Chocolate Tapioca Decadence

Since giving birth six months ago, I have become a certified chocoholic. Don't get me wrong, I have always liked chocolate, but my love for it now has gotten to the point where it is a bit of a problem.

I used to prefer milk chocolate, and dark chocolate was always a little much for me. But now... now is a different story. I could eat an entire bar of 70% dark in one sitting. No problem. So delicious. I could do it every day. (I also love coffee. Not for the caffeine, for the taste.) The 70% is perfect for my taste buds, but I could eat the darker stuff too. I have discovered that 90% dark chocolate is perfect for s'mores. Try it. It's true.

Anyway, I need chocolate like it's oxygen. It's just something I inherited with Eddy. Naturally, I am always on the lookout for various ways to ingest this new addiction that doesn't look like stealing chocolate chips from my baking stash. (Though in an emergency, that does the trick.)

One of my favorite light(er) desserts that is super easy and quick to make is tapioca pudding. We always have extra eggs and it's super satisfying. Making it yourself allows you to make it fat free and lower in sugar as well. Winning.

So naturally, eventually I was going to make the discovery that I could make tapioca pudding with cocoa powder. Turns out, it's delicious.

Ingredients
1/4 cup small pearl tapioca
1/2 cup water
2 cups milk (moo or almond)
1/2 cup sugar
2 tablespoons cocoa powder (or more if you need it :))
dash of salt
1/4 tsp vanilla extract
2 eggs

Soak the tapioca in the half cup of water for a half an hour. Add the milk and dash of salt and slowly bring to just before boiling. In the meantime, mix the sugar and cocoa powder together in a separate bowl. (Side note: here is proof that my addiction is no joke, when adding the cocoa powder, I was super tempted to eat a spoonful. Gross, right?) Add the eggs and whisk together. Once the milk and tapioca mixture is hot, bring the heat down to low and slowly whisk in the egg/sugar mixture. Keep it on the heat until the mixture thickens, stirring often. Turn the heat off, let the pudding cool for a bit, and stir in the vanilla. Enjoy hot or cold. You could garnish with some whipped cream and a little sprinkle of cinnamon if you'd like. So decadent.

You're gonna love it. Try not to eat it all in one sitting.

I didn't have any whipped cream on hand. I know. Shame on me.

Easy, Recycled Fire Pit

Shawn has always wanted a fire pit for our backyard. Every time we saw one for sale at Fred Meyer or Costco or H-Dizzle, he would stare longingly at it and we would walk away saying "someday..." We never bought one for several reasons: price, timing, and just not wanting to buy something that was cheaply made in China.

Well, his wish finally came true on Father's Day when I built him a fire pit from recycled cinder blocks. My sister's hubby was in the process of taking apart an old fish pond that they acquired when they bought their house which resulted in lots of cinder blocks. They also had mortar on them that needed to be chipped off.

So the boys secretly kidnapped Shawn to go watch a World Cup game at a bar and my sister and I equipped ourselves with some hammers and crow bars and got to work.

Dude, chipping all that mortar off was hard work! But we did it, feeling rather proud of ourselves.

We are woman!!!

Once we got all the mortar off, the assembly was a cinch. One paver stone was stacked on each cinder block that was arranged in a hexagon and, ta daa! Fire pit. 

My original plan was to glue the paver stones onto the cinder blocks but I haven't done it yet. I don't know if it actually needs it, to be honest.

Fire. Pit.

Cleaning it out will be easy too since the cinder blocks aren't glued to the ground.

Well, as you can see, this was constructed several months ago. You're seeing this post now because Shawn finally got a chance to use it this weekend.

Happy husband.

Breastfeeding: Part 2

This post is way late. But it's World Breastfeeding Week so. Perfect.

I did it. We did it. Breastfeeding is officially easy. It's been easy for almost 3 months now. And it's awesome. I honestly don't know what helped with the change, other than Eddy growing, lots of practice, and a lot of perseverance on both our parts.

It's so convenient. I don't have to worry about packing her anything when we leave the house, and I can feed her the instant she gets hungry. Not to mention the fact that I can feed her while we're both half asleep. In bed. Super cool. And feeding her in public (without a hooter hider) is still something I'm working on getting comfortable with, but I'm determined to get there for the freedom of all mothers in the future to feed their babies without shame and ridicule.

She's just over five months old now. (Aca-believe it!) At four months, we started giving her a tiny bit of rice cereal because our doctor mentioned we could and it might help her sleep longer. After a week, we decided she wasn't quite ready for it since she was more cranky and wasn't excited about me putting a spoon in her mouth. We tried again a few weeks ago, and still no. She just doesn't seem to like it. So we stopped again. Yesterday, just for kicks, I put a piece of cantaloupe up to her lips and she made a hilariously disgusted face followed with a few adorable baby gags. I know it takes a baby up to 14 times to try a new food before she likes it, so I'm not worried. (Shawn gave her almost a negligible amount of vanilla ice cream yesterday and she actually enjoyed that. Go figure.) We're thinking maybe apple juice or peach juice next. 

So we're happy with our system now. She is starting to sleep for longer periods at night, so I know we'll eventually get there. I love the fact that I am personally responsible for her growth and nutrition, and I still get to eat the extra calories. Oh, and I've heard that breast feeding helps reduce the chances of breast cancer, and seeing as how I genetically have pretty much a 99% chance of getting it in my lifetime, I'll take all the help I can get. Oh, and hello pre-pregnancy weight!!! She's sucking the pounds right off of me. :)

The only downside to the whole breast feeding thing now is the fact that I have to pump a couple times a day while I'm at work and am constantly worried about my supply. (But that gives me good reason to drink stout beer and eat lots of lactation cookies :))

So in the end, my naive excitement about breastfeeding has come to fruition. I actually love it now. She's growing up so fast, but I feel like I'm right there with her. She smiles up at me several times throughout a feeding, and we hold hands while she kicks her little feet at whatever she can kick. She absolutely cannot stay still while eating. The thought of weaning now makes me sad. But I won't have to think about that for a little while.

I love my little lady.

Fresh Air = Happy Baby

When Eddy was a newborn, she wasn't very human-like. She was more along the lines of a puppy, but even more helpless. Of course, having never given birth or reared said human-puppy before, I really didn't know what to expect as far as when she would start acting more humanoid, or what her preferences in life would be, or what baby development even looked like.

When we were preparing for her arrival, we got the standard things like toys, clothes, some furniture, etc. There were a few items that we acquired not really knowing how important they would be in Eddy's early life. Here are the top 5:

1) High Contrast Picture Cards - I had heard that babies like super contrasty black and white drawings because that's all their little eyes and brains can process in the bright outside world in the very beginning. Well, they're right. Eddy has been pretty enthralled by them since a few days into her life and continues to be over 4 months later. Awesome.

2) Books - I am an educator/teacher. So naturally, my child will have an extensive library. But I used to think, come on, how much can an infant enjoy a book? A lot, it turns out. I've been reading to her for a couple months now and she really enjoys the pictures and, I think, our voices reading aloud. She's even now started reaching out to touch the pictures. So. Damn. Cute.

3) Hanging Toys - We got an infant/toddler chair that vibrates thinking it would help with naps. It has, to an extent, but it has now morphed into a piece of entertainment more than anything else. See, it came with a bar of hanging plastic thingies, one of which is an elephant that sings a little song when pulled. At first, even though they were hanging IN HER FACE, she didn't even notice them. Then about 2 months ago, that completely changed. Her eyes discovered them first, and she's steadily been working to grab them ever since. She has just started being able to pull the elephant and start the song herself, which pleases her greatly. We also have another toy that's a bar with a koala and butterfly that just hangs over her while she's laying down which is pretty cool too. So, in conclusion, hanging toys are awesome. Who knew?

4) Crinkly Tag Blankets - A friend and coworker of mine so generously gave me one of these for Christmas. I had never heard of them before but after I opened it I was informed about how amazing they were. I shrugged and took their word for it. I think we have yet to see its full potential, but this is definitely one of Eddy's favorite things. She likes rubbing it on her face and feeling the crinkles in her mouth. Once again, adorbs.

5) NATURE - This one makes my heart swell with pride with feelings of "that's my girl!" Eddy does not like to be cooped up in the house all day. Though the sun tends to be a little bright for her, she really likes being outside. She will sit on our laps for quite a while, content to feel the breeze on her face and watch the tree branches blowing around or listen to the birds do their thing. We have started spending about a half an hour to an hour each afternoon swinging on our front porch waiting for Shawn to get home. Any fussiness can generally be cured by a little jaunt outside. She really likes going on walks too. I salivate thinking about all the different nature adventures we're going to go on.

Babies. They're fascinating, aren't they?

Here comes the cuteness!

She loves sucking on that toucan.

Hanging out outside on 4th of July.

Major giggles for Bubba.

Food-Saving Challenge: Lessons Learned

For Earth Day I embarked on a personal challenge to live the next 30 days without wasting any food. I made some rules for myself to make it a little easier, but to also make it clear what my goal was.

In the name of saving food I did some new things that I would not have done before:

* Eat a bag of super stale crackers.

* Eat a super mealy pear (gross)

* Eat the stem of a super old broccolli but give the yellowed bud portions to the chickens

Another thing I did that I thought was pretty genious was to put some old stale cereal on a baking sheet and throw it into a recently-used oven to "freshen up." Just about 10 minutes in a not-very-hot oven will make any stale cereal edible again. Pretty cool, huh?

Things were going pretty well with the challenge until my grandma came into town. Naturally, this threw our usual daily routine out the window and we found ourselves eating dinner away from the house a lot more than usual. This resulted in leftovers in the fridge being forgotten, and extra food collecting faster than we could eat it. Things have been better since, though, and I've just come to the conclusion that not wasting any food is really hard, but a goal that we should all strive for at all times.

In other news, my garden is totes awesome this year. We've finished the first round of spinach and snow peas, and I finally got around to planting the second round of peas yesterday. The ladies are really enjoying the flowering spinach stalks that I throw into their coop each day, along with the failed (bolted) bok choy and carrot tops. Speaking of which, I've been having fun with my carrots this year. My seeds were from two seasons ago so I didn't know how viable they were. So, since I felt I had nothing to lose, I just dumped them into the soil, thinking the germination rate would be lower. It wasn't. I have a carrot forest now, that I've been thinning slowly over the last few weeks. It's better than if I had thinned when they were seedlings because now I'm getting a bunch of little carrots to eat, plus plenty of greens for the ladies. I've always struggled with the idea of killing baby plants, and now I don't have to do that anymore. :)

Oh, and I HATE aphids. Jerks.

I know this was kind of a sad excuse for a post. Better ones to come shortly. Thanks for your patience.

Freezin' Greens

My garden is off to a rockin' start this year. We harvested a bunch of our own chicken crap compost and got stuff into the ground in April. The hoop house is keeping the tomato plants warm, and everything is coming up nicely and growing really well.

One of this best things we've got is the spinach. It's doing so great, we actually can't keep up with it. I harvested some last week, but the perfect spring weather and sprinkles of rain have made it get a bit out of control. So I spent an hour today picking and prepping it for the freezer.

Here is the patch before:

And after (enough to get more next week, I'm sure):

This is how much I got. This is a big bowl.

I took about two thirds of it and ripped it into smaller pieces after rinsing it really well and stuffed it into a one gallon Ziploc bag and sucked most of the air out. I always put a handful of spinach in pasta sauce, soups, and a lot of other things for the extra bit of nutrients so this bag will be handy for that.

The rest of it I food processed with about a 1/4 cup of water and put them in ice cube trays. Once frozen, I'll pop them out of the trays and keep them in another container so they don't get freezer burned. These will be good for smoothies and... baby food! Our little monster is going to be starting solid foods in a few months, and what's better than fresh food from the garden? We'll probably mix these with some sweet potato or something for some delicious, cheap veggies for Eddy. 

Both Shawn and are excited for the whole fresh food prepping that we'll do for baby once she starts eating real food. None of that yucky tasteless Gerber stuff for our little one! Food is a big deal for us so we want to expose her to lots of different foods from the get-go so that she can have her life enhanced by all the flavors the world has to offer.

Garden 2014 is looking like it might be pretty awesome!

We Have Tenants!

Remember the birdhouse Shawn built last year? Well we've been waiting with baited breath ever since we put it up and our patience has finally been rewarded!

Chickadees! 

We've been watching them for a few weeks now as they fly from the house to our feeder to the cherry blossom tree across the street as they bring beak after beak full of super comfy looking moss.

They've been very busy. This video is from a few weeks ago.

It's so exciting because being so close to our living room window, we will have front row seats to the whole process. We saw a major decrease in activity for a while and thought maybe they had abandoned it, but have seen them a lot on the last couple days. My guess is that they've been tending to the eggs and now they are starting to hatch. I can't wait to see the babies. I'll keep you all posted!

Our bat box still seems empty since we aren't finding any guano. But Shawn has heard them flying around our house at dusk...