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!

Advent: Day 22

Today, for our Advent project, we made gingerbread men. Our vegan recipe is super yummy and we went all traditional and used raisins for the decorations. I think Santa's going to be getting gingerbread cookies under the tree this year. Leilani had so much fun pouring the ingredients, sifting the dry ingredients and mixing them all together.

While we were mixing and measuring, Natalia was playing with Jeremy - she was in a serious daddy-mood this morning. He had to hold her constantly or she got M-A-D. It made me giggle - evil, I know - since he got to experience a bit of what I go through every day. I love Natalia, so don't get me wrong, but she just does NOT like to be anywhere but in someones arms. As a baby, she has that prerogative, I know, but that's why the floor doesn't get swept and dinner's not made - no using a knife while holding a baby! She finally settled on the floor and did some zombie-crawling, pulled a couple ornaments off the tree and then grabbed my leg.

After Natalia released him, Jeremy went out to the garage to get everything ready for his huge DIY project - this amazing bed. Leilani is beyond excited. He's going to be the girls' hero for years to come for making this thing. It's incredible.

Last night, our Christmas light hunting lasted maybe 20 minutes. Natalia fell asleep and Leilani was just done. We had bundled them up in their PJs and went out with high hopes. But alas, this area really doesn't do much in the way of Christmas lights. It was a rather sad showing, but Leilani did enjoy seeing the lights we saw. After we got back, Leilani had some cookies and watched a snowman movie that wound up scaring her, so we switched to Super Why. She finished the snowman movie this morning and wasn't nearly as scared - I think last night had something to do with being tired. Natalia stayed asleep after we got home, and then woke up a little after seven and didn't go back to sleep until 11:30 - used to be that was no problem, staying up that late, but I'm officially a mommy - I was ready for bed hours before she was. We danced, played with some puzzles, watched Elf, had some cookies and read some stories.

Setting Up the Tree

I told you I'm seriously in the Christmas mood! We set our tree up today, Jeremy and Leilani set the tree up while I cooked and took care of Natalia, then Leilani put up most of the ornaments with occasional help from me, Jeremy, and even Natalia (who more chewed ornaments rather than putting them up, but still...). Now Leilani's ready to wrap presents and put them under the tree *grin*

I eventually want to do once-a-month cooking, but for now, whenever I make a meal, I'm making double and freezing the second batch. Just trying to do little things to make life a bit easier.

Natalia's been ALMOST crawling all day. She gets up on her hands and knees and bounces, turns circles, and kicks. She's so close!

I know we did more than that, today, but the day got a bit derailed by Leilani throwing a massive fit and spending a lot of time in time-out. It sort of works, time outs. I'm not really sure what works with her, I just know that this isn't a particularly fun aspect of parentingh, but an incredibly necessary one.

Bnh jbn7vnmn87m - this is Natalia's contribution to today's post *grin*

We're still doing our Thankful Tree, it'll be fun to go over it on Thanksgiving and see what we've been thankful for :).

Halloween pt 1

I started off the day by making Leilani the breakfast she wanted - pumpkin shaped pancakes (used the "bisquick" mix I made the other day). I had no syrup, so macerated some strawberries for a fresh fruit syrup.

After breakfast, we knocked school out because I'd told Leilani she couldn't put her costume on until she was done with school. So school pretty much took no time flat. We all donned our costumes (mine is literally just a witch hat) and headed off to WalMart. I've been getting most of our fruits and veggies frozen, because they're cheaper and more economical. I mean, if I don't use an entire bell pepper, I've just thrown away money, but if I have pepper strips, I can just pull out what I need, no waste.

I had all the best intentions of making Natalia's baby food, but reality is biting me in the butt - Natalia won't let me put her down long enough to make her food. I wound up buying the best option they had, organic, and on the vegan options, it even says vegan, how cool is that? After I got all the groceris put away, I un-costumed Natalia and fed her. I've never seen a baby so excited to eat "real" food.

Staying in our vegan-ness, did you know oreos are vegan? Well, they are, and it's Halloween, so I got Leilani and I each a small pack. You know, the individual size servings. Hardly healthy, I know, but it's probably going to be my only treat today. And Leilani can eat hardly any of the candy she'll be getting, what with dyes and animal products and all. I'll proably relax the animal product thing, but can't really relax the dye thing, since she seems to be allergic to them.

We're planning on going to a trunk or treat at a church that's down the road. It should be fun, and I'm hoping it's mostly indoors since it's supposed to be raining off and on all day. I'll blog about that tomorrow, and have pictures :)

Living Frugally

We're trying to cut our expenses, so we can get out of debt and start some savings. In the spirit of frugalness, I've been doing all sorts of money saving activities.

First, I've been making our own bread, well, until my bread maker conked out on me. Right after I threw out the sourdough starter, of course. Then, since we eat quite a few beans and bean products, instead of buying cans of beans, I bought dried beans in bulk on amazon, and have been cooking beans everyday in my slow cooker for the past five days. I figured that I'll save around $150 over the course of the beans' life. That adds up to quite a significant savings! I also want to avoid cans because of the BPA in the lining, I don't want to put that into any of our bodies. SO between trying to save money and cut out icky chemicals, I have my work cut out for me *grin*. I made my own "bisquick" mix today, it only took about 3 minutes.

I've also been reworking our leftovers into new meals. Like on Saturday I made baked potatoes with "cheezee" sauce and broccoli,so Sunday I took the potatoes, cubed them, tossed them with some frozen broccoli, cauliflower, zucchini, carrots and squash and roasted them. Then today, I took what was leftover from that, seperated out the potatoes and blended them with some soy milk, mixed it all back together, heated it through and - waalaa! - potato-vegetable soup.

Then, I'm going to use all our boxes left from the move to make different decorations and artwork to put up around the house.

Basically, I'm just trying to look at things we don't use on an everyday basis and see how I can rework them into something we need and would use more often. And eliminate as much waste as possible. It's a good exercise for all of us in being content with what we have and creativity.