Getting bigger and redder!!

I'm loving how this one is ripening!!

Container Organizing Begins

I'm attempting to make or front yard more of a cool urban mama food garden look than a crazy plant lady look so I moved them from being all bunched up by the house to the perimeter of the yard...I figure it also help to keep all the plant accessible for watering while semi containing the kids in the yard too. I cab also reach then all pretty easily for harvest.

I am playing with putting up a short faux fence to cover the front of the pots though...think it would be a bit more visually appealing...not sure though. I'd like to think I could make them but not sure what I'd use our when I'd do it. I am keeping my eyes open for ideas though...

Roma!!

Ironic I have two other pots marked as Roma but this is the only one with long tomatoes!! I'm thinking these are my best of that category even if not tagged  ;-)

Ok...I'm a mom...

So i noticed this morning that it was chilly and it was like...omg, my Meyer lemons are still tiny and green!! So i decided to start bringing in my little tree at night...here it is on my dining room table where our will get light when the sun comes up before me. I think I'll keep taking it outside during the day as much as possible though...we will see.

I say I'm a mama because i don't want my baby lemons greeting too cold to grow!! Well that and I have the kids  ;-)

Baby Food, Juicing and Smoothies Oh My!!

This has got to be one of the most planned out posts I've ever done, it all happened when I went to pick up my husband about an hour ago and being in the passenger seat started taking a look at an ad we got in the mail that was selling this item:

 If you can't tell from the picture then let me tell you about it. It is a blender with tiny little cups/containers so mom and dad can make tiny portions of baby food, it can be whatever you want, smoothie-like, dinner all blended up, or anything else you can think of that you want to get blended together for your baby to eat...why did it cause such an urge to blog about appliances? Well...let me tell you...it all started about ten years ago when I was watching TV and I saw an ad for...

Yes the MAGIC BULLET. It is something I swore by for years, in fact at one point in my life I had two of them because I was spending the night at different places and I ALWAYS wanted to have it with me to make my smoothies in the morning. My favorite smoothie mix changed over time and most recently was the mix that I got from Arbonne, either the chocolate or the vanilla flavor mixed with banana, coconut milk, and even some cooled espresso sometimes. Magic was a part of my life for a long time and will always be a fond memory...I have moved on for the most part though and my latest favorite food processing tool is:

This is the Omega 8005 and I got it, or I should say "we" got it as a wedding present when I married my husband Geoff on 8/8/08. I use it all the time to make juice, usually with carrots, apples, kale and/or chard from the garden, herbs I might have around, beets if I have them around, pears if I have them around and so forth...I love this thing. I also recently figured out that if I take...

...a bit of the fibers that result from the juicing process and mix it with a bit of the juice, then it makes a lovely textured baby food you can see here!!:

It was AFTER I fell in love with it that I found out about GrowingYourGreens.com and DiscountJuicers.com (which is affiliated with the rawfoods YouTube channel) and then my love for it skyrocketed... 

See, both of those sites are run by a guy named John who puts up AWESOME videos on YouTube about two things I'm totally obsessed with which is growing food and finding wonderful ways to consume it. His Gardening videos have been great as I feel motivated and more educated about all that I'm doing there and the videos on his rawfoods channel show a lot of ways to eat the food I grow in ways that I had not thought of before. It was also on there that I learned about this beautiful machine...the Vitamix TurboBlend VS:

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I'll have to find and post the video that made me want this machine so bad...it basically took things that I don't think of as even being blendable and made them totally into a smoothie-like substance that he then walked around his yard with and used things like chard to dip into it. I totally aspire to be able to do all that.


Conclusion...
So now we've gone full circle...and basically when I saw that Baby Bullet it made me laugh because the me of a few years ago would have bought it in a heart beat...but especially since I had just figured out this AWESOME motivation to juice more than I already do, because I can not only make juice for all of us but also some more 'solid-ish' foods for my little guy too.

It made me think about that Magic Bullet though too and reminded me that part of why I stopped using mine, aside from not liking the process of washing so many parts (it added up when making smoothies for multiple people) it first the use of the blender we currently have making more sense for making smoothies for lots lf people, and second it was knowing that there was something better out there called a Vitamix TurboBlend VS out there waiting for me to love it.


Links on this page to the Vitamix will link to Johns sites which I make no money off of but would love to send business to him as his videos have taught me so so much and the other pictures when clicked on will take you to the appropriate product pages on Amazon where you can find more details and reviews if you are interested and if you decide to buy any of these Amazon will send me a minuscule percentage of what you pay for them...Thank you for your time and I hope you enjoy your journey too!!


Have you been through a similar appliance journey? Totally opposite? I'd love to know.... 

Pool Trampoline Dreams...

Okay, so this new thing I am curious about started in Costco...they have something like this that caught my attention when it was way up in the air after I grabbed the toilet paper and I had to check it out online because my husband said it was for putting out in the lake and jumping on while I totally thought it was obvious it would go in the backyard to be "either" a pool or a trampoline...turns out we are both right! There is a huge variance in the cost of these different things which I thought was interesting, check this out, here is the one that works the way I thought it would and that I would be most interested in having at my house...

I'd like that one up above because it can be either a trampoline or a pool...it's watertight in other words. I would really like to have a pool big enough to fit all three of my little munchkins in and maybe even me (or just my feet) too for the occasional sunny day in Seattle...

The one above functions more like how my husband envisioned...it 's a kids version of the one below that the pictures you will see if you click through show kids jumping on it while it floats in a pool. I would not be interested in this one just because I don't think it is safe to use in a pool (I confess...I was once a lifeguard and might be overly cautious about pool safety) I can't help but imagine a kid jumping off and accidentally clocking their head on the side of the pool or something...terrifying imho. If I lived by a lake or something I'd consider it, however I'm pretty sure that I'd skip the kids one and totally go for the one below if I could afford it:

I definitely recommend clicking through on this one, it is bigger, and accommodates larger people. I would love this if I lived by water, which might someday be the case but isn't yet so I'll just stick it on my wishlist for now...or maybe I'll put this one on my Ideal Life Pinterest Page til I DO live by the water and add the one above to my wishlist for now.

Floods!!

Apparently I've been living in a bit of a happy bubble in my blissful TV-free life for the last few days...when I saw headlines about 'lots of rain' I thought maybe there just wasn't much other news to talk about, I thought "Rain in Seattle? Big deal...". It started when a woman I have plans to meet up with sent me an email that she might not be able to make it due to the flooding on I-5 in between us. I'm so glad she reached out to let me know because WOW...I'm totally off making an ignorant statement like that!! Floods are serious wherever they are...

I listened to part of a KUOW show today (The Conversation) and read in their email that there was 20 miles of I-5 flooded!! I looked at the pictures on the PI website and there were 'drowning' houses, floating hot tubs and men in water up to their chest!

I also heard that a good friend of mine...who is even closer to having a baby than I am had to leave her apartment. I can only imagine how many horror stories are out there, and of course of all days I can't find my phone.

I'm kind of in shock now regarding the flooding, I haven't seen any flooding evidence around where I live/work (Alki/Downtown Seattle) but wow...