Day 2

Monday

Husband threw together a frittata with some of the leftover vit.greens, bacon, and sausage from yesterday. One slice sufficed.

Spent a good hour or more this morning putting together our picnic lunch for later in the day - salad of tomato, avocado, hard-boiled egg / salami slices wrapped in Gouda (do they let their cows graze in Holland? :) / slices of red bell pepper / rolls of slices of ham / apples and apple pears ( we're eating these all the time now, because it's the only fresh fruit at the Farmer's Market.

The rest of the afternoon was spent at our school co-op, then to meet a farmer to pick up raw milk, bacon and sausage ($9 per lb. - are you KIDDING?!), and stew meat (more economical), then off to basketball practice. The kids staved hunger by munching on almonds and semi-sweet chocolate chips - I need to look into the BestLife brand since we're trying to rule out refined sugar completely.

Home at 6:30 and still have to prepare dinner. Can't default to my usual quickies - PB & J or deli meat sandwhich, so I pan fry some chicken breast quickly that comes out too tough and not very flavorful - I have to remember to tenderize the meat first next time / green beans / and leftover fried sweet potatoes.

We survived our second Paleo day.

Daughter #1 complains of being very hungry at 9pm.....

Paleo Day 1

spinach "quiche" for breakfast with flat, round breakfast sausage from Costco - thought it was so healthy, but oops! it has sugar in the ingredients.

lunch - my husband offers to make lunch for us at his restaurant (yay!) and we invite our parish priest to join us. Salad with all sorts of yummy stuff - grapes, salami, radishes, homemade mozzarella, scallions, etc.  Bacon Wrapped Filet Mignon (oh my goodness!) - we won't usually be eating this gourmet, and sauteed calamari as an appetizer.

Dinner - fish (don't remember the name, but it's like cod and pink when raw). We experimented with coconut oil (Costco now carries a big tub for a decent price) for the first time, breaded the fish in coconut flour first, then dipped in egg - the batter didn't stick too well, but it was still good. Made a sauce with some chicken stock (Costco) in the pan after the fish had fried and then stuck it in the oven.  Served with sauteed vitamin greens (from Farmer's Market) with just butter and onion - works for any "greens" you are making.

Dessert! - I made Pan Fried Apples with butter, cinnamon and nutmeg. Added honey, but it burned a little. Still, delicious.

A Regular Sunday

I'll start out with a non-so-regular part of our Sunday. After breakfast, Riccardo and I went out for a run TOGETHER. That meant leaving the 5 kids on their own.....the oldest is 10 and the 6 mo. old baby was sleeping, I had my cell phone on me, and we stayed within a 4 min. run back to the house, doing loops around the neighborhood. It was great. Matteo did call us after we'd been out for 25 min. or so to tell us Lucia was awake and wouldn't take the pacifier. So we asked the kids to stay with Lucia to keep her company (they can't safely pull her out of the crib), and we sprinted home.

After the 11:15 Mass - thank God we went to that one because I had completely forgotten that Matteo was scheduled to serve that Mass ! - we saw the friends of ours and invited them for an impromptu lunch at the restaurant, a tradition we began about a year ago or so and do every once in a while. Three hours later we were home, I planned for the school week - filling in the kids' lesson plans which I write out in their student planners (except for Isabella's K curriculum which I mostly wing), and then we headed out to other friends' house for dinner and a "movie nite" for the kids. They watch UP while camping out on the floor with pillows and blankets. The adults enjoyed a nice dinner at a separate table and then played a game until the movie finished.

The bambini are doing exactly the kind of thing that I've been hoping to see, especially given my reading lately, For the Children's Sake on the educational philosophy of Charlotte Mason. She talks about the importance of children having many free, unscheduled hours for pretend play. There are probably 5 or 6 bath towels and other props being used and dirtied right now, but I don't care (much) because they have created a house or camp of sorts beneath a group of three tall pines in the side yard - just the sort of thing I used to do as a kid, in the boxwood bushes. That was before my siblings and I realized how many scary spiders were most likely lurking in there. Chiara just asked for hair bandana for her head and a hamburger bun from a bag she saw I had out on the kitchen table for tonight's dinner - veggie burgers that have been in the freezer for a long time and salad or mixed veg. Maybe that 1/2 a burger bun will make for a fun camping dinner over a pretend fire....

L'inizio

I can't believe I may be jumping on the blogging band wagon. I say maybe because I'm not at all sure I'll stick with it. I don't really understand the whole idea, other than it being a way to journal online and that's why I'm interested in trying it out. I have kept a diary on and off for years when I was young and occasionally as an adult, but never consistently. I feel a strong need to document these years as a mother of (now) five young children. If I don't, I know I won't remember all the glorious and horrible details and I'll be sad to not be able to look back and reminisce.........

This attempt, then, is for me and for my children. I would love to have diaries of my mother, grandmother, and others to read and therefore experience just a little of what daily life was like for them. Maybe one day a child of mine will be happy to read these entries.........then again, maybe the world will be so saturated with such "memory recording" that these efforts will be for my eyes alone.