Valentine's Day 2023

Valentine’s Day arrived this year and my youngest son requested basketball-themed valentines for his school party. For the last few years we have strived to send non-food, non-candy, and allergen-free valentines for school parties, in support of my nephew who has a lot of food allergies, and this year was no exception.

I found these basketball pens on Amazon and they came in a pack of 24. Of course, we only needed 30, so I ordered two packs.

We headed to Pinterest for ideas for cute things to put on cards. And we’re suckers for a cute pun!

Next I made these simple basketball cards in Adobe Illustrator. The back just says “Love," and my kid’s name on the same basketball image. I printed them on my home printer onto card stock and cut them out with a 2.5 inch circle punch. The punch I have is Martha Stewart’s brand and it’s an awesome punch, but it’s been discontinues. Here is one from Fiskars that will work great. FYI, a 2.5 inch circle fits perfectly on a wide-mouth mason jar lid.

I attached each pen to a tag using some washi tape that I had to buy because I’m not a frequent user of washi tape. I found some food-themed tape on clearance at JoAnn’s.

In hindsight, I just should’ve used clear tape because at times the washi tape covered up some of the words.

Here’s a breakdown of the cost of this year’s valentines:

• basketball pens - $20.98/pack of 24

• washi tape - $5.99 for 8 rolls from JoAnn’s, on clearance

• card stock - already had

• printer - already had

At the end of the day, each valentine came to just under $1 each.

I have a love/hate relationship with printers. After owning and working with printers from Canon, Epson, Brother, Xerox, and HP, I always end up with HP because the print quality and color management has always proven to be closest to what I see on my calibrated monitor. Right now I have an HP Envy color inkjet printer. The print quality is okay, but nothing compared to a HP photo printer I had years ago (I STILL miss that printer). But ALL printers have their moments. Mine currently doesn’t want to connect to my desktop computer, it will only print from my phone. ::massive eye-roll:::

Here you can read about valentines I have created for previous years.

Does your family celebrate valentines day? If so, what traditions do you follow?

Lunar New Year 2023

Did you know that in some countries that celebrate the Lunar New Year, it lasts for about two weeks? Lots of businesses in China and Taiwan shut down completely during this time. This year's Lunar New Year celebrations, starting the Year of the Rabbit, will come to an end this weekend.

My MIL and my kids in 2016

San Francisco's Chinese New Year Parade is pretty famous and it usually takes place at the end of the holiday. When my husband and I lived in California, we made a trip to Chinatown one year when our oldest son was a toddler to watch the parade in-person. It was a lot of fun! Since then, we make a point to try and find a broadcast of the parade online to watch as a family. This year will be no exception with the parade happening tomorrow evening, February 4th. 

My husband's family is from southern China, and these are some of the traditions that we've woven into our family. From what I have learned, these are similar among many Chinese families. 

It's tradition for folks to spend this time with their families; especially if they don't live close to them. It's considered lucky to wear red and there are lots of traditions one follows to ensure an auspicious new year. Many families do a thorough clearing of their home to sweep out any bad luck from the previous year. It's actually considered bad luck to clean your house, or cut your hair, on Lunar New Year's Day because you will sweep out any new good luck or cut your chances for a prosperous new year. 

My oldest not knowing what to do with his lucky money.

On Lunar New Year's Eve, families usually get together for a big dinner chocked full of dishes that represent positive aspirations for the new year. There is often steamed whole fish (prosperity), chicken (togetherness) or duck (loyalty), noodles (long life), and dumplings (wealth). It's not uncommon for families to come together to make dumplings for this meal. Deep fried spring rolls are also common because they look like little gold bars.

We sometimes have sweet desserts, but my in-laws have tried to teach my kids that oranges and tangerines (success & wealth) make a great dessert too. And they are luckier with the stem and leaves still attached. Some years, my mother-in-law has made sweet, deep-fried, sesame cookies called zhà má yè.    

Here’s a website that has some really wonderful Chinese recipes that are popular around the Lunar New Year.

This year my husband smoked a whole duck and my mother-in-law steamed a whole fish. We had sweet, sticky rice, that had diced char-siu (bbq pork), onions, ginger, and mushrooms. We had homemade bao (buns) to make little sandwiches with slices of the smoked duck, spring onion, and hoisin sauce; similar to Peking Duck.

Our Lunar New Year dinner this year

Of course, the part my kids most look forward to: Lucky Money! Pronounced lai see in Cantonese or hong bao in Mandarin. Traditionally children and unmarried adults receive red envelopes from parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles that contain money. Sometimes they have a "lucky" amount too. The number eight sounds very similar to "get rich" in Chinese, so it's considered a very lucky number. We've often seen dollar amounts given in eights ($8, $88, etc.).

My kids digging into their red envelopes in 2016, back when they were still cute!

My in-laws and my husband's aunts also give our kids red envelopes for their birthdays. My mother-in-law still gives my husband and me a red envelope at the Lunar New Year and on our birthdays too.

In celebration this year, I created a Lunar New Year cootie catcher. The symbolic items on there are pretty specific to many Chinese traditions. You can purchase and download a printable file from my Etsy shop.

Are you from a country that celebrates the Lunar New Year? If so, how do you traditionally celebrate? I would love to make a cootie catcher that is unique to how you celebrate. Are there different symbolic foods, items, or animals in Vietnam, Thailand, or Korea? Anywhere else? Please share!

Land Beyond Zion at Winter Break

Over winter break, my family spent the Christmas holiday with my sister and her family in southern California. We drove there from Salt Lake City. My husband was only able to take off one of the two weeks from work, so as we headed home from SoCal, we dropped him off at the St George Airport and stayed in the southern Utah area for a couple of days; specifically Land Beyond Zion.

Land Beyond Zion is a fun campground/vanlife spot right on the UT/AZ border. Shanti has built out a beautiful place to camp comfortably with flush toilets, running water, an outdoor shower and claw foot tub, WiFi, and a shared outdoor kitchen. It has multiple sleep options: from BYO tent, RV, or van with full hookups to a canvas platform tent (with heater!), an RV, or a tiny house. There’s a lovely spot with hammocks hung, and a play area for kids. She has plans to continue building more amenities and dogs are welcome!

Kicking myself for not taking photos of the structures she’s built; mostly on her own too!

My oldest with Shanti’s dog, Sunny

It’s 30 minutes from Hurricane and 50 minutes to Zion National Park. It’s 20 minutes from Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park. It’s super close to Gooseberry Mesa, about an hour to St George, and 90 minutes to Bryce Canyon National Park. It’s a wonderful basecamp to all kinds of outdoor exploration and adventures.

It actually rained most of the time we were there, so we did no hiking, but it was still fun and relaxing. We had no pressure to actually do anything… and we kind of didn’t. We played a competitive round of Phase 10, we chilled in hammocks, and we slept in; even thru an epic sunrise that Shanti was gracious enough to share a photo of.

One rainy afternoon, I attempted to paint that beautiful sunrise in watercolor and made a video of the process. You can view it here. At the end of the day, I couldn’t get my paints to make that peachy-pink sky (at least not at the vibrance I wanted, so I did another one after I got home in gouache. They’re very different, but I love both for different reasons.

As the rainstorms cleared and we headed home, we stopped at the Cinder Knoll trail in Hurricane to take photos of the Pine Valley Mountains with snow and Red Cliffs Desert Reserve in the foreground. The puddles were serendipitous.

Check out Land Beyond Zion on its own website, but also on AirBnB and HipCamp.

Shanti is hosting two retreats for adults this spring; one at the end of April that is hiking and running focused with Kathy Pugh. Click here for info about that retreat.

She’s hosting another at the end of May with amazing photographer Michelle Craig. Click here for info about the May retreat. If I didn’t have other stuff happening at the end of May, I’d be attending Michelle’s retreat!

Also… I love the logo I designed for Land Beyond Zion. It really turned out awesome. I’ll write a post about that on its own at some point.

Donating Breastmilk, My Story

*I wrote this in the spring of 2017 (back when I ran a parenting blog). I was working on weaning my youngest and how I handled an oversupply of milk.

As humans, we’ve developed ways to donate blood, tissue, organs, and even sperm and ovarian eggs in recent generations, but human milk has been shared since women began having babies. I first learned about milk donation when my mom told me that she had donated milk when I was a newborn. In 1978, a time when breastfeeding rates were pretty low, she had a lot of extra milk but she couldn’t bear to pour it down the drain. Through the Nursing Mother’s Counsel, someone came to her house to drop off sterile bottles and then pick them up once my mom had filled them and bring them to a HMBANA milk bank in San Jose, CA. She didn’t even have a breast pump that worked very well back then, she hand expressed her milk!

Cut to 2009 when my oldest son was a newborn. I became friends with five mamas I met in our Bradley Method Childbirth class and we got together a couple of times a week when our babies were all newborns. We chatted, nursed our babies, commiserated about postpartum life, bonded, and breastfed lots more. One mama mentioned that there was a milk bank locally that gave mamas a brand new breast pump as compensation for donating (this bank has since closed). I was curious about it since I’d just dropped $300 on my breast pump (this was before insurance covered pumps!), and I did a little research on what the requirements were. I learned that they required a minimum donation of 80 ounces at once. After going back to work, I had an oversupply and I was running out of room in my freezer. The week I was going to get the process started, a massive earthquake shook Haiti. The outpouring of support was huge and every time I called the milk bank, I heard a recorded message saying they were so overwhelmed with donations for Haiti that they didn’t have anyone available to take my call. I left three messages and when I never heard back, I gave up.

We ended up using most of the milk I had in my freezer anyway. My oversupply evened out and my day care provider was overfeeding my son at times, so by the time he was seven months old, I had almost nothing left in my freezer. In hindsight, I guess it was a good thing I didn’t donate milk, but it would have been nice to share some of my excess.

Four and a half years later, my second son, M was born and I was able to be a SAHP. I still had my breast pump and I only pumped to relieve engorgement rather than to try and build a stash in the freezer. The few times my husband or my mother-in-law tried to give M a bottle, he hated it and screamed. Since I was not working outside the house full time, it was easier for me to just keep nursing and not bother with bottles at all. 

I had an oversupply again and my youngest slept in longer stretches than my oldest did as a newborn. So I often found myself engorged and needing to pump to relieve the discomfort. Within a week, I was running out of room in my freezer and needed to figure out what to do with it. Throwing it away was simply NOT an option.

Why didn’t I donate through an official milk bank?

When my youngest son was born, there was no HMBANA bank close to me in Utah (only CA or CO) and I would have needed to donate a minimum of 150 ounces for them to pay for me to ship frozen milk to them. I have learned that this has now changed and the 150 ounces doesn’t have to be all at once. At the time, I didn’t have enough milk to meet that minimum, but I still had milk to donate; milk that would be thrown away or made into popsicles since my son wouldn’t take a bottle. There are a multitude of reasons why I chose not to wait until I had enough milk, but one of them was because I needed the freezer space.

Another reason I chose to donate locally was because of how much banks typically charge families for donated milk. I totally understand that it costs money to run a milk bank with lab screening, donor screening, pasteurization, etc. But I really struggled with the idea of families having to pay between $4 and $6 per ounce for donated milk; milk that was free for me. Sometimes health insurance will cover it if a doctor writes a prescription, but it’s up to the family to submit a claim and get reimbursement from insurance. If a family would rather give their baby breast milk than formula for whatever their reason, especially if it’s not due to a medical issue, it made me sad how expensive it would have been for them. That reason is why I was perfectly happy to donate locally.

With how I donated milk, there wasn’t an official process. I posted in my local Eats on Feets and HM4HB Facebook groups to find a recipient. These are networking tools to help mamas with milk get in touch with mamas and babies who need it. They focus entirely on networking and make it very clear that any donor screening, milk screening, medical information, and advice is 100% up to the mamas to figure out.

I shared how much milk I had, where I was located, and the fact that I was on no prescription medications, not consuming alcohol, a non-smoker, and I also included that I do consume dairy products (since some babies can be sensitive). I made it clear I was only interested in meeting someone locally for milk, I was not willing to ship it.

From there, I got a few messages from moms who were interested and we chatted. I had one dad send me a message claiming he was looking for milk for his wife, but I told him I wasn’t comfortable donating milk to a man if I didn’t also get to meet the mom or the baby who would be drinking it. I know there’s a niche market for breast milk fetishes and body builders drinking human milk, but I was not comfortable donating to them.

I met the first mama at a local museum where I met her and her little boy. She suffered from insufficient glandular tissue and wasn’t able to produce enough milk to feed her baby. His tummy struggled with most formulas, so she was looking to donor milk. He ended up having a sensitivity to cow’s milk products, so he only got a little bit of my milk.

The second mama I donated to was a rock star! We met at a local restaurant and she explained that she had just adopted a newborn baby boy and she was inducing lactation so she could breastfeed him. She struggled to produce enough, so she looked to donor milk to supplement. She brought tears to my eyes with her story because it was something I had considered back when we struggled to get pregnant with my youngest son. If we had gone the adoption route, I had hoped to breastfeed too. 

My major take-away from this experience:

I am in the process of weaning my youngest son who’s 2.5 and while I am SO done with nursing, I know I will miss it tremendously. The pride and confidence it gave me as a mother is really hard to describe, but it’s a feeling I will hold onto for the rest of my life. 

Wet nursing and milk sharing was a societal norm until the invention of formula, and it makes me sad that it’s not at all common today among family members and close friends. It’s often discouraged and considered too risky. People are often skeeved out by the thought of milk sharing in any capacity, even when studies have proven that it can be a safer and healthier alternative to formula for many babies. Donated milk is saving the lives of NICU babies and preemies every day. Milk sharing was an integral part of life for new mamas in previous centuries. If a mama struggled to breastfeed or was ill, she could count on a lactating sister, cousin, or a friend to be able to nourish her baby. I would love to see that sense of “village” restored some day.

I Bought a Mat Cutter!

One day, 20-ish years ago, my BFF Yvonne knew I was looking for a job after being fired from the last one (long story there). She came over and wouldn’t leave until I filled out an application to work at the picture framing store where she was a manager. She knew I would love the work, and I really did. I alternated between full-time and part-time, depending on my school schedule, for about five years at a Bay Area chain called Corners.

For the first few years, we did everything in-house. We cut and joined frames, cut mats, stretched canvas, built shadowboxes, we did it all. I learned how to lay out and cut multi-opening mats. I learned how to sew down an antique christening gown or an autographed football jersey without using any tape or glue. I built shadowboxes for military medals, antique coins, musical instruments, and even a few license plates. I stretched canvases that were up to eight feet long and cut frames to fit. It was such a FUN job.

The sales side wasn’t always fun; especially with customers who had no idea how expensive custom framing is. But my favorite times were the weeks leading up to Christmas. We’d have hundreds of orders to finish before the holiday, so we’d get overtime approved, crank up the music after the store closed, and get it all finished without interruption. I have lots of fond memories of singing and dancing and making some wonderful friends.

I have thoroughly loved framing different things for my home. I may have old, cheap, and mis-matched furniture, but there’s never a shortage of framed photos and artwork to hang on my walls and lots of artwork and empty frames waiting for a larger house to adorn someday.

Last Christmas, I splurged and bought myself a mat cutter. A few times I paid way too much at JoAnn’s for a custom mat to fit a ready-made frame and it was so difficult to justify paying that much when I knew I could do it myself. Of course, my house is small, so I don’t really have anywhere to put it other than the floor of my office/studio.

First thing I cut a mat for??

I framed Kukkiwon 1st degree black belt certificates for my son and myself. We worked our butts off to earn those and they deserved to be displayed with pride.

The next things I cut mats for were my own paintings and prints for my exhibition at Draper’s Art in the Barn, Draper’s Internationals Arts & Crafts Festival, and the Sandy Visual Arts show. Being able to buy full sheets of mat board and cut all of my own mats proved to be a huge money-saving tool.

My knowledge and skill allowed me to cut mats to fit ready-made frames and save on custom framing AND have complete control over how they looked. When I chose mat colors for the exhibition and arts & crafts show, I kept the mats off-white and simple.

When I chose mats for the Sandy Visual Art show, I went with black to really make the colors in the paintings stand out; even though it’s wasn’t necessarily mat colors someone would choose to hang in their home.

I am SO glad I bought this gift for myself. I have so many pieces of artwork I bought from other artists I follow and I cannot wait to get matted and framed.

Next goal: Get a new house with a bigger studio/office space so I can have a whole table for my mat cutter.