A Special Birthday Mailing

This past weekend, someone pretty special to us had her 19th birthday.

We have known this young lady for almost 8 years.

I am the only one in our family who has met her.

She lives approximately 3,665 miles from us on another continent.

Over the last 8 years, we have exchanged a lot of letters back and forth.

Who is this young lady?

This is Lina! Our Compassion sponsored child who lives in Colombia.

So what is the special birthday mailing I sent to her?

Since we have received photo updates of her over the past 8 years, plus I have photos from my trip to Colombia 3 years ago, I created this photo page using Canva:

I used the online letter writing tool in my Compassion account to send a birthday card to Lina. Then I uploaded this image to the card as a full page photo. I sure hope she enjoys seeing how much she has grown over the past 8 years!

If you sponsor Compassion children, what special things do you like to send to your sponsored child for their birthday?

Planning our Italian Vacation

In December of 2016, my husband and I began talking about possibly going to Italy. At first, Kevin was not too keen on the idea. But then when he remembered all the art that we could see there, and all the amazing food they have in Italy, he quickly changed his mind!

We still weren't sure if an actual trip to Italy would happen, but when our friend shared about some inexpensive fares to Rome, we had to look into making the trip a possibility!

Lindsey and her husband have been to Europe four times in the last 5 years! They love to help people who have a tight budget make their European travel dreams possible. So we contacted Ciao Bella Vacations to help us get started with the planning process.

I highly recommend contacting Lindsey if you are thinking about traveling to Europe. She had us answer a lot of questions to help us plan our trip. She booked all of our Airbnb's, our flights, and most of our trains. She even suggested many additional activities for each of the three locations we would be visiting during our trip. And she provided us with a lot of great travel tips, especially since this would be our first time traveling to Europe.

We are both hoping that our first trip to Italy will not be our last!

If you could go anywhere in the world, where would you want to go?

Stay tuned...I will be sharing more about our trip in upcoming posts!

Us vs. Them

There are times when I wonder why I even have a blog.

Math was my favorite subject in school.

English was not.

When you write papers about your point of view on something and the teacher marks you down because it doesn't fit with his/her point of view, how can that be fair?

Since this is my blog, I can write things and share things here that are my point of view and never have to worry about what grade I will receive. And honestly, I really never have to worry about what others may think about my point of view either. Because this is my blog.

But one thing I wrote today I feel needs to be shared with a larger audience:

There is currently an assembly bill being considered in the California Assembly that is attacking the rights of homeschool families in our state.

What concerns me is the 'Us vs. Them' arguments being tossed around when we start to feel attacked.

'They' are not perfect.

'We' are not perfect.

No legislation is going to make anyone perfect.

And verbally attacking anyone on social media is not a solution to any of the major issues we have in our state or in this country.

"By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey his commandments." - 1 John 5:2

Bringing a bit of Italy home to our table

After spending ten days in Italy last month, all I want to do now is learn to make homemade pasta, cappuccinos, croissants, and authentic Pasta e Fagioli.

If anyone has the most amazing recipes for any of these, please feel free to pass them along!

Over the past few years, I have made a Pasta e Fagioli recipe, but when I ordered it for dinner one night in Orvieto, the recipe I make looks nothing like this:

It was cold in Italy and all I wanted was a bowl of soup for dinner. This was so amazing! Rather than being tomato based like I was used to at home, this was more like a white bean soup filled with homemade pasta.

So I began to search the internet for a recipe that might be similar and I was happy to find one and made sure to add it to one of my Pinterest boards.

This week, I added the ingredients to my grocery list:

Today was the day to give the recipe a try:

This recipe came together pretty quickly. Since I have not tried to make homemade pasta yet, this is probably as close as I am going to get to the soup I had in that restaurant in Orvieto.

Have you ever tried Pasta e Fagioli like this?

January Photography Focus: Food

"Photography, as a powerful medium of expression and communications, offers an infinite variety of perception, interpretation, and execution." - Ansel Adams

Over the past few years, I have working on learning more about photography and using my DSLR to its fullest potential. I have learned how to use it in manual mode and participated in a couple of year long projects of taking photos every day.

This year, I have decided to focus on one subject a month rather than randomly take photos of whatever fits the prompt for the day type of photography project. (Does that make sense?, excuse my rambling!)

Anyway, for the month of January, I decided to take photos of food. 

Why?

Food is readily available, it is rather cooperative, and I am usually cooking or baking something in my kitchen almost every day.

Now, I have no desire to become a food blogger. But I have been taking advantage of watching videos from CreativeLive on food photography. Have you heard of Andrew Scrivani? He takes some pretty amazing photos of food!

So, here are some photos I have taken this month. In Lightroom, all I did was apply the lens correction and edit the white balance. All of the photos were shot using my 35mm lens.

Potatoes for a new soup recipe with our Christmas lights still in the background

Made homemade bread bowls for our leftover split pea soup

Making salsa

It is January, we are suppose to be eating healthier, right?

My typical lunch, PB&J and an apple

Can someone from South Carolina ship me some of these coffee beans?

Now I have to admit, all of these photos were taken in my kitchen under the florescent lights. Not ideal, but I am pretty happy with the way they all turned out.

What have you been taking photos of this month? Are you working on a photography project?