JustaBlog

Quick little posts

Hey! Did everyone remember I am starting post mostly on my other blog(s)? I have posted cute family pics, etc. on the other blog. I haven't gotten the homesteading blog going yet despite many requests to start talking about healthy eating, doing it on a budget, etc. I hope to carve out an hour or so next week to get that done. So for now I'll post food diary entries, etc. here.

Recently I have been rejuvenated in my quest to eat healthy. Maybe it was going in and hearing the heartbeat and having this all seem much more real. I have honestly eaten healthy this whole pregnancy but it was forced. Now I feel the passion again and I love that feeling. It makes me want to get up in the morning and make breakfast. And get ready for lunch! Love that. And it also takes away that feeling of dread that I am going to have each day be a struggle against overeating, against making bad choices. I feel empowered. Nothing is worse than thinking about food, obsessing about what you are going to eat (or NOT eat) all day. Being excited knowing I have healthy things to make and ideas that inspire me take that obsession away. Love that. So food diary entry.

What I ate today:
B - a glass of kefir smoothie, 1 scrambled egg and half a piece of toast.
L - some mixed fruit (fresh pineapple, strawberries, watermelon), and some fabulous fresh vegetarian sushi with brown rice. I am in love with vegetarian sushi right now. It has big chunks of avocados, cucumber and carrot strips, Nori and brown rice. Yummy.
S - Banana Tahini Carob pudding (put bananas, tahini and raw carob powder in a food processor - yummy)
D - A giant delicious salad with romaine, garbanzo beans, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, flax seeds, feta cheese, artichoke parmesan dressing. Yummolicious!!
Dessert - some mixed berries (blueberries, raspberries and marionberries) with some organic whipped cream with honey.

I did go splurge at Whole Foods today. I usually can't do that. I really can't afford it. I probably should have saved the money for the move. But I'm pregnant and I really reallly REALLY wanted to just go and get some fabulously healthy things to eat. I bought lots of bulk items that I needed and wanted.
Got:
Buckwheat groats (raw buckwheat used to make raw dehydrated granola)
Oat groats (raw whole oats - not rolled - that I soak and blend with maple syrup and an orange until creamy, then I add grated apples to for breakfast)
Sesame Seeds (I make these great halvah ball things with ground sesame seeds, maple syrup, spirulina, and coconut oil that I love for pregnancy treats)
Raw sunflower seeds - use these for a million things
Whole wheat couscous
Amaranth ( never had it before but being an old Aztec grain it sounded cool to try. Supposedly you can dry pop it like popcorn. We'll see)
Sweet Brown Rice - this brown rice is the only one that really makes fabulous sticky rice IMO. It's is SOOO good.
Okay so I *think* that was all the bulk stuff. Then I got some spulrgy items.
I got Clay a small thing of organic whipping cream from this dairy Clay and I like that sell non homogized milk and it comes in glass bottles. He thought that was a treat. If you haven't tried nonhomogonized milk, try it. Spend the $4 and buy a bottle. It is SO much better. Clay vows never to go back. Even HE is convinced :)
I splurged and got a thing of Grey Sea Salt. It is even slightly moist in this weird way. It tastes really good. And is full of minerals. I have always wanted some and my mom and I were talking that we should get some so I did. It was $9 for a thing of salt! But it was for fun.
Organic blueberries is the kind of thing I never can afford and they were HALF price! So I bought two. I am excited to eat those. What else did I get?
A new bottle of flax seed oil.
Pregnancy Tea
What else? Oh I dunno. Now it's getting late. I gotta go to bed.
Nighty Bighties.

A new blog

Hey everyone out there in blogland. Just a quick note :) I always say that eh? But anyways, I have started a new blog. This one will remain but it will be more scrapping, etc. I will post things other than scrapping that might not be the best for the family blog HA! But I have decided that the combination of my product stuff, etc. is not working for me as a blog that my family can read. I have started TWO blogs really. One will be my family life stuff - homeschooling, goings on of the children and Clay and I, photos of our life, etc. The other will be more of a homesteading blog. It will have my food, nutrition, gardening, crocheting, chickens, etc. stuff. I have had lots of requests for recipes, nutrition info, etc. and that will be the place for that. I don't think my family cares about all that so it will be seperate. I haven't started on the homesteading blog much but got started on the family blog.

Here are the new links. I hope that these two other blogs will help my friends get to know our family and I better than this blog has allowed.
Just US - my family blog

Just Homesteading - my domestic blog :)

So regular readers, add these to your feeds . I assume they will start getting more play than this one. Though don't forsake this one altogether. I have some plans for some little goodies here and there for my blog readers :)

Product Announcement

Real quick I am going to post the ad for the week :) I'll be popping on over later to talk about other stuff.

Lots of new goodies at Scrapartist from me today! And with the Valentine's Sale going the 14th-16th everything is ON SALE!!!! Lots of new Stockpile items, 2 new fun kits and a special requested element pack that should be coming in the store any minute - scribble stitches circles!

I also added over 20 products to the Flea Market. They all are $2.00 each. And with the sale, everything in the Flea Market is only $1.50 a piece. A number of these items will be retiring soonm, so pick em up now while they're cheap!

Time journals, food diaries, etc.

I have found that the days that I do food diaries in some sort of public arena, those days are a billion times better than most other days :) I did do this on another board today but am going to post and edit it here today. A little preface though.. As a mother we try to do the best for our children - the best education, hopefully the best nutrition, moral code - we do our best to do the best by our children. I have been saddened a lot lately though by how many women on blogs, boards, etc. do not seem to put any thought into what they eat when they are pregnant. I encourage everyone who eats for two, who uses pregnancy as an excuse to eat whatever whenever, to pause and think about it. When your blood sugar goes up, the baby's does as well, causing the baby to strain to keep it regulated. You are everything to these babies when they are inside you. If you are eating superior nutrition, your baby will too. If you are eating mostly fast food, etc. empty caloric food, your baby is getting a less than ideal nutrition. I want to encourage all pregnant mothers out there. Little changes can make a big difference in the development of your baby. The more little changes you make the easier they get to make. Start small. Maybe for you that's dealing with caffeine, or too much sugar, not enough veggies, not enough water. Whatever it is, start small. Little goals make you feel productive :) And to think that those small changes will help keep that every worrying weight down!!

So far my eating day has been great. Not all days are flawless lol. I hmm.. ate a tad bit of great ice cream yesterday HA! But treats should be the exception not the rule eh?
Today:
B#1 (at 6AM) Cup of smoothie with organic whole milk, strawberries, mixed berries, banana, bee pollen, flax seed oil, coconut oil, and honey.

B#2 (at 8:30) 1 egg, half a piece of sprouted ww bread, and 1/4 yummy organic pink lady apples we got 3# for a BUCK! One of my Supermom Vitamins.

Snack - tiny juice glass of the new Organic NONHomogonized whole milk I just bought, (I'm so excited to have found this!), about 1/2 cup of blueberries with a TBSP of raw almond butter my sweet hubby bought me as a gift. Yum.

Lunch - big Romaine salad with the Annie's Naturals new artichoke parmesan dressing we bought (yum) and garbanzo beans, sunflower seeds, flax seeds, walnuts, yummy~!

On a side note, we do NOT make a ton of money to afford organic stuff. I cannot afford organic produce unless we get it for 3#lbs for a dollar type sales at the farmer's market. I buy everything in bulk, sprouted wheat bread at Costco, shop at a cheap discount store for all my produce and even with organic milk (this is the ONE thing that means the most to me. The hormones in milk are something we are working on eradicating from our diet) I spend less for a family of 6 (3 adults) than most familes of 2, and that includes meat, eggs, etc. I might post another day about ways to drastically cut your spending budget.

Off to eat that salad I just posted about. Haven't taken a bite yet :)

On a lighter note

I plan on posting some updates about sweet Jillain later today but had a quick moment so I thought I'd post the cutest picture in the world :)

IMPORTANT! Much needed prayers!!!

If you pray, many many prayers are desperately needed. A friend's little daughter Jillian was not feeling well, they took her to the doctor where they were told she has a football sized tumor in her chest. This was only TWO days ago. Since then she has gotten to where she is very very ill and they are afraid she will not make it much longer. The doctors are wanting to start extreme chemo to try and shrink the tumor enough to be able to operate. Now the tumor is compressing her heart, collapsed a lung and it is making Jillian struggle to breathe. She is only 4 (I think she is 4). PLEASE PLEASE pray for the Lord's healing and for Him to strengthen Jillian.

Here is a picture of her. Isn't she a doll? Jillian needs prayer more than ever. She will need God's hand to be able to make it through this right now. And please pray for her wonderful parents and 11 siblings that are going to hell and back right now. Oh my heart is breaking. Thanks everyone for your prayers. If yuo have prayer chains at your church, please contact them.

Curriculum Obsessions

I have been thinking of starting a homeschool blog but until then you'll just have to deal with my homeschool ramblings every now and then. And, I really want to start blogging more for my family members that read this as opposed to just the friend peeps and customers :)

I go through periods where I just get obsessed with curriculum and catalogs and just the excitement of new stuff. And of course when I get in this mode I get like probably every other homeschool mom out there and I start second guessing whether or not I am using the best for my kids. But I think I am getting pretty close to having what I want and love. So I'll lay it all out :)

Some things are standard and won't change.
- Math U See  - I doubt I will even think of changing this until we get closer to high school age. I LOVE MUS and Frankie just eats it up. Cassie is about to start her first MUS book - Primer here in about 2 weeks I would say. She is really excited. I am too for some silly reason. I do have the Challenging Word Problems books from Singapore and Frankie does some word problems in those too. He is too smart for his own good that kid.
- Rod and Staff for Grammar, Phonics, Bible readers/reading comprehension, and maybe even Spelling for the next few years. I love the simple straightforward approach of Rod and Staff as well as the clear Christian viewpoint. The readers are all Bible stories, the Grammar sentences even use Bible characters, etc. Love it to the umpteenth degree.
- Copywork - Plain ole copywork for handwriting, etc. I don't use handwriting books, etc. I just teach the littles the right way to write things and then give them Bible verses to copy when they are old enough. Now I am considering going to something like the Reason for Handwriting or even finding an old Palmer method book for cursive. Classically Cursive looks good too. But I also might just stick with my "teach them myself" method for cursive too.

Now these next ones I have been looking at, researching for a long time and now am starting and am really happy about it. Ecstatic almost :)
- Sonlight - Sonlight is a literature based curriculum. I have looked at it for so long and at the beginning of the year bought a couple levels worth of the readers and read aloud books for Frankie (readers) and the children (read alouds). Frankie has been eating them up. Too fast really. I love having the books all here though, since I tend to have problems getting to and from the library in a timely manner. Having a bunch of books for his age group already here and the content already screened, I just love it.
    Of late Frankie has started watching all these shows on the History Channel with Clay. He has started to show a real interest in History. Originally I was planning on just using Story of the World for history until the 5th grade or so. But more lately I was growing concerned over the strictly secular nature of SOTW and the way it treats certain gods in history with the same amount of feeling of truth as it does talking of Jesus. Now some out there might find this a good thing, but for us with small children especially, it is very important to us that they see things from a Biblical perspective and seeing God's hand working through History. So I decided to get Mystery of History. MOH goes chronilogically as opposed to culturally, which I like, and level 1 goes from Creation to the Resurrection. Now I do plan on filling some of the gaps with SOTW because I think that it covers some things better than MOH. Yes this will be a conglomeration for sure. Plus both SOTW and MOH have loads of fun hands on history activities which I think we will all love doing. To top it off, with Frankie's new found love of READING we got the Sonlight History for year 1 that covers the same time periods as MOH and we will be reading those books (more literature and infomative picture type books) as they fit through the year.
     And since we are already doing Leading Little Ones to God for devotions (well we just started it) and it is part of the Level 1 Sonlight Bible curriculum, we are doing that too. Well really it is just a Bible reading schedule, LLTG readings, and listening to the memory verses on the CD.
    What makes me happy is that Sonlight, while being pretty much ALL reading, has a very well laid out lesson plan/schedule, that I find I need to a certain extent (especially with Frankie who wants to just read every book in any order lol)
    So, we use Sonlight for Literature, History, and Bible. So yeah it looks like it is a lot for little Frank, but honestly he reads so fast it is great for him. Plus I really want to use Sonlight from 3rd grade up and want to get in the swing of things, get used to the program and how it works with multiple ages before I get into where things start to get much more complicated.
- Science - Here is the one thing that is up in the air. Part of me thinks that living back in Tennessee they will learn more than enough as small children with chickens, goats, gardens, and a technologically minded husband without doing any Science stuff at all. But here I am in curriculum obsessed mode, I can't help but looking through Science stuff and wondering if the littles will struggle with 6th grade Science and up if they don't do any now. I have had people recommend Apologia Science for them. I was thinking I might use Apologia for the high school years so maybe that would be the best bet. The thing is Frankie has been REALLY into space for the last year or so and in fact just this morning was asking me if we could try to find constellations. Apologia's first elementary science is on Exploring Creation with Astronomy so there is a good chance I will just go with that since it won't seem like seat work to him but fun. I guess I just talked myself into it eh?

When I get really deep into the History and Bible I'll come back and tell you how it is going. I am excited though so it should be good :)

Okay other important and exciting things to talk about but it won't be right now as the littles need some attention. :)

Life is crazy, etc.

Oy, sitting down for just a sec to catch my breath. Life with children is never boring that's for sure. So, here's our mini adventure for the day. Cassie and Frankie are sitting at the kitchen counter - Frankie playing with Legos, Cassie with this toy laptop thing. So Adric climbs up, whips open the lid of the laptop, smashing it into Fin's (our Beta Fish - GINA if you read this, get a Beta fish instead of a goldfish. They live in a fishbowl as well, are way more hardy, are the only pet fish known to recognize the owner when they come in the room, and we have had ours for like a year now)  anyways, smashing it into Fin's bowl, breaking it completely and sending water, glass pebbles, and FIN everywhere!! Oh the madness that ensued at that point - screaming, yelling, sobbing, running around and general panic. I run over and realize that Fin is no longer in the bowl, so the search is on. Frankie finds him on the floor, I am getting a bowl of water and am yelling at him because Fin's too slimy and weird and he keeps not being able to pick him up. So I go rescue Fin myself. Thankfully Beta fish breathe air through their mouth as well as fins so they last longer outside their bowl then most fish. Meanwhile Cassie and Frankie are both sobbing hysterically because they think Fin is going to die. Oy. So finally I get Fin a big glass pitcher, put some pebbles in as well as his plant and he seems happy for now. Of course there was a water and glass disaster to deal with but at least Fin is fine. Of course now to go buy a new fish bowl for Fin today. The expenses of life never cease.

On a sweeter note, today Frankie, Cassie and Adric got Valentine's cards from their Gigi each with $5 in it. They usually dream of what they can get at the Dollar Store but they all decided to put their money in the Tennessee jar. Oh yeah, we glued a top on a gallon jar for a piggy bank to add to our TN fund. They are really excited to fill it up and take it to the bank and find out how much is in it. Of course we have to check ALL the quarters before they go in to see if they are ones we need for our Quarter Map - we have one of those maps where you put the quarters in for each state. We have almost all the ones that are out so far. I'll look soon to see which ones we are missing and solicit quarters from the masses (I think we are only missing like 3 from the released ones - there are still a few years worth of quarters that haven't been released yet) But I thought it was really sweet that they voluteered their money for the jar. Lately when we're out if someone says they're hungry or something they always say "but we aren't going to get anything to eat while we're out because we'd rather go to TN" (meaning they'd rather we save the money for moving). It really inspires me to really set up something like this to support great charity organizations. I think they could really get on board with something like that.

Okay the children are acting up and I need to go help them clean this room, then do school. So I'll quickly post some little previews. I have another couple quick things done that I think I will release for the Scrapartist sale.
First, another (Hmm did I post the first preview here? It might have only been at DST. So if I didn't, let me know and I will post it here) anyways, another Stockpile Basics - Ducttape Basics

There are going to be a handful of Basics packs. Whatever I have done by the sale I'll bundle up for a better price (there should be maybe 4 packs done by then)

Another quick little kit.

Should be about 4 of these kits done by the sale too (that Piddly Pea one being the first) as well as maybe about 4 other fun element packs. I am shooting for 15 new things by the time the sale rolls around but we'll see :) I only have 4 things done as of this point HA!!

OKay off to live real life for a bit, then go get a new fish bowl.