My Nemisis the Grocery Store

So yesterday I piled the kids into the van, grabbed my shopping list and the list off of the fridge of the other known names that MSG goes by and headed into town, we did a bit of a detour the garbage truck had gone by and the noise of it had upset Gray and one of the best ways to get Gray calmed down is to go for a drive I think I’ve said it before but he just loves being in the vehicle it totally calms him down he likes looking out at the sights and the other vehicles on the road and like me he just likes to be on the open road there is just something about driving with no known destination in mind that calm’s the nerves and provides a sense of adventure, I knew I was going to eventually end up at the grocery store but had no time frame in mind and therefore was not rushed. Well we hadn’t been in the van more than 10 minutes when I saw the smile come across Gray’s face and he pulled the hat up over his eyes to look out the side window, success.
So after a scenic drive into town i hit up the local health food store and was pleasantly surprised at the help that I received from the owner of the shop she was knowledgeable about her products and the information that she didn’t know she was more than willing to find out for me, she had never had anyone come into her shop with the situation that I was facing and seemed genuinely interested in learning more about it, even offering to try to special order any items I may need. Unfortunately, it’s a small shop which still left me with a whole pile of grocery’s that needed to be bought. So off to the grocery store we go, yes I did have all three kids with me and yes I may be a little crazy for attempting this kind of shopping trip with not one but three kids, surprisingly the kids were great, there were a few trying moments in the aisles where I wanted to look at the child in question and say “who do you belong to?” not naming any names but well it wasn’t one of my boy’s. I can’t really blame here after all I did push the limits of a three year olds patients levels and to be honest there were a few minutes there where I wanted to throw a big old temper tantrum in the store myself.
Every single item that I picked up had to be flipped over and the ingredient’s list gone over with a fine tooth comb, my eye sight and my brain were starting to go a little bit batty by the end of the second aisle and I still had six more aisles to go up and down. All in all I spent 2 hours at the grocery store, you heard me right 2 very long hours were spent at the store just to get a half a cart full of grocery’s. I know it will get easier as I learn what is and isn’t safe for me to buy, but until I have done it a few times I’m going to completely dread the grocery store, even as I write this I feel a chill go down my spine, I never liked grocery shopping to begin with now I hate it even more.
So what did I learn from my 2 hours in the grocery store well a couple of things actually, first I learned that I really had no clue as to just what all goes into the food we eat, half of the ingredients in the foods I can barely even pronounce let along have any clue as to what they really are, and secondly some of my tried and trusted brands were also some of the worst culprits. Yep that’s right, they have been voted out of the cupboards. I’m going to miss my friends Campbell’s and Dare but if it’s not good enough for Lady Grace then it’s not good enough for any of us. So new rule, if it has more than five items in the ingredients list it probably has msg in it, if my great, great grandmother wouldn’t have had it in her cupboards I probably shouldn’t either. Back to basics and back to actual meal preparation with no short cuts, thank god for the invention of freezers.

The Winter Blahs

It has been a long, long winter, especially where I live way up here in the great white north, The temperatures have been some of the coldest in years hitting a whopping -40 not including wind chill and hovering around -20 daily , and the snow it just keeps coming. Now normally I enjoy winter activities, there is something to be said about falling down and making a perfect snow angel or building a great snowman, skiing and sledding are loads of fun and great excersie too, but this year, with three little ones to bundle into snowsuits before going out into the bitter cold and then only being out for a few minutes before one of the kids starts to cry and ask to go back inside, it just hasn’t been the same as in the past. This year I am actually experiencing the winter blues. I find myself short tempered, depressed and tired.
So what to do when you’re feeling blue, well you change your way of thinking and your lifestyle right. So once again I pull out my trusty lap top and do a little research( I am constantly learning about new things) So why do we get the winter blues, well for one it’s hibernation season, which brings with it lack of contact with others, lack of exercise and lack of sunlight. Then you add in the lack of colour, no green as in no money from over indulging in the holiday season, lack of bright colours from flowers and grasses, the earth at this time of year is mostly covered in white’s, gray’s and yucky browns from dirty snow and lastly a lack of happiness. It’s no wonder that so many people are affected by the winter blues or seasonal affective disorder.
So now what to do about it? Well since it’s not likely that I’m going to be able to afford my little piece of paradise down south of the equator any time soon I guess I’ll have to think of something else, damn I had such high hopes of escaping to warm breezes, tropical beauty and umbrella drinks. Since we are not all bears(though sometimes my personality can be quite bear like at times) we need to stop hibernating, that’s right get out of the house, go for a walk, play in the snow, visit with friends, at least once a week make a point of leaving the house to do something other then go to work or run mundane errands. With a lack of colour around add a little green to your life. I can’t make money grow on trees, believe me if I knew how to do this I would have built a giant greenhouse. So I can’t help you if you over spent during the holidays but I can suggest that you fill your home with green. House plants help to boost your mood and help to clean the air in the house. If you are feeling a little down perk up with a fresh new paint colour or add some vibrant throw pillows to your décor, a splash of colour helps to boost your mood even if it’s just a few well-placed accents, and open those curtains to let in the light, it really does make a difference. Lastly get happy, I know easier said than done so here are a few suggestions to help with this. Laugh often, laughing releases endorphins you know those feel good hormones, kids laugh around 300 to 400 times a day whereas us adults only laugh around 10-12 times a day. So take a cue from your kids and laugh more often, watch a funny movie or show, have tickle wars with your kids, read the Sunday morning comics, whatever it takes to get you laughing. Exercise, it also releases those funny little things called endorphins, make a point adding a little exercise to your life it well help you feel better about you and make you healthier and to steal a quote from a classic Legally Blonde “ Exercise makes you happy, and happy people just don’t kill their husbands” good advice right ladies.
So remember happiness is really a state of mind we can choose to be unhappy and hibernate away from the rest of the world or we can do something about our winter blues and try to live a much happier and healthier life. Bye bye blues hello happy… besides spring is just around the corner. I can already see my gardens now.

The Power of Knowledge

Knowledge is power and sometimes extremely overwhelming. This is the second part to my soul friends story, the reason behind my writing about my friends in the first place. They are as always there for support, encouragement and to just make me feel better about things. Recently my daughter has been diagnosed with an MSG intolerance, up until this point I had been under the delusion that msg was only found in fast foods and Chinese foods. So it came as a complete surprise to me to find out that my daughter may be suffering from an MSG intolerance, after all we ate a pretty healthy diet, we tried to avoid eating out and I was pretty concise of what I was making for the kids to eat even going so far as to compare nutrition labels when buying products at the grocery store, I can’t say that we always ate healthy (I am like many other people my age a fast food junkie) but we didn’t indulge in fast food all that often and I had made a point of planning out meals so as to avoid those nights of ordering out just because I had forgotten to take something out for dinner , better for us and much cheaper on the wallet.
So imagine my surprise when the doctor said that he thought that the reactions that my daughter had been having to what seemed to me to be completely unrelated foods might be that of an MSG intolerance. She had a lot of the known symptoms and reactions and by this point I was open to any suggestions as to what might possibly be making my poor little princesses face go all red and puffy. So the suggestion was to completely remove it from her system, great no problem how hard could it be after all it couldn’t possibly be in that many things, could it? Wow was I ever wrong. You see MSG is not just listed on the ingredients list as MSG it is cleverly disguised under other names I now have a list the length of my arm long posted to the fridge of things I need to look for on food packaging, and when I went through my cupboards for the first time I cried literally, how could it be that almost everything that I had in my house could contain msg and why did I not know about this?, What was I going to feed my daughter? So after a good cry and a good vent I went to work, I started to research and with help from some great friends and family found a wealth of information and recipes.
I am already noticing a difference in my daughters health and in my own as well. I am nowhere near an expert when it comes to our new “real” food life style but It gets a little easier every day and I have found some great recipes, and links and now have some new found cooking skills. I still dread the grocery store and will admit I snuck in a msg loaded burger and fries the other day when I was out without the kids( I blame the addictive nature of msg) . Because I don’t believe in making separate meals for each person I have now adapted this change for all of our family members, my husband I am pretty sure thinks that I am going to kill him with healthy foods and home cooking, I guess after thirty years of eating foods laden with extra’s your body needs a little bit of time to adjust to what real food tastes like. I get a real satisfaction out of making a meal from scratch and then sitting down at the table and watching as my kids not only like it but devour it. The only thing I am missing is pizza, I haven’t attempted a real pizza yet but think that will be coming up soon.
So I have embraced the challenge, here is to good health, good eats and good friends.

Soul Friends

Wow how did such a long period of time go by without me writing, well I have written a few things here and there but nothing that was really good for the soul. To many things have happened for me to try and list them all but to sum things up, I realized during this oh so stressful period of time in our lives that all of my family and friends were too far away to be able to help in an emergency. Though my family and best friends are always just a phone call away, a phone call away is still too far when you need someone to be there right away. This of course had to change, so I went about compiling a list of emergency contacts, it was at this time that I realized that I did not have any really close friends around me, my neighbors are wonderful and would definitely help me out in a time of need but I had no real friends here all of my real friends were hours away, you know the ones that you can call any time day or night the ones that know you for you and still like you, they are there with a shoulder to cry on or just to vent to, they are the friends that you cannot talk to for months and then just like no time has passed at all you take up right where you left off. These friends are few and far between if you have a handful of friends like this then you should count yourself lucky. So how do you go about making friends, when you are in your (cough) thirty’s making friends is not as easy as it was when you were a kid, As an adult you have responsibilities and concerns that you never had to deal with as a child there is always the excuse of having no time which us mothers use on a regular basis, we are too busy to go for coffee, too busy to exercise and definitely too busy to try to make new friends. With three little ones I can honestly say that I am busy as can most mom’s . There is always something that needs to be done or someone that needs something from me, but because of how busy I am and all of the demands that I deal with in a day it was even more important to me that I make friends, both for my sanity and my soul. My husband had no problems making friends he after all worked, and in the military the guys you work with all have this kind of unexplainable bond, this did not help me. So now what? Well the first step to making friends in a new community is to actually leave your house, the second step is actually talking to other people. Now neither of these things has ever been a problem for me so imagine my surprise when even after taking my kids out every day I was still for the most part friendless , it seemed that though I wanted to make friends the other women in the neighborhood did not, I would go to the park and try to talk to the other moms( these sightings were few and far between) but after a brief and somewhat one sided conversation I would still be no further ahead than I had been before leaving the house. After great deliberation I came to a couple of conclusions ,First, I did not have the plague and did not need to be avoided, so therefore it was not me that was the problem , second most of the women in my neighborhood did not leave their homes( how could this be I couldn’t relate I loved being outside, going for walks and for the most part just getting out to explore and enjoy the world around me- and the kids get just as stir crazy as me), and third and this was a biggie there are apparently a bunch of un written rules to friend making on a military base, rules that no one talks about but that everyone but me seemed to know, I felt like I had stepped into a parallel universe, and was missing my best friends more than ever. Then one Sunday morning it happened I had once again taken my kids for a walk to the park my daughter saw another little girl and started to play with her, luckily kids at this age don’t have the same friend issues that come with age. The little girl’s mother made a comment to me and I pounced like a lion that has not eaten in days. I started to talk and for once it was not one sided nor was it forced, I had found a friend and not just any kind of friend but a soul friend. Since then I have met and become friends with some really great women, I am thankful for these connections and cherish what each of these unique women have brought into my life and the support that they have provided to me in times of need. True friends are rare and hard to come by, they truly are diamonds in the rough, but once you find them like a diamond they are almost indestructible. I am blessed to have some true friends, friends that make your soul sing. Here’s to my forever friends, for just being you. Love you all.