Sushi Chef (Say that five times fast!)

I love me some sushi. My whole family does.  This sounds rather sophisticated until I add that our favorite place to get sushi was our local San Antonio HEB. (That's a grocery store for you non-Texans).  Our HEB happened to be pretty high class and had its own sushi bar where they made fresh sushi everyday. It was good! San Antonio Rolls, Firecracker Rolls, Dragon Rolls - yum!

Here in Turkey sushi is significantly more trouble to come by than just popping it into the cart with the eggs and milk. So when I heard there was a sushi making class offered this month I jumped at the chance.  Originally I signed up Brannick to go with me, as sort of a celebration of his last day of work. But Brannick hasn't been feeling well so Carson enthusiastically offered to take his place. 

And so in support of Asian Pacific Heritage Month we showed up at the Airman Family Readiness Center ready to make some Sushi!

 Rolling it in the bamboo mat is the tricky part. But with a little instruction Carson got it down.

 Ta-daa!! Turns out Carson rocks at this. Look how perfect those slices are!

 Then it was my turn. I took it to the next level and wrapped it with the rice on the outside. Cuz I'm that cool.

 As evidenced by my completely cheesy grin.

We left the event full of good sushi and a sense of accomplishment. And at Carson's insistence we stopped by the BX and commissary to purchase a rice cooker and all the ingredients to make sushi for the whole crew.  So tonight is Sushi Night at the Ewings!! Come on over!

My totally awesome globe-trotting parents!

In April my parents came for a visit along with my mother's sister, Aunt Geri. We spent a week traveling around here locally and then went on a much-anticipated Greek Island Cruise. It was an amazing time. Everyday I looked at my children and thought, "Remember this! Remember this!" And I truly hope they do. Partly because we saw so many beautiful places and things. And partly because they had two weeks with their wonderful grandparents. This is something a lot of kids, including most of my siblings and their children, can take for granted. But a military family can't. Time with extended family is rare and precious time.

Having them along really made the experience. So instead of doing a travel log of all the places we went to, I thought I'd just do a montage of parent photos and tell you a bit about them along the way.

This is my mom - LaVonne. If you look up the word 'enthusiasm' in the dictionary, you would find her picture.  She is always smiling and often singing. My kids made a game out of trying to come up with words she couldn't use in a song. The only one they stumped her on was 'crowbar'. This is her best imitation of a Roman goddess statue at Elaiussa Sebaste.

This is my dad - Brannick. He is still Superman to me. He is wise and gentle. I was never ever afraid of him as a child. The nicest thing he ever said to me was that if all the things I had accomplished were taken away, he still would love me and be proud of me for just the person I was.

Here they are at the White Valley at Cappadoccia. They loved staying in the cave motel and seeing the cave churches. I had forgotten (or didn't ever know) that my dad is claustrophobic but he enjoyed the tour of the underground cities all the same.

 Mom holding a hedgehog. I really wanted to show my parents a hedgehog. The night we went out looking for them we were unsuccessful in all the usual spots. So we turned around and headed back home. And then I spotted this little guy in the side yard of a nearby house. As there are no hedgehogs in the States, they were pretty tickled to get to see one up close and personal.

 On the hike back up from a cave called Heaven - near a huge pit called Hell. This was a strenuous hike with something like 400 unevenly spaced stairs. But my parents are in great physical shape and handled the hike just fine. We were all glad that we were visiting in the springtime and not the hot summer!

My mom at the Women's Market -she purchased this vest from the woman who made it. And even though she speaks no Turkish and the woman spoke no English, my mom was so excited and admiring of the vest that by the time she paid for it the woman was kissing and hugging her like they were old friends. The same things happened at the Incirlik Thursday market with aTurkish man and a pair of cheap shoes (well, less kissing).  My mom has that effect on people. She doesn't just make friends, she makes fan clubs.

Dad at a Mosaic Museum in a town not far from the base. Soon after we left the town, heading for Snake Castle, I got hopelessly lost. I could see the castle but I couldn't get to it. We ended up far off course in an unfamiliar city. Normally this would completely freak me out but my dad has always had a encouraging effect on me. We have a long history of me doing things that terrified me (ferris wheels to rock rappeling) if and only if my dad was there beside me.  As it happened, some nice Turkish men who spoke no English but noticed our obviously American behemoth car lead us out of the city and back to the main highway.

One of the reasons we chose a Greek Island cruise is that 30 some odd years ago my dad traveled to some Greek Islands to buy sheep for Iranians. Intrigued? Well, that is another story but he remembered the Greek Islands as some of the most beautiful places he had ever seen. So he was pretty excited to see Greece again and we were excited to go with him. Even if we didn't buy any sheep.

 

Santorini - rode donkeys up the steep hill from the dock to the mountaintop towns. How many retirees can say that?

 The Parthenon in Athens. Bucket list - Check.

Mars Hill. Where Paul preached. Which was a pretty gutsy thing to do considering that the Parthenon is right behind him. Before coming to Turkey, my mom did extensive research on Paul and his travels. She was so excited to visit Tarsus, Ephesus and Mars Hill. They've both been to Jerusalem before but like me before coming here had no idea how much Biblical history is in and around Turkey.

 Speaking of Ephesus. . . .

And here's Hieropolis. We fit both of these lovely Turkish Roman ruin sites before and after our cruise.  I'm pretty sure my parents were stuck in the Rome airport back in the 70s with three little kids and no diapers due to a canceled flight. That little adventure left no time for touring Roman antiquities. Who knew that coming to visit the same daughter who wore her dad's hanky tied around her tush in lieu of a nappy on the next flight out of Rome would remedy that?

I haven't covered even half of what their visit entailed but that's okay. This photo shows pretty well how the visit felt to me.  So Happy Mother's Day and Happy Father's Day Mom and Dad. Thanks for coming to visit us. Thanks for being the wonderful parents and grandparents that you are. Thanks for making all of us feel so loved.

Bond Girl for a Day

Happy Military Spouse Appreciation Month! A big thank you for all the fellow military wives who have helped me keep my sanity over the last 12 years. And another big thank you to all those non-military wives (and their husbands) who have been my friends and my support in so many ways.  If heaven is as I expect, then someday you will all understand what an impact you have had on my life.

So today was a pretty good day. There was a trip organized for military spouses to go visit the James Bond Bridge and hike in a nearby Karaisali canyon. It's called the James Bond Bridge because scenes from the latest Bond movie, Skyfall, were filmed on the bridge. To the locals it is known as the Varda Köprüsü bridge, the German bridge, or the Devil Bridge. Whatever you want to call it, it's a pretty awesome bridge.

 Built in 1909 by the Germans (hence the name), it was part of the Istanbul-Baghdad railway line which connected Berlin to Basra enabling the direct shipment of oil to Germany.  So this bridge is over 100 years old and its still in use! 

 Here's me, pretending I'm a Bond girl. Not really. To be honest, I'm not that much of a Bond fan. It always bothered me that one night in bed with him would make the sexy Soviet spies change sides. Yeah, right. Go peddle your sexist drivel somewhere else. But the bridge was impressive.

I've always wanted to do one of these trick shots.

Here is me standing in the middle of the bridge. My leg bones are only hurting a little. (Does this happen to anyone else when they are on a height?)

Last one of the bridge, I promise. But it really was cool. Oh, and if you have seen the movie and are wondering where the tunnel into the mountain at the end of the bridge is, that was movie magic. No tunnel. No mountain.

After the bridge we hiked the Karaisali Canyon. The canyon has sheer rock walls with a river at the bottom and looks very much like something you'd see in southern Utah or even near the Grand Canyon.

 After hiking an easy 45 minutes we could see this waterfall. It was on the opposite side of the river from the trail but there was a nice picnic area where we could stop and eat our lunches in the shade. There were newly built covered wooden platforms that were lovely.

 The water was cold but felt good! I freaked out some of my fellow spouses by hopping stepping carefully out to this rock. (The water around me is quite deep.) But I didn't fall in and we made it safely back to the bus.

All in all it was a great day to get off base and see something new and a wonderful chance to get to know some of the spouses better.  It's such a small base and you see the same faces all over the place but don't always have a chance to get to know people.

Being gone all day on this trip meant typing up History exams for child 3 and 4 last night, rushing through an Algebra lesson for 1 and 2 this morning, throwing a roast into the crockpot for chimichangas 15 minutes before I left, hoping someone would remember to go pick up number 5 from the bus this afternoon, and leaving quite a few things undone that needed to get done. But I'm so glad I decided to go anyway. Sometimes its nice to get away from all the responsibilities and just have some fun. And it's nice to be appreciated!

Being a military spouse has lead me down roads I never would have dreamed of, both literally and figuratively. It has tested me, tried me, and strengthened me and occasionally come close to breaking my heart.  I am a different kind of person than I would have been without these experiences. I hope a better one but maybe just a more flexible one. And one who is grown accustomed to saying goodbye, both to my husband and friends, far more often that I'd like to.  One thing I do know is that I have a closer relationship to my children than I would have had in a civilian life.  I'd say that is pretty great perk.

Henry's quilt

Remember when Delaney and I went up to Germany to visit my friend Jayne who was stork-nested up there to have her baby? (Read about that here.) Well, Jayne is back in Turkey with her two cute kids and a darling little baby boy named Henry.

We threw a small shower for her in our church women's group.  From the seven women there she received a star shaped crocheted blanket, a knitted stuffed rabbit, a crochet teddy bear, an embroidered receiving blanket and two handsewn hooded towels. We are a talented bunch!

Anyway, here is my contribution.  A few months ago I showed Jayne three different fabric options for baby boy quilts. She picked Ten Little Things. So using Amy Smart's Off-Set Square Tutorial, I made this quilt:

 All of the prints are from the Ten Little Things line. The solids are Turkish cottons purchased in Adana. They seem to be good quality but I still worry that they won't hold up as well as the prints.

 I love those owls. They are so cute!

For the backing I used everything I had left of the asterisk prints in brown and blue. The middle bit is a Turkish cotton. It seemed to fray easily so I serged it to the other pieces and then put a straight seam just inside the serging.  When my mom came to visit I asked her to bring me some Heat N Bond. She did, but when I went to use it I realized she had brought me the no sew kind. And they aren't kidding. You really can't sew through it very well. So I used a blanket stitch to sew down the applique and then echo stitched around each letter so I could see from the front where to avoid when I was quilting it together.

That wasn't the only bump in the road either. My machine went all wonky on me when I tried to free motion stipple this quilt. After a two days of frustration I finally got it to behave again and was able to finish the quilt without the thread shredding every two inches. Yay!

Jayne loved it and hopefully, as it turned out to be fairly large for a baby quilt, Henry will love it for several more years to come. 

Freedom Star Quilt

 I'm so excited to have this one finished!! My parents are coming this week and I wanted to have it done and hung up before they got here. A friend of mine also had a project she really wanted to get done so last Saturday we set up our machines and paraphernalia in the base chapel annex and sewed most of the day. By 4 pm we had two finished quilts!

A patriotic quilt has been on my quilt wish list for a while.   For the reason why see below. When it came to pick a pattern I was inspired by all the great HST star quilts I had seen in the last year. Some time ago I had purchased 6 Town Square Quilts charm packs and with a sheet (okay several sheets) of graph paper and colored pencils, I came up with a design I liked. 

 I intended it to be a wall hanging. Our base house has tile floors and concrete walls so it gets loud! Curtains and carpets in the living areas help absorb noise but there was nothing in the stairwell and it functioned as a huge echo chamber.

The backing is a Tradewinds fabric I purchased on sale. Its a lattice of bamboo and I have it in light green as well. A yummy fabric!

 This is my favorite block. That little dove with the olive branch in its mouth. You can see the quilting was just a simple straight line echo quilting along the lines of the star.

 I still wish the red in the binding were a bit brighter to match the red in the quilt, but I like the stars and think the navy background frames it well.

 The reason I wanted a patriotic quilt was I wanted to make a compliment quilt to this one. This quilt means a great deal to me. As you can see by the label below, it's a valor quilt. My husband was given this quilt at the end of his second Iraqi deployment. No, he was not wounded and I hope that it doesn't offend anyone that he owns a valor quilt without having been wounded.  He was and is a physician and he served in Iraq in that capacity.  The last week of his second tour he had to vacate his hooch (the term for the little trailer things they slept in) to make way for the next wave of medical staff. He ended up sleeping for a few days in the hospital where he had treated patients. The nurses gave him this quilt to use during that time and to take home with him. 

The quilt. is. beautiful. The backing is a text print of the Declaration of Independence and its quilted in a varigated red, white and blue thread. The front has these vintage looking boys and girls dressed in red, white and blue and holding flags. It's gorgeous.

That second Iraqi deployment above all his other deployments and TDYs and even his year in Korea was particularly hard on me, so this quilt symbolized to me a thank you for the sacrifices of military wives and families. I looked up the women who made this quilt and learned that Ruth Stonesifer was the president of the Gold Star Mothers. I am deeply grateful for both her and Nellie Conrad for making this and other quilts like it. I love this quilt. It is something I would grab if my house were on fire. And this is the quilt that inspired me to learn to quilt.

So now they both hang in my stairwell, my own little quiet(er) corner of patriotism.

Mother of Five Evades Death and Celebrates with Sushi

Today I screwed my courage to the sticking place and ventured out to downtown Adana. My goal was to practice driving to the places I would need/want to visit while my parents are here. I took along my good friend Karen who has lived here for nearly two years and will be leaving this summer.

The first place we drove to was the airport, which I will have to go to in the middle of the night so I wanted to be very comfortable with the route. Luckily the construction detour that made it tricky is now mostly finished so getting there is fairly easy.

Next we drove to the Roman bridge. Along with the big mosque, this is one of the places I have seen from the road but haven't actually visited yet.  I do want to be able to take my parents to both places though. We didn't go to the mosque today because it is Friday, the Muslim sabbath so it was packed. But I know where to park now and think I can do that one on my own as well.

The bridge dates from 384 AD and until 2007 was one of the oldest bridges in the world open to motorized traffic. Since then its only used as a pedestrian bridge and a venue for events. Karen showed me where to park at the Hilton to be able to walk across the bridge.  Instead of parking there we drove down one more block so we could get some pictures of the bridge and the mosque.

As we walked we came across this:

 And this:

 That's a sheep carcass hanging from the tree. Just to the right is a sheep market. I'm sure the sheep was purchased there, then killed and skinned right there. The skin is on the ground to the left.

Once past all the lifestock, we were in position to take some great photos.

 Pretty great, huh? The Turkish name for this bridge is Taskopru which translates as stone bridge.

Next we drove to Old Adana which was terrifying. Friday must be a big shopping day because the whole district was packed with people, cars, and buses. All the cars and buses were trying to kill me and all the pedestrians were trying to jump in front of my van. Seriously. Everybody was honking and merging lanes and Karen was trying to tell me places I could park and which streets had which shops on them but all I could think was "We're going to die, we're going to die!" After driving through twice and still feeling like nothing she said was sinking in and there was no way I was ever going to be able to navigate this on my own, I cried uncle and we left.  Maybe in another year I will be able to do that one on my own but for now I'm still going to need some kind friend to take me.

Our next goal was more successful. I wanted to be able to drive to the women's market by myself. I sort of remembered the way and after Karen's coaching the first time through I was able to drive it without her help a second time. On the way home she showed me where the sushi restaurant up by the university is. Since we hadn't eaten lunch we stopped in. It felt so good to be out of the car and out of the traffic. By this time I had a splitting headache but a soda and some sushi were just the ticket!

YUM!!!

I like Turkish food but it was fabulous to have something that wasn't turkish food or base BX food court fare. And I happen to love sushi.
 
Right outside the restaurant was this beautiful tree which along with the lunch and great conversation, help calm my spirit and my blood pressure.

Little by little I feel like I'm getting better at getting around here. Its still challenging but there's hope. (Except for Old Adana on a Friday.)

Frilly Skirt Fun!

After my marathon sewing session last week finishing Delaney's quilt,  I lost my sewing mojo. Which is weird because I never do that.  I leave my sewing machine out and set up in the same room that I homeschool in and I sew at least a little every day.  But not this week.

Until yesterday when I realized that my youngest son's birthday party invitation might be an opportunity. Because the party was for a 7 year old girl. And with my only daughter being already well into her teens there has been a serious shortage of little girls in this house for a good long time.  So I decided to make a frilly skirt. As luck would have it, the girl in question came over to play that day so I grabbed a tape measure and threw it around her waist. And then I measured my son's waist too so she wouldn't get suspicious.

I had the perfect fabric purchased right here in Adana's own fabric district.

 This is just one piece of fabric, with three different shades of polka dots and the flowers. And from the left side of the picture to the right is only half the width of the fabric.  A lot of the fabrics here in Turkey are double wide - about 96 inches in width. I think I paid 7 or 8 lira per meter for this which translates to about $4 per meter.

So to make the skirt I simply cut apart the smaller of the two flower sections and two of the polka dot sections. I used the entire two meter lengths of the darker blue and the flowers but cut the light blue into a 33 in piece.

 I used my serger to ruffle the to bottom sections together. This was a new skill for me and it took me a couple of tries to get it right. But when it worked it was so fun!

After sewing the ruffled bottom layers onto the top section I used some elastic thread to add four lines of smocking in lieu of a waistband. Small rolled hems on the top of the skirt and the bottom of each of the frilly layers and it was done!! All in one night and it was so fun to do!

Sorry for the horrible pictures but you get the idea.

 I'm so excited for Rory to take it to the party tomorrow and I hope that his friend likes it as much as I liked making it!