Saturday, November 29, 2008

First Thanksgiving (w/o family)

We celebrated our first Thanksgiving without extended family this year, and it was really nice. We actually ate after the kids were in bed and celebrated with our friends, who were also home without family this year. We all made a few things which combined made an excellent traditional meal. Here are pictures of our centerpiece, which we made from plants we collected with the kids before bed, and the table, set before eating. I guess we were too into the food to remember to get a picture with loaded plates...



Monday, November 17, 2008

QUEEN for a Day

My birthday was last week, and Peter really played his part well! I woke up to the smell of yummy breakfast which was delivered to my bed a little while after he delivered a tray with reading material and a note ordering me not to get out of bed. He had also written on a piece of paper explaining to me that for my birthday, I was QUEEN for the entire day, and he was my slave. He cooked, cleaned, and watched the kids while I got to do whatever I wanted AND order him around. He even brought the phone cradle up to our bed so I could page him with the paging button whenever I needed something. So, for my birthday, I:

*took a relaxing bath
*got a haircut
*went shopping with a friend
*read
*took 2 short naps
*played the piano
*got bored and ordered my slave to let us all be normal until we put the kids to bed (I missed them!)
*went to dinner at a really yummy restaurant that was more expensive than anywhere we've ever been, and was totally worth it (just this once... what does that phrase mean anyway?? It sounds so weird.)
*went to the movies and then left because our movie was sold out

I guess we'll try to go to a movie some other time. We haven't been to a movie in the theater for about 2 1/2 years. We came home from that movie and watched a Netflix movie, but I fell asleep during that, and the wonderful day was over. Lucky for me, my birthday celebrations carried over to the next day, and I got to go shopping with friends the next morning, and then we had cake later that night. So much fun!

I was actually feeling really guilty for leaving that next morning because Peter had worked so hard the day before, but it turned out that even though Little had gone to bed at 6:30pm on my birthday, she didn't wake up until past noon the next day, AFTER I came home. AND, Littler played by herself for an hour while Daddy slept on the couch, and then took a nap so he slept even more, and it was pretty much entirely a non-issue.

THANKS to my wonderful husband for the A++++++++++ birthday!

FOOD

Over the last couple of years, we've been changing the food our family eats and buys, by tending more toward the naturally occurring and organic foods. I really don't think we're too extreme about it, but we definitely try to have as few ingredients as possible in our food. For example, it's been several months since we've purchased bread or tortillas (aside from loaves of "artisan" breads for fun to eat with cheese--and often we'll make that kind of bread, too--it's just fun to buy it pre-made, so it's like our family's version of eating out). We prefer to make our bread because it's cheaper and yummier and healthier, too. We make our own salad dressing with various vinegars and oils, we pressure cook our own beans, and we've even dabbled in cheese a little bit (and plan to really broaden our cheese knowledge soon).

This article really stresses to me PART of WHY we decided to do this in the first place. Health, safety, money, taste are probably most of the reasons.

Someday, we'd really like to be eating all of our food from the most basic ingredients. The cool thing, you don't have to sacrifice taste! It's great! In fact, when you've been eating more natural foods, a lot of the other foods that are artificially flavored and synthesized really end up tasting pretty gross. (Not all, unfortunately for all of us...)