I first heard Cynthia Lair share recipes on NPR, including from a snippet of her online cooking show which can be pretty funny. After this, I looked up her website and printed off some recipes that sounded good – and they were! I think it was her apple-walnut kale recipe that really sold me. I had never cooked much with dark greens as they can be bitter and tougher, but I began giving them a try thanks to Cynthia. And I discovered I really like them – and (a bit of a shock to me) so does Jay.
Cynthia Lair focuses on making food that is fresh, uses more natural ingredients, and is fairly simple to cook. Ideas that sound good to me! For Christmas, Jay got me her cookbook which I have recently been using A LOT. The recipes are a little different than our standard fare, usually quite tasty, and, for the most part, do not require a lot of time in the kitchen. Did I mention they are quite filling too? I mean, I know this is the goal with food, but sometimes a meal just doesn’t stick with me as long as others. An added bonus with her cookbook, tips for feeding kids a variety of foods as well as how to make parts of meals baby friendly — both of which I’m sure will come in handy in this house soon.
I would suggest checking our her website and see what you think!

Jay and I had our ultrasound today — looks like we’re having a girl!!! Let the ‘discussions’ over names begin!

Possibly a less-than-interesting post for many (or all) of you, but here’s what you get for a little new reading material (tomorrow, if we’re lucky, the answer to boy or girl?).
A month ago or so, sleeping became a bit uncomfortable as my hips would start aching by the end of the night (and not only can I not sleep on my stomach, but no back either – !). I mentioned this to my friend Jennifer and she told me about the Snoogle pillow. Ok, she raved about it. As soon as we got off the phone, a link to the pillow on Amazon was in my in-box. A couple days later, I ordered it and since its arrival, have been sleeping more comfortably. It’s kind of a large ‘C’ shaped pillow that goes around the neck and then down between the knees – the idea is to help keep you aligned. Jay jokingly says he feels a little replaced – or maybe literally feels replaced as it takes up just a little space in the bed… just a little… It required its own suitcase when we went to the Salish… but it’s so worth it (Sorry Jay!) to be able to sleep for longer stretches!
I’m going to attempt to post a link (the pictures of the woman resting with it are humorous) but no Jay here to guide my way (yes, I am that lame) and I might give up…

So I hear it’s not uncommon to have some wild and crazy dreams while pregnant. This woman I sit next to in class who is pregnant told me she regularly dreams that Satan is telling her he’ll be coming for her soon. Fortunatly, Satan has not visited my dreams, but for the past I’m not sure how many weeks, I’ve had, on average, one to three very vivid, usually at least slightly weird dreams per night. Sometimes they are about people I know or once knew, sometimes I cannot figure out where the people may have come from – someone standing in front of me in line? Last night I dreamt that I was at Rio Disney (pretty sure that’s not in the plans of Disney expansion…) and randomly met up with this family who used to go to the preschool I worked at in Bellevue. I ended up taking care of their little girl and we were having fun swimming with unicorn fish in a ‘jungle’ pool until some kid taunted a large water snake who then jumped into the pool – at which point my dream stopped, maybe due to Jay waking me? (which apparently happens more than usual due to thrashing around/making loud noises on my part as I sleep) By far the weirdest and most disturbing dream occurred a few nights ago when, in my dream, Jay decided he had to poison someone who had done some (now unremembered) bad thing. In the dream, I found out about it and then became afraid I would be next so I decided to beat Jay to the punch and poison him first. Then when the effects of the poison began to take hold I started screaming and called 911 to come save him. Paramedics soon appeared, all of them well-known movie stars. They revived Jay and took him to the hospital, at which point my dream transitioned into a new one in which Jay and I were looking at new homes to buy… with huge backyards that had large raspberry beds (a key factor for any house we would even consider buying)… bizarre…

As one of our Valentine’s Day activities at school, my kids made Valentines for their families. While they were working on them, Kristen and I went around and asked them what they would like to say on their Valentines, which I then typed up and they glued on today. Here are the messages from five of my 3 year olds:

I love you. Next time I won’t be mean to my sisters. And thank you for my family.

Thank you to my family. I love my dog. I love my sisters.

I made this for you! I did it for you and you can have it when I go home.

For my family!

I love my Mom. I love my Dad and my sister, Eva. I love cats.

and going to be really upset if this messes up my time with Jennifer and Dave who are supposed to be arriving at my house in 2 days!!! Dumb germs…
That is all the complaining for now.

Prompted by Dahlia’s post and this great idea I saw on Catherine’s board today (school), here we go!
This school year, my preschool has started a Values and Virtues Curriculum (school-wide). We attempt to teach about a different value/virtue each month (I say attempt because some of these concepts will take time for children to really grasp). This month we are talking about gratitude and thankfulness. Catherine and I have been sharing different ideas we’re going to use in our classrooms and today she tried out Gratitude Circles – during circle time, she read the book All in a Day and then the class shared things they were grateful/thankful for. She plans to do this regularly and hopes to encourage the kids to look beyond just their favorite toy. As part of the curriculum, we also send home suggestions for how parents and families can reinforce what we’re learning at school – so this month we’ve been coming up with ideas for how families can encourage thankfulness and gratitude by doing things as simple as talking about why we say Thank You and talking about things each member of the family is thankful for – maybe a new dinner time ritual.
This last idea, making a concerted effort to think about all that I have to be thankful for, is something I have tried to adopt more in my life lately. Some days I can get really stuck on how sad and/or unfair life feels sometimes. I try and validate the sadness, but not dwell – but when it comes to the question of fairness, well life never was and never will be fair so I feel like it’s a waste of time and energy to focus on that. Easier said than done, right? One thing I find that works well for me is to focus on things I am thankful for – maybe something little that happened in a day or maybe some larger part of my life. I try to think of different things each day so that I can see that really, I have a whole lot to be thankful for. I often start my mornings by thinking about what I am grateful/thankful for to kind of set the tone for my day, but focusing on what I’ve got to be glad about also helps when I’m suddenly and unexpectedly hit with a wave of sadness about Mom. Hopefully we can impart some little bit of this to our children at school.

Jay and I recently got a new desk-top computer. It now lives in its rightful home, our office. For about a month (or maybe more, I lose track of time these days), it lived in the media room because the computer desk in the office was too small. Why, you might ask since it was already being used for the old computer? Because this round, we have two 24 in. monitors side-by-side. Jay has two or three monitors side-by-side at work, but I always assumed that was because of the type of work he does. I fully believed that I would continue to only use one monitor even though we now have the 2 in the office (in fact, I down-right refused to even try using two… initially…). Then, one day last week, I was doing some homework and kept having to click back and forth between the questions I was supposed to be answering and my response. Suddenly I realized I could just ‘slide’ one window over to the monitor on the right and continue typing in the window open on the monitor on the left – and oh my gosh, I’m hooked! How did I live before without being able to totally spread out the windows I have open so I could see multiple ones at the same time – in a normal size! I do this with real papers I’m working with so why not on the computer too? At least on the computer, it looks a whole lot neater than the desk itself – currently strewn with papers.