Raw as I wanna be

So I have some friends who have been eating RAW for about a year now. They have both lost a lot of weight. Neither were heavy before but they look and feel great. Lauri decided to do kind of a support group so once a month she invites us to her house to share ideas and recipes. The first night was "Green smoothie night" You got it. We all tried green smoothies.

You start with a couple of large handfulls of spinace, chard, kale, romaine or leaf lettuce. I usually use spinach. Pour about a cup of water in the blender with it and add whatever raw fruits and vegetables you like. Since I have a LOT of frozen peaches from our tree I always use about a cup of frozen peaches and maybe half a frozen banana. The best flavor is to add the juice from one lemon and a little packet of Sun Crystals:

It's down below, it just wont move. Grrr Anyway that's like a spinach lemonade. Hahaha

It has the consistency of SLUDGE! Yum!

Not a bad way to start a day although you need to chew to blend with your saliva. I asked if you could just spit in it. I don't think the ladies liked my idea.

The next month we had a salad night with raw dressings. Y'all get salads. Nothing special but I learned to do a chopped salad with my ingredients chopped small. Its tasty and colorful. In this salad I have romaine, kale, spinach, cauliflower (one of my favorite vegies), tomato, mushrooms and yellow pepper. A colorful pepper makes the salad look festive and adds so much flavor. Then I top it off with, raw dressing? Heck NO! I'm as raw as I wanna be! I have discovered Wish Bone Olive Oil Vinegrette. It has 60 calories per serving which is half or less of a ranch or cream dressing. I'm sure I usually end up with 2 servings but YUM!

Now if you really want to increase your raw food intake try pulse. It's supposed to be in the Bible or something but you go to the health food store and get a plastic screen to go on your wide mouth canning jar. It's worth about 50 cents but costs $5.00. You have to use raw seeds and nuts so they sprout. I use sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, buckwheat choats and a little flax seed. I was told to use almonds too but They swell so big and don't distribute well so I do the sprouts and chop the almonds and add it in at the end. I put this on salad and in yogurt. By the way, these ladies are completely down on dairy but I am as raw as I wanna be!
Ahhh, here is that stubborn picture of Sun Crystals, it's a natural sweetener made from stevia. It's super sweet.
Last week we had a get together for raw desserts. Ya know, there is a limit to how raw I wanna be. The facebook group and e-mail group is called "rawaswewannabe" Thus, my constant reference/tirade. I go to get some healthy food ideas and I have come away with good ideas every time but I'm not going 100% on this. I disagree with a few of the ideas and I have not seen any of the references backed by a doctor so it's just a lot of peoples opinions but there is some good information. I'm eating less fried food and cutting down on sugar. I got a new knife just for cutting my vegetables and I enjoy apples regularly and salads all the time now.
The moral of this blog is try it!
Go chew some sludge today!

Hind family baby shower

So yesterday we had a baby shower for A's side of the family. I spared you pictures of all the guests but the aunt at the far right is the long arm quilter that did a beautiful heirloom quilt. This is the stack of presents:This is the quilt I made. R chose the fabric last year and this year likes pink and green instead but it's a super cute quilt and even hand quilted.
These are the receiving blankets I crocheted. I wish the colors showed up better on the pink one. It's so cute. Both have very nice prints. I've probably done 100 of these over the years.

Oh my Gosh!

For cute!

This is a cupcake of burpcloths with coffee filters as the muffin cup. It was all wrapped in celophane. Most of the cousins were very crafty.

Another crafty cousin did a whole set of burpcloths with cute borders and applique. The flip-flops were a hit.

There were some beautiful basics, receiving blankets and onsies.

This was one of many little outfits. This one was pink and brown, ( how cute will baby look in this with that cute little pink and brown quilt Granma Gigi made?) It has a matching onesie and flare legs. Most of the sleepers and outfits were size 6-9 months.

Now for the heirloom:

Aunt Karen got swatches from R's layette set that she's making and made this beautiful quilt. This is a showcase quality quilt. She could hang it on the wall or a rack for decoration.

There were darling shoes, sewn, bought and crocheted, hairbows and head bands which is a good thing considering that R didn't have much hair till she was three but now has enough for three people. Her mother-in-laws family gave a cash gift to help them buy the stroller/car-seat that they want. Now she needs some basics like crib sheets, matress pad, bottles and books.
We will be doing a family party/shower/barbeque on Memorial day for our family. I'm very excited now for this baby to come. R is getting a little uncomfortable but we are so happy things are still going well.

The food was delicious and the presentation was beautiful.

Blindfolded Easter

Not a glamorous picture but I had all my kids decorating Easter eggs. We had some very creative eggs. a strawberry:

a grenade...

and of course a variety of colors and kits.

L is here to demonstrate our adult Easter egg hunt and the hunt begins!

The things we learned or were reenforced during this activity was that R doesn't like being out of control, B is slow and methodical and it pays off, L is rough and CJ just likes having the older siblings around. A was not quite sure why all the kids would participate so willingly even knowing there was money in the eggs. He thought it would be cents but like the others he came away with $$$!

I have great video but after an hour of it saying it was uploading I figure it pobably never would. Darn!

I have another one when we opened the eggs. The surprise was that there were baby sock and baby washcloths in the socks to R and A got a bunch of that stuff too. Then we had cinnamon rolls and watched conference. It was such a beautiful weekend!