The First of February

So today, to help me along in my no-yell challenge, I made this:

I went to Wal-Mart and found a frame on clearance, got some orange paint, glitter and ribbon. I painted the frame, glittered it up, made a bow and glued it on. Then I put some pink colored scrapbook paper and used the glass as a dry erase board and wrote "Raise your words, not voice. - It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder."

After Natalia woke up, I put her in the stroller and we went for a little walk around the neighborhood. Only about twenty minutes, but it felt great and Natalia LOVED it. My new mantra is "even a small workout is better than no workout." Sometimes I feel kind of like "why should I work out, I can only do it for a few minutes" so now, I'm just gonna do those few minutes. I also bought a baby yoga book for Natalia and a Yoga ABC coloring book for Leilani - we'll do a new move each week and she'll get to color it in, too. I'm really excited. I've been wanting to teach Leilani yoga for a while and now I think I've found a good way to do it.

I had to go get a few things for Super Bowl Sunday...we'll be going over to some friends' house and obviously we'll need some vegan options. I got some vegan burger crumbles, daiya cheddar, salsa and tofu (to make my own vegan sour cream), and I'm going to try to make a dip my brother used to make all the time. It was fantastic and I can't wait to vegan-ize it. I'm also going to try veganizing one of my favorite soups sometime next week - cheesy bacon potato soup. I made a soft cashew cheese I'm going to use in place of the cream cheese, I have smoky tempeh crumbles (in place of the bacon), and soy milk powder to make the heavy cream. Anyway, back to Super Bowl Sunday - I'm also going to make chocolate chip cookie doozers. I'm pretty excited. Tomorrow, Leilani and I will be baking up a storm :).

Tonight we made one of Leilani's favorites - tacos! I use TVP (instead of buying veggie crumbles, it's so much cheaper!) and we used crunchy shells since Leilani specifically requested them. Also, Leilani's school is doing a Read-A-Thon and Leilani needs sponsors! We're going to read 20 minutes a day for the whole month of February (since, ya know, we don't ALREADY do that - averaged out, anyway) for a total of 560 minutes for the month. She's going to read at least five of those minutes, then I'll read the remaining 15 or less. Hopefully, by the end of the month, she'll be reading most of it. That's my personal goal, anyway.

Tomorrow, it's on to baking!