Happy 30th Birthday to Me!

Birthdays of old... oh, how the times fly.


1st birthday


The year I got a dirt cake (hooray!) ... I can't find a photo of the barbie cake.


16th...


21st.


28th.


30th!! (That's me with my 7 month old, Zeke)

Approaching 30 (Part 7)... Birthday Freebies

Less than a week left of being in my 20s! And this week is going to FLY BY, let me tell you. December is always crazy. Good, but crazy. And at this point I think I'm all tapped out on reflection, so now I'm just going to glide on into my 30s.

Celebrations... my parents took me out to sushi when they were in town on their way back home, so I have continued my tradition of birthday sushi. Chris is gonna take me out sometime this weekend if he can find someone to watch Zeke. So not sure if that will happen or not.

Oh yeah, and I'm keeping track of what kinds of freebies I can get on or around my birthday from stores. So far the only good ones I've found are a free drink at Caribou Coffee on my actual birthday, and a free entree at Doc Chey's on the day. A lot of places only give away a free dessert with purchase, which I think is lame. The Gap gave me a 25% off coupon, which is the same as the rest of their promos for the month so that isn't special. I THINK Moe's usually emails a coupon for a free burrito but I haven't gotten it yet, and at any rate I'm allergic so that will go to Chris. So it looks like on Sunday after church we'll be doing Doc Chey's and picking up my coffee.

If you want to plan for your own birthday, here's a national list of places that offer birthday promos.

Approaching 30 (Part 6)... Birthdays of Old

To commemorate the passing of my 20s and my 30-year milestone, I'm reflecting on memorable birthdays of my "youth." Let the nostalgia begin!

One year... maybe around my 11th or 12th birthday, my mom asked me if I wanted a "barbie cake." You know, where you stick a barbie in the middle of the cake and decorate it like a dress. My mom always wanted one but never got one, I guess. I told her no, I didn't want a barbie cake, I wanted a dirt cake. That's where you crush up oreos in some ice cream and hide gummy worms in it and put it in a flower pot and stick fake flowers in it. For my birthday I got a barbie cake. Then I had to pretend to like it. I was sorely disappointed.

For my 16th birthday I was planning a big bash for the Friday after my birthday. So the Saturday before my birthday, my dad took me out to a movie. But there wasn't anything good showing at the time we wanted to see something, so we wound up going to an awful movie with the Olsen Twins and a treasure hunt? Awful. Then we came home, I opened the door to walk inside and all my friends yelled SURPRISE! I just closed the door again. It took me a couple minutes to get over the shock and go into my surprise (a week early!) party. Turns out my mom and my two best friends had been secretly planning for a while, and my parakeet kept almost ruining the surprise. For a week whenever I wasn't in the room he would yell "Surprise!" and my mom couldn't figure out WHY, but was worried he would say it when I was in the room and I would start to suspect what they were up to.

For my 18th birthday some friends "kidnapped" me and took me out to dinner and bowling.

Most of my birthdays since college have been really quiet, because even when I wasn't a college student, all my friends were so they were either studying for finals or had already gone home for Christmas break by the time my birthday comes around. But sometimes I've been lucky and people were still in town.

For my 21st birthday, my roommate threw a surprise party for me and my friend Mandy, whose birthday is one day before mine. This should have been awesome, except I had just become a Christian and had a lot of drama going on (losing friends, gaining friends), so one friend who hadn't been talking to me showed up to tell me that he thought I was doing the God thing all for show and I wound up crying for half the party.

For my 25th birthday we wanted to do a Lord of the Rings marathon. People kept saying they would still be in town when my birthday came along and would come over. But instead everyone had left Savannah for the holidays by then, so only one person came over. We didn't make it through all the movies.

Starting with my 26th birthday (I think), I always go out for sushi on my birthday. In Savannah that meant going to Sakura on Broughton Street. Then the last year we were in Savannah, Chris and I went to visit Atlanta for my birthday weekend and my friend Beth took us to Ru Sans, where they sing to you and give you a $20 gift certificate to eat there later when it's your birthday. So every year since, we've gone to Ru Sans on my birthday.

Last year, 29th, I was pregnant so I could only eat cooked and veggie sushi, and Chris and I spent a quiet date night out. And over my birthday weekend my mom came into town and we went shopping for maternity clothes all weekend. It was great to have quiet girl time to celebrate.

So what does this year hold? Probably time spent with my hubby and my best little man. I haven't thought much about it, though I'm counting on some sushi! Probably a rainbow roll. Hmmm, baby snuggles and a rainbow roll. That sounds about right.

Approaching 30 (Part 5)... Places I've been - Places to go...

Welcome to the next installment of my countdown to the end of my 20s.

Places I visited for the first time in my 20s:

• San Francisco, CA
  
• Washington D.C.
• New York City, NY
• Philadelphia, PA
  
• Cleveland, OH (well, sort of. I was there but didn't get to do much visiting)
  
• Portland, OR
• Oxford, MS
• Dallas, TX
• Myrtle Beach, SC
  

Places I hope to visit before I'm 40:

• Seattle, WA
• Vancouver, CA
• Boston, MA
• Luang Prabang, Laos
• Bangkok, Thailand
• Rome, Italy
• Yellowstone
• Chicago, IL
• Austin, TX

Reflections on My 9 Day Fast from Junk Food

This is a followup to my rambling about an 8 Day Fast from Junk Food.

So my 8 day chocolate / caffeine / refined sugars fast became a 9 day fast and was very successful! Why did it become a 9 day fast? Because apparently Day 8 was my threshold... although I still was craving coffee and chocolate (for the taste, not the caffeine) during Day 7, by Friday, when I was allowed to break my fast, I didn't want to. It was strange to me, too, but I just didn't really care about having a piece of chocolate or a coffee, even though we were taking a 6 hour drive with our screaming baby and reached our destination after midnight. So I figured as long as I didn't WANT it, I certainly wasn't going to be silly and EAT it.

On Day 10 I did have a little chocolate, but still didn't wind up drinking any decaf until about Day 12... and only then because I was cold and it was brewing at my grandma's house.

All last week I was at my grandma's farmhouse in rural Indiana (and by rural I mean corn fields are our neighbors and my uncle owns ducks). It was fantastic and I never want to leave when we're there. My grandma made about a dozen different sugary snacks and desserts that taunted me all week, so even though I was allergic to most of them, I still found sugary chocolaty sweet things that I could eat, to make up for all the food I could not. And I did drink a TON of decaf coffee. Like I said, it was there, and I was cold, and it was tasty. But although I indulged quite a bit over the Thanksgiving week, I didn't feel the same need for the stuff that I had before the fast, so I was very happy to have done it. Getting back to normal life is a bit easier now, and it's been easier to cut back down on the sweets.

On the plus side, Zeke didn't sleep any better or act any less rambunctious when I cut down on the caffeine and sweets, so it looks like having them in my diet wasn't really affecting him that much. This makes me happy because that means I don't have to cut them out altogether. He's just a rambunctious kid, plain and simple.

Approaching 30 (Part 4)... Goals for my 30s

Yesterday's list was my 20 Milestones of my 20s, now for the Goals for my 30s. Things I hope to list in my Milestones in another 10 years.

1. Become a Stay-At-Home Mom. This part isn't up to me at all. It's completely out of my control. But it's something I hope to achieve before I'm 40. Not to say I wouldn't work at all, I'm sure I would work from home some. But I would like to devote the bulk of my time to my children and my home, instead of those being secondary to the day job.
2. Have baby #2. I'm not committing to any more than two kids. Any more than that will have to be the Lord changing my heart again, but I at least want to have a second child. Preferably 2 years from now, when Zeke is 2 1/2 and about out of diapers.
   
3. Figure out if I want to go to grad school, and if I do, get started with it. I talked about this in a post a few days ago. I honestly thought I would have at least gotten a start on grad school before I was 30, if not finished with it. This is not to say that I regret where I am. It was clearly not what the Lord had planned for us - He had Atlanta, learning about food allergies, and a gorgeous baby boy in our future. Grad school would have meant 3 years of sleep deprivation, stress, and sickness (I am pretty positive I would not have figured out my food allergies causing me to feel exhausted and sick all the time on a college health plan). So in the next 10 years I hope to figure out, once and for all, if I even NEED and WANT to get a graduate degree, if so, what kind, then when to do it.
4. Learn to do wet felting.
5. Learn to knit. Yes, I've knitted a couple of scarfs in the past, but I don't remember how to do it and I wasn't very good at it so it doesn't count anymore.
   
6. Learn to sew. I have the sewing machine, and even a friend who is willing to teach me. But I expect a few years to pass before I actually have the time to put into it.
7. Complete a fine art project. I have an idea in mind, I just need to execute it.
   
8. Find a place where I can get into wheel-throwing pottery again. I miss it. It feeds my soul. Then I want to get good enough to make a teapot. A good one. I tried last time around, when I first got into pottery after I graduated from undergrad, but my teapot was a bust and I never even took it home.
9. Produce another film.
10. Buy a house. I was debating whether or not to put this as a goal. Chris asked and I even said I didn't want it to be a goal, because if we don't do it then I'll feel like a failure. But I'm not afraid to list my other goals, so... yeah, to be perfectly honest I DO hope that we'll be able to buy a house in the next 10 years. It's impossible with our current financial situation and with what we want out of a house (size, location, etc). But I DO want a yard and a place to call our own with kids... we don't want to be moving from apartment to apartment forever. So there you have it. It's a goal, and we're slowly trying to put money away for a down payment, and while it's not on our 5 year plan, I do hope to have it on our 10 year plan.

So there you have it. 10 goals for the next 10 years seems adequately ambitious to me... it's like 1 a year. I wonder if this blog will still be around in some incarnation in 10 years so I can look back at my list and see what I've accomplished.

Approaching 30 (Part 3) ... 20 Greatest Milestones of my 20s

Here we are, 20 days before I turn 30. So I bring to you a recap of the 20 Milestones / Accompishments of my 20s.

1. Giving my life to Christ (just days before I turned 21)
2. Marrying Chris (age 23)
3. Giving birth to my first child (age 29)
4. Graduating college with high honors (age 22)
5. Finding out I was pregnant (age 28)
6. Realizing I was in love with Chris (age 22)
   
7. Producing a feature-length independent documentary (age 26-27)
   
8. Showing our first feature documentary in film festivals (age 27)
9. Showing my art in a two-woman show at the Reitz Union with .tif (age 21)
   
10. Learning to crochet, and writing my own patterns (age 27, 28)
11. Becoming friends with my mother (early 20s)
12. Discovering how to eat to feel healthy (age 28)
13. Letting go of "my plans" to move to Portland, and following the Lord's lead in moving to Atlanta instead, without a plan, and watching as God put the pieces into place (age 27)
    
14. Learning to teach (age 22)
15. Designing our own PEZ dispenser that PEZ made for us.
    
16. Learning how to throw pottery on a wheel (age 22)
    
17. Learning how to solder silver to make jewelry (age 22)
    
18. Learning to do stained glass (age 24)
    
19. Having the guts to dye my hair blue for a few months (age 21-22)
20. Learning needle felting (age 28)

My 8 Day Fast from My Favorite Junk Foods

taking a short break from my Turning 30 rambling to talk about my favorite junk food.

Most of you know that a couple years ago, I found out that I have a TON of food sensitivities that prevent me from eating a lot of "normal people" food. While this has made some things very tricky (like finding food when I travel), it's been a blessing in so many other ways. I feel a lot better, for one thing. I also learned how to eat an appropriate amount of calories for my size, which meant that I went from a size 12 to a size 6 in the first 6 months after learning about my allergies, and have since been able to maintain a healthy weight (even the day I went into labor, I weighed less that I did before I learned about my food issues). I have also learned how to cook tons of tasty food and have gotten in a groove of making food to take with me places, which also saves us money. Finally, with all the research I've had to do to find tasty recipes, I've learned so much about eating healthy and the benefits of healthy eating. All great things that NEVER would have happened if I could still get away with just popping open a BPA-laden can of gluten-and-corn-and-sodium-filled Progresso Soup every time I was lazy and hungry, like I did for so many years before.

But because there are so many foods that I have to avoid, I tend to really enjoy the ones I CAN have. I was really praying that Zeke wouldn't be lactose intolerant like many babies are, because then I would have to give up dairy for as long as I was nursing. (Thankfully, a two-week dairy fast proved that it didn't have any effect!) I also really enjoy my chocolate and coffee (decaf, of course, because I'm sensitive to caffeine).

One great thing about nursing a baby is that you can eat a lot more calories and not gain weight. This means I've stopped counting calories (because who has time with a baby, anyways?) and have been giving into my sweet tooth a LOT lately. I even started to cheat and have some M&Ms and Snickers bars every now and then, because that little bit of corn syrup wasn't hurting me much, and they are soooo good. But the more I gave into my sweet tooth, the harder it's been to say no. I finally had to acknowledge that it was getting out of control, and that I didn't have the willpower to stop eating this stuff.

Another thing I started to notice is that I was getting caffeine headaches if I went a day without a decaf coffee or a green tea. I thought that was kind of ridiculous, that I could even develop a dependency on such a low dose of caffeine. I was also wondering if that caffeine was keeping the little man awake... we've always had trouble getting him to sleep, and he's VERY active - always needs stimulation - so I was starting to wonder if the caffeine and sugar from my diet had anything to do with it.

Then I kept reading about how sugar consumption makes you much more susceptible to colds/flus, and with this crazy flu season I didn't want to be increasing my chances of bringing something home to my son.

All of this combined kept me thinking about my dependency on my favorite junk foods, and how with the holiday season around the corner, between traveling and holiday meals my eating habits were only going to get worse. I needed to do something about this now instead of deciding to do something about it in January when I will already be burnt out.

So I decided it was time for drastic action. Telling myself to "cut down" on the junk wouldn't do the trick. I needed to detox from the junk... so I am doing an 8 day fast from chocolate, caffeine, and sugar. I'm now on Day 5 and doing great!

Why 8 days? Because I'm going out of town on the 9th day and I don't want to deny myself coffee or anything else that I can eat when I'm on the road and struggling with the normal difficulties of eating on the road. 8 days was as good as it was going to get - and I'm hoping a good week of eliminating those things will make it easier for me to make healthy eating choices over the holidays.

The decision was hard to make but it's been easier to do than I thought (except for the coffee... I just love coffee! I miss it!). I've realized that my mind works in a very specific way. Food that I know I shouldn't eat is a strong temptation that I almost always give in to. But food that I know I can't eat isn't a temptation at all. I just look right past it, like it's rocks or something. So I just needed to tell myself that I can't eat chocolate, sugar, or caffeine and then it's not so hard. I even made my husband some of my favorite no-bake chocolate oatmeal cookies last night (ingredients are basically butter, sugar, chocolate, milk, and oats) and didn't even think of eating one.

I do need to come up with some reasonable limits to my junk intake for when I allow myself to eat these again, so I don't go right back off the deep end. Otherwise it will have all been for nothing. I'm thinking one cup of decaf a day, one serving of chocolate a day... but is that too much? Maybe 4 servings of chocolate a week? This is the tricky part... I'll get back to you on that.

In the meantime, I've just been chowing down on dried papaya chunks whenever I have a sweet tooth, and I've been drinking lots of fruity tea with honey. Those both help, but it also helps that my husband and friends are all very supportive (not tempting me or telling me I'm silly). I've been posting a Facebook status about this at least once a day to keep myself accountable and get a little encouragement.

And, of course, I keep dreaming of the coffee I'll make on Friday.

Approaching 30 (Part 2)... Well, what did you expect?

To me the most natural thing about hitting a "milestone" birthday is to ask yourself whether or not you are doing what you hoped to be doing at that certain milestone. Yesterday I talked about where my parents were at 30, and what expectations they may have had. So now to think about where I am, and where I thought I'd be.

When I was around 20 years old, in college for computer graphics, I had some definite expectations of where I would be 10 years later. I always believed that if I worked hard I would be able to do whatever I wanted, doors would open, jobs would appear, and I would be successful. I was always a really hard worker, so I figured I would graduate with honors, get a great job in a big city as a web designer, and move my way up the ladder. A couple years after that I would get a graduate degree, then get a job as a web design professor at a college somewhere. I saw myself happily married and owning a fancy loft somewhere. No kids. I'd have plenty of money, not rich but living comfortably with a good savings. I didn't know who I'd be married to or where I'd live, but I figured I'd make my way out to California, maybe the San Francisco bay area. I always had a very romanticized idea about California. Good weather and fun stuff to do and artsy people I could related to.

Cut to real life at 30. I am happily married, I'm a web designer, and I live in a big city. I did graduate undergrad with honors, but I guess I didn't work hard enough of something, because I never have found a job that pays what the career sites say someone with my skill set should be paid. And there is no ladder to climb where I work. We just barely pay the bills, and we live in an apartment, nothing fancy. We're in Atlanta, not California, and plan to be here for a long time. Even still, we don't have any plan to buy our own place soon because the money just isn't there. I haven't gone to grad school, so although I've taught at a tech college, I'm not on my way to being a professor. Perhaps the biggest difference from what I envisioned is the little man who has become the center of my world as of late. I honestly never saw myself as a mom.

So this begs the question - do I regret where I am? I think that's a tough question. There are things that I WISH were different, but nothing that I wish I had done differently... does that make sense? I believe I am where the Lord would have me right now. I am glad that I married Chris. Glad that I followed him to Savannah. Glad that we followed the Lord's leading to Atlanta. Ecstatic that we followed the Lord's prompting that led to the birth of our amazing son, Zeke.

I tried a couple of times in the past 6 years to do the grad school thing. I was accepted into graduate school at SCAD in Savannah, but after one quarter and speaking with a dean, I realized that the programs SCAD could offer me would not give me the education I wanted, and so I dropped out. I didn't want to go into debt for a degree that I wouldn't use. I am VERY happy that I decided not to complete my degree at SCAD. Then I applied to some fine art graduate schools after Chris graduated... I really worked at it this time and thought I knew what I wanted, but I wasn't accepted to any of the programs. That was really hard on me. Really hard.

But looking back 3 years later, I know that those programs wouldn't have been quite right, either. And if we HAD gone someplace for me to go to grad school, well... life would be very different. And while I can't reasonably speculate on what would have been different in an alternate reality, I will say that I doubt I would have discovered my food allergies (the secret to how I am able to function for a full day now instead of crashing horribly after just a few hours), and I highly doubt that I would be a mother now. The Lord's plan was different from my plan... and I have to say that the Lord's plan looks a lot better than my own. At this point I honestly don't know if I wanted graduate school for the right reasons anyways. I may have wanted it because it's what I was "supposed to do" to "live up to my potential." And that might be a really bad reason to do something, if it's not truly where the Lord is leading me in my life. I am hoping that I will gain more insight in the next 10 years about whether or not I need to pursue a graduate degree in anything.

So, sure. It would be awesome to have more money, a nice house, a fancier job. Or Chris with a fancy job so I could be a stay-at-home momma. And to be honest, I still hope to have those things when I hit my 40-year milestone. But these are the areas of my life where I am learning to be content with what we have, while I am joyful over the things I never even hoped for... trust in the Lord and an amazing baby boy. And I know that so far, the Lord's plan is better than my own.

Approaching 30 (Part 1)... Where were you?

So here I am, thinking about how close I am to the Big Three-Oh, and wondering if my life looks like I expected it to look at 30. It got me wondering what my parents' lives were like when THEY were 30, so I sent them each a Facebook message (yeppers, my dad just joined the big FB, so now you KNOW it's no longer cool. I'm joking, Dad). They were both kind enough to give me a bit of reflection on their lives at 30, and told me I could share it with you.

When my Dad turned 30, he had a daughter who had just turned 5 (that would be me), and a 2 1/2 year old son. We lived in Richmond, IN, just 30 minutes from my mom's family and about 4 hours from his family in Louisville, KY. He was working his second job since graduating college with an accounting degree. He owned his first house, and he had been married for 7 years. I think it's 7, anyways. He told me,

I really wasn't sure what I would be doing at 30. We lived in Richmond and were ready to try something new. Florida was a growing state (plus warm), while Richmond was struggling, so we thought we would give Florida a try.

We could always move back if Fl didn't work out.

I was 31 when we moved. I obviously wanted a better life for our family so we went where there were more opportunities. Similar to you guys going to Atlanta.

My mom is a couple years younger than my dad, so when she turned 30 we had moved to Florida, but we were still renting the condo we lived in the first year we were down in the Fort Myers area. (They bought a house in Cape Coral and moved us there just 5 months later). She had a daughter who had just turned 7 and was in the 1st grade, and a son who was 4 and in preschool. She had started her own business selling and delivering copier paper to local businesses - a job that she could work from home most of the time, and where she could make deliveries during the day while we were at school to make sure she was home for us when we got out of school. She said,

I had just started my business in August, and we bought my first business car on my birthday, so I joked that it was my birthday present, a used celebrity wagon, stick shift.

When I asked her if her life was what she thought it would be at 30, she told me,

My life was so much more than I had anticipated it to be at 30. For one, I had never anticipated we would live in Florida. I thought we would live in Indiana, Kentucky, or Ohio. I thought I would be working in interior design. So when we moved to Florida, and I started my own business, that was so far from my anticipations.

Was it what I wanted it to be, I guess I didn't have big expectations. I think I always wanted a bigger house, and I always wished I had the money to have the furniture of my dreams, and build the house of my dreams. But that is all material, and I'm not really disappointed that I didn't. What I did have of my dreams was, and is, a wonderful, kind, considerate, loving husband, who has provided well for his family. And two healthy children, a girl and boy, what more could I really want. Because from the time I was a little girl I think all I really wanted was just that, the husband of my dreams, and children. All the rest is just icing on the cake.

By the time my parents each turned 30, they were on their way down the path of what I would consider their "lives" once the dust settled, but even at 30 they still hadn't met the people who have made up their tight circle of friends for over 20 years. I don't know why, but for some reason that blows my mind. Sure, I know that within a couple years of that milestone age, they would be settling into a home in Cape Coral they would live in for 10 years. My dad would get a job in Fort Myers that he would stay in for even longer. My mom would use her paper business to buy groceries and save up for her kids' college educations, and wouldn't retire it until her kids went off to college. All of that, the career stuff, the house stuff, it's important stuff but even as all of that changes, your core friends are the people who walk through it all with you, so it's just crazy to me to think that at 30, the people they still hang out with on a weekly (and often more-than-weekly) basis, and have been for as long as I can remember, were still a couple of years away.

It's interesting to me... I always had in my mind that by 30 I should "be" where I'm going to be in my life, so it's kind of comforting, in a way, to realize that my parents, who I think have done very well for themselves, weren't quite to that stage yet at 30. It makes me wonder what the next 2 to 5 years have in store for us. If it will be a journey into "the next 20 years of our lives" in a way. What jobs, homes, children, and friends will come our way. If there are friends I haven't met yet (or am just beginning to get to know) that will walk with us through the next 20 or 30 years of our lives. I wonder if you will be celebrating Zeke's 30th birthday with me?

Now that I have pondered where my parents were at 30, tomorrow I will reflect on where I thought I would be vs. where I am at 30.

30 days 'til I turn 30

In one month I'll be thirty. Wow... 30. Thir-ty. Chris turned the big Three-Oh just two weeks after Zeke was born, so he didn't get much fanfare. (Though my dad took him out to two movies that weekend and to Ted's Montana Grill - leave it to my daddoo to make up for me being too tired and distracted to be good at celebrating). Ever since then I've caught myself referring to myself as thirty, too... I guess I figured I was close enough and just started rounding up. Which is pretty ridiculous - I should be holding on to every last vestige of my 20s. I guess being a mother makes me feel older or something.

At any rate, as time passes I'm becoming more and more aware that I will soon be out of my 20s forever, and it's a little odd. I never thought of 30 as old; I have plenty of friends in their 30s and they don't seem old. I even had a few friends turn the big Four-Oh this past year. That doesn't seem old either ... for them. But for ME to be turning thirty, suddenly it seems much older than I expected it to.

So to commemorate, I plan to write a handful of navel-gazing, completely self-centered posts. Lucky you. (Hey, no one's forcing you to read them!) I only turn 30 once so I plan to enjoy it a little. I remember when I turned 26, it wasn't until I was turning 26 that I realized I had completely blown an entire year of pointing out that my dad was "twice my age," and that he would never again be twice my age... from now on I was gaining on him. He will still be 25 years older than me, but never again would he be "twice my age" or "more than twice my age." All that fun, wasted. I called him to lament that I had missed such a golden opportunity, but that was NOT the same as seizing said opportunity for the year.

Not so for 30! I will do things like think back to the big things that happened in my 20s, talk about where my parents were at 30, talk about previous birthday milestones, and make lists like my goals of things to do before I'm 40, places I want to visit in my 30s... I told you, self-centered navel gazing for the world to see. If I was really good, I would do this in the form of a countdown of the 30 days before I'm 30, with a post a day... but I've got a full-time job and an infant, so I am not that ambitious.

My Recipe for Yummy Veggie and Chicken Noodle Soup

On Saturday I finally made my favorite chicken noodle soup, that I haven't taken the time to make since Zeke was born. It was super tasty and so I decided to finally write down my "recipe" to share. Just a reminder that you can ammend as necessary if you don't have something or don't like something in the recipe. We usually have all this stuff in the fridge, and when Chris bakes chicken thighs he always makes extra for me to shred and freeze for later recipes. We also had some extra broccoli prepared for omelets last night, so I threw what was left into my soup. I don't usually add broccoli, so even though it's in the photo it's not in my recipe below.

Kendra's All-natural Yummy Veggie and Chicken Noodle Soup

• 1 cup chicken broth
• 2 cups water
  
• 5 oz. cooked shredded chicken thigh or breast
• 1 small yellow onion or 1/2 a large onion, chopped
  
• 1 stalk celery, chopped
• 2 carrots, chopped
• 3 baby bella mushrooms, sliced
• 2 cups of greens (spinach, or kale, mixed greens, whatever works).
  
• 1 bag spaghetti-style tofu shiritake noodles
  
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• tbsp olive oil
  
• 1 tsp onion powder
• 1 tsp sea salt
• 1 tsp cumin powder
• pepper to taste
• pinch of cayenne pepper
  

1. Put water, chicken broth, onion, celery, carrots, mushrooms, garlic, and olive oil in a pot and bring it to a boil. Reduce to medium heat, it should be boiling lightly for 10-15 minutes or until carrots are as soft as you want them.
   
2. While that's boiling, rinse the tofu noodles, cut them in half, and microwave for 1 minute.
3. Mix in the salt, cumin powder, onion powder, pepper, and pinch of cayenne pepper.
4. Mix in the greens, and shredded chicken. Let simmer for another 3 minutes or so until greens have wilted.
   
5. Get two big soup bowls*. Put half the tofu noodles in each bowl. Ladle the soup over the noodles, half in each bowl.
6. Serve!
   

* For me this makes 2 big bowls of soup, depending on how much you eat you might want to break it into more bowls. I have found that the noodles are hard to divide evenly if they are added to the pan of soup, which is why I put the soup on top of it. Sometimes I do the same thing with the chicken, heating it first and then just adding as much as I want for each bowl to the top of the soup.

Cooking Day

Today Chris had to work all day, so Zeke and I were on our own for the Saturday. Since I had some squash and a pumpkin and stuff that I needed to do something with, today became a busy Cooking Day. I often get a bit too ambitious when it comes to baking days... I just keep adding "one more thing" and they keep piling up and it gets a bit hard to juggle, but today wound up being pretty successful nonetheless. By the end of the day I had accomplished the following:

1. Crock pot full of the tastiest batch of White Bean Chili I've ever made (with ground turkey and sprouted beans - navy, garbanzo, pinto, lentils).
   
2. 6 servings of Roasted Pumpkin Salad (not that tasty, but I'll cope - it was fun to try and now I've got lunches for a week).
3. A batch of sweet potato puree for Zeke (ice cube tray full of batches for later)
4. 4 cups of pumpkin puree for baking later
5. Ice cube tray full of pumpkin puree for later recipes
6. Roasted pumpkin seeds - best part of baking pumpkins!

The problem with all the cooking is that lots of things needed to be frozen, but our freezer is already full of veggie broth and shredded chicken and breast milk and tons of other miscellaneous stuff, so I also had to organize the freezer with a baby strapped to my hip and remove the ice cream maker bin to make room.

I also did two loads of laundry, took a walk with a friend, and... watched 2 episodes of Gilmore Girls. And all with a 6 month old who refused to nap. Good day!

Tomorrow after church I have a friend coming over to hang out. We're making some sort of lunch with the squash and turnip greens I have (need to find a recipe), and I need to bake something yummy and gluten free with the pumpkin puree that I didn't freeze. I love free weekends.

Now cleaning... yeah, cleaning isn't happening at all. I might try to do some of that tomorrow. I also might actually FOLD some clothes tonight. I do much better with baking that with cleaning. Cleaning doesn't fill my belly.

Kitchen shelves

Our new kitchen has much less counter and cabinet space than our old apartment... that was the one thing that made me uncertain about renting the place. But everything else about the place was so perfect, so we decided we would make the kitchen work. Luckily it does have a "breakfast nook" so we got an island from Ikea (as-is section!) and then the fun part. We had been collecting wine crates from places around town to use as shelves and drawers and such. So we put some up on the walls in the breakfast nook to make more cabinet space. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.



For more on our craftiness in the new place, check out Chris's awesome tables. These things are amazing!

Atlanta Deluge

So if you don't live in Atlanta, it's possible that you've missed the news that it's been raining for about a week, and yesterday's storms brought the metro area to its tipping point... floods everywhere!

So yesterday my coworkers and I decided we should leave work early to try and get home before storms and flooding got worse, but we were about an hour late in making that decision... a coworker and I got stuck on the I-75/I-85 connector in downtown Atlanta when the interstate flooded in both directions. I circled the approximate location of my car when this aerial shot was taken - right under that overpass. I was just grateful to be under the overpass so I could get out of my car and walk around a bit to figure out what was happening... and also grateful that I wasn't about 10 minutes earlier to the scene, or that may have been my car drowned out in the water!



My coworker took this photo of the scene.



After probably an hour of sitting there, police organized things enough that we could all turn around and squeeze up the side and get onto a bypass a little ways back on the interstate. Then I had to call Chris and get him to figure out for me what the best alternate route was for me to get home and not get stuck on another flooded road. Chris had a friend who was also going home from downtown, who was able to tell him how he made it safely to the interstate, so I followed suit, slowly but surely... and my 30 minute commute finally ended 2 hours after it started.

I was just soooo grateful to be home and not stuck on the interstate for longer than we were. At first I was anticipating being there for hours!

At least now I have a story, and I can mark "make a three-point turn and drive back the wrong way on the interstate" off my list of "Things to do before I'm 30." *

* No, that wasn't on my list. I don't even have a list. But I SHOULD have a list, and if I did, that should have been on it.

ceramics fun day, and the craft tables...

A couple Saturdays ago, my friend Bethany and I (and little Zeke!) went down to my local independent coffee shop and had fun painting ceramics, courtesy of Glazy Dazy. Zeke was pretty well behaved for most of the time, playing in his car seat and sleeping in the carrier I was wearing, so that I was able to get most of my set painted before I had to get Bethany to help out with him so I could finish it up. We had a good time and I have a new addition to my teapot collection!

The pottery was really reasonably priced, and the woman who does the ceramics also does parties, so we're thinking we HAVE to get a party together to paint once we get our all-purpose-creative-room finished. Chris and his dad built some super cool work tables for the room, but Chris has to put the finishing touches on them and finish organizing that room. I can't wait until it's all together, it is going to be an awesome room.

Here is a sneak peak of the work in progress.

compost fail

Yeah, so we gave up on composting. After a year of trying with our 5 gallon bucket system and winding up with compost that killed my plants and smelled bad, Chris decided he would dig a trench for compost in the back of our new apartment, only to find that we had hard clay, not dirt back there. So since we don't have the money for a real compost drum or anything, we're back to throwing away our food trash and calling our year-plus experiment of saving food waste a total waste of time and effort. Bummer.

Studies show that Prenatal Air Pollution Lowers Children's IQ

So I just read the first article to really make me paranoid ... a new study showed a link between exposure to smog before birth and low IQ in children. I live in Atlanta and, until about two months before I got pregnant, would walk a mile down a really smoggy street to the train station and back 4 times a week for work. Sometimes in July/August even the short walk from the train station to my office building would make me feel sick from the car exhaust. I'm just glad we happened to move to a less busy area right before we got pregnant... but it still makes me a bit paranoid about living in a big city.

Zeke and the mobile

Zeke just got old enough to care about things like his mobile, so we finally put it up in his bassinet. The first time he saw it he was mesmerized for quite a while and actually smiled and talked to it, which was the best compliment a momma could get! Here he is at 11 weeks old, checking out his sea mobile.

Genetically Modified corn and soy

Chris sent me this interesting (although long) article on the effects of genetically modified (GM) foods. It further makes me wonder if my corn allergy is related to eating GM corn before I started avoiding corn. Some of the side effects they mention (other than allergies) are flu-like symptoms... which are exactly the symptoms I get now when I eat things with corn or corn derivatives.

Design snobbery

This is a pretty hilarious comic. It reminds me of when I was in college and refused to shop at Old Navy because I hated their commercials so much. (The ones with that obnoxious woman with the round white glasses). It also reminds me of my good friend Tiffany who likes to point out, "I have that font," pretty much any time we pass a sign or a shirt with a font she recognizes. It's kind of rubbed off on me, and I've caught myself telling Chris when I have a specific font that's on a tshirt he's wearing or something.

cowboy booties

Since our lives are basically All Zeke All The Time right now (and my life is basically Nursing Zeke All The Time), pretty much any updates for a while will be on the baby blog, so I'll probably be pretty lax on the updates here. (And since it's hard to blog while nursing, at least right now, most updates will be made by Chris).

But I did want to post a photo of the baby booties I made for Zeke. I started them on Saturday, April 25th, and finished them while in labor in the middle of the night, right before I woke Chris up to help me with contractions Sunday morning. So they have a pretty special place in my heart now.

Zeke wore them on his first restaurant outing, to Ted's Montana Grill on Saturday night. We went with my parents, for Chris's 30th birthday. He was rather stylin.

(the t-shirt was hand-embroidered by Chris's sister, Emily. It's the first onesie we put on him once his umbilical cord fell off Saturday morning).

I'm a mom!

Ezekiel Lee Skeene was born at 4:26 on 4/26. He weighed 7lbs, 3 oz and he was 20.5 inches long. There are tons of photos over on the Baby Blog. If this is your first time hearing then go check out the photos. Chris has been taking pictures like MAD, and I finally got a chance to post my birth story yesterday.

I haven't been on the computer much in the past week (maybe 2 or 3 hours total, overall) with all that's going on, and probably won't be on for a while. Too much to learn about being a mommy!

baby booties

I have a couple of friends who are having babies soon (actually, I have a lot of friends who have either just had a baby or will have one soon, but two of them are in my small group, and our small group is throwing us a joint shower next weekend).

One is having a girl, and the other a boy, so I thought it would be fun to make them some cute baby booties. So I found a couple of free patterns online (for mary janes and for sneakers) and made these. I made up the leaf embellishments for the mary janes, but otherwise just followed the patterns. They were both pretty quick to whip up since they're so small, so they were a fun project.

Chris wants me to make cowboy boots for Zeke, and I actually have a friend who has this pattern book with the cowboy boots pattern, so I will probably do that at some point, too. Man... never thought I'd be the "crocheting baby booties" kind of gal. How things change.

march finance update

So since I talked last month about how Chris and I were doing with being better stewards of our money, I thought I should keep it up and give a report on March. I won't be as long-winded, though.

Basically, we didn't manage to stay under budget, but we came really close. Chris had to get some cavities filled, so that was an unexpected expense, but the upside is that he walked in the door from his dentist appointment with both his bill in hand, and the mail - and in the mail was a check for freelance work I'd done the month before, for very close to the amount that the dentist bill came to. It was kind of depressing for me that I had done that extra work just to see the money flow right back out, but at least we had it! God is good. We went about $12 over our food budget, which isn't too bad considering we had people over to eat 5 or 6 times, including Pi Day, featuring fancy things like gluten-free pi(e)s and homemade frozen yogurt. And Chris had to go out of town for a weekend for a wedding, and we still only spent about $20 all month on eating out.

So there you have it.

glass mug cozy

Okay, this is actually a really long explanation for a pretty simple item. So our church offers free coffee and snacks in the mornings, right? Only a while back I decided to start bringing my own mug because I felt really wasteful using a paper cup each week, when I KNEW I was going to get coffee when I got there. Then when I was trying to get more calcium, I started bringing milk in my mug so that I was all prepared with my milk to add coffee to it. The cup holder in our car is really small though, so the only thing that fits in there are those glass POM tea jars, and they have a lid to go with them. The problem is that these POM glasses don't have a handle, so it was hard to hold once I put hot coffee in it. So one day Chris suggested a crochet a cozy for it so I didn't burn my hands, so one morning I finally grabbed some yarn on the way to church and made a cozy for it on the way there (our drive to church is 40 minutes long, so I was finishing it up just about the time we got there). I didn't get the handle on it for the first day, but after testing it out decided what I needed for a handle, and made that later in the week. I've been using it ever since, and I love it because it's super handy for my purposes.

I also kept getting lots of compliments on it, so I thought it might be fun to make a few more and try to sell them on Etsy, but for the purposes of keeping shipping manageable, tell people to buy their own POM tea to put it on. Imagine my dismay when I looked up the POM website, only to find that they've switched to a different sized, plastic bottle!

Alas, I got Chris to take a good photo of it anyways, so I figured I'd share.

I'm thinking of making cozies for Ball Mason jars, though, since I use those a ton to bring coffee to work and stuff... so might still try the etsy thing, but with Ball jars instead. Who knows. It's not like I don't have a thousand other things that take precedence on my to-do list or anything.

First Etsy Sale!

I just made my first Etsy sale! Some fabulous etsy customer bought my Sea Creature Mobile pattern. I was starting to think the whole crochet pattern writing experiment was a big waste of time (and it still may be, who knows, if I only sell the pattern a couple of times it certainly won't have been a profitable endeavor... that thing took forever between designing, writing, creating the layout, and testing it!) but it's pretty exciting still to have my first sale. Huzzah!

Anniversaries

This next few days are chock full of anniversaries / milestones.
Most importantly, Sunday (March 29) is Chris and my 6 year wedding anniversary! And our last child-free anniversary. How are we going to celebrate? Probably by skipping church, sleeping in, and then doing not much of anything all day, just hanging out. It will probably be our last chance for a while to not do much, so we will relish it. Last year we did the same thing - stayed home and did nothing - and it was great. A fantastic way to celebrate. :-)

(March 29, 2003 - the wedding party, left to right: Alan, Emily, Sam, Kendra, Chris, Brooke, Mike, Amy, Phil)
Sunday is also my one year anniversary of calorie-counting. (Yep, I started my diet on our 5 year anniversary. I'm weird.) I lost about 25 lbs and got to my "goal weight" in about 4 1/2 months. And right about the time I got to my goal weight and started eating enough calories to "maintain" my weight, we found out I was pregnant! Since then I've been steadily climbing back up, but this time with pregnancy weight. The thing that's funny to me is that one year later, I still weigh about 7 lbs LESS than I did a year ago, even though I'm in my 8th month of pregnancy! Calorie counting pays off big time... let me just say it's not fun or easy, but I definitely think it's been worth it to have a better idea of what's going into my body, and now, Zeke's body.
Finally, Tuesday will be my one-year anniversary of being gluten-free. Yep, a year ago I found out that I had a gluten sensitivity and started on the road to figuring out my many other food sensitivities. I think it's safe to say that even with a little Zeke stealing all my energy as of late, I feel a zillion times better than I did a year ago, when my body spent all its time attacking the food I was eating.
Celebrations abound!

Etsy Store and free baby jellyfish crochet pattern

I've finally gotten around to finishing the pattern for the baby mobile, creating an Etsy shop, AND posting the pattern for sale on the Etsy shop. Hooray! Now to see if anyone actually wants to buy it. :-)

Update: Now you can also buy it through Ravelry for $4.95.

I've decided to post the instructions for the baby jellyfish from the pattern here for free, to give you all a tiny taste of what you could be making. So here it is!

Baby Jellyfish Pattern

Materials:

• fingering weight yarn in whichever colors you want your creatures to be (sample uses Claudia Hand Painted Yarns)
• 3.0mm D crochet hook
• Needle for sewing pieces together
• Stuffing

Abbreviations:

Abbreviations:
• ch = chain
• sc = single crochet
• fo = finish off
• inc = increase (two sc in one stitch)
• dec = decrease (one sc across two stitches)
• sl st = slip stitch
• st = stitch
• x2 = repeat two times (etc for multiple numbers)

Body:
Worked in a spiral. Do not join, do not turn.
Start a circle via magic ring or whatever is your preference.
1. sc 6 around (6)
2. inc 6 (12)
3. [sc, inc] x 6 (18)
4. [sc x 5, inc] x 3 (21)
5-7. sc 21 around for 3 rows (21)
8. [sc, dec] x 7 (14)
FO, cut string and weave in end.

Tentacles:
Make 2 dark and 3 light tentacles. Attach each one to the inside top of the body. Loose chains should help the tentacles to curl.
1. Loosely ch 28
FO, cut yarn short, but not so short that the knot will come undone. Alternately, you may try to weave the end back up the chain and hide it in the leg. Use the other tail to attach inside the body.

Note: some yarn doesn’t curl as well when loosely chained for the tentacles. If your tentacles don’t curl, try these alternate tentacles:

1. ch 30
2. inc in each ch
FO, cut yarn short, but not so short that the knot will come undone. Alternately, you may try to weave the end back up the chain and hide it in the leg. Use the other tail to attach inside the body.

Get the rest of the sea creature mobile pattern from my Etsy store at
http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=22891478

Happy Pi Day!

Pi Day is the perfect excuse to eat pi(e) with friends. We had a good time, and now I am stuffed full of allergen-free apple pi(e). Well, allergen free if you aren't allergic to apples or butter or rice flour or sugar. Yum!

Chris made the shirt last night for me. He made an iron-on stencil with freezer paper, and sprayed bleach water on it to make the design. A quick DIY tshirt project.

yay for

So we had a good time visiting with my grandma and my great aunt this afternoon / evening, and even though it's been a very busy day, now that they've gone to bed, I'm still too awake to sleep... which is a bummer because I do have to go into work tomorrow. I guess I'll manage.

So I struck out with the rosemary and basil plants. I want to get organic ones, but none of the places that usually carry them (Whole Foods, and Sevannanda) have them right now. I don't know if it's too early, or what. Home Depot had basil, but it's not organic, and since I'm using organic potting soil and organic plant food that I already have, I don't see the point in compromising and buying a non-organic plant. But I REALLY want some basil! I wonder if it's too early, or if I just need to expand my search. I should probably call Urban Gardener tomorrow and see if they've got their herbs in stock. I can't even try to grow things from seeds, they always fail (the one exception being my avacado plant, and I tried three of those and the only one that lived is the one that was ALREADY sprouting inside the avacado when I cut it open). So each year I just buy the actual plants... I really don't have a green thumb, I just try real hard not to kill my plants, and that's about the best I can do. Alas!

Spring!

This morning we got the phone call that we have a baby niece! Hannah Emily Skeene was born in Thailand at 4:29pm Thai time (that's 4:29am our time), and we got the call around 8:30 in the morning. Sam and Nicole were quite pleased that their baby girl was born on a prime number day - 03/07/09. So much excitement about numbers lately, it makes me smile.

So less than a week after our big Atlanta snow, we had an 80-degree day today. Chris and I invited a few friends to have a picnic with us at Piedemont Park to enjoy our first big spring day. It was great to be out and soaking up the sun. This spring weather has me so happy and looking forward to all the new life it brings... not just gardening, but in the form of a niece and a son, too, of course!

So I had quite the productive day, I made a batch of sprouted hummus this morning before the picnic (I'm a hummus-making fiend lately), and this evening I made some lavender ice cream - yum! We also went through all the baby clothes our friend Amy just sent us, and got them all washed and organized and whatnot. Busy busy! I usually hate doing laundry and folding clothes, but I can't get enough of folding little boy onesies!

Tomorrow after church I'm going to get some new basil and rosemary plants (they always die over the winter). I'm so happy to have weather that will be kind to my plants, which have all slowly died over the winter. I hope to have the time to get them planted before my grandma gets into town in the evening. She's driving back up to Indiana and so she and my great aunt are staying the night with us. I'm excited to get to spend some time with them. Quite the packed weekend!

Get Ready for Pi Day! Tomorrow is 3.14

This great photo is from zenwerx, which will also inform you of the value of pi to 4 million digits. Now that's dedication.

While I won't be making a pie quite this fancy, I am making a couple allergen-free pies tomorrow in celebration of Pi Day, and a few people are coming over to help us eat them. I'm going to make a pumpkin pie just because it's my favorite, and an apple pie. I was going to make a blueberry pie but blueberries are just too expensive... I could spend about $18 on enough blueberries, or $3 on enough apples... not really a tough choice this time around!

So what are YOU doing for Pi Day?

Square Root Day - and I missed it!

I've been eagerly looking forward to Pi Day, which falls on a Saturday this year so I think I'll bake a gluten-free pie (blueberry? apple? pumpkin? I haven't decided yet) and wear a shirt with a pi symbol on it, if Chris makes it in time. But much to my dismay, I missed Square Root Day, which was yesterday, and I didn't even know it. Miss Emily alerted me to the missed holiday this morning. Maybe I could have cut a sweet potato into squares and sauted them for dinner. (And wish everyone a Happy Square Root Day, which is all you really need to do to celebrate a holiday).

So now that we're planning ahead, is anyone else gonna do something fun for Pi Day? Maybe crochet a pi scarf? More importantly, who wants to come over to my house for some pie? (Don't make me eat it all myself!)

lifestyle changes

Over the past few months, Chris and I have felt the Lord calling us to be better stewards of our money, our earth, and our health. To that end, we've been slowly trying to incorporate little changes into our daily lives to live healthier, greener, produce less waste, and save money. Most of these things come from tips we see on the internet where we think, "we could do that," and then we give it a shot. Some examples are making our own vegetable broth from veggie scraps, composting, and replacing our normal cleaning products with natural products like vinegar, peroxide, baking soda, and castile soap. And probably a few things that are so integrated into our daily lives at this point, that we've forgotten it's something "new" that we adopted. This is, of course, aside from all the cooking food from scratch that we've started doing since I learned about all my food allergies. I didn't really realize how many "strange" things we were doing until my mom came to visit in December and I found myself explaining all sorts of things to her (like what we were doing putting the butt ends of our onions in the freezer).

Well, this year we've had to put a whole new spin on things and kick it up a notch, because just like the rest of America, our income has been cut significantly from what we were making last year. And on top of that, we're adding a member to the family! At first I was really frustrated... we had worked so hard last year to become better stewards of our money and to be content with what we have, so it was really hard on me when our "reward" for that success was a further income cut. I started out being really stressed about our situation (well, to be honest, I still am stressed about it many days), especially when I realized that there was nothing new I could do to add to our income (there are only so many hours in a day), and that Chris was doing all he could as well. So since the only option left was cutting costs, we started brainstorming for ways we could make ends meet by spending less, instead of making more.

So we've been reading lots of money-saving blogs for tips and ideas, and generally asking ourselves what we can cut out or do differently. You may have noticed that Chris is especially obsessed with getting stuff for free, like food at restaurants, products at CVS, and of course our washer and dryer (although the jury is still out on whether or not those are working well enough to keep them. hmmmph). We've gotten better at cutting down eating at restaurants (we had cut down to about once a week, on Sundays, but have even tried to cut some of that out as well), and I've gotten much better at making my own ghetto lattes at home to bring to work, and "just saying no" to buying coffee work. We decided to cut down our meat consumption, and to use more dried and sprouted beans instead of canned beans, as yet another way to save a few dollars here and there. Finally, we've gotten better at questioning our normal grocery store purchases... certain convenience foods have to be put back if they're not on sale or necessary for a specific reason (like if we're traveling out of town and I have to have snack bars to take with me), and some foods were substituted for cheaper brands or different products (cream if rice for my breakfast is cheaper than cream of buckwheat, and just as tasty).

To be honest, I wasn't sure if all of this was going to work or not. I kind of felt like these things were all just drops in the bucket and we wouldn't really notice a difference at the end of the month. And I was so stressed about money that I didn't log our receipts from the month until yesterday (usually I try to keep up with it on a weekly basis so we know where we stand as we get closer to the end of the month). Imagine my surprise when I saw that, aside from buying a used car this month (an unavoidable necessity), we actually broke even for the month!

Some examples... although we ate at home a little more than we had been, we spent close to $200 less in groceries than our average month (and just so you know, that somehow meant it was actually EASIER for me to get all my necessary vitamins and minerals in my pregnancy diet, including calcium, protein, iron, and folic acid). We're still buying organic for the essentials (apples, dairy, eggs, etc), and we fed other people a few times. We also spent about $20 less on eating out, even though we paid for a friend's meal once in our month. I realized that in the whole month, I only bought two lattes, one because I was meeting a friend, and one because it was my boss's birthday. And our "just say no to non-essentials" policy meant we spent about $100 less on "miscellaneous" stuff than we usually do. To be honest, I don't feel like we deprived ourselves of anything or suffered through the month. It's a pretty good feeling. I'm hoping we can keep it up and hopefully make this yet another new lifestyle change that we don't even realize we're doing.

There is one aspect to all of this that shines out above all the others, and that's with all the new baby essentials. I've made my lists of what we need to have to be prepared for a new baby, and which items are conveniences instead of necessities, and have been expecting to spend quite a bit of our savings on baby stuff each month as we try to get all the essentials. What I wasn't quite expecting was just how generous people are, and how much the Lord would provide for us in this area. We've had a few people give us or lend us baby stuff that they no longer need, including clothes, diapers, a baby swing, a bouncer, a car seat, etc. Another friend has promised to help me with my sewing, and teach my how to make my own baby sling with fabric I already have (I cannot tell you how excited I am about this!) Add to that the generosity of friends and family with baby shower items, and we are getting fairly close to having everything we need for his first three months (and in some cases for the first year), without spending much at all. We have truly been blessed, and we know it!

So this has been quite the long rambly post that probably almost no one actually got all the way through, but there you have it. The moral of the story is that it's worth it to incorporate small changes into your life, and that they can indeed become great assets when they become second nature. The other moral of the story is that the Lord provides for our needs in ways we often don't even see at the time.

Baked Sweet Potato & Black Beans

Chris came up with this tasty dinner idea for me a few weeks ago... at first I was skeptical, but it's actually very tasty. Kind of like a baked potato w/ chili topping, but I am allergic to both baked potatoes and tomato sauce, so this version is a baked sweet potato with black bean soup topping.

And Chris makes some fantastic black beans... for this batch he sauteed onions, garlic, and mushrooms in olive oil with some creole spice before adding the black beans. I topped it off with some cheddar cheese and some plain yogurt (instead of sour cream) and had quite the tasty meal. The slight sweetness of the sweet potato is actually a great compliment to the spicy black beans.

Just thought I'd share in case anyone is getting tired of their normal dinner options and was in search of a new idea. The best part is it's healthy AND cheap!

My new favorite sea creature

I think this is my new favorite sea creature... Alien Octopus Baby! Some day I will need to make a crochet pattern for one of those! I just can't get enough of those big baby alien eyes.

baby gators

Because I just can't get enough, I wanted to show a close-up of a couple of the baby gators we saw. Aren't they just so cute and tiny?

Paynes Prairie

This past weekend we drove down to Fort Myers, FL for our baby shower. On the drive home, we stopped at Paynes Prairie in Gainesville, to have lunch and take a walk, since I can't really handle long drives anymore, "in my condition." This is one of my favorite places to go ANYWHERE, and we haven't been in a few years... partly because we are rarely in Gainesville for more than a couple hours, and partly because the last time we tried to go, it was flooded from hurricane season. Now there's a new boardwalk that will help that issue when it rains really bad, but then there's still another mile of walking past the path.

This is at the La Chua trail and the Alachua Sink in Gainesville, Florida. Chris and I counted 120 different alligators on our 1.3 mile walk (one way; we only counted on our way back from the end), including 9 brand new baby gators. There are also bison and wild horses living in the prairie, but I've never seen the bison, just the horses. You see signs of them on the trail though, in the form of nice big droppings.

We took tons of photos for those of you who have never enjoyed the fun of walking along the trail watching alligators!

BABIES! There were 9 total, but I think only 7 in this shot. That's momma in front. We could see them so well because they were on our bank, so we had to be careful not to get too close and upset the momma gator.


This one was probably the closest to us of all the gators, actually being up on our bank. But gators don't really bother people unless they're bothered first. Like if we stepped on his head or waved a chicken in front of his face, then we'd be in trouble. Otherwise, no worries.


Large gators on the opposite bank.


Lots of gators lounging at the Alachua Sink. Warm water comes up from the springs below, which is why this is such a "hot spot" for alligators.


This is what most of the trail is like; we walk along the path, and to the right is the stream with all the gators, and to the left is basically nothing. This shot is taken from the overlook at the end of the trail. Walking back from here, we counted 120 gators between the end of the trail and the beginning.


Here's the new boardwalk, at the beginning of the trail.

dumb little decisions

So every few months, after I've been super good with watching all the food I eat to make sure I don't get any of the foods I'm allergic to, and I'm feeling good, I'll start feeling like a pain in the butt from being so obsessive over my food, and I'll start wondering if I'm REALLY that sensitive to this stuff, or if I just think I am and am being difficult on everyone around me with my food issues. "Surely," I think, "a little bit wouldn't hurt me. I probably get contaminated by little bits of stuff all the time and don't even realize it. I'm probably just being silly."

Today was one of those days. I went out for sushi with a coworker for lunch (cooked and veggie sushi, I know I'm not allowed to have the raw stuff while I'm pregnant), and I forgot to bring my wheat-free soy sauce. And so there I am, faced with either eating my avocado roll without soy sauce, or using the wheat-poisoned soy, and I had a moment of stupidity where I thought, "I can probably tolerate just a tiny bit and it won't bother me. I haven't touched anything with gluten in months." Fast forward a few hours, where that tiny bit of gluten has my muscles all sore with that special sore feeling I only get after eating food that my body reacts to. Stupid Kendra.

Live and learn, live and learn. At least I've confirmed in my own mind for another few months that gluten is poison. I haven't forgotten yet that corn is poison, because an organic soda with citric acid in it a few months back had me feeling like I was getting the flu for two days, or potatoes (just because of how very badly they hurt), but I suspect that sometime after Zeke is born, I will want to test just how sensitive I am to tomatoes again. I might miss tomatoes the most.

Christmas from Laos!

We just got a box of Christmas presents in the mail from Sam & Nicole (shipping from Laos takes a long time), and man is it some cool stuff! Chris layed everything out all cool-like and took pictures to share. This is my stash of cool Laotian gifts.

Complete with a set of cool chopsticks, yummy Lao teas, a hand-made book, a tshirt, and a beautiful Nicole-crocheted scarf. Now it just needs to get cold one more time so I can wear the scarf this year! Coolio.