Natural Easter Egg Coloring

While the food dye industry continues to assert that food dye's have no correlation of hyperactivity in children and whole host of other negative impacts, I for one, do not believe them at all.  Just a few weeks ago the Huffington Post came out with an article about how the FDA is looking into changing their official statement on food dyes. If they do, it will be the first thing the FDA has done right in awhile.

In the meantime, lets just go with our guts.  Food dye can't be good, can it? How can anyone think  ingesting something that is bright orange or bright red is OK?  You couldn't pay me a million dollars to give Penelope Gatorade, or jello, or goldfish or store bought Popsicles. 

So I sure as shit wasn't going to dye our Easter Eggs with Red 40.  No ma'am!

I bought three bottles of natural food dye from our local organic grocery store.  They are all created naturally, for example the yellow was made from Turmeric.  Which you can do on your own (click on this link! it takes you to the cutest foodie blog), but I got too busy to make food dye from scratch.

Instead of hard boiling the eggs, I blew out the egg yolks.  I have a farmer deliver eggs to my house every other week, for myself and some of my friends.  I had a few extra dozen one week and I didn't want them to go to waste. So I thought, perfect, will use them for Easter Egg coloring! 

While this way worked, and I have a nice display of long lasting colored Easter Eggs, it was a pain in the you know where to do. I ended up pricking my holes a bit bigger, and thus you can see them very well, to make it easier to blow the egg yolk out.

Also, when I was dying the eggs, they were so light from having nothing in them that I had to hold the egg down in the liquid with my fingers.  Which is hard to do, when you are doing this a with a toddler in her learning tower and she wants to simultaneously break all the eggs and splash colored water all over the kitchen!

I mixed the yellow and blue to make green and the red and blue to make purple to give me a total of 5 different colors.  Here is a good link with the recipe for the coloring. You basically just need vinegar and water.

And since I used farm fresh eggs, as you can see, they are not all white.  The brown eggs did get some color but not nearly as much as the white eggs.  But I actually like how they turned out.  They look exactly like what they are; Natural Easter Eggs!

Then we took the leftover colored water outside for some finger painting fun.  And Penelope decided that dying her brand new Pottery Barn cloth baby doll would be much more fun.  Either that or she decided that it was not cool to have all white baby dolls and that her baby doll collection needed some diversity.  :)

Butterfly Pose for Tots

Butterfly pose is such a fun and easy pose for your toddler. You can start teaching this pose as soon as they have mastered sitting up. In fact, most babies, as they are learning to balance while sitting up, will naturally put their feet together in front of their bodies,  to create a more stable foundation for themselves.

First you need to do the pose yourself and show little one what it looks like.

As a totally unrelated side note, I am having a really hard time finding the right word to describe our babies/tots/toddlers/little ones/kids. It's starting to drive me insane. Penelope is not a kid but she is not a baby, clearly she is a toddler, but the poses I talk about here are not just for toddlers they are for babies too and even older kids for that matter. Ahhhhh!! So if anyone has a good word that encompasses all those things PLEASE let me know.

Ok, back to Butterfly pose.

So once you have done the pose your self you can help your little one (see what I mean!!!) by putting their feet together for them. Then show them how to move their knees up and down by gently, doing it for them.


Then move your own knees up and down and show them again. And say Butterfly!!! You do it!!!!

I like to say Butterfly slowly and rhythmically, almost like I am chanting and I move my legs in the same rhythm that I am speaking.

Then I like to say, now open up your feet like a book! I do the sign for book, and then I open up my feet. So the outside of the feet stay together and inside of the feet open up.  Then again, I say your turn!!!

Then I usually do the sign for Butterfly and go back to "flapping my wings".

In an older kid class, I may take my first two fingers and use them as my "antennae" and play around with them really getting into pretending we are butterfly's.

Butterfly pose is a great pose for Mama's too, it is one of the best poses for releasing tension in your hips, groin and inner thighs.  Which is oh so important if you are trying to conceive or are pregnant.

And as always give them lots of praise when they do the pose.  Try not to say good job, but other things like yay! you did it!  what a beautiful butterfly!  how does it make your legs feel?!

Just FYI, most of the baby yoga poses I post, I learned at my Itsy Bitsy Yoga training. The founder and creator, Helen Garabedian, has a great book and dvds that you can purchase to help your home practice. Or you can go to her website and try and find a class near you!

This Moment: Belly Flab

Oh, man, this is kind of painful.  Hopefully it will hold me accountable and help inspire me to eat less sugar.

Basically, this is what eating cookies every day looks like.  I eat very healthy and make sure to meet my nutritional needs, but I have a serious sweet tooth. 

I have no words for this one.


Well, at least my arm looks ripped in this one.

How to Really Store Breast Milk

I know everyone is pretty familiar with the breast milk storage guidelines.  They have been the standard guidelines for a long time and anyone who's anyone in the breastfeeding world stand by them.  Here is Kelly Mom's standard page and here is the La Leche League's.

I have found them to be conservative in some areas and would like to share my take on breast milk storage. 

What got me thinking along these lines of breast milk storage was that I had heard through the online grapevine that the standards were conservative and that a good rule of thumb is to let the baby taste the milk before throwing it out just because it has passed the aloted time.

I also started thinking about how raw milk, sours, it doesn't go bad.  And sour raw milk is really good for you.  So why would slightly soured breast milk be any different?

So I started experimenting with the times to see how far I could push it.  As you all know, I have been exclusively pumping for Penelope since she was a week old.  She comfort nurses around the clock, but I still pump for her once a day and give her a bottle once a day. 

When she was younger, and I was pumping every two hours, I would just give her what I just pumped.  But as she got older and my supply stayed at feeding-a-small-African-village level, I spaced out my pump sessions and got larger amounts at each session.  So that meant, in order to give her fresh milk, I just left it out on the counter till it was time to feed her next.

I tried to always give fresh-from-the-tap-milk, that had never seen the inside of the refrigerator.  I wanted her milk to be as close to perfection as possible.  Because even milk that has been the refrigerator looses some of it's leukocytes and beneficial bacteria.

So here is what LLL's says:

• at room temperature (66-78°F, 19-26°C) for 4 hours (ideal), up to 6 hours (acceptable) (Some sources use 8 hours)
• in a refrigerator (<39°F, <4°C) for 72 hours (ideal); up to 8 days (acceptable)
• in a freezer (-0.4 to -4°F, -18 to -20°C) for 6 months (ideal) up to 12 months (acceptable)

What I have found to be true:

I have found that at room temperature, that you can really leave breast milk out for 6 to 10 hours (ideal), up to 12 to 14 hours (acceptable).  

I also found that the exact temperature of "room temperature" doesn't really matter.  I have taken bottles in the car, outside, even in the summer.  

And as far as thawed frozen milk goes, the guidelines say to store it in the fridge no longer than 24 hours.  I have found that its really more like 72 hours.

I also never threw out a bottle that she didn't finish. I pace fed her, on demand, because I was trying to make her intake of milk as close as possible to normal on-demand nursing.  So she was a "classic" breastfeed baby in the sense that she never ate more 2 ounces at a time, through the day and night.  I just put the bottle back on the counter until the next time she was hungry, never putting it in the fridge.

As a side note, when you store breast milk in bags, you can lay them flat like bricks (as in the picture above) and they take up less space in your freezer that way.

P.S.  This is not medical advice, you must follow your own intuition about what is right for you and your baby. This is simply my experience.

Freezer Cooking with Slow Cooker Recipes

Welcome, Pinners!  Please be sure to check out my Real Food tab at the top to find more slow cooker freezer meals!


Like I mentioned in my post the other week, the last time I did a big cooking day, I had big ah-ha moment.


Although, I had a blast with Lauren, it was logistically very difficult to accomplish, between the juggling of cooking and childcare, the prep work, organization and scheduling, it can be overwhelming.


So this latest big cooking day, I did it by myself and only did slow cooker recipes.  Basically, all I was did was chop vegetables and assemble ingredients.



Even with doing it this way, it was still a 3 hour affair, but during this time I was able to finish all the cooking AND the cleaning.  Most importantly my feet didn't ache at the end like they normally do.  I also didn't have any sort of panic or anxiety leading up to the big cooking day like I normally do. HUGE.

I chopped all the vegetables with Penelope in her Learning Tower before nap (which was really fun, I went through all the colors of the vegetables with her and talked about rainbows and made it a fun learning experience).


Then I assembled everything during her nap (thank you Jesus, I can now skip a pump session here and there and can do other things at nap time than sit in front of a computer) and finished cleaning up after nap, again with her in her Learning Tower.  


This time she played independently with a bowl of soapy water, she made a huge mess,  but the rags I used to clean up her mess where the same rags I used to clean up my mess so it wasn't that bad.

I just dumped the veggies into the gallon ziploc bags, then added the meat, then added the spices.


Once I was done and cleaned everything up, I felt like I had invented electricity!  I thought I was such a genius for finally (it took me over a year, people) getting once a month cooking down to an efficient and easy art form.

I am telling you it will change your life! Give it a try and tell me how it went!

Here are my recipes.  I use a ton of vegetables in each meal, because I don't tend to eat a lot of veggies through out the day, so I try and get them all in at dinner.  And Peter is more apt to eat veggies if they taste like barbecue or curry than as a plain side dish.


 
Healthy Mama Barbecue Chicken
3 medium unpeeled  sweet potatoes, cut into 1/2 inch pieces
2 large green pepper, cut into strips
1 large red pepper, cut into strips
1 zucchini, chopped
1 medium onion, sliced
1 tablespoon quick cooking tapioca
2 pounds chicken thighs or drumsticks
1 8-ounce can of tomato sauce
2 tablespoons packed brown sugar
1 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
1 tablespoon yellow mustard (I wasn't sure if this meant actual mustard or the spice so I did a little of both)
1 clove garlic, minced
1/4 teaspoon salt


Dump everything into two gallon freezer bags, shake it up, seal, label and put in the freezer.


Stephanie's Goulash
3 cups chopped onions
2.5 cups coarsely chopped green sweet peppers
4 large beets, peeled and diced
2 cups of carrots
3 cloves garlic, minced
3 pounds beef stew meat, cut into one inch cubes
1 6-ounce can tomato paste
4 teaspoons Hungarian paprika or regular paprika (I used regular)
1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper
4 cups hot cooked noodles
1/2 dairy sour cream


Dump everything into two gallon freezer bags, shake it up, seal, label and put in the freezer. EXCEPT the sour cream, that is for garnish after the meal is cooked.


Chicken Curry
3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
4 tablespoons curry powder
1.5 teaspoons ground cumin
1.5 pounds chicken thighs, cut into 1 inch pieces
2 cups chopped peeled sweet potatoes
2.5 cups baby carrots
2 cup coarsely chopped mango
1 cup chopped onion
1 zucchini chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 chicken bouillon
.5 cup raisins (for garnish)
.5 cup peanuts or cashews (for garnish)


Dump everything into two gallon freezer bags, shake it up, seal, label and put in the freezer.


To cook, take out of freezer and set on counter for about 30 minutes, then dump contents of bag into slow cooker. Cook on high for 4 hours, or low for 8 hours.

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Meet Stephanie!

Here's my official introduction!

Stephanie Brandt Cornais, is a Licensed Massage Therapist, Certified Infant Massage Instructor, Happiest Baby on the Block Certified Instructor, Certified Doula, Certified Yoga Instructor, she has been trained and certified through Birthing From Within,  and Itsy Bitsy Yoga, she is a Reiki Master, and holds a BS in Environmental Science.

She started babysitting infants at age 11, and before becoming a mother herself, she was a Nanny for 5 years. Most of her time was spent with one family, taking care of two precious little girls, Ava and Ella, who are twelve months apart in age.  Ella is also her Goddaughter.

On 11.11.09, she finally became a Mother herself.  I say finally, because literally, she has been waiting to be a mother since she was 5 years old.  Penelope Nadyne Cornais (named after Stephanie's paternal grandmother) was born at home, in water and into her own two hands.  Although, she had the birth of her dreams, breastfeeding was extremely difficult and you can read more about it here.

Stephanie has always loved movement as a way to release and relax, starting with her early days as a dancer. Dance is what brought her to yoga at age 13. 

She loves to be creative and is a natural storyteller.   Both yoga and being creative have helped her heal old wounds, and she enjoys sharing her wisdom with women and mothers in our now global, online community.

Her desire is to help women and mothers create a truly supportive community in which to grow, learn and heal on every level; mental, emotional, physical and spiritual.

She used to do this through mentoring and helping women, by teaching her classes and owning her yoga studio and organic boutique.  Now, she inspires mama's here on the Mama and Baby Love website, while she is a work at home mama to Penelope, the love of her life.

She hopes that mama's find who they truly are through their own self-discovery process. She views birth and parenting as sacred, soul experiences that are opportunities for personal growth and exploration. She believes that the specific way in which we birth or raise children does not matter, but only that parents are present, conscious, mindful and bring unconditional love to each moment. 

Through this website she hopes she can help women and families be more present, looking within for answers. She also hopes to lead by example in regards to excercise, yoga, nutrition and overall health and wellness inspiring other mother's to be more concerned about their health and their children's health.

This Moment: Spring Break

When we went on our little family vacation during spring break we drove to Disney and then onto Miami to visit friends and family. Along the way down and up we stopped at a little surf spot about 30 minutes south of St. Augustine so Papa could surf.

These pictures melt my heart.  Her little sandy toes.  It reminds me how big her feet are getting.  I must do a foot stamp print soon!

She was so excited by the water.  She is such a water baby and wants to dive into water whenever she sees it.

Little surfer girl in the making.