Trying New Things

The entire goal for the day (aside from making bread, grocery shopping, and gymnastics) is to post pictures.  And the trick is, if I say that's what I'm doing to enough people it puts pressure on me to actually get it done right?  Well anyway, Shawn is coming home sick from work today and I think I can catch him while he's trapped on the couch trying to sleep and make him help me with pictures.  Ha!  (I really need to learn to do this all by myself.)

We've been sick all week.  By "we" I mean everyone, one at a time.  Some of us twice.  Lots of fun.  To my credit, I think I only put sick kids in front of the t.v. all day (in order to preserve my sanity) once. 

I've made three decisions which are seriously affecting my life right now: getting rid of my phone (which is affecting me in a good way), and putting all of our savings toward paying off debt--which means no new car, no bunk beds, etc. (which I'm sure will affect my life in a good way ultimately, but at the moment it's kind of hard).  I've also given up chocolate.  It makes me feel lousy, and gives my babies colic.  It also gives me the worst menstrual cramps ever (!) and aggravates RLS when I'm pregnant.  I have officially switched over to carob.  Oh, and eating a mostly veganish diet...for the sake of my husband, who appears to be allergic to food.  All food.  Well, only sometimes.  But dairy definitely doesn't help.

So life is definitely different right now, and I'm trying to adjust to the changes.  And now that I've escaped the clutches of my smartphone, I'm in the middle of some serious goal setting.  I'll let you know how it turns out :).

New Ideas about Food

I believe I’ve recently mentioned that menu planning and food preparation while traveling gets both old and difficult fairly quickly.  If my children and my palate could handle peanut butter and jelly 3 times a day we’d be good, no problem.  But neither are cooperative with this arrangement for long.  I have tried a variety of things I’ve never tried before.  For instance, microwave dinners.  After three nights of them I was ready to go back to peanut butter and jelly sandwiches permanently.  The companies who stock the freezer section even know how to ruin spaghetti.  I didn’t know that was possible- I can even handle seriously overcooked noodles.  So plan B was…well there wasn’t one, or I wouldn’t have resorted to microwave food in the first place.  However, I became very diligent at looking up ideas on the internet.

I found a site called greensmoothiegirl.com.  It seems to be somewhat of a fad diet, but she calls it a lifestyle change and after my diet I was willing to try anything.  The idea of a 60-80% raw diet looked very appealing (as I didn’t have any cooking appliances anyway, after we switched hotels I didn’t even have a microwave), and I started to look up the concept of “whole” foods.  I’m interested!  So the plan at the moment, is to buy a Blendtec as soon as I can muster up the will to push the button that causes me to spend $400, as a birthday present to mwah, and incorporate as many smoothies and salads as I can comfortably handle into our family’s diet, while eliminating most of the junk…and you’d be surprised at what I consider junk.  I don’t expect amazing results while traveling, and we’ve been doing tons of salads anyway, but I hope to continually improve.

I guess I've always had some weird ideas about food, but friends and fam beware...it's getting weirder.  People ask me if I'm a vegetarian.  I guess I'm not officially, but I don't cook meat pretty much at all anymore, I just eat it when I go out.  It's been a gradual process.  I learned what kale is, and arugula, and lots of other types of vegetables that caused the checker at the grocery store lots of grief trying to find out what the items were and then price them.

Anyway, I'm finding it's actually quite fun to eat mostly whole foods, although considerably more expensive.

Homeless

     I must say, as much fun as I’m having visiting family, and as grateful as I am to be able to be with Shawn on the weekends, traveling gets extremely difficult after a while.  There’s no real routine, a lot of time in a car, I have a difficult time sticking with goals (fitness goals for instance, or budget goals), tracking expenses after a while, etc.  It’s tiring too; you’re always on the go, packing or unpacking, looking for the toothbrushes, worrying about washing the clothes, or how you’re going to work out the meal plans.  Especially the food- planning meals in a motel with no fridge or even a microwave is just ridiculous.  I’m extremely grateful to be staying with family during the week. 

     Theo is my most needy child as far as routines go.  If we don’t do the same thing every time it can seriously upset his entire day.  This is a child who can throw a fit for hours over a single diaper change if you don’t have the right diapers—Huggies, with Mickey Mouse on them (which I totally spaced the other day when buying diapers…it’s gonna be a fun month).  So he’s been telling me every day that he wants to go back home now, to California.    He is not taking the news well that there is no more home in California, even though I try to get him psyched up about the new house we’ll be going to in Hawaii.  Right now, he’s just sad he doesn’t have any home at all.  (Olie is also telling me he wants a house now please, and he wants to not stay in hotels anymore!)  I feel for the kid, all of them really, even though I do get a little flustered when one of them goes around telling random people we’re homeless. 

Children Keep My Life Interesting

1^st October 2011

I enjoyed what I could listen to of conference today.  The connection is slow, so sometimes it would stop and buffer.  Part of conference was interrupted by the parakeet.  The bird (I’ve been told his official name is now Diggory, but everyone still calls him “the bird”) decided he liked us and started landing on Demetri.  This was fine until he tried to preen Demetri.  There were no feathers for him to pluck out so Demetri ended up with some pretty good welts.  He spent the rest of the day (whenever he was allowed to) training the bird not to bite him (after we convinced him that the bird was only doing it because he liked Demetri not because he was trying to hurt him).  We looked in a book and found that they like to play with balls, so Demetri put one on the cage and waited for the bird to knock it off.  They both thought it was a fun game.  By the end of the day, whenever Demetri came near, the bird would land on his shoulder and sit there while he walked around. 

I’m going to have to read some of conference over again, but I’m glad we got most of it, and that I’m able to read it later too.

Olie wanted to do something fun after we went shopping.  He was whining at me about it and I told him he could help me make dinner.  He said that wasn’t a fun thing to do and I could make dinner while he did something fun.  I suggested that maybe he should make dinner while I did something fun.  The poor shocked child said, “What?!  But I don’t know how to cook!”  Then he thought about it for a minute and said, “But if you teach me how to cook then I would know how.”  So he decided he was going to make spaghetti and salad tonight all by himself.  He did most of it, although it felt like the most work I’ve ever done to get spaghetti and salad on the table.  And he was extremely proud of that dinner.  He thinks it should be his new chore every day.  We compromised on once a week.

Our current project is table manners.  Small bites, chewing each one 20 times, sitting upright, using cloth napkins (and keeping them on laps!).  I am the worst offender, and wanted to work on it.  So far, they think it’s really funny, but they’re doin’ good.

Great ending to the day…I got rid of all the stuff I didn’t want in one fell swoop.  A lady came by for a bed, saw some other things around that were metal and said she sold scrap metal.  We loaded her trailer and pickup good and full.  And I’m very happy.

Looking forward to another good conference day tomorrow, and I’m considering whether Demetri is too young to start family history work??  (Sigh) I would have to learn how to do it all again, it’s all changed.

Recipe overload combined with self-imposed sleep deprivation

I found out this week that there are some awesome music-related games for the Wii. I’m going to have to look into that some more…my position on the Wii is softening considerably. But I’ll still have to go try it out. Amazon reviews are mixed. Wouldn't the kids be surprised?! (And Shawn too:))

Re-learning about pathos, logos, and ethos. Kind of. That’s what I was supposed to be doing tonight. Instead, I amassed 11 pages of new recipes and food blogs to visit “someday.” I spent 2+ hours looking at food! And I still have to go figure out what to make my husband for lunch tomorrow. (Sandwiches are the normal standby but we’re out of bread- though I just made it on Tuesday.) I’m still trying to figure out exactly why I am so attracted to food blogs…because I can’t really cook (okay, not completely true, but my cooking skills are limited) and my husband’s greatest desire is that I learn how? Ah, well, guess I better just buck up and go find the kitchen. I’m sure there is Pasta Roni somewhere in the pantry…which will at least get him through the day. What do normal people-with-jobs do about lunch?

The kids had a very difficult time going to sleep tonight, so hopefully they’ll sleep in. And then, the weekend. Weekends make everything better. Sleep helps. One of these days I'm going to write about something much more interesting.

Side note: Ebay is my best friend. Love it. Bless the one who thought it up! (Pierre Omidyar- courtesy of Google and Wikipedia.) Amazon is a close second.