A Whole New World, With Peanut Butter On Top

I’m blogging about getting kids to eat healthy over at my other stomping ground today. Come visit!

Wordless Wednesday: A Smooth Life

**This smoothie is green! Full of romaine lettuce. Go here to read more.

For more Wordless fun go here and here.

Angels Now

My heart is breaking as I type this, but in case you haven’t checked in with Beth at I Should Be Folding Laundry since yesterday, you need to. She has received devastating news about her pregnancy, about her babies, and she will be needing a huge amount of prayers and support.

Green Smoothie Challenge: Day 1

Alright party people, today is day one of the smoothie challenge. Who’s in? Our first one was a big hit and so awesome and refreshing. As you can see above, this one had oranges, strawberries, kiwi, spinach, H2O and a tiny bit of agave nectar (after the first sip was a little too “green”). I think I was a little heavy handed on the spinach, but a little agave and all was well with the world. I have more pictures up on my Flickr set, and will be posting pics there every day of our green concoctions.

Be sure to subscribe to my photos if you’d like to follow along!

Best Shot Monday: Speed Skater

I love how this hoodie makes him look like he’s on his way to the gold medal in speed skating. These clothes are amaaazing. Look for my review on them at Mama Speaks soon.

It’s been dark and dreary here, as reflected in this pic, but I’m posting something green and sunny up next. Stay tuned!

For more Best Shots go here.

Ari. I. Am.

After a friend’s recent blog post, and subsequent conversation about said post, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.  This idea of…who am I?  The journey of discovering your self.  Figuring out who you are can be really elusive, and I honestly didn’t even KNOW that I didn’t know who I was, until I finally figured out who I am.  Bear with me here…

My first in a series of epiphanies that have recently occurred, is that I haven’t been ME in at least 3 or 4 years.  Since my first son was diagnosed with autism (the same month my second child was born) in 2004, I have been in survival mode.  Struggling to just get through every day, and never really being happy with what I had done or been at the end of each day.  It was marvelous.

Depressed for most of the time, I couldn’t even be bothered to CARE that I was just surviving.  I had a snarky blog that I kept anonymous so I could complain about anything and everything.  Sadly, many people read that blog and commiserated.  I’m sure most of the unhappy bloggers out there see many more visits than the happy bloggers do.  Too much misery to go around, and like an over-soaked sponge it just seeps out all over everything.  I was far away from my true self, and worse–far away from God.  When you’re miserable the last thing you want to read about or write about is happiness.

Also, let’s be honest…I didn’t care what I looked like AT ALL.  I couldn’t be bothered to worry about my body or my looks when there were these kids that took every last cell in my body every day.  I realize now that I was not being a good steward of my body, never mind giving my husband something appealing to come home to every day.  On top of everything else, I didn’t have a home that reflected me.  Having a passion for interior design and NOT painting or decorating my house, well, you know something had to have been wrong.

So, I’m looking back and seeing this woman and wondering who the heck she was or is, and I realize something.  When have I lived through and through as ME?  I wonder if I have EVER been myself or known who I am before this past year.  Reflection of the last 10 years or so has brought me to the realization that I just kind of flitted and floated around, changing myself to be like whoever I surrounded myself with.  Not just hobbies, but taste, personality, faith, everything.

This brings me to the here and now.  I know who I am, or at least I know who I want to be.  It sounds so simple, but how can that be such a hard thing to achieve?  Knowing yourself.  It can’t really be just that I’m turning 30 in a few weeks, can it?  Is there some magical self-enlightenment that spawns from the big 3-0?  I finally feel like ME, and it’s so liberating.  Like I was in there all along and just never nurtured her before, acknowledged her.  The shackles are off, it’s time to dance.

I feel confident in who I am, the soul God gave me.  The spiritual gifts that He blessed me with have never empowered me like they do now.  I feel like I know MY style, not the style of what others are bringing to the table.  My home is slowly becoming more and more me, and we all know how important it is that our home reflects who we are.  My health is kinda in the dumps right now due to thyroid problems, but my recent epiphany that I need to be a vegan has injected new life and hope where I had become pretty hopeless.  I know these things might sound trivial, especially to those that have *known* this about themselves for some time, but to me they mean a lot.  Surrounding myself with people I love and being the real me is such an enormous gift.  It frees me up to really seek joy and an abundant life, and most of all it frees me up to help others.

Freedom, you never looked so good.

Love Thursday: A Man and His Wheels

The love my boys have for their cars can only be compared to a dog’s love of a bone, a woman’s love of shoes, or my love of office supplies. It’s may-jah.

Pure, unconditional, slightly obsessive, love.

For more love-ness, go here.

Wordless Wednesday: Playing With Textures

For more Wordless fun go here and here.

Something’s Fishy

I’m at my other blog talking about why I love these strawberry fish oils so much.  Come visit me, leave me a comment–or better yet, leave your own health tips!

Have Some Compassion

Have you been keeping up with the Uganda Bloggers?

My husband and I started reading along with Sophie from Boo Mama and Shannon from Rocks In My Dryer over the past week or so as they blogged from Uganda. They were a part of a team of bloggers that traveled with Compassion to spread the word about the massive needs of children in Africa. Throughout the past week, we’ve discovered the other bloggers (Carlos, Heather, Shaun and Anne, to name a few), and after reading everyone’s posts and seeing the various pictures and videos, we’ve completely had our hearts broken. Wrecked, I tell you. We won’t ever be the same, and we wouldn’t want to be.

The children in Africa are affected by AIDS in their villages and many of them have lost one or both parents. Think about that for a minute.

They live in extreme poverty, and many don’t have the means to even attend school (school is not free there). The severe poverty isn’t one that any of us can imagine unless we’ve visited such a place to see it for ourselves. The stories of these precious children need to be told. They need your help.

Because we had our hearts broken, we started thinking about what we could do. The wealth that we have (even though we don’t feel that way most of the time) is so far and above the majority of the world’s, it’s not even funny. We’ve been feeling very strongly lately that we need to make sure we are teaching our children that there is a much different world out there when they leave our little town. Leave our Country. We want them to see the realities of the slums so many live in, in person and for themselves some day. This won’t be until they are older, but they need to see what it’s like to not have the riches we are blessed to have here in the U.S. So, what can we do NOW?

This brings us to Emanuel. That’s his picture on the right. He is our boy now–we are sponsoring him as a family through Compassion International. He is 5 years old and his birthday is a couple days before my 5 yr old son’s birthday. He has lost both parents. We just got him, so we haven’t received any of the great things we hear about (a letter from him, maybe a picture), but we already feel like he’s part of our family. We pray for him with the children every night, and show them where he lives on our world map. Yesterday when the phone rang, my 3yr old said “is that our boy?”, thinking Emanuel was calling us. Excuse me while I go weep.

For $32 a month, you can sponsor your own child. That’s it. For us, I think $32 might be a month’s (ok, two weeks) worth of coffee from Starbucks. But that little amount will absolutely change the life of that child, and–bonus–you will be able to sleep at night. Not a bad trade.

Here’s one video by Shaun…you will be moved. Consider yourself warned.

Here is Shannon talking about the village in that video:

The slums were just exactly like every picture you’ve seen of African urban poverty. The children ran around in rags, while adults sat outside their doors, many trying to sell things, others begging. Raw sewage ran in various open channels through the streets. Cows and chickens roamed freely, and the open air market sold raw fish absolutely covered in flies.

It is just exactly like I pictured a hundred times, just exactly like I’d seen in countless photos of Africa. And yet it was profoundly different, standing there, seeing it, smelling it, holding the hands of the children who just wanted to see a “mzungu” (white person).

Read the rest of the post here, and another one here. Then check out this video from Carlos:

You just go ahead and try to stop thinking about these kids. Consider. Go here to read even more, and go here to Sponsor A Child.

If you have your own Compassion story to share, go here and post your link to the list.