DI - Destination Imagination

And so the season of creative ping pong balls has started again!

Let me back up a little. Three of our children have been/are involved in DI (used to be called OM - Odyssey of the Mind). This is a program that fosters creative problem solving and team working skills. We love it! It teaches them to think outside the box, or as my husband says, "what box?" It teaches them to respectfully work together as a team while under pressure. These are two things we think are crucial and yet missing in so many adults today.

When the kids sign up as a team (often through schools, but not limited to) they are given a list of challenges they can choose one from. After weeks/months of meeting and scripting and building and revamping and practicing the competitions start and today was the first round: regionals. Our relatively small school has a history of doing well and we are again through the first round and will go to the State tournament. Going to "State" is the best reward, they kids work and hope to go to state. Not only do they have the honors of competing at state level, but our school has the tradition to go the day before, and all the DI-kids go out and eat pizza.

There are no words to really describe the atmosphere at these tournaments except..."creative ping pong balls"-all over!! Wherever you look, there are kids with the most creative and hillarious costumes and props and ingenious scripts. They are given a certain amount of time to perform in front of judges during which they need to meet several critiria weaved into a main challenge and one or two side trips. In addition to the prepared performance they also compete in Instant Challenges where they are given a problem to solve, about 10-20 minutes to prepare without and then perform. The kids are not allowed to have anybody outside their team provide solutions or help. They are allowed to ask for instructions to a process they have decided to use, but it is a clear and fine line between helping and providing instructions. The golden rule is basically that they can ask for any information they need but you can only be a source of information, not solutions. You can answer their questions when they ask and only answer the question, not give more information or hints or tips. You cannot help them or do any of the work for them.

And then comes the time for awards. The tears and joys, disappointments and cheers.

Yes, I love it!!

2011 SDSU Spring Fashion Show

Last night was the annual spring fashion show at SDSU which this year benefitted the Children's Miracle Network.

One part of the fashion show was sponsored by the Apparel Merchandising Association (AMA) and we chose to feature garments made of....trash! In other words, only items that normally would have been discarded.

Like any runway show, the sentiment is often presented stronger than the actualy style. Our point was to highlight that with a little ingenuity we can reuse so many materials in unlikely ways.

So, here is a taste of what we presented.







I made this dress of Neocate formula bags. The bags were cut into diamond shaped pieces. In order to give the garment some visual interest and break up the monochromatic color, I cut the bags into three different sizes of diamond shaped pieces. I then sewed them together to create a new "fabric".










The dressed is underlined with discarded cotton curtains and accented with scraps of crepe backed satin. The scarf is chiffon "rescued" from a damaged evening gown.











This is my Dana!! She modelled again for AMA (and me!)







Moiria Curry from LoveCurry Couture designed and created the following pieces.







This dress was entirely made of Juicy Juice packages.












This garments was constructed from discarded window screens and lined with old bed sheets. The flowers were created from Poptart wrappers.













Our third "green" designer was Danielle Laughter who created this ensemble modelled by Laura.

The head piece is constructed of tires and the necklace is made of old t-shirts.

Solar ovens for Haiti

It has been more than a year since Haiti was hit by a devestating earthquake that basically demolished the capital. As if an earthquake isn't hard enough to recover from, it came at a point when Haiti was finally getting some economical footing and hope. But now....it is beyond tragic.






For some reason(s) the billions of dollars are not getting to the relief efforts. From all the stories I have read and heard, it seems that it is very hard to get past customs and crucial materials are stuck in customs, sitting on the ground in Haiti (!), waiting for things like a seal or stamp or in many cases people don't even know what is holding up the process. In the meanwhile, Haitian people are existing in conditions beyond words.




As many predicted, the deplorable conditions and lack of sanitation became a major problem once the rain season started. In November Cholera broke out in massive numbers. This "poor man's decease" is purely from lack of clean water and contaminated foods. The simple process of boiling the water could greatly improve the odds against attrackting this deadly decease. But how do you do that when you have no house, no stove, no electricity and the price of wood is astronomical? Solar ovens!








As part of a service learning opportunity at South Dakota State University we were able to volunteer at Haiti Solar Oven Partners lead by Rick Jost in Volga, SD. He has been working in Haiti since 1990s building schools. On one of his many trips to Haiti, he brought along a solar oven, just to see if that would be of interest. And it was! He spearheaded a program to build solar ovens for Haiti not knowing how crucial they would become.

The solar ovens not only offer a way to safely prepare foods without having to spend money on expensive fuel, but can purify drinking water. With the use of a simple (but ingenius) little and reusable device called a WAPI (Water Pasteurization Indicator) people can see when the water has reached high enough temperatures to kill bacteria. The WAPI contains a little plug of wax which will melt and drop when the temperatures have reached 160F. After removing the WAPI from the water, the wax will solidify again and you can flip the tube around and use it again.






The project takes place in two places, in South Dakota and in Haiti. In South Dakota, Rick orders materials and with the help of volunteers, prepares complete kits that are shipped to Haiti. There his team, he and volunteers from the US, assemble the kits and teach the recipients how to use the ovens. There are at this point too few ovens to meet the demand so he asks a $20 for each over. This is an affordable fee and it allows the serious users to get them first instead of finding them somewhere in a corner and not used. It also is a way of creating a sense of ownership which tends to result in better care of a product.





The tasks are organized and divided in such a manner that it requires very little instruction to get volunteers started. Rick has three stations: one for tracing the pattern, one for folding the outer liners, and one for counting screws and putting them in zip lock bags. Here, Kayla is tracing the pattern unto the insolation.







The outer black lining is already shaped and somewhat folded, but it helps to have some of the folds creased a little more. Here Rick is showing us how to crease the folds without bending the liner.











There can be two people tracing and two people creasing. Jenn is carefully tracing the pattern unto the insolation.








Dr. Enz, our French professor, arranged the service learning opportunity.
We were able to choose from two dates so our class went in two groups over two days. Here she is creasing the outer linings.












Jaycee at the creasing table.













Jenn tracing the pattern. We were the second group to go volunteer and Kayla and her were determined to beat the previous group's efforts. :-)










Jaycee was creasing the outer linings while Rick was packaging the kits.

Chai spiced cheesecake

It has been a little while since my last post. Our youngest and oldest sons have been ill, but we are all well again and I am back to some of my favorite activities: cooking!

We had another (!) snow storm today, so what better time than to make a cheesecake with warm Indian spices on a ginger crust to overcome the cold blues of South Dakota weather. I was just a little surprised at how tall this cheese cake is: it filled my 9 " pan and baked tall into a souffle like cake. But once it cooled and settled, it had the great cheesecake consistency I so like.

So, here it is:

For the crust:
- 1 1/2 cups flour
- 1 tsp. ground ginger
- 1/4 tsp. salt
- 3/4 cups butter
- 1/4 cup sugar
- 1 large egg yoke
- 1/4 cup minced crystallized ginger

Grease a 9" spring form. Mix together flour, ginger, and salt. Add butter and sugar until it looks like the "Parmesan" you get in a can. Add the egg yoke and ginger. Press into form, 1 inch up the sides of the pan. Poke it with a fork and freeze for 30 minutes. Preheat the oven to 350F and bake until golden, about 30 minutes.

In the meanwhile, the filling:
- 4 8-ounce packages cream cheese
- 1 1/2 cup sugar
- 1 8-ounce mascarpone cheese
- 5 large eggs
- 2 large egg yokes
- 2 1/2 tsp. ground ginger
- 2 1/2 tsp. ground cardamom
- 1/2 tsp. vanilla
- 1/4 tsp. ground allspice
- 1/4 tsp. white pepper
- 1/4 tsp. salt

Beat cream cheese and sugar until smooth. Add mascarpone. Add eggs and egg yokes, one at the time. Add the spices. Poor into baked crust and bake for an hour at 350F, then lower the temperature to 200F and bake for another 30 minutes or until cake sets around edges. Center will still move slightly when the pan is moved. If you wish, you can take the cake out after 30 minutes and spread with a mixture of 1 cup sour cream, 5 tablespoons sugar and tsp. vanilla and then bake at 350F for another 10 minutes. I didn't like this topping at all, so I am hunting for a better topping.

Now the hardest part: let it cool!! After about an hour, you can transfer the cake to a cake platter (sometimes the metal of the spring form will give off nasty flavor) and cover. Refrigerate overnight! Really.

But then.......oh so worth it!

A morning with my mom.

I spent a wonderful morning with my mom this morning and, true to our natures, food was involved. This is the result:

The best sweet potato muffins I have ever had!






There was just enough sweet potato to give them a beautiful color, great texture and hint of "something different".









Then it was time to try a new recipe for buns. Super combination of flavor, moisture (and yet not too moist), texture and crust.










Yeah, I know, we look just...GREAT in our Saturday-morning-no-make-up-or-hair-do-or-anything-clamotten, but we had a wonderful morning :-).

Proloquo2go on the iPad

Our son has autism and is deaf. He had basically no language, especially expressive language. We have worked with him since he was three months old, trying to teach him sign language. His receptive vocabulary slowly expanded but it had no real meaning for him, let alone a avenue to express himself.

After a long road of ups and down he has for the last two years had the most fantastic teacher and has made incredible progress. No, I won't tell you her name, not just for privacy reasons but I don't want anybody to take her away from David :-)

Anyway, she managed to not only introduce an iPad into David's communication schedule but also found a donor so he can have his very own.

On the iPad she/we loaded Proloquo2go and it gave our son a voice.

It is extremely user friendly with a very easy interface based on pictures with or without words. There is then also an option to let the iPad "voice" what David wrote, e.g. "I want fish movie" (see the video example at the end of the post).



On the main screen is a little icon with Proloquo2go. From there you go into any menu you set up.







This "screen shot" is just one of the menus he can choose from, but it gives you an idea what it looks like. You load whichever icons you want and how many, depending on your/your child's needs. It takes them through a simple and systematic menu to get to their choices.

Clean up - blues and yay's

(I wrote in my "About me" that this blog would at times take you through rabbit holes. This is one of them. Because this blog is for my pleasure and not focused on how many people might read it and bla bla bla, I will at times post things that are personal and not that interesting to others. And slightly confusing.....But it is my rabbit trail. :-) )

Yesterday was a fantastic day! We spent the whole day cleaning up the basement. Although I was a little apprehensive to throw out so many of my things, I was excited about the progress: storing hopes and dreams did not made them happen, it just cluttered my life.

But, this morning some of the elation has been replaced with sadness. I expected a little "clean up remorse" but I feel more than just remorse. I cannot help but to look at my life and have to admit that I am not the person I used to be or wanted to be.

Ok, so here we go: whine, whine, whine! I have just returned from India where I have witnessed people living under sub human conditions and here I am whining about my little life that hasn't panned out the way I had hoped for.

But the feelings are there and the familiar words are not helping. No, I am not experiencing a mid-life crisis. I am just looking at reality. Throwing out so much of my "stuff" is an indication how I have not been able to implement so many of my interests and I find myself at a stage in my professional career I would expect a 20-year old to be. Granted, some of that is because I am unwilling to use, misuse and step on other people in order to advance myself. I have seen and experienced that too many times, people who often have no real skills of their own but are very good at weaseling and politicking their way upward, even setting others up to look dumb. They have learned to compensate for their inadequacies by mastering manipulation. Yuck!!!!

Some other reasons are just life. It is filled with unexpected turns and events you have to adjust to. Having a multiple disabled child has turned our lives upside down and changed everything! Who plans for that? Our oldest is about to graduate from high school and move to a college dorm and the next oldest is only a year away. We would have been at a point in our lives we had talked about years ago, but David's severe disabilities have altered all our plans. And hopes.

And some of the reasons are also my own choices. And I don't like some the choices I have made. Even the ones I didn't make is a way of making choices.

I am not actually at the stage of a 20-year old. I have experiences that are definite not to be ignored, but I have no papers confirming that and I have now chosen to start a new career at a later stage in life.

My goal has as long as I can remember been to get myself in a position where I can help others. Not hand outs which just further indignant dependency, but pulling people up to a level where they can start building their own lives. What I lament is that I am not in a position to do so. Yet.

Cleaning up my basement, and my life, is a good thing. The hardest reality is still better than the sweetest lie because I can work with reality, not with lies. But it still hurts a little. What scares me is the uncertainty. If I have not succeeded by now, what will it take to succeed in the future? Something will need to change or I will just fill up my basement with new hopes and dreams.