My boy, what have you done?

It's a beautiful morning in late May, 2017. I'm sitting in a packed courtroom in Lethbridge, Alberta. I'm trying to get comfortable on a wooden bench a few feet behind a man who has been accused of killing an elderly woman, a two-year-old girl and her young father less than 2 years ago.

I study the back of his head. He is 24 years old.....would've been only 22 when the crime took place...barely an adult in my eyes. I can't help but admire the youthfulness of this young man. He's clean-shaven, assuming freshly showered, obediently sitting very still, hair as black as a shiny night sky and beautiful features that I'm sure his mother is proud of.

I also can't help but think --what if this was MY son? What would I say to him? What went wrong? Would I blame myself? Is there any excuse that would satisfy me?
I can hear the mother in me asking "At what point were you thinking that this was a good idea?" and "Were you hoping to not get caught and making this kind of thing a hobby?"
I've been seeing pictures of this young man in the media--lots of pictures. He seems to have it all..friends, family and good looks although some of the photos are taken in awkward situations where one doesn't expect a photo shoot....of course the media will focus on those!

This story is so very sad. I've been following the details of this murder tale over the course of the two years since it happened. It's a horrendous story that one might find in a fictitious book or Hollywood movie.

I watched the mom of the deceased little girl on the local TV station back in the fall of 2015 and my heart tore apart watching her speak to the media about her baby. I also couldn't help but think about the families of the deceased young father and the elderly woman whose lives were taken by the senselessness of the situation. The entire scenario is so very heartbreaking. There has been, and will continue to be, an incredible amount of mourning. I can't imagine what these people are experiencing!

And how about the accused's own family? My goodness...his father had to testify in court. The family must be angry and embarrassed to say the least. I don't know the family but I'm pretty sure he wasn't raised to think that murdering people was the right thing to do.

Normally I'm one to hear of a murder and I say to myself "Hang 'em high!" but sometimes I think differently. Maybe, this time, it was because I made a connection to him by being so physically close. Don't get me wrong...I think he should definitely pay for what he has done. In fact, he was sentenced just the day prior to the writing of this post, and he'll be serving 75 years in prison before he's eligible for parole. The evidence against him was overwhelming as one might guess.

While I was sitting in the courtroom that day, waiting for my jury number to be called, (which thankfully it wasn't) I had an overwhelming desire to talk to him as if he were my own son.

Motherhood has done this to me (and age). It has made me soft but it has also made me look at situations differently. When your son or daughter does something stupid, you want to find out why and keep an open mind. That doesn't mean you don't want them to pay for what they've done...you want them to make things right...if possible.

Unfortunately in this case, this young man won't be able to make things right. He's taken three lives away from their loved ones and there's no turning back time. His life is ruined.

For all the families involved, forgiveness will be hard, if not next to impossible. I've seen it done but not very often. I believe one must forgive in order to carry on but this would be the ultimate test.

I applaud the experts who study the way our brains work, how our personalities, behaviours, mental processes change to accommodate the situation.

I wish I could talk to his mom.

It's Taco Tuesday!

Sorry Taco Time...it's Taco Tuesday at our house too!

I used to make my own taco shells quite often...I'm referring to something I wrote in the last blog when I say I didn't want to drag all the hungry yard apes to the store with me because I forgot to get shells for tacos during my last shopping trip.

Here's my recipe for these....it's super duper easy and they taste great...but can be a little time consuming so start supper early or have supper late....unless you've got some help or do these earlier in the day.

Home Tortillas
-2 cups all-purpose flour
-1/2 teaspoon salt
-1/4 cup margarine
-1/2 cup warm water

-Combine flour and salt in a bowl, cut in margarine, and then add the water into a well formed in the middle of the mixture. Combine into a dough and knead lightly.
-Divide into 12 equal parts. Lightly grease your hands with some margarine and roll each ball of dough with your hands to coat them with fat.
-Cover with a cloth and allow to rest for about 30 minutes.
-Roll each ball into a thin 8 inch circle on a lightly floured surface. Pull or stretch if necessary. Allow to rest by cooking the tortillas in the sequence they were rolled out.
-Cook on a hot ungreased griddle until brown speckles appear on the underside. Use spatula to squash down and flip to cook on both sides.
-Finished tortillas can be stacked between paper towels or the folds of clean tea towels.

Don't worry if they are not perfect circles because they just... won't.... be... but your family will love them anyway.

Now these tacos take some time to prepare and I usually enlist the help of somebody in the household to help me with these. OR I just buy taco shells when I do my weekly grocery shopping trip. (I'm much more organized than I used to be with shopping trips--when the kids were little I was such a scatter-brain!)
Our family likes the store bought shells in the different flavours like the spinach, cheese or tomato-flavoured shells.

BUT I always make my own taco seasoning...here's my recipe for this mixture and we love, love it! I double or triple this recipe, use about 3 heaping tablespoonfuls (we like it strong) to the meat and store the rest in a clean labeled canning jar with a tight lid. Keeps well for many months in the pantry.

Taco Seasoning
-6 teaspoons chili powder
-5 teaspoons paprika
-4 1/2 teaspoons cumin
-2 1/2 teaspoons onion powder
   or onion salt
-1/8 tsp cayenne pepper
-1 teaspoon garlic powder
-1/2 to 1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon oregano

-Combine all the ingredients in a bowl. Stir or whisk well and store in an airtight container in a cool dry place. Stays fresh for at least 6 months.
-When making chicken, beef or pork tacos--brown the meat in a frypan and drain. Add 1/2 cup water and enough taco seasoning to your preferred taste then simmer until most of the water has evaporated--about 10 minutes.

..and there we have it.
It only takes about 5 minutes of my time to mix up the seasoning and because we have tacos every month or two, it's well worth making a big batch of it and always having it on hand. It saves a few pennies and tastes much stronger than store-bought seasoning mix. We always had to buy two packages anyway to get what we wanted. I dislike bland food.

Sugar, Spice and Everything Nice....and Cheap

When the kids were small, I hated packing up everybody (and there was always a resistant baby to drag along) so I could just pick up a few things at the store just before supper time. I decided to make some of my own spices, syrups and mixes and with a little creativity could go a week without stopping at the grocery store except to quickly pick up milk, bread, and eggs. And those were often things I could ask Mike to pick up along the way from work.

I was raised by depression-era parents so I can get quite frugal when I want to. That is a skill in it's own.

Some of my favorite do-it-yourself mixes are things like seasoning salt (I have two such spice mixes that we enjoy), chocolate syrup, coffee creamer for my homemade iced coffee, sweet coffee mix, Italian seasoning, ranch dressing, and many many more. Some I've looked up on the internet and usually end up tweaking the recipe slightly. Some recipes I've found in old cookbooks like dog biscuits and chocolate pudding. It amazes me how we've forgotten how to make simple mixes instead of dishing out so much of our hard-earned money for something that doesn't taste that good.

Here's what I've been making a lot lately, since the weather has turned nice...finally....
It tastes a whole lot better than Timmy's iced coffee, in my opinion anyway, and you can make this as sweet or as strong as you'd like.

As you can see, the second batch I made this week is almost gone!

Iced Coffee:
     Put a heaping cupful of ground coffee in a clean 4 litre ice cream pail. Fill with cold tap water. Put the lid on the pail and let it sit on the counter overnight or at least 8 hours.
After the coffee and water has soaked, pour it through a few layers of cheesecloth. (I lay my cheesecloth in a strainer and set it on top of a pitcher.) Refrigerate.

Creamer:
     In a blender put one can of sweetened condensed milk, 1 3/4 cups of milk and 2 tablespoons of vanilla extract (I've tried rum extract and it tastes great too). Blend well and pour into container(s) and refrigerate. Lasts a week and a half at least (or until the milk expires). May have to shake before using.

Put a few ice cubes in a glass, fill with your cold coffee and top off with your homemade creamer. You can tweak it as you like by adding more coffee to make it stronger or you can use heavy cream instead of milk in the creamer to make it creamier.

We've been enjoying this home-brewed iced coffee for the last few years.....Mike and I seemed to have acquired a fetish for iced coffee but it was costing a bucket of money every week--something had to be done!!

Bye Bye, Birdie

When my oldest son was about 7 years old, he wanted to sleep in a tent in the backyard one night. I was a little hesitant about letting him do it because we had lived in this city for only a year or two and were a little concerned about the crime here. I tried not to show my fear and told him "Okay, and I'll leave the back door unlocked in case you need to come inside in the night." That night, my husband and I helped him get settled in the tent, kissed him goodnight and went inside to get ready for bed ourselves. It was a restless night for me. At about six a.m., Brody came running into the house, stood by my bedside and whispered really loudly "I did it, Mom!" He was so so proud of himself!

Brody's Grade 1 Picture

Now Brody is moving almost across the country to Ontario travelling in a van that he has fashioned into a camper. I don't know when I will see him again. I will miss him dearly but I know this is something he needs to do. After all, he's 21 years old, working night shifts slinging burgers at Denny's...who wouldn't want something else in life?

I can't help thinking of the time when he was this little boy determined to sleep in the backyard in a tent. I worried back then about whether he'd be okay and I worry now. Motherhood isn't easy.

Below my worry, I'm excited for him. He is young, single and nothing is holding him here. I want to hug him and not let him go, but that wouldn't be fair to him. Brody is craving adventure--I see it in his eyes. He's got a friend living in the area where he'd like to go so I know he won't be totally alone. He also enjoys his own company and I know will enjoy trying and seeing new things. The girl who stole his heart is out east too. She's a lovely girl that still holds his heart although they broke up a couple of years ago. They still talk...a lot! (Maybe one day they'll let me write their story.)

The day he left, it was a windy cloudy rainy cool day....the kind of day for a funeral....you know what kind of day I'm talking about. My heart ached all day as I was thinking of Brody, alone, sleeping in his van somewhere along the TransCanada highway. I can't help wondering "Did we teach him well enough to handle whatever may happen on this trip?"

I'm confident that we did.

A Mother Can Brag, Right?

My baby girl just turned 14 years old. Fourteen I said. She's starting high school in the fall.

When she was little, we thought she was the prettiest little girl in the world.....and she still is. We even considered chaining her up at home--never letting her go anywhere---so nobody could break her heart. That is, until, she was about 5 or 6 and she said her first vulgar word--my fault---totally my fault--sorry about that.

She is a sweet heart. Raelynn is very soft-spoken and gentle. I see a lot of myself at that age in her...except for the sweetheart, soft-spoken and gentle part. I see her struggles and I wish I could take any hurting she's feeling away from her. But I can't.

She is very different than her fourteen-year-old friends. Her friends look like they're going on 18 or 20 years old whereas Raelynn actually looks younger than her 14 years. She will be asked for identification FOREVER. She's very mature for her age and is getting herself mentally ready to move out on her own one day. She can cook, bake and clean. She manages her allowance surprisingly well. She's getting phenomenal grades and has been on the honour roll in her middle school for two years now.

But look out! If she gives me a smile and challenges me to a game of ping-pong, I know some horns will start growing out of the front of her head any minute. She can get tough when it's called for.

Little things about her make me smile. It won't matter how many disagreements we have or how far away she will move from me one day, I will always see her eyes when she observes a beautiful sunrise.

I'm forever grateful that God chose me to be her mother.

...and by the way...she didn't want me to post a recent picture of her on my blog so the picture you see above is from a long time ago.

Mennonites Don't Dance......Unless it's for a Good Cause

When I was growing up in southern Manitoba, it wasn't uncommon for people to throw what we called a Social Occasion, typically shortened to a Social, to raise money for say, somebody getting married, a sports team or somebody going through hard times to help pay for medical bills. It was always quite a shin-dig. All funds raised, minus the cost of setting it up, would go straight to whomever it was being thrown for. You'd buy tickets, either ahead of time at a participating business, or at the door the night of. When you'd arrive at the party, you'd buy tickets for your drinks, socialize with whomever was there and laugh and dance the night away to the popular music-man set up on stage taking requests anything from pop, rock, country and rap.....whatever your heart desired.

There were always plenty of things going on like raffles, 50/50 draws, silent auctions, door prize draws....whomever the Social was held for, could walk away with a good chunk of change.

In our community, the information about an upcoming Social would spread like wild fire. Oh yes, us Mennonites could spread news as if it was The Last Faspa.

Of course, it's us Mennonites who aren't very good Mennonites that would attend these things. You mix booze with Mennonite up-bringing and the Good Lord only knows what could happen!

It was our Mennonite Go-Fund-Me in a way but it was way, way more fun. It was a great fundraiser and fun as heck. Anybody could throw a Social as long as one followed the rules with liquor permits and gaming laws.

Most of the Socials were held in the neighbouring town of Morden because our little town of Winkler was dry.....well, we called it dry but you could go to the local bar and have a beer. (Just beer...they didn't serve anything else but many different kinds of beer.) Morden was less Mennonite than Winkler so that was convenient for the "closet" drinkers.....you don't want to be hugging a bush on a Saturday night in the front lawn of the community hall, emptying your innards from drinking too much vodka and OJ, and suddenly Uncle Henry drives past from having borscht and fresh buns at Grandma's house! Oy vey!

Maybe they have them here in Alberta?? but I haven't heard anything. Of course I'm an "old lady" now and not in the loop like I used to be. I have to be told by my children what's hot and what's not.

What Stitchery Is This?!

A couple of weeks ago I was quite stressed about things going on in my life. I turned my rage towards my quilting. I had a pattern that I wanted to get started on but hadn't purchased the fabric for it yet but I needed something to keep my mind at ease...NOW! So I eyed my fabric scrap pile and went about cutting and sewing, piecing together fabric willy nilly with absolutely no regard for matching colors....well, that's not entirely true. I do have some standards.

I was very pleased when I got this blanket together.....it turned out kind of cute!

I know I'm being a whiney baby. When I step back and take a look at this quilt, I see my stress that I had at that time. It really wasn't so bad. There are many people out there that have much, much worse problems than I do.

I have our taxes to prepare for. I feel another quilt coming on.