My deepest fear

I'm cleaning out some areas of our home office , tidying up and sorting through papers. I came across a crinkled paper in one of my old loose leaf notebooks from my college days in the mid-90's. I can remember the day one of my nursing teachers handed it out for worship. It makes me stop and think about my life every time I read it:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our Light, not our Darkness, that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous?
Actually, who are you NOT to be?
You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world.
There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you.
We are born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us.
It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone.
And as we let our own Light shine, we unconsciously give permission to let other people do the same.
As we are liberated from our own fear, our own presence automatically liberates others.

- Nelson Mandela, 1994 Inaugural Speech

Strawberry Banana Ice Pops!

This weekend, I made some strawberry banana smoothies - but I excluded the greek yogurt this time - so it was just strawberries, bananas, orange juice and ice. Yummy! The best thing about making smoothies is the leftovers! I pour our leftovers into our ice-pop makers.

We've got a few different types of ice-pop makers. Some folks advocate using a paper cup and popcycle stick, but I'd rather use something re-usable, and with a smaller serving size. So one of My Favorite Things this week is my ice-pop maker. I get to give the kids wholesome Popsicles.

Cheating while making cookies!

Seriously, if my kids waited until I had time to make cookies from scratch, it might never happen. I do have days when I can go all out and do everything from scratch. But the reality of it is that I am a full-time working mom, every once in a while I need a little help.

Help last week came from The Immaculate Baking Company's awesome oatmeal raisin cookies. Oh.my.goodness...my house smelled fantastic while these were cooking, and the texture is just absolutely perfect. My kids loved these cookies. In fact, they point them out at Publix every time we are there.

One thing I love about these cookies is that the company is really into promoting folk art. We've got some awesome folk artists here in Central Florida, and I'm crazy excited (that's like Tom Cruise jumping on Oprah's couch excited!) about promoting Folk artist.

Okay, I'm done raving. Just know that when I can't find the time to make my own from-scratch cookies, this is absolutely what I'm reaching for - healthy, no trans fats, awesome cookies!

Cool kid snacks/lunches

It's nearly the end of the school year and my kids are showing some resistance to taking healthy lunches to school.

Usually their lunchboxes follow this regular skeleton:
- Mots for Tots juice box (watered down apple juice)
- Sandwich
- Something from the fruit drawer (I have different fruits chopped and ready to go in the crisper drawer)
- Something from the pantry snack box - we do a lot of Annies Cheddar Bunnies and TLC's crackers.

They don't get a morning snack and their afternoon snack is supplied by the school.

Joshua is nearly 7 now and he's been eye-balling his friends' less than healthy lunchbox treats. Today we went out and picked out a few things that add a little fun to the lunchboxes. I'll try to add some lunch-on-the-run posts to the blog for the realistic mother on the go. I worked some seriously long hours last week, so many of the treats in my kids' lunchboxes will probably be pre-packaged items this week as I continue to catch up on things around the house that did not get done last week.

MFT - Food from the Deli

Another My Favorite Thing... I've read multiple different times about people using food from the deli and using it as a base for their meal. Instead of building dinner around the deli, I used my deli purchase to make some take-to-work lunches.

I purchased a cooked roisserie chicken (seasoned with lemon pepper) from my grocery store (on sale, of course) for $4.99. I chopped and diced and de-boned and did all sorts of fun things with my chicken to get every piece of meat off of it. I know some people would boil what was left to make stock, but, remember, I'm taking baby steps.

Since the chicken was already flavored nicely with the lemon pepper, I chose to just stuff some whole wheat pitas with the chicken meat, lettuce, tomato and a little bit of mustard. It was fantastic!!

Spaghetti Sauce

I don't have a spaghetti sauce recipe. I just kind of throw a bunch of stuff together and let it cook for a while. Last night I tossed some left over chicken breasts (real chicken to eliminate confusion, since we do use vegetarian chicken quite a bit!), some canned tomatoes (I love Muir Glen), a bunch of fresh herbs, some tomato paste and a few other things I found hanging out in the fridge (I think there's some eggplant and broccoli in there, again left overs from earlier this week).

So now, I've got a bunch of yummy chunky sauce ready for dinner tomorrow night. Monday nights are always rough around here since I returned to work.

It works for Oprah!

I can't really say that I'm an avid watcher of the Oprah Winfrey show. However, I check out her site all the time because she's always got some great ideas and discounts for the super-cheap like myself. Every once in a while, Oprah does a show based on her favorite things. I've seen it go from something simple like 90 calorie frozen fudgepops to $200 pairs of shoes. I think her entire studio audience gets to take home everything featured on the show. Well, I'm not giving away my favorite things (remember, I just admitted to being super-cheap!). But I am going to make a post every once in a while of my favorite things that allow me to cheat a bit on dinner. You know, those nights where it would be soooo easy to order a pizza because we've been on the go non-stop all day? I try to keep a small arsenal of healthy-ish fast-ish food in my freezer for those days when I have exactly 4.2 minutes to put dinner on the table or someone is going to fall apart. My MIL turned me on to these sweet potato fries. While I have to admit, I like fresh sweet potatoes sliced and baked just a tad bit more than these, it's the time saving factor that makes me like these bagged sweet potatoes. While these are baking, I have time to warm up some Stakelets (vegetarian steaks - very yummy!), boil some corn on the cob and chop a salad. Sure, it takes a little more than that 4.2 minutes allotted by the irritable, hungry children, but it's worth it.

I'm sure there are those that would read this and comment that it really doesn't take that much longer to peel and chop fresh sweet potatoes. And I will take this time to remind you all that this blog is about my own personal growth. That just a month or two ago, I probably would not have given a second thought to finding something healthy for dinner. I probably would have had the phone propped to my ear (battling over insurance coverage for hospital bills, finishing up things from our move, searching for a job...you name it, we all have our things that start as a 5 minute task and then end up sucking up 30 or so minutes of precious dinner prep time), and tossed some hot dogs in the microwave, and tater tots in the oven, or worse, opened a bag of chips to go with them - just in case we hadn't gotten our weekly quota for sodium all in one day.

I'm all about being the best mom any of us can be, whatever that means to you. So for me, being the best mom I can be last week on Thanksgiving meant that I was able to forgive myself for using store bought cranberry sauce just as easily as I was able to have no regrets over the 40 minutes I spent that morning helping my 6 year old create an amazing rocket out of legos. My life is about creating balance. I wish I was that 100% from scratch mom, but for where I'm at today, that's not me. Maybe in a year or two, as I grow in this journey and learn to use my time wiser (than, say, wasting time blogging about my poor time management in the kitchen!). So here is the start of a new segment of things I will label as My Favorite Things. They are my time and sanity savers.