Baby Bump - 21 weeks

I took this picture last week. (Still no replacement camera lens.) As far as the pregnancy, I am feeling pretty good. Really no big complaints. Still not sure if we are going to do an ultrasound and find out if we are having a boy or a girl. Maybe, maybe not. We have a girl name picked out, but we are really stumped on boy names. With names I like to use either a family name or a name from the Bible, but the problem I'm running into is that so many biblical boy names are really popular these days, and I tend to want to stay away from the popular names. But whoever this little person is, is getting stronger with little kicks and punches, which I'm so thankful to feel throughout the day. It's exciting to be past the half-way point, though in some ways I feel like we still have such a long time to wait.

Menu Plan - Week of March 29

On our way out for a birthday eve dinner.

We had a nice weekend here, even with the cold temperatures. The sun was shining for most of the weekend, which does a lot to boost everyone's mood. My birthday was on Saturday, and we went out for dinner to celebrate on Friday night. Tom made breakfast on Saturday morning, and then I went out by myself and did some shopping that I've been wanting to do for a while - mostly looking, not much finding. But still, it was nice to have a chunk of the day to the browsing that I don't normally get to do. Everyone in our family even took naps in the afternoon, which always makes for a good day in our book. So it was a relaxing, low-key birthday for me, which is what I like.

Now, moving on to this week's menu. I typically just plan out our dinner meals, since I keep breakfasts and lunches simple enough that I don't really need to make a plan for those meals.

Breakfast is usually either toast (made with Ezekiel bread) or oatmeal and some fruit. I haven't made smoothies for breakfast much during the winter months, though I'm sure I'll start including them in our breakfasts again soon. Lately we've also enjoyed having muesli for breakfast.

For lunch, I like to make enough for our evening meals that we can have leftovers for lunch. I haven't been as good about that with Isaac eating more these days, and Millie has had a bigger appetite lately too. Since I haven't been making smoothies for breakfast, I often make green smoothies to go with lunch. We also usually have some raw veggies, along with either hummus or nut butter for dipping. Other lunches for us are hummus sandwiches made with pita bread, tortillas with refried beans, and occasionally the kids will eat nut butter sandwiches with jelly.

And this is our rather tentative plan for dinner meals this week:

veggie stir-fry, brown rice

baked potatoes, asparagus, baked beans

red lentil curry, sauteed greens

Greek - Italian chopped salad

pasta with chickpeas

It looks like we have some nice days in store here this week, so hopefully we'll be outside more enjoying the sunshine. Hope your week is a good one!

This post is linked to:

Menu Plan Monday

Flowers in the Garden

We're a bit behind on getting things ready for the garden this year. I just got our seedlings started last week, and our garden beds still need a bit of attention before I'll be able to plant any of our seeds for spring greens. However, there is still plenty of time to make plans for the summer garden. Though my big focus is vegetables, I also like planting a few flowers among the edibles. Not only is this good for the garden, as flowers attract beneficial insects, but I think it's especially nice when children are involved in the gardening process. We love our veggies, and the kids have fun harvesting and eating them. But flowers in the garden add an additional dimension for kids to explore and enjoy outdoors.

I took these pictures of the kids at the end of last summer. They spent an afternoon cutting various blooms around the yard, then happily sat and arranged the flowers in vases and the odd bottle.




My absolute favorite flower for cutting is zinnias (though not pictured here), which have the benefit of being easy to grow. Black-eyed susans are nice too. There's not much effort or cost involved in adding a few flowers to the garden, and we always get so much enjoyment from them, both outside and when we bring a few blooms indoors.

This post is linked to:
Frugal Friday

A Moment in the Sun

A beautiful, sunny afternoon earlier in the week was perfect to get out for a little jaunt around the block.
I used my iPhone to take this picture, and all my pictures lately, in fact. Entirely my own fault and my own doing, I dropped our camera recently and jammed the front of the lens. So I'll be sticking to snapping photos on the trusty iPhone until we get a replacement lens. Just as well, I suppose, since I'm more likely to keep it with me than I am to bring the camera along.

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You Capture

Vegetable Chopping Made Easy

A while back my sister told me I needed to buy a Vidalia Chop Wizard. She had just got one and loved it, and assured me that I would too. So I promptly went out and bought one, but then I never used it. It always just seemed simpler to go ahead and chop veggies with my trusty kitchen knife, instead of having to pull out another tool in addition to the knife and cutting board that were already out.

So I'll admit that this particular kitchen gadget didn't strike my fancy at first, even when it was available to me in my own kitchen. But all that changed last fall when I did some big freezer cooking sessions. Once I was faced with a dozen onions that needed to be chopped, suddenly this time-saving device was looking mighty fine.
I know you can chop onions in a food processor, because I've done this in the past. But when you do that you end up with onion pieces that are very irregular sizes, some big pieces and some really tiny, practically minced to a pulp. So I especially like the nice, uniform pieces you get with the Chop Wizard.

The other thing I'm loving about this gadget is that it's enabled my kids to help more with meal preparation. Millie and Silas love to help me in the kitchen, but when the bulk of my cooking requires chopping vegetables with a sharp knife, I usually feel like there's not much little ones can do to help. But, I have wanted to make a concentrated effort to let them be more involved in what goes on in the kitchen, so I figured it would be worth a try to let them use the Chop Wizard.
At first I wasn't so sure the kids would be able to exert enough force to cut through the vegetables, but I found that if I cut the pieces slightly smaller initially, they were usually able to find a way to make it work. And let me tell you, they LOVE doing this. I can set a bowl of prepped vegetables next to them, and they will happily, independently, chop every last piece. The only issue is fighting over who gets the privilege of helping.
In case you're wondering, the Chop Wizard works great with onions, bell peppers, carrots, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and probably other things that I'm not thinking of, but that's what we've mostly used it for.

This post is linked to:
Works for Me Wednesday

Wordless Wednesday

Menu Plan - Week of March 22

The last day of winter was beautiful - sunny and warm and perfect for an afternoon at the park. The first day of spring greeted us with snow falling for most of the morning. But still, spring is officially here, and we enjoyed the lovely days during the week leading up to it. I'm still tempted to feel like I did "nothing" all week. But now that I think about it, we did actually accomplish some good things at our house, even with getting slowed down by yet another round of colds.

Millie made most of the dishes she had hoped to make from Salad People. Even though this involved more prep and clean-up on my part, she loves getting to follow a recipe all on her own, and I feel like it's a good learning experience for her. I did some good house-cleaning this week. Not my favorite thing, but necessary. And I also got around to sorting and organizing the boys' clothes. It was time to go through all the bins of clothes and put away outgrown clothes and hunt for some things in the next size up. With Silas coming up on 4, and Isaac at 18 months, this meant getting out nearly ALL the boys' clothing bins. I was feeling a little overwhelmed by the process, but then Tom reminded me that it's no more time-consuming than going out and going shopping. And since we have lots of hand-me-downs, it's also essentially free, so I truly can't complain. The last thing we conquered this week was getting our way-behind-schedule seeds started indoors. To keep things easy, I'm only doing tomatoes, peppers and eggplant indoors. Everything else will be direct-seeded outside. And even though I'll be hugely pregnant, I am hoping for some good hot weather this summer so that everything will actually grow!

So, my menu planning was sorely lacking this month. This was pretty disappointing after such a good month in February. I think part of the issue was some boredom with all the typical winter dishes we've been eating for the past few months. I hit a point this month where I was DONE with soup, but I've still been waiting for asparagus to go on sale (I found some at a good price today!). So I guess I'm feeling a little in-between seasons in the culinary sense. That said, here's what I have planned for this week:

vegetable pot pie, carrot salad

bean burgers, asparagus

baked tofu, cooked greens, brown rice

rice and beans

veggie pizza

We're planning to eat out at the end of the week for my birthday - yay! My only other big plans for the week include some homeschool research/planning. This is actually what I really wanted to do this past week, and I'm glad I got some of the other stuff on my to-do list out of the way so that I can get moving on this. Hope you have a great week!

This post is linked to:
Organizing Junkie

An Update of Sorts

I think a strange thing about being home with small children all day is that I end my day really unsure about what I did all day. I mean, I know what I was doing, but it's hard to articulate to myself if I actually accomplished anything. It's just all the same things - the cooking, cleaning up, fixing snacks, breaking up squabbles, changing diapers, nursing the baby, doing laundry, picking up clutter, reading to the kids, and on and on. This is not at all a complaint. I am beyond thankful that I have healthy children, and that I get to spend my days caring for them and teaching them. But at the end of the week I still have this nagging feeling that we weren't really busy, so why was I so busy, and so exhausted at the end of each day?

So I guess that's why another week has gone by and I haven't managed to type up my meal plan. This week I do have a partial plan - Millie made a long list of all the dishes she wanted to make from the book Salad People. So I scheduled those in, though I'm still unsure of what I'm making to round out the meals in the evenings. Tonight I pulled together a new recipe for quinoa salad, with a yummy cilantro-lime dressing. There are times when not having a meal plan is a good thing, like when it forces me to think outside my normal recipes and try a new dish.

But enough rambling, what I actually wanted to update about is my pregnancy. I'm 20 weeks now, which really snuck up on me. Last week I was trying to remember if I was at 18 weeks yet, and when I calculated it, I was at 19 weeks, 4 days. That was a nice surprise! We had our first appointment with our midwife on Saturday. It was good visit, and overall everything looks great. The only not-so-good thing is that apparently the abdominal separation (diastasis recti) that occurred from my last pregnancy didn't ever heal. My midwife wasn't overly concerned at this point - she said the separation isn't too much right now. But it is something for me to be aware of; I need to be doing my pelvic tilts and I've already started wearing a support belt all day to help prevent any further separation. And I'm not supposed to be doing any heavy lifting, which includes Isaac. As any mom of a toddler knows, that's a tough one. But otherwise, everything with baby looks great! It's still hard to believe that I'm halfway through.

This post is linked to:
Steady Mom

Bring on the Firsts

Since the beginning of January, Millie has been delightedly observing when we do something for the first time in 2010. It was more frequent at the start. First pancakes in 2010! First time to watch TV in 2010! It seems we've used up most of the "firsts" by now. But I realized that with the warmer weather this week, we had a few lovely firsts for the year.

~~First time to open up the garage and pull out the bikes, scooters, and other wheels

~~First sighting of the tulips in our front yard

~~First thunderstorm

~~First cut flowers on our table - daffodils from Trader Joe's (which I couldn't resist for $1.49)

It's been such a surprisingly pleasant early March. The nice days have been interspersed with rainy ones, which makes us all the more eager to get out when the sun does shine.

And I think this may be the first time this year I've seen the shadow of my pregnant profile.

This post is linked to:

Finer Things Friday

February Reading

I discovered some excellent reads in January, and came across more good books for February. You'll notice from my reading lists that I tend to stick with non-fiction books. Not that I don't enjoy fiction, I really do. But if I get into a good story, I have such a hard time putting it down. I tend to neglect other things that really need to be done, and neglect sleep as well, which is not good for a mama who needs to be present and patient during the day. So, no fiction for me, usually. But it's funny because I just realized that Millie is the same when it comes to a good story. I find reading to her to be simultaneously fulfilling and frustrating. I love seeing her become engaged in a story, but I never hear the end of, "can we please read now?!" until we've finished whatever book we're reading.

Anyway, here's what I read in February:
A Sane Woman's Guide to Raising a Large Family by Mary Ostyn - Some good tips here, a good read for families of any size. I really appreciated her common sense approach to parenting and raising a family.

Family Feasts for $75 a Week, also by Mary Ostyn - This book focuses on helping families cut their food costs. Some useful tips, though I didn't find much that interested me in the recipes.

Blue Like Jazz, by Donald Miller - okay, yes, I realize I'm about 7 years behind on getting around to reading this. Excellent book, like I'd heard many times, and I'm hoping to get around to reading his latest book in a more timely fashion.

Green Smoothie Revolution by Victoria Boutenko - I love this book, and may need to get a copy for myself. I usually throw a little bit of everything into the smoothies I make (veggies, fruit, nuts, seeds, etc.), but this book gave me some inspiration for a slightly different approach. Boutenko stresses the importance of dark leafy greens, and gives lots of recipes for incorporating these healthy plants into smoothies. The recipes are usually just greens, fruit, and water, which makes for a simpler, lighter smoothie, which our family has really enjoyed.

The Engine 2 Diet, by Rip Esselstyn - If you're a fan of Dr. Fuhrman and Eat to Live, you'll find this a good book to take a look at. The focus is nutrient-dense, vegetarian meals. There is more tofu and processed soy in the recipes here than what I'm comfortable fixing for my family, but there are some really great ideas here too, and I'm looking forward to trying out a couple of the recipes.

Eating Animals, by Jonathan Safran Foer - I started this a couple of weeks ago, and I'm about mid-way through. It's been really excellent so far, and I'm curious to see where it's headed. More great info, along the lines of Food Inc., about how food gets from the farm to our plate.

Too Many Cooks, by Emily Franklin - A memoir written by a mother of four, chronicling a year of feeding her children. It was fascinating to get an inside look at another family and how they deal with feeding young children, who can be notoriously finicky about food.

I am reading a couple of biographies as part of observing Lent, though I am really plodding along in those books. I'm wondering if I'll even finish them at all, but haven't given up yet.

This post is linked to:
Life as Mom

Natural Laundry Soap

Have you heard of soap nuts? I've been hearing about them for a while, specifically as a good, all-natural option for washing diapers (though you can use them for all your laundry). And it just so happens I was thinking maybe we ought to try something different for washing diapers. I put off trying soap nuts because I thought I would have to order them, and anytime I have to pay for shipping it makes me drag my feet. But just last night I was at a local health food store (Fruitful Yield), and I spotted a box of soap nuts. I snatched it up and went home with an out-of-the-ordinary enthusiasm to start a load of laundry.

These are soap nuts:

The term "natural" gets thrown around a lot these days, but I'm excited about using something that I can see for myself is from nature. Soap nuts (also called soap berries) grow on trees in temperate and tropical regions of the world. This particular brand I bought, Maggie's, imports soap nuts from Indonesia.

So, all you have to do is put five soap nuts in the cloth bag provided, and throw it in with your laundry. That's it. Then you re-use those 5 soap nuts for 5 loads of laundry.

Oh, and after you're done? Just toss the soap nuts into your compost. I love that! I don't have a verdict yet on how well they clean, but I'll let you know once I've done a few more loads of laundry!

Colcannon - Mashed Potatoes with Kale

Colcannon is a traditional Irish dish, though it doesn't seem to get as much attention as other Irish foods, at least from my limited perspective. I don't think I'd even heard of it until last year.

I mentioned in one of my menu plans that I was making mashed potatoes with kale, and my friend Jill asked about my method. And that's a great question, because when my sister told me that she added kale to her mashed potatoes, I tried to do the same thing, but my results were a little disappointing. Once my sister showed me how she made them, we were all set to enjoy this delicious, healthy dish!

I won't give you a recipe for mashed potatoes, because my recipe is not set in stone, and I usually make it by "feel". So I'll say just plan to make a batch of mashed potatoes however you would normally make them. While the potatoes are boiling, get the kale ready. One bunch of kale is probably a pretty good starting point, pictured here is a little less than that. Wash the leaves and remove the tough stems. At this point I don't chop the kale, though I might tear some of the bigger leaves into a few smaller pieces.
Then just cook the kale for about 10 minutes. I cooked mine in about a cup of vegetable broth.
After the kale has cooked down,
run it through a food processor, until it's finely chopped. Funny how that big bunch of kale turns into a rather small quantity.
Once the potatoes are cooked and mashed, you can add in the kale along with whatever else you normally add to mashed potatoes. And that's that. Simple enough, and a great way to boost the nutritional value of mashed potatoes.
My mashed potatoes were just a little bit dry, which you can tell from the picture. But we all ate them and enjoyed them. I will say that with the kids, it helps that they've eaten this before with an older cousin who happily ate a huge helping. I just remind them how much their cousin likes mashed potatoes with kale, and they're much more willing to dig in!

For another take on Colcannon, try these Colcannon Puffs at Fatfreevegan.

This post is linked to:
Works for Me Wednesday

Hello, March!

I think I've been in hibernation mode since the beginning of January. Seriously, it's been cold and dreary and it seems like we've just been dealing with one cold virus after another. We've pretty much been staying inside, and I honestly haven't looked ahead at the calendar much at all. I've just been taking life a day at a time.

But now it's a new month, and I'm ready to start thinking and planning ahead. Winter can't last forever! Here's my list of things to look forward to in March:

1. Starting seeds. It's time! This is something I dread and happily anticipate all at the same time. Those little seedlings need some TLC, and each spring it's like I have another baby to care for. But the summer veggies are so worth it, so once again I'll have a laundry room full of seed trays soon.

2. Begin homeschool planning. Or thinking about homeschooling planning. The pre-planning stage of planning, something like that. But seriously, with a baby due in August, I feel like I'm working with a deadline. I'd like to sit down and plan out our year in June or July, and I'd like to have materials in hand when I do that. So, that means I need to start thinking now about materials for next year.

3. Visit with our midwife this month! Our first official check-up with this pregnancy.

4. Related to that, I'm thinking at the end of this month we'll try to do an ultrasound to find out if we're having a boy or a girl. We didn't do this with our last two pregnancies, not necessarily because I wanted to wait, but mainly because ultrasound just wasn't a standard practice with our care providers. This time around it would be really nice to be able to plan ahead, and really nice for the older kids to be able to call the baby by his or her name.

5. We're still in for mostly cold days this month, so I'm planning on a trip to the roller skating rink with the kids (oh, the nostalgia!), and maybe even a first-time trip to try out ice skating.

6. Can't forget to celebrate St. Patrick's Day with something green. Last year we had these green smoothies. This year maybe we'll have some green pancakes.
Finely chop a cup of fresh spinach in your food processor, then mix into your favorite pancake batter and cook as usual. Spinach is mild enough that seriously, you will hardly taste it. But it gives a lovely green hue, and you won't have to use any food coloring!

7. Maple tapping. We attended a maple sugaring demonstration last year, so whether we go again this year will probably depend on the weather. But it's a fun, fascinating reason to get outside.

8. First day of spring! Too bad it probably won't feel very spring-like here, but it's still fun to celebrate. I'm thinking I should plan on some sort of kid-friendly craft, wondering if this might fit the bill.

9. New month, new craft budget! I'm going to get some watercolor supplies for the kids and see what sort of artwork we can come up with.

10. My birthday is at the end of the month. 32 this year. No big plans, but I'll probably take the day off from the kitchen, so eating out will definitely be part of the celebration.

Do you have any fun plans for this month?

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Top Ten Tuesday