Day 7

I was making juice for this first time today with my friends very fancy wonderful juicer. Airionna runs out of the room yelling "we have to take a picture of this mother!" I wonder how long she will think it is normal to take pictures of every thing we do in the kitchen:-) So this picture was taken from her with a little aim help. I might be concerned about her thinking food is our god, with the way we have been giving it so much attention lately. But I have to share a story from today with you that has nothing to do with this 30 days, but lets me know my above concerns are not to be worried on. I was having a moment or two this morning where nothing was going right, or even going at all. I felt like I was on a treadmill of life putting forth a lot of effort but not really doing anything. Hopefully my comment at this time of helplessness does not offend anyone. But I looked at Kage and said in my dramatic way, "I am so ready for Jesus to come!" Kage shared my statement with the others and Airionna comes up to me and says in a sweet motherly tone " oh, mother Jesus did come and he is here with you right now." God used my precious out of control 3 year old to bring my heart and mind under control real quick. So I really liked the juice. I did not follow a recipe of course, I just started throwing stuff in.Everyone thought the red bell pepper was a mistake but I loved it. Tomorrow I will be good and follow a recipe. At lunch the kids had apples in honey and sunflower seeds and a freezer bar from yesterday. I had a bar from yesterday. I am not really good at planning ahead which God has brought to my attention several times and where I thought I had improved enough in this area with the last lesson, I guess I still have work to do. Dinner was broccoli dipped in a red bell pepper sauce I kinda used a recipe from the web site but not exactly. It was definitely eatable. I am going grocery shopping again on the 8Th so I will pic up the ingredients I am missing to make them exact and I am sure their flavor will improve greatly. However things are going as planned as far as how much I am liking the food. Before this all began I was thinking if only I did not love the way food tasted I would have know problem eating to live instead of living to eat. But I did not have the motivation at that time to purposely eat food I did not like. Well now I do! It is not that the food I'm eating is not good it is just I am not a veggie person. Growing up I only ate mashed potatoes and corn, literally. My first salad was after Terrina was born. Since then I have had great friends who have had fun introducing me to many foods I have never had before but I am pretty sure it all included cooked food along with the healthy food. So even though I am not loving the total RAW diet, I am still convinced that I will be adding these new raw foods to my cooked food diet and honestly love it them.

Seth asked me "so mom, has it been about 20 days now?" I said "no, just 7" He had a bewildered look and told me it seemed much longer. Terrina and I energetically agreed. and then Kage piped in saying " it seems shorter to me... it must be because I am actually enjoying it". LOL I love my children!

Day 6

It has been a nutty day.

Kage has been sick today so we did not do porridge but went with "Gods pop tarts", bananas for breakfast.

For lunch I gave Terrina a rest from raw and let her have the left over french fries from last night. I had some pecans,almonds, and dried cranberries, along with a glass of green tea with lemon and agave. We munched and watched a fabulous movie called "The Secrets of Jonathan Sperry". Wow this was an unexpectedly wonderful movie. I was worried at first because it starts with boys liking a girl and I did not know where it was going, but it turns out wonderful. It is a true story and very inspiring It is definitely christian all they way. I recommend this very highly especially for those of us with boys.

So I was pretty bummed about the dehydrator not working and figured now we can't have any of the cookies or cakes which was what first enticed my people into joining me on this venture. Then I got to thinking... When I make regular cookies we usually just eat the doe soo why not just eat this healthy doe right? Well most of my other great ideas have not panned out, so I was not real confident in this one. Plus my food processor did not grind up the nuts or oats completely so it is much crunchier that it ought to be. So I slowly took a tiny bite and OOLALA we did it! So yummy. We all enjoyed the doe and then rolled them into bars and put them into the freezer. Airionnas melted a little before she finished it but everyone else ate theirs with no mess. I definitely suggest doing this. We will make these even back in the real world. We used the recipe from Amie Sue's site for "Orange infused Cookie with Creamy Orange Sherbet Frosting"

Only I had no desire to continue and I figured I would stop while I was ahead so I did not make the frosting. Another time we will try making a sandwich with the frozen bars and the frosting. They would also be good with dried fruit added.

So the kids had chicken noodle soup for dinner and the bars for snack, I just had some more of the doe. I know I know. I do not need lectures on the reasons not to do this often (I did not eat one veggie today), but I figured it was more healthy than the 5lb. pizzas we usually have on Sundays.

Day 5

Well the tiredness I talked about us all having on Wednesday was a false alarm. It turns out we were just tired! K.G. came down with a fever tonight too. So I don't think it was the food change that made us tired it was just a bunch of things working at the same time.

So I just got an e-mail today from my aunt asking if I was reading her comments, and I had no idea I was able to get comments yet. So I went back and from day 1 on I think She has been making comments so if you have to push a button like I did in order to see them I would. She has decided to make daily acrostics for RAW. At least so far, I know she is good but I think by day 20 she may have to use a different word. Also there are comments from Amie Sue who is the one who has the web site that inspired this whole thing. If you want to make a comment also, Angie has explained how on her comment on Day 2.

For breakfast today we again had chia porridge. I am not one who needs a lot of variety. However in Terrinas I left out the seeds, so she just had the pureed fruit with some cashews on top. She loved it.

At lunch the kids had the cheese sauce and broccoli which they were fine with until Seth and Airionna got pb sandwiches. Then Terrina was coming up with her logical reasoning's for why they should not do this a whole 30 days but maybe just 20:-) I was not hungry yet from breakfast but later had some walnuts.

Tonight was the most difficult yet not to have dinner with the others. It was not terrible but still it is the first time since we started that I wished I could have just one bite. We had company and so I served pulled pork sandwiches and homemade french fries. MMMM. Oh well no pain no gain. I am one of those who if it is too easy it doesn't seem worth it so it is a blessing for me to have a night harder than the others. I had zucchini noodles with the rest of the cheese sauce on it. It really was good. So the retry on "Touchdown Spicy Cheese Dip" was a success! woohoo. I needed one of those.

Our home made dehydrator? Not such a success. Good at getting the food nice a rotten for Kages worms though!

day 4

This is Kage. I woke up wanting some eggs for breakfast, but I had banana and fresh Orange juice shake. It was awesome!

We went to the store and got a very big box that we turned into a dehydrator by covering the inside with tin foil and we got sticks to set the pans that we bought onto. Mom thought that we should use four sticks, two sticks per pan. But I figured out a way that we only needed two! I took two sticks and I put them in an "X". Like in the picture. We actually have made something like a dehydrator before except for it did not have a door. And it had a whole in the back (bigger than the whole in this one which is for the light bulb). We used it for a green house.

At lunch time some of our friends came and mom forgot to soak the nuts so we didn't have time to make the cheese dip for lunch like we planned to. So we just had nuts and a banana for lunch.

And we had apples while we went to our other friends house.

For dinner we had the cheese dip and broccoli. Mom did not put enough salt in it this time. But we just got our own salt and we put a little bit on the cheese dip. Then it was a little bit better. Not as good as when she put Table spoons in. The kids also had chicken strips, corn and french fries. (not mom)

THE END

day 3

Hi this is Terrina,

for breakfast we had porridge again, I like the banana/strawberry taste but its to seedy for me.

At lunch we had to open a coconut to get the coconut water! It's really sweet, I think we have to add the flesh (the white stuff) to the water to make it coconut milk. It was a strong coconut,it was hilarious to see Mom banging on it with our knives, she even broke one of them! So she had to get a hammer, as she was banging it coconut hair was flying all over! I wondered how gorillas do it so easily! We used it in a soup but it was soooooo spicy that NONE of us could eat it,so we ate honey-do, sunflower seeds, blueberries and nuts for lunch.

For dinner me and Kage can have cooked food so we had stake,and baked potato's and I made Mom a spinach salad with tomatoes, sunflower seeds, garlic, pepper,pine nuts and olive oil. We all had a little salad but I don't like it at all so I can't say anything exiting about it.

Day 2

Poor poor Terrina! This is how she looked most of the day. So sad and gloomy wishing she could have "normal food". It is unlike her to keep up the funk this long I started getting worried. Then, after lunch I became really tired. Around 1:30 I told Kage we should go jogging and he for the first time said "well I just really don't feel like exercising today." "What!?" I have never heard him say that. Ever. So with all three of us seeming unusually tired I began to think maybe it was a withdrawal of the foods we normally have or something. I went on line and sure enough others have had the same experience. It seemed to have started later for them though and lasted up to 2 weeks. Well since we started right away maybe it will leave just as quickly for us.(please pray this will be true) As I was looking on line about others talking about the raw food diet I also realized we may not be eating enough. They all talked about having to get used to eating soo much. One said he ate 8.5 lbs of food and woke in the morning 2 lbs lighter. Well I don't think we will be weighing our food before we eat it but we did go to grocery outlet and stock up on some more fruit for in between meals.

I tried to surprise Terrina this morning with some oat meal which she loves.(When cooked) A friend of mine who has been eating raw for a while, which I did not realize, told me oat meal soaked over night worked great. So I put oat meal in her bowl first and covered it was a small layer of porridge. I eagerly watched and held my camera up to her expecting to see a sign of delight as she tasted the oatmeal, but it never came. I told her it was in there and my sweet girl realizing I had tried to help her out, perked up with a "oh yes I do taste it, I guess this is a little better than yesterday!" Kage still loved his chia porridge and I enjoyed mine even more than yesterday. Seth and Airionna had their single bites and then appreciated their own cereal. Seth loving his bandannas and strawberries again. Looks like one good habit has already been adopted. Bryce scarfed down 1/4 of my porridge and then had some of Terrinas left overs.

Lunch is what you see up above. It is on the Nouveau Raw web site under side dishes called "Mexican Style Seasoned". We all three agreed that this was very tasty. We would like to try this dish again putting it in one of the corn wraps and eating it like a taco or scooping it up with a chip. Those who enjoy eating salad will love this recipe just the way we ate it. Airionna and Seth were not to eager to try this one but when given the choice of one bite of moms food or a whole pile of plain peas, they chose moms food. Airionna had to quickly follow it with a crunchy fish cracker.

For dinner we had left overs. I finished up the zucchini noodle dinner from last night and the kids finished up the pizza from... Monday I think? Any way I was not really looking forward to the cold sour sauce. Now here is were my friend with the web site may shake her head in disgust but here goes. Well as a mom when my babes were babies and I could not get them to eat something, what did I do? Add banana! As I was wondering what to add to my pesto to take the sour away I walked by the last banana sitting on the counter and wondered Hmmm. So I tried it. I popped the banana and pesto into the food processor and mixed it all up hoping the process might make it a little warmer also. (I did end up putting my finished dish on top of the oven while the cooked food was making and this helped worm up my dish a tad). The sour was gone! I totally get babies and the whole banana thing! How did it taste? you ask? Well, I do not recommend adding this to your recipe on purpose but if you ever put to much of anything in something you may want to try it. Even Terrina perked up as she had it and said "it is perfect!" Bryce agreed and ate it with me for dinner.

I forgot to tell you we ate dinner at 3:30. We had to run some errands before going to Awana in the evening and I did not want to have to rush home to eat so we had dinner at snack time and then after awana had a wonderfully tasty banana before bed.

The kids seemed to get untired enough to have a great time during the awana game times. Kage was so excited to tell me that he had done better at dodge ball than he had ever done before. In the recent past he had attributed his gradual increase in speed during game times to our 5k training. This is what I thought he was going to do this time. However he excitedly said "It must be the raw food!" I love how excited he is, it definitely rubs off and keeps the rest of us going.

I was still pretty sleepy and scatter brained when we got home so after the kids were down for the night I hopped in bed for some sleep. I thought about doing the blog first but all the things on sleep I had been seeing kept flashing through my mind. "if you are tired sleep" "if your body wants to sleep it needs sleep!" All yelling at me as duh! Also I just listened to a sermon on sleep by C.J. Mahaney. Reminding us that sleep is a humbling gift from God. So for all these reasons I went to sleep. Now I feel great!

I wanted to thank everyone for there encouragement and comments on our adventure. It really makes it fun and holds me way accountable to sticking to it. I am not sure how to make the blog allow comments but when I figure it out I will let you know.

1st day Breakfast

Good Moorning!
I am writing tonight backwards from dinner to breakfast so that is appears in order on the blog (I think) So if I seem out of order, I probably am.
I wanted to share with you an acrostic my Aunt made after reading about Terrinas statement yesterday. R-really
A- awkward/awesome?
W-way of eating I love that. She is so clever.
This morning Kage ran down eager to see what we would be having and Terrina made some little whining noises as she looked at the "chia porridge". I actually found a bag at Thunderbird that has chia, hemp seed (I have to find out why this is not a drug), and buckwheat. It only takes 5 min. to soak but it says RAW right on the bag. It looked like bird seed. I took the soaked porridge and fallowed the recipe from http://Nouveauraw.com mixing in an apple,banana and cinnamon. In fact unless I mention other wise just assume all recipes are from her web site "K". I did add honey on Terrina's and Kages because they love it, and pureed strawberry's on all of ours.

So we were all pretty nervous to take our first bite. So we pretended we were horses and we had to eat grass. So then after the first bite we would compare our food with grass and decide if it was better or worse. I had to keep reminding Terrina to compare it to grass, but Kage said "I don't even have to compare it to grass. This is great, I want it every day even after the 30 days is over!"
Seth and Airionna took their one bite each and were content to stay with their ricecrispies. However as Kage and I were raving about the healthiness of our dish Seth wondered how healthy his dish was. I told him "not too healthy". He was eager to find a way to make it healthy. So we added sliced bananas and pureed strawberries to his ricecrispies. This alone is a success in my book.
I thought it was rather tasty. With the banana it had a creamy texture and with the seeds it just seemed like super seedy strawberry. I could definitely eat this for breakfast often.

Day 1 Lunch

OK for lunch we chose to have "Touchdown Spicy Cheese Dip" with broccoli. I was interested to see how this Nutritional yeast tasted. This is one of the items I could not find at the store without help last night. The kids were not apprehensive about this dish because one of my favorite healthy lunches is broccoli in cheese dip stuff. So they were not worried. I kind of was still because I did not see how it could taste like cheese... Now to the verdict: It was AWFUL! and yet I suspect this will be our favorite dish ever that I will totally use instead of my "cheese stuff". Confused? I will explain I put way to much salt in. I think I was supposed to use tea spoons instead of Table spoons but next time I will leave it out and just salt to taste at the end. But I could taste around the horridity and pick out the red bell pepper and garlic and onion, and oh my, I know that done correctly this will be me favorite dish!

We still ate it because this is all we had. Again an opportunity to appreciate the other dishes so much more right? Terrina and I chased each bite with a grape, Airionna looked shocked at why I would have offered her something like this but she swallowed with no fuss. Kage and Seth, Loved It. I think is has to do with what I mentioned yesterday about "boys like yucky things", Because especially Seth who had some left over bread sticks from last night chose to continue eating it! I told Terrina I would dump out this batch and make a new one later and Kage cried out no! I love it.

Day 1 Dinner

So now for dinner. The kids were very excited they got to eat cooked food! Terrina came in as I was cooking beans to make burritos for Tim and she says "What smells sooo good" I looked at her and slowly said "beans" she started laughing and said "I never thought I would get that excited at the smell of beans". So it looked like I was on my own for dinner. I was "cooking" from the website under "main courses", "Basil Pesto and Zucchini Noodles" only I did not use basil. But she said I could substitute with spinach, so I did. This time I used too much lemon but it was pretty good. I don't think we can judge the taste of the foods today. We will wait until the next time I make these dishes to really get into how they taste when I hopefully don't put to much of anything. I can tell you though I was very pleasantly surprised at how good the zucchini noodles were. I have only ever really liked zucchini fried with egg, crackers, and butter. So I was not to sure about it, but it was very good! Also I had never had pine nuts which were yummy too. I had to keep the bag from the kids or they would have eaten them all. Oh yes I am not a perfectionist as you will soon see so I usually try to find an easy way to do things. In this case I did not want to figure out how to "spiralize the zucchini noodles" so I just put the zucchini in my cheese grater and pushed the button. I could not twist my fork in them but it sure was fast and yummy.

I was using a plastic spoon to get all of the Pesto out of the food processor. Airionna loves licking this spoon (usually with pistachio cake made by Terrina on it). Well she saw the spoon and asked for it. I figured one lick and she would be done. I was wrong. She made that nasty shivery sour look kids get when they suck on a lemon and then she asked to lick the whole spoon! She also shared with Bryce who kept coming back to her for more. She did not stop there though she had me re dip the spoon 3 times. I was shocked! But very pleased. Those are magical spoons:-)

Terrina and Kage shared some with me along with their cooked burritos. Neither complained once, or asked for any more.

Well at the end of the day, Kage and I are just as excited about this venture, Terrina is wishing she had not signed on, Seth is joining in more than expected, and Airionna has shocked me the most with her willing and sometimes eager bites.

1st shopping trip

I got to go shopping with only Bryce tonight which was a life saver because as it is I was gone for over 2 hours. It is tricky shopping for things that you do not know what are. Thunder Bird is awesome though. I expected to have to go to several different stores to find everything but they had most all of it. The only things I did not find were Kelp and Quionoa grains. Maybe Fredmeyers? Any way at one point 3 people were helping me find things on my list, a little curious why I was buying stuff I did not know what was. One of them knew exactly what and where it all was so that was great. Did I mention they were all nice and eager to help? I did explain I was going off of some raw food recipes so when we met again in the check out she came across the steak she looked at me saying " don't tell me your eating this raw" lol No, that was for Tim my husband who is very clear that he will not be joining us on this journey, but will watch us with much joking I am sure.:-)

So we are all stocked up and ready for tomorrow! Terrina was all for it as I was telling her about it but then when she saw all the "GREEN" stuff she started to change her mind. Kage on the other hand is still very excited. Seth just might surprise us. I am reminded of the time at the Sader dinner that he dipped his parsley in the salt water and when we all took a nibble he scarfed it all down proudly saying "boys like gross stuff". Not that I am expecting our food to be gross but looking at all the fungus and green stuff I am just saying... you know, from the kids perspective:-)

I am so excited! Remember how I said part of the journey was going to be getting a dehydrator and juicer? Well I thought it would take time if it ever happened. O.K. really I figured I would not be able to do the recipes that called for these things at all, which would have been a bummer. But I just got a message from a friend who offered to loan me her juicer during our 30 day adventure! Wow, I need a new word other that great and excited, but it is and I am!

Also, we are going to make our own dehydrator. We will line a box with tin foil and put a light bulb in the side. I looked it up on line and it seems to work for others really well. I will put a thermometer in the box because the point of raw food according to Dr. Oz is that the food needs to stay under 116 F so that the natural enzymes in the food are not destroyed. We'll see.

1 Corinthians 10:31

I want to stress that my desire is not to become an extremest in the way we eat. I believe all food is a blessing from God. We want to have some extreme fun here though and I believe God will bless us as we do so. We were discussing over lunch today as the kids had their last batch a Mac and Cheese for 30 days. Terrina said "this is either going to be a great 30 days or a horrid 30 days!" We concluded that if we love our experience we will have learned new ways to be healthy that will last the rest of our lives. If we can't stand it and we torture our taste buds for 30 days then we will much more appreciate the cooked food we return to. So either way it is win win for us. I am guessing we will land in the middle.

There fore, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.
1 Corinthian 10:31

As we see the changes that occur to our energy or skin, or body shape I pray we do not give credit to the food, but to God who made it for us.

The Idea

So, The idea started on January 23, 2011 at about 8:00pm as I was upstairs putting my 5 chickadees to bed. I started telling them about this web site that my friend has about raw food. http://nouveauraw.com My kids and I ,especially the older two, love healthy fun stuff. I told them I wanted to try the recipes from this site and eat nothing else for 30 days. This reminded my son about the McDonald's experiment, a documentary titled "Super Size Me". The man in this film performed an experiment were if McDonald's did not sale it, he did not ingest it. So we decided to do the same only opposite because we will be filling our selves with healthy food! This idea of following the recipes of my friend also reminded me of the movie of which a lady blogs about her experience as she ventures to try and make every recipe from the book in a year, I can not remember the name of the movie but this is where the idea to blog our experience came in.

The Rules:

I will not eat anything that is not raw for 30 days.

I will attempt to follow the recipes on my friends web site to the best of my ability.

My older two children will only eat raw food for 30 days except at dinner they will share the meal I make for their Dad along with what I am having. (I do not want to take meat out of their growing bodies)

My younger three will have at least one bite of every thing I make.

What Should I expect to see on this blog?

Well, we will share the food we ate that day, and I will let you know how we each liked it.

I will introduce my children to you to see which ages accepted which foods.

I will also keep you updated on how we, feel and how our bodies are affected by this way of eating.

To get a good picture of the changes that occur I will tell you a little about our current situation so you can enjoy the changes with us.

I can not promise that we will stick to the subject since in my typical female mind "everything is related to every thing" as is humorously explained in a clip on UTube called " a tale with two brains" which I highly recommend you watch if you are in the mood to laugh. Any way If I go on a long trail away from the topic at hand I will change the font. That way if you are only interested in the 30 day raw food experience you can easily see the info you want and don't want.

About us now:

I just turned 30 this month! my goal was to be the best I could be (physically) by the time I was 30. Well I way did not make that. But instead of getting discouraged God placed hope and encouragement in my life. So here we are.

I am 5'1 154 lbs. I am a sucker for before and after pictures so I will do that myself for you.

Also, many of the foods I will be eating this month are great for skin so I will let you know how that goes also. I have never gotten over the adolescent stage of my skin. ( much hope!) I am so excited to see the after:-)

I am on again off again when it comes to exercise. as of now it has been on again because my 8 year old son and I have been training to do our first 5k race on Feb 20. Also my son and I try to do our morning work outs together. The workout is from a poster that came with his jump rope he got in his stocking.

So, as we change the way we eat we will continue in the same physical exercises we normally would.

My kids:

My oldest is ten years old. Her nick name is Turny. She is naturally slender, but is not much into exercise. She has the ability to be served a hot fudge Sunday and leave over half of it if she gets full! This is something that amazes me and makes me grateful to God for her sake.

My oldest boy is K.G. He is 8. He is the only one of my kids that is thicker in nature. He is definitely my son because he is the one that will lick the plate clean and finish everyone elses plate for them. (we don't want to waist) I had some concern for this at first but we together have been learning about self control where food is concerned. He is also my huge exerciser so I soon realized at least for now I do not need to have concern for this issue. His mane goal is to get a six pack.

We now have Sethy. He is six and enjoys the benefit of being the middle child. He can be considered an older child at times and a younger child at other times so he gets the best of both worlds. Again this is an answered prayer from all the dooms day stories I here from other middle children. He is exercising this right of middledome in this experience:-) He is skin and bone but eats and eats and eats.

Airionna (princess) and Bryce are last.

She is 3 and follows the old poem to a T. When she is good she is very very good and when she is bad she is HORRID! how much joy she brings us though for even when she is horrid she is adorable. She does not like any food. Bryce is 1.5 years and learning to potty train. He is what we think about when we try to get out of our personal funks because just thinking of him makes you smile. He will eat every thing in sight one day and then eat nothing for 3 days.

Well that is us in a nut shell. I hope you have fun and maybe you could even join us on a similar journey of your own.

Today we will be going to the store and stocking up on all the foods we will need. On the web site she talks about things I have never heard of before. She mentioned that some foods are not found in regular stores. Do to our specific situation at the moment I am limited to regular stores, Wall-Mart, Fredmeyers, Thunderbird etc. so we may have to find substitutions. But we will keep it raw.

We also do not yet have a dehydrator or juicer which she mentions often so acquiring this things will be part of the journey.

Well we are off see you soon!