What Do You Eat??

Over the past year, our family has made a change in our diet. We had been cutting way back on meat intake for a while, and then we cut back on dairy. This past year, we've moved to a primarily vegan diet. We try to stick with 90% vegan foods, with a lot of veggies, fruits, nuts, whole grains and beans.

The "90% vegan", practically speaking, means that we eat vegan at home with exceptions at restaurants and celebrations like birthdays. I stick with it the most strictly. My exceptions are pretty much confined to our monthly trips to our favorite Indian restaurant. I choose only vegetarian items, but I know they probably have ghee- clarified butter- in them. I've been doing this long enough that I've really lost the taste for meat and dairy. Daddy "celebrates" more than the rest of us. ;-) His diet, though, really is much better than it was before.

Anyway, I thought I'd just post what we eat for about a week, just for fun. People seem to be curious as to what you eat if you don't eat meat. Here goes:

Saturday
Saturdays are our feast days. We're busy during the week, so our meals are simple then. I try to do something special to welcome the Sabbath on Friday night, and then we all like a big breakfast/brunch on Saturday morning. The kids, on this day, got up and ate apples and had a glass of almond milk. I guess this was their first "snack" of the day.
Breakfast: Oatmeal Pancakes with Orange Syrup, fresh raspberries, and orange juice. I'll post the recipe for the Pancakes. We love them, and I use the leftovers to make almond butter and jelly sandwiches for Bryan to eat for his weekday breakfasts. (He eats in the car on the way to work, so it has to be portable.)
Lunch: Breakfast was late, so there's not really much "lunch" to speak of. Just my homemade whole wheat challah with carrot sticks as a snack.
Dinner: Spaghetti (Bryan's absolute favorite), homemade whole wheat French bread, steamed broccoli, and a big salad with olives and cherry tomatoes. We had almond cookies for dessert.

Sunday
Breakfast: We need to be quick in order to get to church at 8:30, so I made QUICK bread. Orange Quick Bread. Even though I made it with spelt and cut the sugar in half, it's still kind of a treat. I opted for muesli, but then ended up sneaking the last piece of Orange Bread when I got home from church. Justin wasn't happy about that. I guess he was planning on doing the same thing, but I beat him to it.
Lunch: Lentil Nut Mini Loaves, Baked Potatoes with Chives, Steamed Kale, and Fresh Cherries for dessert.
Dinner: I decided we just HAD to run some errands, so we found ourselves out around dinner time. Poor planning on my part. The kids had had Lara Bars in the car earlier, but they were HUNGRY. Anyway, we went to a Souper Salad, and got big salads and vegetarian soup with fresh melon for dessert. We made (mostly) vegan selections. I think a couple of the kids got ranch dressing, and I can't vouch for the cornbread. As a sidenote: It was a perfect opportunity to see that here in America, one can make himself a full "salad" without touching a single vegetable.

Monday
Breakfast: Steel Cut Oatmeal with Almond or Soy Milk. The kids have theirs with a touch of molasses and cinnamon. (My Opa from Tennessee gets us the best molasses.) I have mine just with cinnamon. Later, we had apples for snack.
Lunch: Stir-"Fried" (really steamed) Veggies and Rice, Steamed Bok Choy, and Kiwi for dessert. The kids had Bananas with Almond Butter for snack before gymnastics.
Dinner: Almond Butter and Jelly Sandwiches for the kiddos, Big Salads for everybody. Mango Smoothies for dessert (mmm, yummy!) (Bryan eats a late snack at work, and then usually has our "lunch" for dinner when he gets home. He gets home late, so that works out better during the week.)

Tuesday
Breakfast: Fruit Salad (with lots of yummy fresh and frozen fruit) topped with milled flax seed and Almond Cream Sauce (made with almonds, dates, and water).
Lunch: Leftovers!! The kids had spaghetti and I had stir fry. We had had baked tortilla chips (just baked corn tortillas) and black bean dip (black beans and salsa whirled together in the food processor) as a snack earlier. We had been raking mulch all morning and we needed some fortification!
Dinner: Pecans and raisins for afternoon snack, then Big Salads and Vegetable Soup for dinner. My friend Kristi gave me the idea to have salad stuff (lots of variety) in the fridge just to pull out whenever. Then everyone assembles their own salads. It's fun for the kids and really healthy too. I also fixed the kids smoothies. These are a good way to get them to down some things they might not otherwise eat. (In this case, I was trying to get a certain avocado-hater to consume some heart-healthy fat. Shhh...)

Why you should NOT buy dyed mulch

Well, here it is! The mulch that marks the beginning of our yardwork. We are finally starting to get some things done on the outside of the house. Our first step was to mulch in the large (100x50) circle in the driveway. The kids were excited about spreading it, and I'm happy to have their help, but...

The mulch is dyed black, and this was the result.

Justin says he's like the "Epicomian" (Ethiopian) in Kipling's Just So Stories. Let's just hope it's non-toxic...

Creepy

Okay, I REALLY hate snakes. This one was slithering across the driveway when Nathan and I were taking the trash cans up to the road. Then, he got up in a tree. (Nathan wants to know how I know it's a "he.") Our good-for-nothing cats were calmly munching their dry food all the way back at the house. He (or she) was about 3 feet long.

My skin is still crawling.

(Click on the picture to enlarge it.)

Mommy, you have to put this on your blog!

"Mommy, you have to put this on your blog!" That's what Nathan said as he marched triumphantly away from his gymnastics fun meet, proudly waving his certificate with six blue ribbons on it.

The fun meet is an annual event for the gymnasts who aren't on the teams to show off their skills. The older (non-preschool) kids get scored based on their performance, and then get a corresponding colored ribbon. Blue is the best, and Nathan got all blues! He was so excited.

We had a great evening. Evan and Justin participated with the preschool club, and they were adorable. (Carsten is too young, and Megan is on the Level 1 team, so she will have her first competition sometime in late summer.) All the younger kids got medals. Justin told me before the meet that he was going to get gold, "because silver is just a loser!" Not sure where he heard that. Maybe he's going to be competitive.

At any rate, a picture is worth a thousand words, and a VIDEO, well, that's hard to calculate. Hope you enjoy the latest thing we're trying out on the blog- Live Action!

Hello Again!

Well, the long silence following my last post makes it seem as if I've been buried under a great mound of laundry. Almost true, but not entirely, I promise!

(I am currently typing with one hand while nursing baby Steffen- every capital is a sacrifice.)

So here is what has been going on around here in short form:
Feb. 27th- Megan turned 7!
March 15th- Justin turned 4!
March 29th- our home Passover Seder with just one other family- a really fun evening
March 30th- church Seder with over 200 people!

We also wrapped up Classical Conversations for the year, took a trip to the symphony (Evan recognized the French horn and identified when the different instruments were coming in- yeah CC!), and the two older kids went with some friends to Enchanted Rock. Then, of course, there was gymnastics and school and church (Our Awana program just finished for the year) and all those other things. And I forgot to mention the Keepers at Home mother-daughter sleepover and the Contenders for the Faith father-son fun night.

I'm not just behind on laundry and blogging- Steffen is 3 months behind on his check-ups (he looks healthy to me, and I've seen lots of babies) and I've realized that I really need to schedule next year's school (I placed the curriculum order today.)

I do plan on getting a few pictures up soon, so don't give up on checking in entirely! ;-) And look for an update on the laundry soon- I think we may be coming up with a solution!

Laundry

Since it is ever so much more fun to blog about laundry than to actually do it...

Our laundry is endless. This is, in fact, a true statement, because at any given moment, clothes are either in the washer, dryer, hamper, or on bodies just waiting to be put in the washer, dryer or hamper. Usually, there are clothes in all four places. Truthfully, the hampers are winning the "most clothes" contest.

Now, not all of these clothes in the hamper are dirty. Many are washed and just waiting, very patiently, to be folded. Herein lies the problem. Clothes are patient. They just wait, quietly, without any fanfare until someone needs them. They know that they are needed, so they don't make a fuss. Because of this, they get overlooked. Now, if clothes whined and demanded attention, they'd be folded and put away promptly.

Back many, many long ages ago, when I only had 2 children, I ran across a message board devoted to large families. One of the questions posed was this: What do you do if you haven't sorted socks in awhile? Isn't that silly? What kind of a question is that? You just sort them and put them in the drawers by the neatly folded underwear and PJs. Now, though, I know. I know all about that question. And I have the answer: Let them sit in a basket and everyone can just grab two of the same (relatively same) color.

Of course, this isn't a REAL answer, but it is the current "system" in place at our house. It doesn't stay like that, I assure you. It goes in cycles. I get them sorted and folded and put away. (I have long since given up on putting socks in drawers- they go in a bin by the shoes and all the kids guess at which ones fit.) Then, more socks appear out of nowhere and invade the laundry room once again. Now, before you get judgmental, please remember that our family can go through 98 socks in a week. (You can check my math!) And that doesn't include the kids taking off their socks and losing them somewhere in the house, thus necessitating the wearing of a new pair.

Well, that's plenty of blogging about laundry. Now, I must go and fold 8- yes 8- loads of laundry.

And I still won't have finished it all...

Nathan's Birthday

Nathan is 8! And for the second year in a row, his birthday party had to be delayed due to sickness. (We were all down with bad colds.) But we had a fun time the next week. He wanted a chess theme, so that's what we did. Those are chocolate and white chocolate chess pieces on the cake (made with a candy mold.) Almost all of his friends were able to come, and they all played and played. They were having so much fun that we didn't even interrupt them to play the "planned party game." It couldn't have been as exciting as running around outside and playing tag in the dark. We did give them glow-in-the-dark necklaces so that we wouldn't lose them.