Living the Simple Life

Olivia is 6

2009-05-20T11:51:00.000-07:00

For Olivia's birthday we went to the Children's festival and got to see a live puppet show of "The very hungry caterpillar". It was so cute. After that we had a picnic at a park and Olivia got to play at the play ground. I used to LOVE baking. Since I am a raw foodist now I gave that up. I have no intention, however, of giving up cake decorating. So here is my raw cake I made for Olivia. It tastes even better that it looks. I was so excited about how it turned out. I got the recipe from a book called "Living in the raw, Desserts" by Rose Lee Calabro.

Raw Cake
2 cups soaked walnuts
2 cups (about a pound) pitted dates
4 tablespoons raw cacao powder
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
*Blend this in the food processor and then mold it into a cake shape

Chocolate frosting
1 cup soaked cashews
3 tablespoons agave nectar
3 tablespoons raw cacao powder
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 banana

While frosting
Same as above except no cocoa and add 1/8 cup water

*Frosting are blended in a food processor of vita mix

*When the cake is done put it in the freezer. It ends up being the consistence of brownie pieces you would find in ice cream. It was so good :)

Olivia is almost done with her classes at the alternative school for the year. Below is a tortoise that she made in pottery class.

Now that we have moved my two favorite things to do is walk and go to the library. I love the downtown library. Done you think it looks cool?

I also love this building. It reminds me of New York city.

Day off from school

2009-05-09T15:40:00.000-07:00

Olivia and I went for a walk to get out of the house. It was so much fun. We walked over the the Seattle Center and Olivia decided to run in the fountain. She is the one in the purple shirt.

Than this girl below decided to drive her rickshaw into the fountain. She had two girls in the back but when she road it into the fountain they jumped out.

Olivia had a blast in the water.Afterward we decided to walk to the store to get a snack. Olivia was soaked so I gave her my coat to wear.

There are so many beautiful things in this city. I felt like taking pictures of everything.

Olivia started to dry off.We got raisins to eat at the store. After we ate some she wanted to find birds to feed them to. Or this squirrel...I tried to take a picture if it and it started hoping toward me which freaked me out.

Urban wildlife...

She finally found a duck to feed the raisins to. The duck was friendly and let us get very close.

That was fun :)

New Classes

2009-03-21T13:58:00.001-07:00

So we enrolled Olivia in Home School Alternative School (which I already told you about). It is through the public school system. It is like a supplement to home schooling. We still school her but there are some classes she goes there for. I love it because the people are so nice. The classes are more relaxed and the parents can be in there if they want to. Right now she is in three classes. A science class, a fundamentals class (reading and writing) and a pottery class. She LOVES her pottery class.
As far as at home I am teaching her cursive. Her french is going along very well. She is getting pretty good at simple addition and subtraction. Her favorite thing is anything that has to do with animals. Every week we go to the library and get her one book to read for each day and about 5 DVD's. I let her pick one DVD and then I usually get her one musical or operetta, one about another country, one nature or animal movie and then one of something else like science or anything educational. This week we had to go to the laundromat. We practiced writing and ate snacks while the laundry was going. I love this sauce!!

These are Olivia's cursive d's. Pretty good for 5 years old I think. I am so proud of her.
This is her new favorite thing. I sock monkey she got from Kristin.

This picture cracks me up because she looks so sarcastic.

Shain just bought all the workbooks for her first grade year. She will have a lot to do. She loves worksheets.

2009-02-28T18:30:00.000-08:00

It has been a while... here are some resent picturesGrandma gave Olivia this violin pen. She likes to pretend to play it.

Olivia took this picture. She like to run off with aunt Charlotte's camera.

Olivia took this on and the next one of herself.

She loves to pose for the camera.

Olivia doing yoga with grandma.

More fun at Grandma's house...

We enrolled Olivia in a Home school alternative school. This is where we can sign her up for a few classes that we choose and we still do the rest of her schooling. I think it will be a good balance. It will give us more resources and she will spend more time with other kids. She got tested for reading at she is reading at a second grade level (and she is still technically in kindergarten). Things are going great with her schooling.

Launromom

2009-01-20T07:30:00.000-08:00

We have a membership at the YMCA now. I have been working out 3 days a week. There is a pool there and I need to teach Olivia how to swim. We could not let her awesome hair color get ruined so we got her a swim cap.On fridays now we do school at my mom's house. The latest math classes center around understanding coins and thier value.

Her hand writing is getting so much better and she can spell pretty big words now like "wonderful".

Her she is working on her french flash cards.

I recently painted my parents kitchen for them. Notice how the brown wall matches the appliances. This is just one wall.

The other walls are this color.

We go there is Fridays now so I can get laundry done while we do school....yaya!

Suzie's Hair, Funny Pics and Thanksgiving

2008-11-29T12:35:00.000-08:00

This is my younger sister. I just did her relaxer the other day and I decided to do a little Suzie hair history post. This is before her first relaxer 3 months ago.
This is after...so much better.

This was an old color I did on her. her natural color is so pretty but I am still sad she doesn't have me color it anymore cuz it was so much fun!

...after that we colored it back and cut it off.

...another cut.

This is what it looks like curly.

...this is before another color.
...and after.

I think the last one was the best. This is after her latest relaxer and cut that I did the day before Thanksgiving.

In other news...

Olivia lost her first tooth. It was so exciting. She got money from the tooth faerie and bought a stuffed bear.

This pic is just funny. We put a pillow in Bernie's kennel and sugar found it...

This happen right after Draco had been soaking in the tub. Now he is drying off.

Thanksgiving

My first raw Thanksgiving dinner was not the best. When I made the raw stuffing and it was in the dehydrator the whole house smelled like stuffing. It was great. The stuffing was really good. Everything else was just so so. I think next year we will just make something that we know tastes good instead of trying to imitate a traditional dinner. The dessert Shain made, however, was amazing!

The the day after thanksgiving was so much fun too. We slept in, hung around the house and relaxed. When we did finally go out we got Mario Party 8 for the Wii. That was so much fun. We also bought and watched "Across the Universe" and it was an amazing movie. Shain got himself a Nintendo ds for when it is slow at work. This weekend has been so much fun. Now I need to go get caught up on all the cleaning.

2008-11-15T16:17:00.001-08:00

Today is laundry day. We got a phonics lesson done at the laundromat.

Berny likes to eat the birdseed that falls on the ground. I didn't quite catch it in this picture but Berny looked like he was going to lick Bunnie and Bunnie put him in his place.

Our New House and Charlottes hair.

2008-11-09T10:02:00.000-08:00

This is our new house!

Here is the back yard. I am so happy for the dogs...and Olivia because she likes to chase them around the yard.

Here is the living room. (that's the salt water fish tank...nothing died in the move, thank goodness)

This is Olivia's rompus room where she can make as much noise as she wants.

New animals....more room=more animals. Draco our bearded dragon.
...and two tortoises named Michelle and Barack. Michelle is Olivia's pet.
This is Barack hiding.
Michelle is more outgoing.

Final count...(dogs) Guiness, Lovely, Bernie, (cats) Queen Aretha Latifah, Sugar, (Turtles) Michelle, Barack, (bearded Dragon) Draco, (Birds) Cheereo, Toodle, Bunnie, and the fish. 11+

Today my sister Charlotte is coming over to get her hair done. Olivia is very excited about Auntie Charlotte coming. She drew a picture of her while we were at the Laundromat.
Charlotte has a nice camera so she took some picture for us.
Charlotte before......Charlotte after.
Here she hadn't seen the color yet.Here she has the color on her head.
Charlotte's eyebrow need a lot of tweezer love.
Toodle and Cheereo love their new home.
Charlotte let Olivia run around the house taking pictures with the camera. Here are some of them.
The fresh water fish tank.
Our bowl of nuts. I actually think this is a very cool picture.

Close up of Lovely.

All moved

2008-11-07T19:15:00.000-08:00

We are moved into our house. We are almost done packing everything...pics to come. I am so excited.

Today is day two of me eating raw food. I am going to do it this time. Our house will be a raw house.

I have been working my butt off all day I am going to go relax now... :)

Halloween!

2008-10-31T23:09:00.001-07:00

Befriending Homeschool moms

2008-10-25T11:52:00.000-07:00

I love that there is a home school community. I love that they are diverse and open minded. I feel very accepted and enjoy going to the activities. On the other hand…I feel very different from the other moms. Mostly I feel like we are more strict with Olivia. But I don’t think we are strict, however being around the other home school kids makes me feel like we are. It’s kind of weird cuz in some ways we are very old-fashioned and in other ways we are the opposite of old fashioned.
For instance…old fashioned, I believe in discipline (not as in punishment but as in structure and expectations). I believe this is very important. I believe it is important to teach your children that when they get out into the world and need to get a job that there will be expectations that you have to meet and having a work ethic is important. I also believe in respecting you parents and other people, teaching how to be kind and polite. I think parents should be parents first and not try to be friends. I also believe in structured learning. Reading, Writing and math are important. In these ways I feel very different from the other home school moms.
On the other hand…ways we are nontraditional. Even though I believe in structured learning I also believe that is not the only way to learn. I believe in teaching about diversity, how other people live, and compassion. Our religious beliefs would probably not be considered traditional and being vegan and raw some consider extreme. There is another vegan mom in the group and at least the other people there don’t think I am crazy and weird for being vegan. I get the impression most of them think it is admirable and respectable. I feel like they are gay friendly which is important to me even if they don’t see me as gay.
Don’t get me wrong I don’t expect to meet people that are just like me but I feel like I haven’t met many that are close

We are moving!

2008-10-19T10:17:00.000-07:00

Friday...
While I was giving Olivia a bath my cell phone fell in it. So I went to T Mobile and bought the cheapest phone they would sell me without signing a new contract. Luckily it was a picture phone so I will still be able to post pictures on my blog. I think the pictures are even better then my old phone.

Small Folks Book Club
So I took Olivia to her first book club with the homeschooling group. At first I didn't understand how they could have a book club for kids under 6 but I realized after that most of the kids will practice and memorize a small book to read. I didn't know this so I brought one of Olivia's phonics book and she did a "cold" read. I was so impressed. None of the kids wanted to go first so she volunteered to go first. She read the book without any problems, showed everyone all the pictures and all the other kids actually sat and listened. It was great! After that they played at the playground for 2 hours. Some of the kids at the book club had made their own books so she wanted to do that when she got home. I will post pictures of that later.

New House
We just signed the lease for our house we are moving into. I am so excited. We have been living in a one bedroom apartment in Seattle. I love Seattle but at the same time it will be nice to live in a quieter place with less bums hanging out in front of our door. The new house is in Everett (a very nice area). Upstairs it has 2 bedrooms, living room, kitchen, full bath and breakfast nook. Downstairs it has 2 more bedrooms, family room and 3/4 bath. It also has a fenced yard for the dogs. I have never lived in a house that was not my parents and I have never lived in a house that big. I am so excited. I will put pics up the next time we go over there. I had not figured out how to use my new phone yet. We will probably be moving November 7th. It will be so nice to have a place that is our own. No neighbors above or below us. Olivia can run and jump and make as much noise as she wants. No more going up and down stairs to take the dogs out. The animals will be so happy, they will have so much more room. We will have a classroom! I am so excited about that. It will also be the craft/sewing/art room. The house will be very empty at first because we do not have enough stuff to put in it...but that is better than too much stuff. Hooray!

Happy Birthday Guiness and Thanksgiving

2008-10-15T12:45:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow is Guiness's birthday. Olivia made him a card.

It was cold this morning. Olivia likes to do Phonics in her bathrobe. It is hard to get a picture of her without her making faces at the camera.

Thanksgiving Recipes

Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays. I always loved it when I was a kid. As I grew up I didn't feel so good about things like the traditional picture of pilgrims and Native Americans eating together peacefully when that is not at all what happened. I also have a hard time with the fact that the holiday is centered around a dead bird that has been bread to be so fat (for thanksgiving) that they can not even live normal lives. The turkey is such a beautiful bird. I do, however, love the concept of giving thanks, spending time with family and I love spending hours making a meal that will be gone in 5 mins (and I am not even being sarcastic. I love cooking). When I became vegan I learned how to make a vegan Thanksgiving, when we realized Shain was gluten intolerant I learned how to make a Vegan-Gluten-Free Thanksgiving dinner and this year I will figure out how to do a 100% Raw Vegan dinner. The cooked vegan dinner is my favorite. Here is what I would make...

Tofurkey Roast

You can get these at Whole Foods and some other health food stores, they are so good.

My Mom's Stuffing Recipe

Saute onions in earth balance (margarine). Pour them over broken vegan bread. Add lots of sage and some salt, pepper and...that's all I remember. There isn't really measuring involved. It is all done by taste. Add this to the roast. The roast comes stuffed but I like my mom's stuffing better and I like to have a lot of it so I put the extra stuffing around the roast.

The Best These-won't-make-ya-skinny Vegan Garlic mashed potatoes

Boil potatoes. I like to use Yukon golds and sometimes I add some sweet potatoes. While the potatoes are boiling I saute onions and minced fresh garlic in some olive oil or earth balance. Once the potatoes are soft I drain the water and put the potatoes and onions and garlic in my Kitchenaid mixer. I mix them for a few minutes and then add a scoop of earth balance, some vanilla soy milk, 2 big spoon fulls of Veganaise (which can also be found at Whole Foods and it is sooo good). You can also add a little bit of Tofutti Better Than Sour Cream. Whip is until it is smooth.

Biscuits (The old Better Homes and Gardens Recipes. I love that cook book)

2 cups flour

3 teaspoons baking powder

2 teaspoons vegan sugar

1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/2 cup earth balance

2/3 cup soy milk

Put all the powdered ingredients in a bowl. Cut in the earth balance. Fold in the soy milk. I like to keep them lumpy and scoop them onto the cookie sheet instead of rolling them out. Bake at 450 degrees for 8 mins or more depending on size. (I like to make them huge!)

Gravy

I cheat and use a packet. "Road's End Organics" or "Hain Pure Foods Vegetarian Brown gravy mix"

That's pretty much it. Sometimes I will make a vegetable like some steamed broccoli but I like to keep it simple. I don't like cranberry anything and I don't like pies.

Olivia's New Hair

2008-10-12T20:09:00.000-07:00

We went to work with Shain today. I got my hair colored and so did Olivia. Checkout her new asymmetrical haircut. She is way to hip to be 5.

Vegan Baking

2008-10-08T11:42:00.000-07:00

I love baking. I don't get to do it much anymore now that the rest of the family only eats raw food. Here is my absolute favorite recipe.

Cupookies
(This is a combo of the Toll House original chocolate chip cookie recipe and my mom's recipe for chocolate chip cupcakes)

3/4 cup Earth Balance (this is a dairy-free margarine that has no trans fats or hydrogenated oils, it is basically just made out of vegetable oil. Great for baking!)

3/4 cup white vegan sugar (many sugars use animal bones in the processing. Buying raw sugar or something labeled vegan is good)

1/2 cup brown sugar

1 tablespoon vanilla extract

Replace 2 eggs (You can buy "Ener-G Egg Replcer" which is a powder made of vegetable starch. That works the best. You can also substitute 1/4 cup of almost any smashed fruit with 1 teaspoon baking soda for each egg. Apple sauce works great. If you use bananas you will taste them)

2 1/8 cup flour

1/3 cup non-dairy milk (soy, rice, almond etc)

1 1/2 cup chocolate chips (it is not hard to find semi-sweet chips with no dairy. Check the back to make sure it contains no milk fat or whey)

1/2 tablespoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

I like to mix it all with my Kitchenaid mixer (my favorite thing in the kitchen). Pour into a cupcake pan that has papers or is greased. Bake at 375 degrees for 9-18 min (depends on how big you made them).

You can use the replacement ideas for butter, eggs and milk to make any favorite recipie vegan!
Try it. It is so good. I will post dinner recipes later.

Food and Animals not animals for food...

2008-10-05T13:29:00.001-07:00

We took a family trip to Bainbridge Island. It is so gorgeous over there. We collected shells on the beach. I always take home a piece of a shell or two every time I go to the beach. I keep them in a bowl. Being close to the water is my favorite place in the world to be. This time we found many whole shells and I could barely fit them in the bowl.

Last night I went and visited my friend Amber. I like to go over to her house and we paint together or do other art projects. This is the one I worked on last night. I have been working on it for a long time and I think it won't be done anytime soon...but it is getting closer. What has everyone else been doing? Burney gets to have a ponytail now to keep his hair out of his face. He doesn't like it of course so he is always trying to take it out. I tryed to get a picture of his face but he moves around so fast that it's hard to get a picture at all. The ponytail is so cute!

Guiness has allergies and sensitive skin...poor guy. He is pissed right now because we had to put a caller on him to get him to stop chewing himself. Look how sorry he feels for himself...it's kinda funny :)

Lovely is not the puppy anymore now that Burney is around...but she gets attention from Sugar.

Bunny doesn't want to perch on our fingers anymore. She likes to be on the cupboards, which she is not supposed to be on so a lot of the time we are chasing her around the house trying to get her back on or in her cage. Look how happy she looks.

This is the one family member I have not put a picture up of yet. This is Queen Aretha Latifah Williams. She is the Queen of the house and she is training the new puppy to understand the pecking order. You don't mess with the Queen.

Olivia's most recent religion class was Islam. Below her picture is a picture she drew of people preying to Mecca.

She can read so well now and is blazing through her math lessons. She rarely gets confused about math.

What we eat

When I first met my husband I was a meat eater. When he explained to me what a Vegan was I thought "What DO you eat". Now I have been vegan for about 5 years. Shain started researching the Raw food diet a year or two ago and now eats only raw food. Olivia is also only eating raw food and I am clinging to my bread and fake meats. I do eat a lot more healthy food than I used to. Here are some of the things we eat.
Ever heard of Lara Bars? They are so good! They are made of raw nuts and fruit. Shain makes us bars from scratch in our dehydrator. He also makes an amazing Hummus that is made with zucchini instead of chick peas. We make smoothies, juice things with our juicer and eat a lot of just fresh fruits and vegetables.

The best part is. Shain is so good at making raw desert. Below is that last pie he made it was so good! No flour, sugar, heating, butter.....just cocoa, dates, avocados, agave and nuts. (Those may not be the exact ingredients because I don't remember but you get the idea.)
Well that's the latest with us. All this talk of food is making me hungry I think I will go finish my salad for lunch.

Drawing 101

2008-09-25T09:32:00.000-07:00

One thing that has been a challenge with Olivia is teaching her to deal with her disappointment in herself. She gets very upset sometimes when she doesn't get all the answers right or if what she's doing isn't perfect. I keep telling her that you have to practice things a lot before you get good at them. We do drawing classes sometimes. I found this website called http://www.drawspace.com/ that has free on-line drawing lessons. I have walked her through a few of them. I was trying to take close ups with my phone and it turned out really fuzzy. Here is the KoalaWanda the fish......and an alligator
She does very well at following direction and likes to color her picture exactly the same colors as the example.

Puppy!

2008-09-24T12:55:00.000-07:00

We have a new addition to our family. Meet Burney. He is a 3 month old Mal-Shi. He is very well behaved for a puppy. I think he will be very spoiled. We are labeling things today in Phonics. Olivia reads the word and finds where the label should go. It's lots of fun. Daddy is teaching her about Asia this week also.

I have started crocheting again. I had two puppets that I made when I was younger that Olivia likes to play with. I decided to make her another one that is a bunny. (it's hard to tell in the picture.

Then I decided I could try to make her a sweater. This is how far I am...

That's all for now. We need to do more math.

Social Time

2008-09-14T11:03:00.000-07:00

On Friday I took Olivia to a homescholing group activity for the first time (first time for me that is cuz Daddy had taken her 2 times on his days). Every Friday the Seattle Homeschooling Group has "Small Folks" activities for kids 5 and under (I think). This Friday was "Building Day". We all met at the Greenlake Public Library and brought our favorite building things (we had big Legos). It is so nice to watch her play with other kids. I am very excited that she will hopefully be able to build a long term relationship with some of the kids. I got to meet some of the other parents which was very cool. There was another vegan parent there. I am very excited to make this a weekly event.

I have incorporated counting in multiple languages into her math classes. English, French and Spanish. I am also trying to incorporated her french into her handwriting practice...kill two birds with one stone.

Geography I have not been doing as much. She can find a few things on the map...Seattle, New York City and India on a good day.

She also has been working on her religions. I made religious flash cards for her for Buddhist, Muslim, Jewish, Pagan, Christian, and Hindu. I put symbols on the cards that I thought would help her remember things better. Each school day we go through the flash cards and we just go over the name of the religion and one basic thing they believe in. Then she picks one to learn about for that day. I try to just expose her to some basic ideas. There are quite a few religious kid cartoons on Youtube for Buddhism, Hinduism...I didn't find as much for Paganism. We haven't done Christian yet but I know there will be plenty of info for that one. It's is very important to us that she grows up understanding and respecting other people and their beliefs. Of course we spend more time over all talking about Buddhism since we are Buddhist. I am happy about how well that is going. I also try to talk about the holidays that the religions celebrate so that she understands what different holidays are about and why we do and do not celebrate different holidays. Here are some of our visual aids...

This is our altar.This is Krishna for our Hindu lessons....and Shiva
...and GaneshHere are her flash cards. The names of the gods are on the back.

I haven't really started to teach her history. Sometimes things will randomly come up. We like to take trips to the down town library. She likes to watch movies a lot so I let her pick one or two DVDs and I will pick two out that seem to be the most educational whether it is about history, speaking Spanish(which Daddy picked out for her), culture etc. I got her "The King and I" the other day. It was the cartoon version but I would like to expose her also to the things I had the opportunity to get exposed to when I was a little kid that I loved...like opera, musicals, plays, classic stories, operettas, and Shakespeare (haven't done that one yet).

Tea Kwan Do is going great. I just tested for my yellow stripe and then just the other day Olivia got her first stripe. She was so happy. The other day in class I told her to try kicking higher and she kicked so high she threw herself on her back...now that is effort. She handles it well....she was in a little bit of shock at first but then she just kept going.

I need to work on her music classes. I started working with her on rhythms but after two classes I just stopped. We need to pick that up again.

So Far...

2008-09-05T09:55:00.000-07:00

So far we have been focusing on Math, Language Arts and Phonics with the help of K12 (online curriculum). We also have quite few books Dad has been working with her on and I have been putting in sporadic subjects like some Geography, History, Art, French, Spanish and World Religions. It's exciting and overwhelming all at the same time because there are so many things we could have her do and so many resources. Well we have only been doing it for a few months now. She would have started kindergarten next week and she can already read things like "Pam put the ham in the pot. Mac is sad. Kim will get the vet"....etc. She is such a happy well-adjusted kid. I just need to get her around other kids more. We have hooked up with the Seattle Homeschooling Group so that is looking better....well I must go start school. :)

Meet our Family

2008-09-04T10:48:00.000-07:00

This is my husband and my daughter
Above is me and below is a pic of our Salt water tank...we also have 3 other fresh water tanks.

We have 2 Cats. Above is Sugar and we also have one named Queen Aretha Latifah. We also have 2 dogs. Below is Guiness.

Below is our other dog Lovely with "Bunny" our Cockateil.

We also have 2 parakeets, Cheerio and Toodle. We live in Seattle close to the Seattle Center. We homeschool our daughter. We are Vegan, Buddhist and into animals, nature and living life simply. Here I will be journaling about day to day life with our fun little family :)