This was the view from our living-room window yesterday morning:
Luke loved it, and spent a good part of the day out frolicking in it…
…while the rest of us enjoyed it from a distance, through the window, next to a roaring fire.
It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas….
See the Silkotch Four dancing as we’ve never danced before!
Ten years ago I was the poster child for poor nutritional habits. I pretty much lived on pizza, donuts, rocky road ice cream and Dr. Pepper. I had no concept of what constituted a balanced diet.
Then I became pregnant with my first child. For the first time I began to wonder if I should maybe be taking a closer look at what was going into my body. After all, I wanted to give this new life inside me its best chance at a healthy, strong beginning.
So I started reading about whole foods and additives and the effects of processing, and pretty soon I’d decided to make some changes in my eating habits. And it didn’t take long for me to discover that the better I ate, the better I felt. One change led naturally to another, and within a few years I felt stronger, more energetic, and just plain healthier than I had since I was a kid. Whole grain breads and cereals, fresh raw produce, organic whenever possible, staying away from artificial flavors, colors and preservatives, no more soft drinks — these things dramatically changed the quality of my life. Not that I’d ever had any serious health problems before, but the new sense of vibrant health was incredible.
One of the smaller changes I made was to stop using regular commercial baking powder. I used to use Clabber Girl, which like most commercial baking powders contains aluminum sulphate as an acidifier. Consuming aluminum has been strongly linked to developing Alzheimer’s disease, and man, I just can’t see taking chances with that.
For a while I was making my own homemade baking powder with baking soda, arrowroot powder and cream of tartar. But the packages of arrowroot powder always passed their expiration dates before I’d used even half, and it seemed like a waste of money (and arrowroot, although to be honest I’m not really sure what that is). But then I found Rumford Baking Powder at my favorite health food store; it’s a “premium, aluminum free” baking powder that uses monocalcium phosphate as an acidifier. Monocalcium phosphate is generally recognized as safe, maybe even good for you depending on who you talk to, and Rumford Baking Powder isn’t that much more expensive than the regular kind, so I started using that instead of making my own.
So this morning I was making waffles for the kids, and I got to reading the fine print on the Rumford label, and discovered that it’s made by the Clabber Girl Corporation. I absorbed that info for a minute, and then wondered, “Why would a company acknowledge the strong connection between an ingredient and a disease, develop and offer a safer version of the product…and then keep on providing the original, probably dangerous version? I mean, why not just offer the safer product as a “new and improved” version of Clabber Girl Baking Powder? It works just as well in recipes. And not everyone shops in health food stores, or knows that consuming aluminum might seriously hink with the quality of their future life. Should there be some ethical responsibility taken here? Seriously, does it ALWAYS have to be about making a few extra bucks by using cheaper ingredients, even at the expense of your customers’ health?
Clearly I was never meant to be a mover and shaker in the world of big business, because these kinds of choices never make any sense to me.
Last week I posted a list of my family’s favorite Christmas-themed children’s books to read aloud. That post has gotten more hits than anything else I’ve written here on this blog — apparently there are a lot of parents and grandparents out there looking for Christmas stories to read to their little ones and wondering what’s good.
So let me tell you about a wonderful little book I just picked up a few days ago: Olivia Helps With Christmas.
I’ve never read any of the other Olivia books, but I understand there’s a whole series of them. All I can say is, if they’re all this funny I wish I’d discovered this little pig years ago. The Amazon blurb says it’s meant for kids 4-8 years old, and that sounds about right, but my nine-year-old laughed almost as loud as my seven-year-old at Olivia’s antics in this story. And my seven-year-old just about laughed his lungs up!
As a parent, what I like best about “Olivia Helps With Christmas” is that it focuses on the things that make this holiday truly merry and bright: the little family activities and interactions that are repeated year after year until they become a cozy, inextricable part of the Christmas spirit itself. Untangling the strings of lights, decorating the tree, singing carols, trying to fall asleep while listening for Santa, the excitement of Christmas morning…it’s all captured wonderfully here, and Olivia’s enthusiastic abandon makes it all the more fun.
If you and your kids/grandkids enjoy reading aloud together, this book belongs in your holiday collection. At the very least, it’s worth checking out at the library for a night or two of storytime laughs.
And I’ll be looking for the rest of Olivia’s books. You can never have too much laughter in your life. 🙂
Elizabeth had a nightmare last night. It freaked her out so bad she actually came in and crawled in bed with me and Steve, which she hasn’t done in yeeeeeaaars. I mean, at nine years old she considers herself to be “practically an adult” (her words), so it was rather unexpected when she showed up in our room at 4am.
I asked her what the nightmare was about. Any glimpse into the workings of Elizabeth’s Brain is a rare treat; she’s not really one for the oversharing.
“There was this clock,” she shuddered, snuggling up close to me.
A clock? Didn’t sound all that scary to me.
“It’s hands were vestigial,” she continued, “but it had big round eyes like hollow craters.” (Yes, she really talks that way.)
“Like those really old versions of Mickey Mouse?” I asked. Those old Mickey Mouse cartoons where he has empty gaping holes for eyes give me the wiggins.
“No, because they had these tiny pupil-holes in them that let light in…and monsters out.”
“Monsters came out of the clock’s eyes?”
“Yeah. The clock was hanging on a wall, and it had motion sensors in its eyes, and when I walked past it it said, ‘I can see your future.'”
I was beginning to see the creep factor now. “Did it tell you your future?”
“It said, ‘You will want to partay!!’ and then monsters came out of its eyes.”
“To, um, ‘party’ with you?”
She shuddered again. “Yeah. They were all made out of light particles.”
“Wow. Pretty scary dream.”
“Yeah.”
“You can stay in here.”
She couldn’t get back to sleep though, and she was still wigged out about it when she left for school this morning. When she got home she drew a picture of the clock, and titled it “My Greatest Fear.” It was indeed a very freaky-looking clock. It’s “vestigial hands” were tiny useless things in the center of its face, and it had huge round eyes and a big evil-clown smile.
She’s never been an afraid-of-monsters sort of kid. Gotta say…for a first monster, an evil fortune-telling light-particle-monster-producing clock is pretty impressive. I’ll probably dream about that damn thing myself tonight.
An Invincible Summer 