was very proud of how his dough had risen in the bowl. (It didn't seem to matter I was the one who told him to cover it and place it in a warm dark corner.) He proceeded to make several new variations of the old family favorite. Of course, I insisted on some regular old standbys but Tim moved on to honey, cinnamon, raisin, nut in one roll, regular with nut in another roll, chocolate raisin nut in another, next came chocolate cinnamon raisin, and finally the last roll was cooked whole and sliced after cooking.

Honey was a disaster - it seemed to ooze out while cooking and everything was a bit too sticky and not very sweet. Those with nuts (chopped walnuts) were good. The chocolate ones seemed to have concentrated in a small area of the pastry so we need to trying refining it in the future but worth another try. Tim seemed to enjoy the experience of trying new variations - I wonder if the bottle of wine had anything to do with it.