Spent the day preparing for the kids Halloween parties. For those who wonder what a stay at home mom does with her time, one of the things I did today was create juice box zombies.  I hope  these little guys make great memories for my daughter and her friends.  Took about thirty minutes while the little man napped.  Just one if the many tasks on the "complete before Halloween" list.

Happy Wednesday night!

Simple things I learned

& 

The Weekend Before Halloween! 

 

The secret to a successful move, and life, is keeping busy.  I learned that from a dear friend in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.  She is humble and does not like it when I point out what I have learned from her.  So I feel mildly guilty when I say, "whatever" and decide to hold her on pedestal anyway.   I will proclaim that she taught me that you cannot wait for the world to come to you - you need to embrace the world!  To reference my title, this as a concept is simple and some people do not have to move to South Dakota to figure that out.  I on the other hand learned, in part due to being starved for things to do in a bitterly cold environment, that taking advantage of what is around you is important part of experiencing life.

In less general terms this means looking for local attractions, events, fun and going to it.  I moved to the right place to try this out, Colorado has large community which embraces this very simple understanding of life.  There is always, always a local event worth trying.  I understand why many of the local cities are considered the happiest in the USA (source CNN money - so, if you think your community is better, take it up with CNN money).  Everybody is always out embracing life - with music, festivals, farmers markets and giant inflatable balls we stick our kids in and watch them run into things!  (See picture below). 

Another reason I am sure that some of our local cities are the happiest in the country are the many local restaurants designed for families.  When I say designed for families I do not mean Chuckie Cheese (which is more like parent hell with loud noises, blinking lights, tracking down your kids, trying not to step one someone else's angel, demands for tickets, demands for money, demands for candy, demands for demands, fights and the grand finale full on meltdowns!  The type of meltdown where you end up dragging your little red faced, tear streaked cherub from the Las Vegas style clinking and clacking machines home - all the while assuring the staff you are not kidnapping your own kid).  I do not mean they have great kid menus with Kraft Macaroni & Cheese and hot dogs (which they chargeyou five bucks for and you could have made at home), or adults in cartoon character suits (which you always wonder what kind of adult is hidden inside), or clowns, or ponies, or crayons (which my son eats or throws at passing waitresses).  What I mean is they have outdoor seating with sun, and fresh air, as well as areas for the kids to do kid stuff AND they serve amazing drinks! 

This weekend our outdoor restaurant had solid Margaritas, plus a place for the kids to draw on the sidewalk with chalk (fenced in), plus a grassy area to run around.  Not only are these kid activities effective and less artificial (no blinking lights, no electronic games, no huge walking teddy bears), there are always kids taking advantage of them.   No one is tense about their children playing - we can see them, they have the fresh air and are less sensory overloaded, thus,(sometimes) they fight less.  It feels more like eating at a park with a waitress and a nice buzz, which is, also a simple lesson to a happy life, superior to eating in an indoor, uptight restaurant and trying to bribe my son with fries to keep him from climbing on to the table and flinging food like a monkey at the zoo.  Or bribing my daughters to not fight with the iPad and Kindle Fire.  One of the first local digs we tried out is an Ice cream shop with an outdoor play area and inflated rubber cows for infants, toddlers and the kids to jump on and wrestle with.  They do not allow dogs inside the fenced off human area (and whereas I love dogs it is nice to know my children can play without ending up in a mess).

We spent Saturday downtown.  We grabbed a bite to eat at an outdoor restaurant, (with, as I feel the need to restate, amazing margaritas), trick or treated from store to store, watched the annual Halloween 10k and 5k runners finished their marathon (I told the family next year we are hitting the 5k - it was the kids marathon!), and finished up at one of our favorite ice cream places (the ones with the rubber cows). 

Sunday we hit the local pumpkin patch!  Well, one of the local pumpkin patches, turns out there are a lot. I learned a couple things about pumpkin patches that I will pass on:

• Hit the Pumpkin Patch Early in the Season.  It was a little depressing to see how many rotted and smashed pumpkins there were... it was also very hard to find ones we liked. 
• Know that you understand the simple and enlighten truth about life - doing things is healthy, no matter how your family acts!  The kids may have stated several times, "I like when we got to Target and just buy pretty pumpkins", they also said things like, "this is hot", and my man might have grumbled "this sucks".   And maybe your son does not face you when you try to snag a quick, cute autumn shot for the baby book (see above picture).  Just know you are doing the right thing, even when you are hot, sweaty hot, and holding an overtired child and a camera that is too heavy (especially when you have an iPhone that takes fine photos), and you kids have backwashed in all the bottled water you brought, and you find yourself snapping, "no" a lot more than you envisioned...sigh... you are doing the right thing!  BEcause, near the end of the couple hours in the Colorado heat, and the pillaged pumpkin patch you kids get to try something new and fun, being put in inflatable balls in water and running into each other!  Then you know, it was worth it to simply leave the house and do something fun!

This might lead to a more than a few tiring weekends, but it also has led to a bunch of wild adventures.

 

Happy Tuesday Everybody!

Be grateful, Monday if over...

(this week)

Our Essentials for the Nomadic Life Style

Evening walk.

My attempt at interior decorating.

We still do not have a permanent location to live.  Right now we are in our new temporary housing.  We spent two months at our old temporary housing, before that two weeks in two different hotels.  Our first real temporary "home" was a sizable (1200 square foot), but really dingy townhouse.  My proof of dinginess was the full canister of dirt in our vacuum every other day.  Yuck.   Our bedroom and living room boosted the only normal sized windows which faced a wonderful view of a couple office buildings and our tiny "backyard" (aka dog bathroom) was over grown with weeds and creepy crawlers.  The part I will always remember are the large, squish resilient spiders I killed daily.  Still get spider-mares at night! 

Luckily our dog loves to eat spiders, our cats are essentially worthless.  The only living creature in my house that helps out is our dog.  She eats food that spills on the floor, licks my sons face clean, licks the high chair clean and eats the bugs I miss, plus alerts me to people at the door. 

This being stated we made the best out of our home.  I decorated with pillows, and a rug from Costco (the idea being to keep my little man off the gross floor as much as possible).  Plus, my daughters and I found Halloween items to decorate with, as Halloween is one of our favorite holidays.  We had evening walks to the local park, very cute park, full of nice people walking their dogs or playing with their kids, plus neighborhood young adults playing
basketball or frisbee.  My favorite part of the park, and really so far of the entirety of Colorado, are the mountains and trees.  Every where we go we can see the mountains in the background, and they are beautiful!  Plus, right now all the trees are turning bright yellows and reds.  Gorgeous autumn colors. 

At our new location we are closer to the community we want to live in and we have beautiful large windows that flood our tiny apartment with light (and heat). Very appealing to my California roots.  At night we take walks around the lake, view the mountains at sunset and get bitten by evil mosquitoes.

The most difficult part of temporary living is that everything we own is in storage.  I found that within the first few weeks I was purchasing things I cannot live with out.  Everyone in our family has learned what our essentials for a happy life are for each of us as individuals.  For me that has been a kitchen aid, effective vacuum and cupcake tins.  All used frequently.  I brought with me my coffeemaker and Romba.  Of course my camera.  :-)

Ramona's most recent dragon drawing

For Ramona art supplies are imperatives; thus, we now have fabric paint, water colors, markers, colored pencils, crayons and paper.  On top of that we replaced scissors, a dreaded addition to our belongings since kid with scissors essentially means little bits of cut up paper all over the floor.  Glue and glitter are similarly dreaded belongings, that we have replaced, and I have spent late hours cleaning off the floor and furniture.  At least Ramona feels at home, and lets face it, when I am hunched over scrubbing glue and glitter off the floor I am pretty sure I feel at home too.

Ramona's Class Flag Design!

Ramona has been flexing her art skills in class too!  She is getting a reputation as an artist.  She takes this very seriously.  Her teacher asked her what she is good at for an in-class interview and Ramona said, "Art".  No real surprise; however, she followed that statement up with, "It was what I was born to do."  This took my breath away.  How many people feel they are born to do anything!  I had a huge mommy pride moment, plus a bit of an anxiety attack about her future... art is not an easy field to make a dent in.   Ramona also won the class competition to create the class flag.  So, she had been diligently designing and painting the flag that will hang outside her classroom for the entire school year.

 

For Beezus we have slowly been building a home library (and of course got a library card).  Currently she into the Warriors series.  Her new reading obsession.  The drawback to Beezus's love of books, she stays up very late reading.  I have to take all the books out of her room, which usually involves looking under her pillow, under bed, under her blankets and in her dresser.  I end up leaving the room with piles of books, which I do not bother to put in our bookcase, but instead dump on the floor.  If I do put them "away" they are all gone anyway by bedtime the next day, hidden all over the room again.  I am proud of Beezus and her love of reading; however, she is the only kid I have which the punishment is no books past 8pm. 
 

Our book collection so far...

Of course, when Beezus is not reading, she is composing a book.  She has her writer's binder full of pages with hand written plots, characters and chapters.  This is harder to take out of the room, because often her loose leaf pages mix with Ramona's loose leaf pages of art.  Ramona hides her sketch pads all over the room and draws late at night and together they make their room a mess of papers and creations- but thankfully the scissors and glue are still in the dining room.  Too bad dogs don't eat paper - that would make my dog the best vacuum ever!







Hope my family enjoys my update.  Things are, as my mom would say, chugging along.

 

Happy Almost Halloween!

Puppy Love

My son is a little man of few words.  He is fourteen months old and his vocabulary consists of a couple main words, "daddy", "goggy"  (aka doggy) and "mama".  Mama means "I want", "get this", "no, you fool", "hurry up", "my sisters are annoying me", "water", "food", "no car seat", "I love you", "no I do not want my diaper changed" and so on.   Daddy means daddy and sometimes doggy when we are not sure which word he is actually using.

He does like to elaborate.  For this he has some baby signs.  He knows "I want", "dog", "duck", "cat", "food", "sing, "twinkle twinkle" and "that" ("that" is just pointing).  It is with these signs I have learned that he thinks all in animals (if it is not ducks or cats it is dogs).  He makes his baby sign for dog daily, sometimes hourly.  In fact, it is through this communication I have learned just how important our dog is to him.

He follows our dog around, tackles her, kisses her, bites her (yes he does do this), he likes to smash her face, poke her eyes, grab her feet and at least twice a day he gives her massive bear hugs.  he loves to lean on her, lie on her and he tries to sit on her. He does not like to share her.  When his older sister was relaxing on the couch and placed her feet on the dog he got very defensive.  He screamed at her over and over "mama!"  "mama!"  (in this situation "mama" meant "mine").  While screaming "mama" he kept attempting to  knock her feet off the dog.  She was mischievously grinning during all of this.  If he succeeded  in knocking her feet off, she would just place her feet back and ignore him.  He tried hugging our dog, and pulling our dog away from her (but he is smaller - and our dog is pretty damn good at this point at ignoring him).  Finally, in a fit of desperation he attached his sisters legs.  Biting and pushing them to get his precious dog back... sigh.

Sometimes during the day he sits in my lap, points to my computer says, "ma, ma" waggles his finger at the screen and says either "googy", does his sign for dog, or says "meow" for cat.  Which means it is time for one of our favorite new games, look images of dogs and cats up on google.  It is amazing how long that game can last.

He loves our dog so much that he feeds all the food I give him immediately to her.  If it looks like I am going to stop him from this he throws the food fast, instead of sharing it in pieces.  A new rule has been made in our house, the dog has to be in the other room while we eat - in hopes some of the solid food makes it my sons mouth.

Thus, it is not surprising that the new word my son has added to his vocabulary is "bed".  "Bed" does not mean "nap time", "I am sleepy", "I just woke up" or anything having to do with people sleep habits.  "Bed" is the command that everyone in the house uses when our dog has to go to her mat.  So, now he signs dog, says dog, calls all living animals that are not cats or ducks dog, feeds the dog all his food, often most his water, and he now commands her when to go to bed. 

Still waiting on him figuring out his sisters names.

Happy Late Friday Early Saturday!

Gluten-Free Insenstive

Tonight, right before bedtime, this article made it across my Facebook feed:

 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kelly-maclean/surviving-whole-foods_b_3895583.html?utm_hp_ref=fb&src=sp&comm_ref=false#sb=5329153b=facebook

 

 

Many people thought this article was very funny, while a whole community of those who eat gluten-free were pissed off.  I found this article to be offensive, despite it's claim to be satirical.  I believe the author could have done herself a favor and at least understood the gluten-free community before flippant, disrespectful article.  I too see that many people are joining a fad; however, that fad is based on a solid, strong and connected community of those diagnosed with Celiac Disease.

 

I wrote this comment in response to the article -

I think the most offensive thing about this blog post/article, satirical or not, is the statement which implies that restricted diets are primarily a "rich persons" optional ailment. This discredits many people who are unable to eat certain foods for valid health reasons. My daughters are unable to eat gluten, because they are both medically diagnosed with Celiac Disease. This has been a long and rough road at times, and we can be, understandably, sensitive. It is hard enough on my kids to not be able to enjoy the food at pizza parties, birthday parties, school functions, festivals, amusement parks etc. They always have to sit at the allergy free-table, they always feel left out. They both are sick more often than their peers, due to impaired immune systems. They get flu like illness when they do ingest gluten.

To someone who can choose to skip the gluten-free aisle this means nothing, but to those who can never skip it, this means everything.

It was extra cute that after invalidating the entire Celiac community the author goes on to add insult to injury by dissing the only food we can eat with the comment that the wheat substitutes are cardboard and sawdust.

I get this was supposed to be a joke, and perhaps it is funny, if you are not restricted in diet and you like to point a finger at allergy prone kids and laugh. Congrats to you.

So, I will skip the Namaste and just say,

F-You

 

 

I want to write about Whole Foods, at least for a second.  Whole Foods is expensive  (I also often complain about that) as a result I do not often shop there and my man and I do refer to it as "Whole Pay Check".  In fact, a lot of people I know do.  And it definitely goes for that hippie vibe.  Dietary restrictions just always seem to go hand in hand with the hippie trend.  That being stated, it is one of the few stores I know I can find a ready made snack, dessert or dinner for my family in a pinch.  Unlike every other grocery store out there, which almost exclusively cater to unrestricted diets.  Most importantly to me, Whole Foods Market was the first place I felt "normal" again after my oldest daughter was diagnosed with Celiac Disease.  It is the place that people aided me in finding products, giving recommendations and even support in the grocery aisles! In fact, several times I asked other patrons for help, only to find out they too had Celiac Disease, or were married to someone with Celiac Disease etc. 

 

I feel the author of this article stepped in something she did not expect, and wrote an entire article on an assumption or stereotype she had.  I think, it is so easy on the internet to write thoughtless comments and articles, without research, without basic comprehension... it is important to practice some decorum when writing. 

Our Princes

I posted last week about the gluten-free brand Jovial.  A brand making cookies, among other products.  I reviewed their cookies negatively.  I made a couple other points in that post:

1.  Gluten-Free food is becoming mainstream.
2.  In becoming mainstream many Gluten- Free companies/products are popping up.
3.  This should make products cheaper (but has not... yet).
4.  Some products are awesome... and some need to be improved upon!

In response to my post my mother emailed me,  

"Sometimes to find a prince, you have to kiss a few frogs."

And she is entirely right.  I even took her advice!

This week my little man was sick.  Starting last weekend he hardly slept, for the first three days of the week he hardly slept, on Tuesday night he was up from midnight till 4am!  He was cranky, he had a fever, he had snotty nose and at the tail end of the week he had a body rash.  Needless to say by combining lack of sleep with the 30 minute commute to my girls school it was a long week for baby and mommy.  Unfortunately for us, it was also a huge week for the girls' school.  The girls' school had the school fundraiser of the year and meetings to plan events for my oldest daughter's class later in the year.  I have been so happy to move to a school that has a highly involved parent community - so of course I was volunteering most the night at the main fundraiser, I signed on for the event planning, plus I promised two gluten-free cakes to the cake walk!  All good intentions aside, I did not create time to actually make those cakes - not for lack of effort.  I kept thinking I could find time, but my little man needed me more.  As a result I had to indulge in the world of new gluten-free products and purchase some cakes for the cake walk.  I was entirely grateful for the many companies popping up and creating ready made baked goods.  Like tons of other parents I was able to rush out to my local Whole Foods and cheat, bringing pre-made, store bought cakes to the fundraiser.  While I was out I found a new  gluten-free Prince product this week.


Poparuba:  A Denver based company founded by Kerri Gedert which aims to create healthy and fun gluten free, low sugar, low calorie treats.

Poparuba make Gluten-Free Petit Fours which are cool for the health conscious consumers.  Poparubies are low in carbohydrates, low in sugar, high in fiber and are "calorie controlled" at 50 calories each. 

I these because they are healthier than other treats available to gluten-free families, they are small enough to put into a purse, they are ready-made (no prep) AND, most importantly,  they are yummy!  These are four tiny little cake bites, that are definitely decadent.  I found chocolate and lemon at our Whole Food Market and enjoyed them.  One complaint - they are not cheap!   

 

 

Now the fundraiser was a blast!  We met a ton of wonderful and friendly families.  I volunteered at three different booths and spent most the night busy - which I loved.  I have definitely missed being highly involved in my children's' school activities, thus I felt right at home in the middle of the noisy festival atmosphere.  We even won/bid on a new bike for Ramona.  She was thrilled to bring it home and it gives us some nice future adventures coming up (bike riding on Colorado trails!)  My man took care of the little man, who was feeling a bit better by the fundraiser and entirely better this weekend.  In fact, little man decided to make up for lost time.  He climbed all over the dog, the furniture and even tried to scale a wall to bring a hanging picture down (he did not succeed).

 

 

Happy Late Sunday Night!

Have a Great Week...