Thursday, March 20, 2008

R&R Coffee

Ryan opened his coffeeshop!! David's good friend Ryan has wanted to open a coffeehouse for quite some time and now it's here!! For those of you in the Colorado area, you can visit him here.
Lily and I went on opening day last week and I enjoyed a sweet cup of vanilla latte. I plan to become a regular patron and may hold a few Mommy gatherings there.
Congratulations Ryan!!!

Proud Owner

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Earth Diet and Oh Yea, it was St Patty's Day!

David and I are on our 4th day of our "Earth Diet". This is our made up name of a basically vegan/vegetarian diet. I got inspired watching Dr Oz on Oprah talking about a group of British folks who ate "the ape" diet. This diet is basically eating 11 pounds of raw fruits/veggies every day. After 12 days they lost weight, had significantly lowered their cholesterol and lowered their blood pressure. I flirt with having too high cholesterol, so I thought - "I wonder what would happen if we ate this way?" Of course I chickened out with the 11 pounds of fruits and veggies, but modified it to fit our lifestyle. David is doing the vegan way and I decided I didn't want to give up dairy, so I went vegetarian. (must have greek yogurt!) This also includes no white stuff - no white flour or sugar. It's actually going really well and I feel great! I thought there would be tears shed over bread, but not so far! We did our grocery run this weekend and spent our average weekly dollar amount on all sorts of fruits, vegetables and nuts. Later this week we will introduce some fish (there goes David's veganism). I worked on many many recipes found mostly from Dr. Oz's book, Montel Williams' book and Dr. Weil's book. I must say we have found some new yummie recipes!
Our original plan was to go 10 days. However, I goofed up and planned a breakfast date and dinner date with some friends this Saturday. Sooo, now we will just do 7 days. Perhaps down the road, we'll do this again. It's funny, I have some vegan friends who eat this way all the time. It's just their way of life. I admire them! I just would miss dairy and bread too much. :)

The Newly Stocked Fridge

One of our many veggie soup recipes

And I forgot to say "Happy St. Patty's Day" on my post yesterday. I'm not a lick Irish, so this day hasn't meant much to me. However, I do love the color green and I'm happy to support the green clothing tradition. I donned Lily in some green as well.

Monday, March 17, 2008

Ready for Next Christmas

Every year my crazy family in Indiana gets the "underwear head shot". It's tradition that my Mom buys all of us underwear. Not sure how this started, but we all decided to put the new underwear on our head and get the annual picture.

Here was last years.

This is Lily practicing the underwear shot. Yes, these are my chonies (our slang for underwear). I promise I did not show her how to do this. I was folding laundry and Lily decided to "help" me by taking the laundry out of the basket. She found a pair of my chonies and promptly placed it on her head. Yes, this is my daughter.


Thursday, March 13, 2008

Going Paperless

The responsibility at my very PT job is to help the company go paperless. I'm scanning in documents and then shredding them. We found a company that claims to recycle the shredded paper - I sure hope they do as they do have quite a bit of paper!

Along the lines of going paperless, my husband and I are trying to have a "paperless" house, as much as one can. Here are a few websites to help along in the process

www.donotmail.com - petition to allow us to get on a "do not mail list", such as the "do not call" list

http://www.paperlesspetition.org/ - Found this on one of my favorite blogs: MomGoGreen. You can sign a petition to opt out of the phone books!

http://www.41pounds.org/ - this website assists in stopping your junk mail! It's $41, but would be worth your while! David and I plan to do this soon!

http://www.catalogchoice.org/ - you can opt out of the catalogs you receive here!

I'm sure there are more websites out there.
Other ways we are going paperless.

-Requesting bills be sent via email or available online
-Paying bills online
-We don't get a newspaper
-Cancel or don't reorder magazines we don't really read

It feels much lighter in our house when we aren't cluttered with extra paper, junk mail, magazines!