Consumed

Though I'm hardly on Facebook these days, it was a good way to share some news with a lot of people at once.  For a few of our friends who aren't FB users, and for my own journal-keeping purposes, I figured I'd better quickly outline three major changes that our family is dealing with in 2011.

1.  First, the happy news!  Baby #6 will join our family approximately August 30.  After a miscarriage at 7 weeks last summer, I was thrilled to see a heartbeat on the monitor at my first appointment on Monday.  I'm just past 9 weeks, and all is going well so far.

2.  And the sad news.  We learned on Monday that Ted is definitely deploying for a full year, with 4 weeks of training beginning in mid-April and leading up to his report date of May 28.  Though we were bracing ourselves for the possibility, knowing that it is a certainty has cast a certain pall over our lives.  And yet, we know God's purposes will prevail, and we pray that He alone will receive the glory for what He accomplishes in and through us during this time.  We do rejoice and thank the Lord for moving the hearts of our landlord and his wife to allow us to extend our lease one more year, so the children and I will be able to stay put, giving us some much-needed stability and nearness to our support network in the neighborhood and of course at our amazing church.

3.  Finally, we have officially begun a new diet/lifestyle.  I hesitate to use the word "diet," because that conjures up images of people trying to lose weight.  That isn't really our primary goal, though I suppose the taller members of our family could stand to lose a few pounds, LOL.  The program we are following is the GAPS diet, along with the Specific Carbohydrate Diet.  The steps leading to this major decision are too complicated to outline in this (supposedly) short post, but in a nutshell, we hope to heal the bodies of our family members who have been struggling with allergies and asthma and have been on medication for the symptoms.  Enough is enough--it's time to stop treating the symptoms and get to the root cause.  Additionally, we have learned too much about the food industry, so our change is more than simply cutting out sugars and grains--we're also replacing meat and dairy products with REAL food!  More expensive, to be sure, but we want to know our food is coming from good sources that will help us be healthy, not add to our health problems.

Any one of these issues could easily overwhelm me on any given day...but combining all three, I feel completely consumed.  I freely admit I'm overwhelmed at the thought of adding another baby to our clan when I feel I can barely keep up with the care and schooling of the ones we have.  Doing it all as a single parent makes the task even more daunting.  And now add to that the fact that I am cooking 3 meals a day and can no longer rely on the "easy" meals that seemed to free up so much of my time!  This week, I have spent approximately 90% of my waking hours in the kitchen.  I have been consumed by the difficulties of implementing a new lifestyle.  I know it will get easier as time goes on...much time this week has been spent making homemade condiments and soup bases, for example.

When circumstances threaten to overwhelm me, I just cling to my Father in heaven, and I keep thinking of the verse from Lamentations:  "Because of the Lord's great love, we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail."  What a promise!  He will never fail us.  He will never leave or forsake us.  When the world seems to be spinning out of control, He's there holding it together.  How thankful I am that He is our Rock and our Redeemer.  Without Him, who could stand?

And so we are NOT consumed!  I have many moments in which I feel I am.  (You should have seen me trying not to curse at my blender this afternoon!!)  But by God's grace, we will get through this, and Lord willing, it will be triumphantly declaring His praises and His glory!

10 on Tuesday

I really need to sit and do some focused blog entries soon, but there are a lot of little things, so here we are again with another 10 on Tuesday...

1. The kids had their eye exams this morning after a year and a half. Charis is now sporting a trial pair of contacts (my baby's growing up!), and Arden has a pair of reading glasses on order. Tobin is getting new frames and lenses that will hopefully hold up. Both he and Charis are supposed to take their glasses/lenses OFF for up-close reading and activities, while Arden is supposed to wear his for the same purpose in order to try to prevent him from needing regular glasses in the near future. Despite desperate pleas otherwise, Kenna is NOT getting glasses. (Nor did she have her eyes examined, I might add!)

2. We've always used whole-wheat pasta for our cooking at home, with the exception of boxed mac-n-cheese for quick lunches now and then. Recently, however, I've become convinced (convicted?) that we need to be more proactive in making sure we are keeping processed foods OUT of our bodies, or at least to an extreme minimum. So, today we had homemade mac-n-cheese, which the kids like just as much if not better. (I ate some myself, and that would NOT have happened if we had made it from a box. Ick.)

3. The problem with #2 is that I have not yet located whole wheat elbow macaroni. I know it's out there--I used to buy it at Walmart in Las Vegas, for cryin' out loud. But the commissary and Walmart here neither one carry it. I'll have to check Kroger's and possibly Trader Joe's, which is quite a haul from our house, but one I will be making regularly in the future.

4. Lucan is now saying...syllables. We're eagerly waiting for him to become more verbal, but so far his word repertoire consists of "Hi!" (with MUCH inflection, as if a grown-up is talking baby talk, which is probably why he says it that way--everyone around him says "Hi-iii" when they see him!), "ya" (yeah), "bubba," "ma," "na/da" or something like that for no. The accompanying shove with his "no" syllable does wonders for interpretation.

5. Ted had an exciting weekend--he attended a Project 86 concert Friday night and took Arden to a Broncos game in Cincinnati Sunday night. Arden was thrilled to go! Tobin was thrilled to stay home and finally watch the first Spiderman movie, LOL. Charis thought the movie was "OK." :-)

6. School is beginning to start up around here. Our city schools start a week from today. Frankly, I'll be glad when everyone else's kids go to school, LOL! Our boys are hardly home these days! But seriously, I can understand why many moms can't WAIT to send their kids to school. Two and a half months without a routine definitely tends to make the kids go crazy. Though I had great intentions for keeping us on a summer-school type of schedule, doing math, Bible bee activities, reading, etc., we've been flying by the seat of our pants the last few weeks, and it's showing!

7. Due to #6, a MOTH schedule is coming soon to a refrigerator near us. (Managers of Their Homes,for the uninitiated.)

8. I can't remember if I already posted this...Ted and I have signed up to run a 5K in September to support some missionaries from our church. My time should be GREAT if, like this morning, I get the urge to use the restroom 1/2 mile into the run.

9. It's less than 2 weeks until the local Bible Bee competition. We're way behind, but we're pressing on.

10. I have a new planner! My brain is happy. :-)

The Little Green Drink

I stole this blog post title from my friend Annette, who wrote about this same thing recently. I've long heard that a great way to get kids to eat more greens is instead to have them DRINK more greens. And as the Happy Box people tell us, many greens are best enjoyed in smoothie fashion.

Well, I had never actually tried this, though I thought it was a great idea. Spurred on by Annette's post...AND by BOXES of greens from last week's Happy Box delivery (good heavens, how much lettuce, spinach, kale, and cabbage can one family eat in 7 days?!), I decided it was high time we tried this out.

Yesterday was our first attempt. I didn't let the kids see what I was doing, heh. Into the blender went:

* 7-8 strawberries
* 2 bananas
* 1 cup of orange juice
* about 1/2 cup of plain yogurt
* some ice
* and kale...lots of kale...all the way to the top of the blender.

I set the blender on high and let 'er rip until you couldn't see any individual pieces of green--it was just all one smooth shade of green, not unlike Elphaba's skin tone in Wicked. I poured a big cupful into a ginormous cup with a lid and straw so the kids couldn't see what was in it. Then I made them each take a big sip. After I heard all their excited reactions, I told them they could each have their own cup and straw. They laughed at the Yoda coloring, but they drank it all up! I never did tell them there were veggies in it!

Annette recommends some other healthful additions, none of which I have on hand at the moment. But as she pointed out, the simple fruit and greens combination gives so many good vitamins and nutrients!

I made another smoothie recipe this evening to go with dinner--I had made salad for Ted and me, and since our kids aren't big salad fans, I decided why not let them have smoothies?! They thought they were getting away with no veggies for the evening, ha! I did the same thing as last time, only I just had one banana left, so I used the rest of our strawberry yogurt in place of the plain yogurt. It was just as tasty.

I look forward to more experimentation! This will definitely help us use up all of the Happy Box ingredients, methinks!