Sneak Preview

I still want to make curtains and replace the blinds, so until I actually finish the girls' room I'll just post this picture of it. It's the best part anyway. Oh, I also want to spray paint the ceiling fan. Anyway, I saw this really pretty stencil online of a bunch of vines with a couple of butterflies. I loved it, but it cost a hundred bucks for the stencil. Umm, no thanks. So, I traced it out on a piece of paper to have something for me to look at. Then, I got a piece of chalk and drew this out on the wall and then painted it. Obviously, not the same quality as if I'd spent the $100, but I'm pretty excited that I did it myself! I also made a butterfly chandelier, and the girls did some artwork, but I haven't taken pictures of it all yet. So, yes, I did get the girls' beds put back in a good amount of time, but once again, I do still have loose ends left unfinished.

Free!

I've talked about Dressing Your Truth before, and Carol Tuttle is now making her course to discover your type of beauty available for free. I think that is wonderful because I don't think her book does a good enough job to really be able to decide which type you are. The videos help a lot. So, if you don't know what type you are, or if you don't know what I'm talking about, go check it out! It's a lot of fun.

Hannah's 11

Happy birthday to my sweet girl, even if it was three weeks ago!

 

The Itch

I would have posted more lately, but I keep thinking I'm going to find the USB thing that transfers my pictures from my camera to my computer. I'm still going to find it -- hopefully soon. Then I can post pictures of Hannah's birthday, Nikki's gymnastics meet, and whatever else I have on my camera.

Since we put in new cabinets in the kitchen last fall, I have taken a break from house projects. But the home-improvement itch has returned. I REALLY want new wood floors, but since that isn't happening right now I decided to get started on something I can do. I got some paint today and rolled the first coat in the girls' room. They are excited about it. I'm a little nervous that it's going to be too bright, but I guess they would love it that way anyway. Oh, the wonders a coat of paint can do!

I'm not good at finishing long-term projects, so I'm really going to push myself to just finish decorating their room as quickly as I can before I lose my interest in it. My kitchen is a great example of that -- we put the cabinets in months ago and just last week I finally got the drawer knobs put on, and I should have tiled my backsplash next but I'm tired of working on the kitchen. Hopefully, I'll last long enough in the girls' room to at least get their beds put back in place!

Scripture memorization post that turned into something else

One of the things I love about homeschooling is that we have a devotional in the mornings. I am actually in the process of figuring out what we need to do to revitalize it a bit, but that's kind of a process I'm going through with just about everything we're doing! One part that is working is that we have been memorizing scriptures, and I have been so impressed with how well they are doing. We have been using this method, and it has really worked well. I'm sure it would work even better if I was on top of things enough to remember to review them more than once a day. I also want to get a white board to hang somewhere that we can write the current verse we are learning to have it in sight more often. Anyway, here are a couple of my favorite verses that we have memorized this year.

"A soft answer turneth away wrath: but grievous words stir up anger." -- Proverbs 15:1

"For verily, verily I say unto you, he that hath the spirit of contention is not of me, but is of the devil, who is the father of contention, and he stirreth up the hearts of men to contend with anger, one with another." -- 3 Nephi 11:29

"Thou shall not be idle; for he that is idle shall not eat the bread nor wear the garments of the laborer." -- Doctrine and Covenants 42:42

(yes, there may be a correlation between some issues in our family and the verses I have chosen to memorize)

"I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me." -- Phillipians 4:13

"Fear not, nor be dismayed, be strong and of good courage." -- Joshua 10:25

"And inasmuch as ye are humble and faithful and call upon my name, behold, I will give you the victory." Doctrine and Covenants 104:82

And I think the next one we need to memorize is D&C 88:119, "Organize yourselves; prepare every needful thing; and establish a house, even a house of prayer, a house of fasting, a house of faith, a house of learning, a house of glory, a house of order, a house of God;"

It's the "organize yourselves" part, and the "house of order" part that we are struggling with quite a bit. Well, maybe it's because I'm struggling with it that the kids end up having a hard time, too. This is what our family night lesson was on tonight -- creating order with the stuff in our home and also in how we operate together as a family. We can be more on the same page. I'm clearly doing a poor job keeping it all together while Nate has extra work and school assignments, and our girls are old enough that I shouldn't be doing as much as I do on my own (or letting things fall through the cracks on my own), and I shouldn't have to direct them through every step of their day. And I get it that a lot of the problem is my fault for creating such a situation where I depend on Nate so much, and where I don't require enough from the girls. Actually, it's the following through with them that I struggle with so much.

Tonight we took all of the jobs that are needed to be done to clean the house on a weekly basis and broke them out into small tasks, like cleaning the downstairs bathroom mirror or sweep the front porch. We wrote each one on a small square of paper, and we ended up with 40 tasks. We'll put them in a bowl, and they will draw out their jobs each day. If only Hannah and Nikki participate (because honestly, I'm the CEO of this operation and I hope I don't have to actually do the work, ha ha) they only have 4 small tasks to do each day from Monday through Friday. If they go quickly, they can do more and have more days off. I also told them that if they make this a daily habit with a good attitude, they will easily be able to rope Ryan into helping them do their jobs. Then, after a while, he'll be good enough at the work that he will get his own assignments and they'll have less work to do!

The trick is consistency, right?! Keeping them going once the novelty wears off as they pick their jobs tomorrow.

Dishes and more

Some women are dripping with diamonds

Some women are dripping with pearls

Lucky me! Lucky me!

Look at what I'm dripping with

Dirty Dishes

That's my new tune. I really do have more going on in my life than just thinking about food and nutrition, but I just have to say how thankful I am that Nate did the dishes tonight. My children do not each lunch or snacks at school. We are home for every meal of the day, and without processed snack foods in the house, I end up cooking three meals a day and peeling or chopping or something for snacktime as well. Okay, I got that out and now I can move on. 

Although, just one more thought on food. AGHH!! Do you know how many different ideas there are about what is healthy to eat?! No wonder we are fat and sick as a society. Where can you turn to find reliable information? Who is right when you can find an authority pushing just about whatever philosophy you can imagine? I will say, though, that the most common thread I have seen in all of my reading so far is to just eat whole, unprocessed foods. We don't eat enough fruits and vegetables as a rule. What kind of a mix of whole grains, lean meats, and dairy you add in are quite debatable. So there, I've learned a whole lot haven't I?!

I feel like I should move on to another topic, so ..... Happy birthday, Kellee! I watched all of Nikki's gymnastics practice tonight (yep, that's three hours in the gym for me tonight), and I really enjoyed it. It's no wonder she is so hungry all the time. They get quite the workout and she is focused the whole time. I love that I never see her laying down or complaining about what they ask her to do. She works so hard. On the way home tonight, she said she can't wait for Tuesday when she gets to go back to the gym! Hannah gets to register for softball tomorrow morning. I've never done this before, so I don't know if she'll actually do any kind of activity or if it's just signing her up. We'll see. She told me this week she is a little nervous because she doesn't know if she'll be any good at softball. After a little conversation she promised she would just go and have fun meeting new girls and getting some fresh air and exercise, and if she ends up being any good at softball then that will just be an extra bonus. She also decided today that she wants to learn to play the violin. I think that will be an excellent choice for her because I know nothing about playing a string instrument. I just can't seem to keep my mouth shut when she's practicing piano. I'm really just trying to help her make her practice time valuable, but I probably shouldn't. Ryan's new interest is in the days of the week. "Mom, what day is it? What can I do on Friday? What day comes after Friday?" etc., etc., etc. every day. Another homeschooling mom had a great idea that I'm going to steal. She said she is going to get plastic bins and label them with the days of the week, and she will put in different activities that her 3-year-old son can pull out each day to work on during school time. Brilliant! I just have to come up with enough good ideas: playdough, watercolors, puzzles, coloring, lace-up cards, Legos. What else should I include?

Progress

My biggest fear in trying to improve our diet is that this little cutie will starve before he'll try to eat a new food. Here he is eating a frozen strawberry. He's getting a little desperate with no graham crackers in the house. :)

Last night I felt like I had a little success in making a great recipe a little healthier. We got a bunch of red bell peppers in our produce box this week, and I love to make stuffed peppers when we get them like that. It's a labor of love, but they are really good. I've never searched for the healthiest version of stuffed peppers because of my aversion to most vegetables. My friend said these were great, so I tried them and I agree with her. My kids were not impressed when they came to the dinner table, but they all liked them. Well, they ate the filling anyway. Here is the original recipe a friend gave to me.

Stuffed Peppers from Melissa Hansen
6 bell peppers
1 T. butter
1 T. olive oil
1/2 c. chopped onion
1/2 c. chopped celery
1 15 oz can diced tomatoes
2 cans (8 oz each) tomato sauce, divided (one can is for the sauce)
1 clove crushed garlic
1 t. oregano
1/2 t. basil
2 t. salt, divided
1/2 t. pepper
1 egg, slightly beaten
1 1/2 t. Worcestershire sauce
1 lb. ground beef or turkey
1 1/2 c. cooked rice
1/2 to 3/4 c. shredded cheddar cheese
1 c. sour cream

Cut tops off of peppers. Remove seeds and membranes. Chop edible parts of tops and set aside. Rinse peppers under cold water. Place peppers in a large pot. Cove with salted water. Bring to a boil, reduce heat, cover and simmer for 5 minutes. Drain peppers and set aside.

Heat olive oil and butter in a large skillet over medium heat until hot. Saute chopped green pepper, chopped onion, chopped celery for 5 minutes or until tender. Add tomatoes, 1 can of sauce, crushed garlic, oregano, basil, 1 t. of salt, and 1/4 t. of pepper. Simmer 10 minutes.

In a large mixing bowl, combine the egg with remaining salt and pepper and Worcestershire. Gently stir to blend. Add ground beef, cooked rice, and 1 c. of the tomato mixture. Mix well. Stuff peppers with meat mixture and place in a 3 quart baking dish. Pour remaining tomato mixture combined with extra can of tomato sauce and sour cream over the top of the peppers. Bake at 350 for 1 hr. If desired top with cheddar cheese just before done baking.

So, to make it a bit healthier, I sauteed the onion, celery, and peppers in water rather than butter and oil. I also used about 1/2 lb of meat rather than a whole pound. I substituted quinoa in for the rice just because it cooks faster than brown rice, and I am trying to find recipes where I like it (I'm not ready yet for this Mango Quinoa Breakfast). I also cut the salt in half and didn't miss it. I was out of eggs, so I mixed a tablespoon of ground flaxseed with 3 tablespoons of water and let it sit for a couple of minutes and used that as a substitute for the egg. I didn't put the cheddar cheese on top, and I don't think it needed it at all. I used a large dollop of fat-free sour cream rather than a whole cup. I almost used plain Greek yogurt, but the date on my sour cream was almost up. I think it probably would have been fine without that, too, though. It was absolutely delicious. Even Ryan said he liked it. He finally relented and tried some when he saw I was baking oatmeal cookies for dessert. So much for a healthy evening, eh? :) Clearly, I have a long way to go.

Tomatoes: My brother told me once he would give me 50 cents for eating a tomato (I think he upped it from one quarter to two when he saw I wasn't going to do it at first). I almost threw up. It was so nasty. This week, however, I have voluntarily put tomatoes on a few salads I prepared for myself. I am so proud of myself! Can I hear a big cheer from the Littles please? :) They used to pick tomatoes in the greenhouses and pour a little salt on them while eating them like apples. Oh, that grossed me out! But I am making progress. I don't even think the texture bothered me while I was eating them this week. I think I can finally say that it is now just a psychological block. I couldn't bring myself to eat a bite with just a tomato in it -- it had to be filled with lots of other things, too, but I could eat it. And I did like it while I was chewing each bite. I just kept catching myself scooting my fork around them on my plate. I had to make a conscious effort to scoop them up and eat them with each bite. But, that's more than I've ever done before.

Cheese: I love cheese, and Ryan loves cheese. However, in a serving of the cheddar cheese I had in my refrigerator last week, there were 100 calories. Of those 100 calories, 70 of them came from fat. That makes it 70% fat, right? Is my math or my reasoning off there? I read nutrition labels all the time, but just stopping to notice that and say that the cheese was 70% fat really grossed me out. I haven't had a hard time cutting out the cheese this week. Ryan, on the other hand, was not happy when we ran out.

Vegetables

It's not about losing weight. Our children have a family history of high cholesterol, high blood pressure, diabetes, depression, anxiety, chronic headaches, migraines, ADHD, asthma, stroke, heart attack, brain tumor, and skin cancer. I'm sure I'm missing something. That's pretty scary when I list it out like that. That's what this post and my recent interest in nutrition is about.

A couple of years ago, I realized that it was not normal for Hannah to spend three hours completing one math homework worksheet. It broke my heart to see her get so stressed out and anxious about not being able to complete her work before bedtime. It was beyond frustrating for me to sit down with her and have to redirect her attention back to her math problem after every step in solving it. She would skip problems on tests. She was always the last in the class to finish, if she finished at all. She would misspell words that she clearly knew how to spell simply because she would skip over letters. When talking to her, I could see her eyes glaze over about half-way through what I was trying to say, and I knew her mind wasn't anywhere close to listening to me. She could not keep track of anything. Where are your shoes, your backpack, your hairbrush, etc., etc., etc.? She was a daydreamer and in a world of her own most of the time. It was just heartbreaking for me to see how hard she was working to keep up with the normal expectations of a third-grader. So, we had her tested for ADHD, and my calm, quiet, gentle daughter was diagnosed with the inattentive type of ADHD, anxiety, and a non-specified learning disorder. What were we supposed to do? The information available regarding ADHD is so confusing. Medicine is dangerous some say, and others say it will give her a new life. Gluten-free and sugar-free diets are supposedly accepted by only radical mothers and not at all scientifically proven to be effective. It was so tough trying to figure out what was right for our daughter and our family. After trying for a few months to make changes in our routines and also working closely with her teacher at school (I will always love Ms. Brown!), we decided that she might benefit from medicine. It was an incredibly hard decision, but it was the best we could do. And it did help. I think it taught her what it feels like to focus on a task. It got her through third and fourth grade. It was wonderful to have her symptoms lessened, but they weren't alleviated. She also had some side effects that made me wary of increasing her dosage to help more with her concentration. She became the pickiest eater in the family. She had no real desire for food some days, and that really worried me. She also didn't sleep well, which is common with these drugs. Sometimes she could be pretty moody, and I would wonder how much is just being a normal girl and how much is side-effects from the medicine. This past summer we tried an alternative kind of therapy called Interactive Metronome Therapy. It was really neat, and the woman who did it for us also recommended a regimen of vitamins that has shown some promise in helping children with ADHD. I was encouraged with the progress Hannah made. Supplements beyond a multivitamin also scare me. It seems just like a drug when you start adding extra substances to your body, so I knew I needed more education. My sister-in-law uses a lot of holistic and homeopathic healing methods for her family, and I really enjoyed talking with her this summer when I was in Utah for a few days. Then later she made a few other recommendations that I could try with Hannah and some books to read as well. Anyway, since I didn't make my long story short, in November we took Hannah off of her Concerta and were just giving her a good multivitamin, fish oil, calcium, and an amino acid for her anxiety. At first, it was pretty tough. She struggled quite a bit in math and piano practice. But she has made great progress. She immediately said she felt happier and more playful when she stopped taking the Concerta. Her moods did improve, her appetite improved, and her sleep has improved. But all of this is just to explain that I have been searching for a while. I want a good, happy, healthy life for all of my children.

I love food documentaries. King Corn, Supersize Me, Food Inc. Recently, we watched "Forks Over Knives" on Netflix. I found it fascinating.

After that a friend told me about this one:

Right now I'm reading a book by one of the doctors mentioned in the Forks Over Knives video called Eat to Live.

Next, I want to read this book by the same author, Disease-Proof Your Child: Feeding Kids Right.

I think my mother must be laughing so hard at me being interested in vegetables! Growing up a tossed salad to me meant iceberg lettuce and carrots. I would lick the butter off of the corn on the cob instead of eating the corn. When I moved in with the Littles I remember being so amazed that Eileen would serve so many vegetables with their meals. It was even more amazing that everyone in their family loved them! My tastes have changed over a period of time. I eat more vegetables now than I did growing up, and I'm even interested in learning to like more. I think it's possible. That's a miracle in itself!

I'm not going for a vegan diet, and I don't think that is necessary. I am interested in really learning to live the Word of Wisdom more closely. The Word of Wisdom is what makes Mormons seem so odd in not drinking coffee or tea. It also instructs us to avoid tobacco and alcohol, but I think the hardest part to live by is what it tells us we should put into our bodies. Meat is to be used sparingly, but how much is sparingly? I'm thinking it's probably a lot less than what I typically eat. I also found it interesting in rereading the Word of Wisdom recently that it doesn't mention dairy at all. It says "flesh" of the animals is for our use. Well, it does make sense that cow's milk is for cows.

Okay, so that's enough rambling for today. I want to be healthy, and I want my family to be healthy. How crazy is it that I have eaten almost every day of my life, and I still have such little knowledge of nutrition? I'd like to change that.

Downton Abbey

This is my new addiction. The first season can be instantly streamed on Netflix. The current season can be watched on pbs.org. It runs on Sunday evenings, but the episodes are online by the next day. It is so good!

By the way, today we had a much better day than yesterday. Whew!

My Bright Spot in the day

Today was awful. AWFUL. But now that I'm at the end of it, I can see how I made it through. Ryan. He was my tender mercy today. That sweet boy woke up happy and stayed happy all day long. When nobody else did. At one point in the day Nikki was complaining about some school work I had given her. She said, "I have to do the whole page?!" Yes, one page. "Why do I have to do all of it?!" Because I'm the meanest mom in the world. Just do it. Probably about five minutes later Ryan was eating a snack and he said, "Mom, you're not the meanest mom in the world. You're nice." Oh, melt my heart. I needed him today. I'm so thankful he is part of our family.