A Mid-Summer Update

Wow, I didn't realize it had been almost a month since I last posted! Eek!

Since last month, my family and I have gone on a trip to Victoria and Kelowna, both in British Columbia. Some time to just have fun is always important! :)

My husband has most of the pictures on his phone, but here's a picture of French Beach, not far from Victoria. We spent a few hours there, mainly enjoying the tidal pools with all the wildlife: little crabs, a pleco, tons of tiny little hermit crabs running around everywhere (even fighting at times!) and more. It was absolutely fascinating!

*sigh* Blogger insists on having this picture this way.

French Beach; that's Washington state on the other side of the strait. We did not get a phone signal until we had gone so far down the beach that we managed to get an AT&T signal from the US!

Since getting back, we have been working on having a clutter-free basement. It's still not done. :/ There's a lot of stuff to go through, a lot of stuff that accumulates during 11 years in a house! Especially with growing kids and running a home daycare! My dayhome (that's what we call home daycares here) has come to an end for full-time children and I will only have my nieces and nephew after school in the fall. The youngest of them will be 5 and no more babies in the house, so I'm giving a lot of stuff away, both to people and to Goodwill. We're also finding a ton of clothes. It seems our cat, who is always trying to escape, thought that there might be another way to escape the house?

A lot of garbage and recycling has gone out, too. The basement and crawl space are looking so much better! There is still quite a bit to go through, but I'd say it's more than half done. The more clutter-free it becomes, the happier we are! If you've had a cluttered area that you've been ignoring, it's so worth the hassle and frustration and work

One thing that has not been good since getting back is junk-free and overall healthy eating. It's starting to affect me: huge sugar cravings, sinus issues (I used to have sinus issues all the time; I haven't in ages and I am not liking it!!)... I worked yesterday at getting back on track by eating a lot more fruit, which that alone reduced my huge sugar craving. Food is so important! I think it's by eating better and feeling better, then "slipping up" that it really hits how important it is; it's too easy to get used to things slowly get worse and worse and not realize just how much we are being affected by food we really shouldn't be eating, or eating in the quantities we do.

That's it for now! There is laundry to be done. Wouldn't it be nice to have a laundry-free life? :D

Natural Deodorants

Several months back, I started having irritations in my armpits. They simply wouldn't go away no matter what I did, so I decided to try going with a more natural deodorant rather than the antiperspirants I was using. I tried one naturalish deodorant that was supposed to be good for even sports, but I found I smelled of sweat eventually. The irritation went away almost immediately, though, so I knew I was on the right track. Tried a different brand and it still didn't quite help with the eventual sweat smell. I finally decided to see what else was available at this one store and found this:

(My cover looks a little different, probably older stock, but it's the same thing.)

I figured I'd give it a try. Well, it WORKS. For me, anyhow. No sweat smell. At all. And it's been weeks that I've been using it. I haven't a clue how it works, I just know that it works for me!

Do you use a natural deodorant? If so, which one? Do you like how it performs?

Mish Mash

It's been an interesting couple of days. I've had a few blog post ideas run through my head, but not the time or thought when I had the time to sit down and do them. I apologize in advance for the mix that will make up this post!


***

One thought I started having yesterday was about how, really, I've made so much progress with my family and their food consumption. Is it the perfection/ideal I would like it to be? Not even close. But I have realized that I've still nonetheless made progress with them. Some things I can think of:

• My husband used to take to work each day a Gatorade-sized bottle of those awful drink crystal beverages. I don't remember how it was done, but he now brings real juice (just juices, no added sugar or anything) with him.
• A year and a half ago, I had set the intention to have all processed foods out of the food I made my family--within 6 months. Um... that didn't happen. But it hit me just how far we have come. It used to be that most of our meals weren't really "homemade"--unless you call using a taco kit or Hamburger Helper truly homemade. We used to eat those Uncle Ben's and Lipton rice packets all the time (the ones with all kinds of stuff added into them) and more. Those kinds of things are barely eaten around here now. And I have some rice packets that have been sitting in the cupboard for many, many months. Nobody seems to want them.
• There are so many more fruits and vegetables in our fridge now. I don't know what our fridge used to be filled with, but it wasn't stuffed with fruits and vegetables!

There were some other things I was appreciating on Thursday, but they've escaped me at the moment. All to say that sometimes progress is slow, but it's okay: you still eventually get to where you want to be.

***

I had a serious sugar craving today. But not white sugar: fruit. It started yesterday. I didn't have what I needed to make green smoothies I like, so I didn't have a green smoothie. I can't really remember all that I ate yesterday, but I know I did not get as many raw fruits and vegetables as the rest of the week. I even ended up eating a thick pita as a snack last night. The result? I woke up feeling puffy, swollen. I don't like it. Especially since I could tell the chronic puffiness had finally been easing up with my increased intake of raw foods. This morning, I was craving fruit so badly, I pulled out what I found in the fridge: cherries, apples, pears, a peach and grapes. Although I did manage to eat a peach the other day without any reaction (I don't think I posted about that--it was the first peach I've eaten in years that I didn't react to), I wasn't able to eat an apple today without my tongue starting to itch badly. I only succeeded in eating a quarter of it. It didn't surprise me much given I felt puffy and was sneezing like crazy. My body was already feeling "toxic" and would likely react.. But that meant I shouldn't try to eat the peach nor the pears and I don't like cherries. So, grapes it was even though there weren't many. They satisfied me a bit, but not like my green smoothie. Or even just a banana. I then resorted to having a small bowl of gluten-free granola with almond milk.

For lunch, instead of doing raw, I decided to have some steamed carrots, broccoli and cauliflower. It was kind of strange: I did not feel satisfied after eating the cooked veggies as I did from eating my mini veggie wraps the other day.

I physically feel blah. Two days of not eating with a focus of raw fruits and veggies and a slightly increased grain intake and I feel blech. I just want a green smoothie in the morning! Fortunately, I did stop at the grocery store this afternoon just to get some fruit I love: strawberries, bananas and a cantaloupe. Tomorrow, back to predominantly raw! At least with this, I know what I'm pretty much going to want on our camping trip this summer: lots and lots of fruit and veggies. :D

This has really had me realize how quickly my body is adapting to an enjoying the raw fruits and veggies I've been eating. For probably over a week, my mornings and afternoons were probably about 75%-90% raw. Then the past two days, not even close. My body really does, like so many other people, better on raw. I didn't even have any meat during the day today nor at all yesterday nor the day before, but that change in raw food consumption... I'm feeling it. And the way I was craving fruits today, I started thinking that maybe the 80/10/10 might not be such a crazy idea for me after all. ;)

An Afternoon Adventure (or Why I Don't Believe In Weather Forecasts)

I was all set to get the missing ingredients for the Shepherd's Pie: go pick up my niece and nephew from school with my 4-year old niece and the 2-year old little guy in tow; stop at grocery store for the couple of items I needed with the 4 kids in tow [as I type this, I'm thinking to myself, "Um, the plan wasn't a good one to start with!"]; go home; start supper.

That was the plan.

And then it started to rain.

Not just rain, but at times torrential rain.

Monday, they were predicting 20% chance of rain for yesterday with a mix of sun and cloud. When I looked mid-morning, it had changed to 40% with clouds all day.

It rained for over 3 hours at my place. So much for 40%. But I'm off track here.

I headed off with the 4-year old and 2-year old in the van. It was raining lightly at that point; we'd had a short-lived deluge earlier, but it wasn't bad when we left to go pick up my niece and nephew. Which was good since the 2-year old had arrived without a coat today. (It was clear skies this morning and nice; you can hardly blame his dad. Besides, they had predicted a low chance of rain and a mix of sun and cloud!)

Within minutes of leaving my house, my wipers were on full blast and despite that, I was having some serious visibility problems. Even while stopped at a red light. This lasted for a good stretch of the road. I arrived at my niece and nephew's school a little early and the rain calmed down while we waited. Then it picked up again when I had to go into the school...with the 4-year old and the coatless 2-year old.

And this was just going to be the first leg of my trip.

The thought of torrential rain potentially returning while I tried to take 4 kids in and out of a grocery store--and just realizing the sheer amount of time it would take with 4 kids--cancelled all thoughts of actually going with them. Before the cancellation, my mind went through, "How important is it to you to have a vegan supper tonight?" My immediate mental response: "Not that important." I might one day have a higher level of commitment and forge ahead despite such rain, or perhaps I'll have enough vegan recipes under my belt that I'll whip something else up when a plan falls through, but for today, that commitment was not there. Not for that kind of rain. For which, had I known it would be that bad, I would have changed my dinner plans in the morning, possibly figuring out something else that was vegan with what we have in the house, instead of finding myself late afternoon in an insane downpour and realizing that it just wasn't going to happen and I'd have to figure out something else for supper very quickly.


Forecasts. Huh. What are they good for? Absolutely nothing! ;D