I pulled some photos off of my camera so here you go.

First, we did some major cleaning up last weekend and as a result I was able to do some dyeing again. It was nice to have my space back, things tend to migrate out to the extension and build up, mostly recycling stuff and kid clothes that need to be put into storage, things like that. Every few weeks we go through and clean everything out. Here’s my dyeing table, it’s nothing fancy but it does the job. I love my ghetto $4 GeeDub crock pots.

I mentioned winding a huge skein for self-striping sock yarn. Here’s the setup, what I like to call The Definition of Torture. Ugh, SO not worth it, especially when I realized that after dyeing I need to rewind everything all over again so it’s in a usable size skein. And this is two skeins worth, so it needs to be split. Blarrgh.

I mentioned kidlet made clown barf, and I wasn’t kidding. I do have pictures of the yarn rinsed and dried and it’s not quite this saturated, I’ll post them when I’ve got them.

The only other mildly exciting thing is that I read an entry by one of my favorites who was expressing her love for green smoothies. Being curious I read up on them and they really resonate with me, check out GreenSmoothieGirl.com for details.

Michael and I have already discussed multiple times the idea of moving to more of a whole foods diet and even more of a raw foods diet. Being diabetic he would benefit from it and being overweight it can only help me, and anything that is good for the kids is something I’m interested in. Having so little time and brainpower to get organized has been a challenge, however. I read the website and decided that I wanted to try this for myself – I figure if I can drink one green smoothie a day to start, just to get the hang of it, I can decide if I want to go further than that. I don’t have an industrial strength blender but the one I have works okay, I just have to add the initial greens little by little until it gets enough in there to keep things going.

Yesterday (Friday) I made my first smoothies – I went to the farm stand in the morning where I picked up an obscene amount of green thingies – spinach, red and green swiss chard, endive, parsley, lettuce (for salad), and then a good assortment of other things including bananas, apples, tomatoes, strawberries, raspberries, nectarines, a coconut, two dozen eggs, cheese curd, dates, carrots, potatoes…I actually had to use a cart instead of a handbasket and even with overfilling a banana box and having a bag to carry in addition to that I only spent $50. It was only that high because of the more expensive items like the coconut and the cheese. I love our farm stand – our usual purchase is 3-4 bunches of organic bananas, a bag of apples, 1-2 dozen eggs, 1-2# baby carrots, tomatoes, an onion or two, lettuce, celery, and sometimes pears for under $20. I feel very lucky to live in an agricultural state.

Anyway. I brought my huge bounty home and decided to mix up something simple so I used spinach, green swiss chard, parsley, strawberries, banana, and a few dates for sweetness. It was really tasty and I felt very full afterward. Best of all I ate more spinach in that one smoothie than I’ve probably eaten all month. It’s amazing how a huge handful of greens becomes a very small and compact volume of smoothie. What a great way to get our fresh veggies! I hate salad dressing and I hate eating salad so this is perfect. I made a glass for Michael and asked him to try it – I think he tolerated it, so I’m going to keep making them and offering them to him.

When kidlet got home from school I asked him if he wanted me to make him a smoothie – I’ve made fruit smoothies for him before, usually from frozen fruit and yogurt. He loves them. So I made him one with lots of fresh strawberries, a banana, a couple of leaves of green swiss chard, a small handful of spinach and a couple of ice cubes. I tasted it and it had a very slight green flavor to it (kidlet doesn’t like “green stuff” in his food like herbs) so I added a small amount of maple syrup to it and he LOVED it. He drank the whole cup I gave to him and the rest that was in the blender. I didn’t tell him that he just had a serving of swiss chard and another of spinach. That’s my little secret. It was kind of a reddish-brown so to hide that fact I put it in a kid’s cup – we have about a million of them from when we go out to eat – and put a color-changing straw in the top that was blue and turned purple when cold. He couldn’t tell what color it was so he didn’t have the opportunity to be weirded out by it.

It really was quite easy, so I’m going to go ahead and keep doing this “one a day” method for a week, maybe two, then work my way up to doing more. I’m really glad to have found this because I was sprouting a few months ago and enjoyed doing that a lot, only I couldn’t figure out what to do with all those sprouts! I just have a cheapie jar with a screen top and it made more sprouts than I could choke down. Now I can use them in smoothies! Yay! To celebrate I dusted off my old jar and set it up with broccoli seeds tonight. Kidlet and I are doing it together as a project, I’m going to take pictures every day and then print them out so kidlet can make a little folder or something with them in it.

Here it is, sprouting, day 1:

It might not look like much but trust me, within a week that jar will be filled to bursting. I did this with alfalfa seeds a few times and the volume of sprouts that came from 1-1/2 tablespoons of seed was incredible, the jar was packed tight.

Just trying to find ways in my everyday to get moving, to eat better, to make changes. Little by little.