It's Growing Season!

It's growing season all around here at apartment 307.  We decided to go ahead with doing an organic garden this year, just something small since we live on the third floor and have just a small balcony to work with.  With the early spring weather, we were able to start planting about a month and a half early!  And as of yesterday, we've already enjoyed two rounds of lettuce and one round of beans!  Normally down here you wouldn't be planting until after April 15th, so we were spoiled with a warmer than usual winter!  This year we are growing stringless bush beans, zucchini, bell pepper, loose leaf lettuce, herbs (spearmint, basil, cilantro, parsley, thyme, dill), strawberries, green onions, and two avocado trees.  We started everything from seed except the strawberries.  It is so fun to come home and slice off a handful of lettuce and enjoy a fresh salad for dinner.  So worth it!

baby beans after about 2 months of growth from seed

lettuce after about 2 months of growth from seed

first cilantro sprout

Lettuce at 3 months, after our first harvest.

beans and zucchini coming right along, planted in 5 gallon buckets

Our first meal including lettuce from the garden - topped with whole food black bean burger, roasted asparagus, and avocado.  Heaven on a plate!!!

Also growing at an extremely fast rate is our little nugget.  Austin has six teeth now!  Two on the bottom and four on top!  The top set came all together last week.  He has been handling his teething pretty well this time, we barely knew they were coming until the day they cut through.

Grandma Sarah - this turned out to be Austin's favorite new toy.  :)  Coming in a close second is a chip clip he snagged from the fridge door.

naked time on his potty  (Elimination Communication for anyone wondering)

My boys in their polos.  Love!  A's first day in 12 month clothes. (7 months old here)

Austin is also outgrowing all of his clothes.  Well, at least it seems that way!  He weighed in on Tuesday at his check up at 25 pounds!  (I forgot his height measurement, but he was in the 25th percentile for height.)  I'm sure every mom feels this way at some point of their child's life, but I've got to say I feel like I'm upgrading his clothing size every week!  Haha!  What fit last week fits no more!

We had a fabulous Easter, which started off with a gorgeous early morning breakfast and traditional service at a church we visited in South Carolina.  As we left the service, the youth of the church released a few dozen butterflies at the large cross on the lawn just outside the church doors.  It was about 9:00am and the sun was streaming down thick rays through the clouds.  It was a beautiful experience and the perfect way to honor Christ!  We then went to our church for a second breakfast at Christ Lutheran and the contemporary service to follow.  So we had quite the mix of everything on Easter, and we loved it!  Enjoyed a walk on the greenway in the afternoon and Yoforia before heading home.  I think we will always cherish Austin's first Easter and what a perfect day it was.

Austins' first Easter basket!  The cookies are for mom and dad.  ;)

crawling over to his Easter basket

pictures by the cross and lilies in the sanctuary

Couldn't get him to hold still long enough for a solo picture.  He thought it was so funny to grab the flowers.

Walking on the greenway on the beautiful Easter afternoon!

Here are a few videos of the cutie pie growing up!

Oh yes, and I must mention what happened to us two weeks ago.  We had gotten a babysitter for the first time and had her at the apartment set up with Austin.  Now I wish I could say we had a big date planned, however no.  We were in our office room working on the business plan and financial projections for our future business we plan to open soon.  We had four hours carved out with the sitter, and we had just sat down to start plugging numbers when there was a *knock*knock*knock* at the door.  Dave and I were pretty surprised, because we never get a knock at our door.  And I really mean never, like never in the 10 months we have lived here except for the occasional package from UPS.  I hesitantly answered, expecting to find a salesperson of some sort.  But it was our neighbor from across the breezeway.  She accidentally backed into our car!  Thankfully we had pulled in with the back of the car facing outward this time (usually Dave will back in to a spot with the front of the car facing out.  God had our back on this one!).  So Dave spent the next couple hours working out the details with a police office and insurance.  We drove the sitter home an hour early, because there was no way we could focus on our work after that.  And we haven't had the chance to touch our project since.  Ahhhh, parenthood.  :)

The damage.  Just a few scrapes and broke the light cover.  The light fixture was A.Okay!

Welcome Baby Sophia!

This is going to be a bit of a scattered post.  I have so many thoughts to jot down  before I have to leave for work!  Please bear with me!

Introducing Sophia Madelynn

Arrived at 1:41am
Thursday, April 15, 2010
7lbs 7ozs  - 21 inches
100% NATURAL & DRUG FREE

Christina did an amazing job not only in delivery but also thru the 9 months leading up to the beautiful birth of their daughter.  Christina chose to do a natural water birth.  We are SO proud of her!!  Last Sunday we went out to Paul & Christina's house to cook them a meal while they adjusted to having Sophia in their lives.  We grilled up some of my secret recipe burgers and had strawberry-apple spinach salad.  Gorgeous weather!  So peaceful to sit out on the deck with Soph and soak it all in.  :)

Dave had his last day of T8 internship yesterday.  Dr. Bruce treated Dave and the entire office staff to lunch.  Dr. Beck took us out for drinks after work to say goodbye.  It was a fun time and thanks for the treats guys!  Dave will miss the office and wonderful patients.  He's got 2 weeks off then starts his T9 internship the first week of May.  He'll be working at Bandana Chiropractic, which is a Maximized Living office in Roseville (about a 30 minute commute from home).  He's really excited to get into this office and have some new patients to take thru the Maximized Living Essentials.  What's great about this next phase of work is that these doctors are going to give Dave a lot more control over his own patients.  I won't get too much into the details, we realize while we find these things exciting, maybe you guys don't...but all you need to know is Dave's going to be having even more fun at work, learning new things every day, and getting closer and closer to graduation in November!

Dave and I attended a Biomarkers of Health seminar two weekends ago in Bloomington hosted by Nutrition Dynamics.  Students were able to attend for free this time, so I dragged my boy along.  :)  It was fabulous!  It was a seminar dedicated to identifying disease in the body and treating it naturally.  I get so excited to learn more and more about supplementation and natural disease reversal. 

In honor of Earth Day, I did a post on Healing Cuisine.  I can't recommend the book Gorgeously Green by Sophie Uliano enough.  If we weren't on a student budget, I'd buy this book for all of you, seriously!  It's great, jam packed full of tips on green living!  Happy Earth Day!

My hunky husband just finished making me a large mug of homemade organic chai tea, so I must leave this post.  It smells wonderful!  Look for a post on HealingCuisineByElise.com with the recipe soon!  We've been working on it for a couple weeks now and think we finally have the perfect ratio of spices!  Yummmy breakfast treat!

Want to Save 400,000 Trees??

Dave and I have been on a journey to become more green and organic for almost two years now.  We understand we can't expect each one of you to make the switches to a natural lifestyle over night, but we recently learned about what is going on in the toilet paper market and just HAD to share it with you.  Do you want to save 400,000 trees??  Who wouldn't, right?  Is your luxury toilet paper destroying forests?  Wait til you hear this, pulled from multiple research sources (including GreenPeace USA, Green and Natural Parenting, Consumer Reports, Washington Post, and the New York Times).

Many of us may never even think about the environmental consequences of toilet paper and if we do we may think it is not a very big deal in the grand scheme of things.  If we are thinking along those lines, we are thinking wrong.

I am sure you are all familiar with the soft, cushiony toilet paper brands that are thrown at us via TV commercials and ads all the time…brands like Cottonelle Ultra, Quilted Northern Ultra and Charmin Ultra.  Especially with the latest craze of "ultra plush" or "ultra soft"..  If you want to feel as though you are wiping your behind with a cloud then these are the brands for you.

Unfortunately this article from the New York Times shows that luxury and softness has a price.

"...millions of trees harvested in North America and in Latin American countries, including some percentage of trees from rare old-growth forests in Canada.  Although toilet tissue can be made at similar cost from recycled material, it is the fiber taken from standing trees that help give it that plush feel, and most large manufacturers rely on them."

Ugh!  We are destroying forests just so we can have something super soft to wipe our backsides.  That is the very definition of vain and wasteful.  Dave and I would have to agree with Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist and waste expert with the Natural Resource Defense Council when he said  “No forest of any kind should be used to make toilet paper.”

How can we justify such a thing when we can use/buy toilet paper made from recycled paper products?  Is our bum worth that price?

The cost of “white” toilet paper is also high as tons of chlorine bleach and water must be used to bleach the paper pulp.  This is highly unnecessary in our opinion...

Charmin, Kleenex, Cottonelle, Quilted Northern and Scott are among the toilet papers and tissues that do the most harm to forests and the environment, according to a new report by GreenPeace.  The non-profit research group evaluated dozens of brands of toilet paper, facial tissue, paper, towels, and napkins according to three criteria:

1. How much recycled content they contained
   Using 100% recycled content helps protect forests because it significantly reduces the demand for trees, especially trees coming from native forests.
   
   
2. How much of that was post-consumer waste
   To get the top ranking, at least 50% post-consumer waste needed to be used in manufacturing the product.
   
   
3. How the paper was bleached
   The top-ranked products are not bleached using chlorine, which can create the toxic byproduct dioxin.
   

Read more: http://www.thedailygreen.com/living-green/blogs/green-products-services/sustainable-paper-products-55030201#ixzz0WJLXpRTm

So what can you do?  Buy recycled, unbleached toilet paper.  According to GreenPeace, Americans could save more than 400,000 trees if each family bought a roll of recycled toilet paper — just once.  We highly recommend each of you to visit GreenPeace's site for their Pocket Size Tissue Guide which you can download and print out to keep with you in your wallet or purse so you can remember what brands to look for, which to avoid, and chemicals to avoid, too!:  http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/campaigns/forests/tissueguide.  Also, please please PLEASE take the time on that same page to click "Take Action Now" and send a quick letter to Proctor&Gamble asking them to stop killing the hundreds of years old forests around the world.  (Dave and I did this today!! Share with your friends and family!)  Inside their pocket tissue guide, GreenPeace recommends some of the following brands as being the most eco friendly choices:

Green Forest
Seventh Generation (the brand Dave and I use most often)

Trader Joe’s brand

And of course there is always the option to use cloth.  This option extends past the use of cloth instead of toilet paper.  Try to use cloth diapers, cloth baby wipes, even cloth menstrual pads or a Diva Cup.  I admit that even I have not made the leap to cloth for everything for our family yet, but we are still on our journey to being an ALL-natural family.  Make a healthy and clean choice for YOUR family.  It's easy when you can buy recycled, unbleached toilet paper.

Plants That Cleanse Your Air

So I came across this link from another blog we follow. It's on our beloved TED.com (amazing speeches and presentations. check it out sometime if you're bored!)

Dave and I have started our own little collection of indoor plants since getting married. So far we have two aloe plants, a spider plant, a bamboo (given to us by Amber!!) and some spiky one that we don't know what it's called. We've been hoping to add to the bunch, which are clustered around our sliding deck door. After running across this video, I think we will definitely be picking up these three types of plants this spring to help clean up and detoxify our air year round!



http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/490


Hope you find this video as informative and helpful as we did. It might be one of the simplest ways to create health in your life!


- Dave & Elise