Dearest Ann Eliza

Dearest Ann Eliza, I cannot tell you how excited I am to make your acquaintance.  I have often longed to explore and learn about the past and have many questions for you, but first I must address those which you asked of me. 

                You asked me to provide you with a vision of our means of communication.  You mentioned that you write a letter to your dear mother every two weeks and eagerly await the return post.  While typical post is still very exciting to receive, we have many other ways of communication.  In fact these other methods are becoming so popular that the post is very slowly disappearing.  One of my favorite means of communication is a fabulous invention called FaceBook.  Facebook is a place to connect with family and friends.  For you FaceBook would be a valuable treasure.  It would allow you to not only keep in constant contact with your dear mother, but also provide you a way to show off all of your lovely children.  On that note FaceBook also helps mothers connect with endless amounts of information useful in rearing children.  For example say you are looking to purchase a new type of cloth diaper and want to insure it will not cause you extra laundry and cleaning.  You simply have to ask your friends on Facebook which type they recommend, or if they like the type you are considering.  Trust me, you will get more answers than you ever bargained for.  Once you see what everyone else has to say, you can make your decision. 

                Once you purchase your new fancy cloth diapers that practically wash themselves you can head back to Facebook and contact the seller of these diapers with any questions or concerns you might have about the product.  If you discover these are the worst diapers you have ever purchased you can leave your comments for others to see and help them avoid the same fate. 

                If you are a sports fan, enjoy keeping current on political affairs, have a favorite author you use for inspiration, or another famous person you just need to know what they are doing next, you can head over to Twitter.  Another interesting and fun place to keep in touch with those around (or not really around) you.  On Twitter you can “follow” what others are doing or thinking.  If you and your children enjoy watching a game of baseball, perhaps you have a favorite team?  You can keep up on what that team is doing at all times.  I know you won’t be able to make it to all the games, travel with so many children is very difficult, but you will never miss out on the excitement of the game with Twitter.  It is also a great place to find people who share similar interests.  There is a tool called a hashtag with which you can connect with everyone who has used the same tag. 

                You mentioned in your note that you sometimes feel a bit lonely.  While I find that very hard to believe considering the number of people you live with, there is a wonderful outlet to loneliness here in our time.  There are these things called Blogs.  Anyone can create a blog and anyone can write whatever they feel on that blog.  Some people use these blogs as a place to express their artistic nature, others use this as a place to vent their angers, some use this as a place to sell products, and yet others use it as a place to provide valuable information to great amounts of people.  Blogs are one of the best resources available to people in this age.  There are literally blogs of every nature.  For example you may find a blog about the Holy Scriptures to be of use to you.  There are blogs that might provide tips and ideas to help you improve your relationships with your sister wives and husband.  There are blogs that have wonderful ideas about how to engage children’s minds and keep them busy so you can get some laundry done!  There are also blogs that are just for entertainment.  (Not that you get bored with 48 children to look after!)

                There are lots of ways in which we are able to interact and connect with other people in our time, however every now and again I envy the simplicity of simply writing a letter to someone.  With all of these news ways to stay in contact, we get carried away and often reveal far too much information.  Information that should most likely be kept private.  We also have become obsessed with sharing nearly every moment of our lives with everyone we know.  Now when you go to the park to play with the kids, you photograph everything they do, post the pictures to facebook, and update your status that you are going to the park and in doing so miss a few precious minutes of time just enjoying your wonderful family. 

                Well I think I have given you quite a bit to think about.  I am hoping that you will share some of your tips for keeping children happy and busy.  I am also wondering if you will share your secret to getting along with 11 other wives.  Oh yes, and what exactly are crinolines?

                With anticipation,

                Beth

Fluffy icing, cake pops, s'mores, and cake!

Today I decided I wanted some cake and fluffy boiled frosting.  No, I take that back, I didn’t want it.  It was a need.  I am not joking folks, this frosting is so addicting it could be classified under the addictive drugs section.  It is so gooey and yet somehow fluffy at the same time.  It melts away in your mouth leaving a sweet, smooth, marshmallow taste lingering behind.  I am not going to lie, I have made a batch before just to eat without the cake.  Just dug a spoon right into the bowl and ate it like ice cream. 

 

So I whipped up a quick vanilla cake batter.  Look it’s smiling at me! 

 

 

Popped it in my cake pop maker machine.  (Yes that is really what it’s called)  Success!  Perfect little cake balls.  My three year old daughter couldn’t resist these little orbs and came by and snatched one.  I kept trying to explain that it is even better once frosted and to just wait.

 

So I thought I better get on it and start frosting them.  Luckily I had already whipped up the frosting.  Latterly, beat it to death.  It should be noted that to properly beat eggs one must bust out with Michael Jacksons “Just Beat It” though out the whole beating process.  Thanks to YouTube I was able to hit play and do a dance routine as well.  All while mixing the frosting.  That is really the secret in all my recipes. 

 

 

All frosted, even added some sprinkles too! 

 

The last step is the most important step.  The cake pops must be tested for quality.  We can’t be selling a tasteless product.   

 

This is Jude, she works in quality control.  I pay her way to much for this job, and I am not going to lie she is a very messy worker.  Looks to me like she approves this batch!    

 

Anyways the whole point of this, and yes there is a point here, is that inspiration struck during this process. I kept thinking I need a new flavor combination.  The old combos are boring and leave me wanting.  Today I was craving chocolate and marshmallows and something… 

Then it hit me like a semi.  S’mores.  S’mores and cake combined.  S’mores cake!  OMG!    

A super moist milk chocolate cake, with a layer of sweet fluff frosting, layered with crumbled gram crackers, topped with another layer of milk chocolate cake and smothered top to bottom in fluff frosting.  Add a sprinkle of crushed gram and hold on to your belts folks!  To die for!

 November is a new month, also my birthday month, and it deserves its own special flavor.  So for the entire month of November you can get an 8” round S’mores cake for $12.00.  This is the perfect desert for any get together.  Even if you are not getting “together” it is still the perfect cake.  I baked one up and ate it in front of my faux fireplace.  Just like camping, sort of!  So make sure to grab one this month and enjoy!

Cake, Cake, and More Cake!

When I was growing up money was tight.  We ate our three meals a day and rarely had sweets or snacks.  Every year on my birthday I was allowed to choose what my mother would cook for dinner (almost always chicken nuggets).  This dinner was eaten on a special plate that said “today is your special day”, and that was a treat in itself.  The real treat happened after dinner however, when my mom would bust out the treasure we had all been waiting for.  Every year she made us angel food cake topped with this insanely gooey melt in your mouth boiled frosting.  The cake was spongy, light, and tasty, but the frosting, let’s just say I would give up a limb for that stuff.  Lucky for me, mom was always willing to make it, and she gave me her secret recipe. 

I believe that is where my obsession with cake started.  When I graduated high school, I did so with ambitions to become a world famous artist.  You can see how well that dream worked out for me.  I realized pretty quickly I would still be eating just one cake a year off of what I would make on my artistic abilities.  So I got a boring old office job and crammed my creative side into a box shoved to the dark recesses of the closet and happily ate cake whenever I wanted. 

Then came my daughters first birthday and the need for a pink bunny cake.  A tiny bit of my creativity somehow escaped the box and battled its way through the dark to create my little girls birthday wishes.  What I created was a monstrosity.  Something nightmares are made of.  All of my friends assured me it really did look like a bunny, not Satan’s spawn, and if nothing else it was delicious.  I was mortified.  How could someone who was an art major claim that thing?

That is really the beginning of Beth Al-Qudah’s Personalized Cakes.  From that moment I needed to prove myself.  I dug through that scary closet and ripped the rest of my creativity out of that box and got to work.  I redeemed myself with corn-cob cupcakes at a work potluck.   After that I spent a lot of time experimenting with fondant.  It generally won the battle, but finally I created a blue M&M wearing a diaper for a baby shower.  Success was mine!  I started offering to make cakes for everyone’s events and after the millionth birthday cake I made for my five year old niece (not exaggerating the numbers here) I decided to make myself a legitimate business. 

I can create nearly anything you desire.  Simply give me an idea and I can find a way to make it into a cake.  I have several favorite flavors, vanilla bean, double chocolate, reese peanut butter, pink lemonade, red velvet, and my own personal concoction neopolitan.  I make all my own cake batters and frostings so anything is possible.  Each cake is unique in its own way and completely personalized for to your tastes.

And of course, for those of you who would like a new addiction, I still have my mother’s secret boiled frosting recipe.

https://www.facebook.com/BethAlQudahPersonalizedCakes?ref=hl

A New Love In My Life!

Once upon a time I visited the Red Sea.  On this day I fell head over heels in love.  It was an all-consuming love, the kind that you will never forget and don’t want to ever let go.  It is the kind of feeling people chase their entire lives and often don’t have the pleasure of finding.  Me, I am lucky though because I found it, I lived it, and I will forever remember it.

I had been begging to go swimming in the sea since last summer when we visited Aqaba so my husband decided that we would go today.  We packed up the family, got in the cars, and headed to the beach.  When we arrived we were at the beach, but it wasn’t the beach.  It was a resort set on the beach with three swimming pools.  Swimming pools on the beach!  What?!  That was not part of my plan, so I broke away from the group with just my husband and three children and headed down to the actual beach. 

I had come prepared, or so I thought, and was determined to get in the sea and swim around.  I plunged into the water with complete disregard to my surroundings.  Went out to waist level and then looked down at the ground and discovered a whole new world at my feet.  I couldn’t believe it, there were about 20 brightly colored fish right there, I was practically stepping on them.  I am sure I stepped on some reef life on the way out here without even knowing it.  I got so excited I started waving and yelling frantically at my husband on the shore.  “You have to come out here and see this, it’s amazing!”  “Omg, look at that fish, it’s so cool.”  I ran back to the shore line and grabbed my daughter determined to share this awesome sight with someone.  We waded back out and I started to show her fish.  She wasn’t interested, not at my level. 

At this point I learned you can rent snorkel equipment.  So naturally I had to have the snorkel equipment.  My dutiful husband wandered up to the rental counter and purchased me a snorkel and mask.  Then the real kicker, offered to take the kids back to the pool and leave me all to my lonesome to explore the sea.  I seriously was so overjoyed at this moment in time. 

The excitement I felt above the water was nothing compared to that first moment I dipped my face underwater and spied the aquatic fantasy world that awaited me.  I was in complete and utter awe.  I began to swim around in crazy circles looking everywhere trying to take it all in at once.  I discovered every few feet was a whole new world.  There were so many colors and shapes.  Life was everywhere.  I would see fish that had a funny face and laugh out loud through the snorkel tube.  I got a little too excited a few times and ducked too far under only to suck down a heaping mouthful of salt water.  I reluctantly resurfaced choking and gasping for breath, to drain the tube and clear my goggles.

 

I spent an entire day swimming only about 20 feet off the shore.  Everywhere I turned was some super fantastic sight that I was sure had never been seen before.  With my head stuck under the water I couldn’t hear or be distracted by the world above.  I had entered a place of sheer peace and happiness. 

Even though my mouth was dry and the salt was slowly dissolving my skin, I couldn’t bear to part with this wonder I had found.  It was too magnificent.  I knew once I left the sea that day I wouldn’t make it back again this trip and so I selfishly swam until the sun was setting and I was developing sores from my bathing suit rubbing salt into my skin. 

As I wandered back to the pools, I did so with a grin that could not be disguised and heart so filled with happiness.  I knew in that moment I would forever love the Red Sea and I would never forget this special gift she gave me. 

I didn’t know it that day, but my wildest dreams were about to come true.  A few days later we actually went scuba diving in the sea!  I know I will never have enough of this special underwater world and I look forward to next summer when I will be reunited with my love, the Red Sea.  

A few pictures from my diving experience!

Justice for socks.

There it is. Right there, sticking its insane red head out and staring me down.  It looks like it owns the couch.  I mean I was going to sit over there but then I'd have to pick it up and I would probably feel obligated to lift all the cushions to check for more. I've been sitting here across the room staring at it in all its disgusting glory for about a half an hour now.  It’s that darn dirty mate to a sock I threw out last week.  I knew the other was here somewhere, but he was too much of a coward to show his face on laundry day. 

I have to tell you, I am getting so sick of these yellow bellied socks hiding all over the house.  I mean I even found one in the fridge once.  Those chicken livers will hide anywhere to get out of being cleaned.  I am fairly certain that with every load of laundry I do, at least 10 socks end up MIA.  Every single load, no exaggeration.  Since I do roughly three loads every day that makes about one billion socks a year gone missing. 

This is a major threat to sock society.  For every billion socks that go missing every year, there are another billion that are now jobless.  On top of being jobless, they also belong to a broken home and have deep seated psychological problems.  It saddens me greatly for those poor jobless socks. It’s not as if they could have done anything more to keep their mates from running off. 

In my opinion there is nothing worse than a sock who runs out on his spouse.  Leaving her to sit in a useless sock pile, dreaming of his return.  This usually comes to late as further humiliation occurs when her owner gives up hope of reuniting her with her love and dumps her in the trash bin. Personally I believe the cruelty of these socks who don't think twice about running off and leaving their mate is beyond unacceptable. We must band together and find these fugitive socks.  They must be held accountable for their callous actions. Laws must be declared and enforced with swift, strict punishment.  Something must be done immediately to stop this epidemic.

The first step to putting an end to this horrific injustice is to understand the underlying cause. Recent research suggests that the runaway socks do not have commitment issues, but rather suffer from a deep irrational fear of the washing machine.   "These runaways are not really criminals, they are in a way just as much victims as the mates they leave behind." states Ibrahim Al-Qudah. Mr. Al-Qudah, a specialized psychiatrist, has been counseling runaways in his clinic, Scared Socks, for upwards of thirty years now. He has been working diligently towards finding a solution for the problem.

I urge each of you to help us in this mission. We can no longer afford to overlook this catastrophe. The socks must be saved.  This madness must end.  My children must start putting their dirty socks in the laundry basket or I will go utterly and completely insane!  I mean, they really need to stop leaving dirty socks all over the house, I can’t take it anymore. 

The Tree

She walks to the bottom of the tree, stands as straight as she can, tilts her head back and stares up into the swinging branches.  The top seems ages away and nearly unreachable, but she knows that it can be achieved.  After all she watched him do it only a few moments ago.  He had placed first his left hand and then the right upon the trunk.  Stepping on those large roots protruding from the ground.  Quickly he swung his leg around the trunk and scooted up a little ways, careful to reposition his hands.  He continued his assent even with the continual motion of the tree.  Effortlessly he slid the heel of his foot over the branch and pulled with his leg to bring his entire body up, teetering atop the weak unsteady tree limb.  He however was not satisfied yet, he had to stand on that unsteadily limb and spring off with the expectation that same limb would reach out and catch him.  It did, it always has.  For that limb is not really a tree limb at all, but the limb of his and her father.  A man so devoted to his children he allows them to climb him like he is nothing but a tree. 

Before I had children I had one hope for those that I might have someday.  I hoped they would have two very loving and involved parents.  I hoped they would know their grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins and be close with them.  It’s not as if my parents aren’t wonderful parents, they are.  They were just always busy doing something they thought needed to be done for me and my sisters.  Too busy to spend much time just being silly with us. 

My husband is great at just being silly with the children, but me I have forgotten this lesson.  Today I became so upset with my twins for opening all the board games and throwing the pieces all over the house and ruining the majority of the games.  Sitting here tonight after they have all gone to sleep made me start thinking about how the board games were not important.  Rather enjoying doing anything, even destroying board games, with them is what’s important. 

Maybe tomorrow I will be the tree. 

 

Aristotelian Rhetorical Analysis of 5 Ancient Medical Practices -- Thought Glass #6

The video posted below is a very fast paced and exciting one to watch, however I noticed right from the beginning the only thing we know about the guy in the video is that his name is Kevin.  He also says “Vsauce” super-fast at the very beginning.  Being that I have no idea what Vsauce even stands for and it’s not explained in this video, there is very little credibility to the content.  If you wanted to find out more about Kevin himself or Vsauce you would have to go elsewhere on the web and do some research.  I poked around on youtube but there was not really any additional information provided as to where the information came from to start with or what authority Kevin has. 

Based on Kevin’s upbeat and funny way of delivering information I would assume people of the younger generation would enjoy this, while someone my mother’s age may not.   

The content of the video is pretty straight forward.  It explains of lot of historical medical procedures that no longer take place.  This video gets people thinking about history in a fun way, and if you want to take it one step further, perhaps gets us thinking about how grateful we should be that we live in the here and now. 

Kevin delivers the historical information and captures your interest in the form of humor.  An example of this is his facial expressions and also when he talks about Bart Hughes performing self-trepanation and recommending others do it as well, Kevin adds that the scientific world responded with “um, no”.  I laughed out loud during this part of the video, as was his intent.

Kevin picked several subjects that are interesting to people today.  He chose to talk about procedures and possible cures from the past which are things we would find truly outrageous today.  The drastic difference in the beliefs he talks about and those we all know about know, makes the viewer really feel for the people who underwent these horrid medical practices.  This video makes you disgusted, sympathetic, and touches the funny bone a bit too. 

Overall it is a fun video to watch.  You can learn a very small bit of history, and it might encourage you to go out and find more information on the subject.  I wouldn’t use this a scholarly source however since it I lacking any credibility.  Fun, with facts, but no sources to back them up.