Randomness II

Sometimes I blog about really spiritual things, and sometimes I tell funny personal stories, and other times I share crafty or inspirational ideas, but I also share some randomness. These are little stories or ideas that I feel are worth writing about but are too short to make their own post, or are just odd and all disconnected but I still wanted to share them with someone. Strangely enough, I got more comments on my first ever randomness post, that I think I may start doing them more often. I have lots of things cooking in my head all day long. I'm a full time momma these days, and so I have very few outlets for these gems. So you get to feast on them.
Enjoy.

A random clutter of ideas and word pictures.

Topic #1
As a missionary, you go through seasons where you have very little money. We are currently walking the fine line in our budget right now, and it is these seasons where I always get the most awesome coupons. It irritates me to no end!
You might think coupons is a good thing, but the truth is, you have to have money to even use the coupons, just not as much as when items are at regular prices. So I get all kinds of awesome coupons for my favorite crafting stores, like Joann's and Michael's and I can't use any of them.
The one that nearly had me in tears - Joann's had all their yarn on sale, all of it, for 30% off, then they sent me a preferred customer coupon for 20% my entire purchase. Get that people, I could have had the nine skeins of victorian rose simply soft Caron yarn for 50% off! That is an insanely good deal, but you have to have some money to be able to even afford it at 50% off....sadly, that sale has passed me by and I've paused my victorian rose afghan to work with some other yarn I have.
I have other yarn to work with, and so I tried not to be to upset when I couldn't get more yarn at 50% off, I have more than I need in so many areas of my life. I wonder if all those coupons aren't some sort of test for my heart. To bring up selfishness and covetousness and show me the areas that still need some work. Thank You Lord that You care enough to do it.

Topic #2
Kinsey is in the most hilarious phase of sponginess and spontaneity. That girl goes from a full dead sleep to full sentences in the morning in 30 sec or less. Three mornings ago I had to go wake her up because it was almost eight and as she groggily turns over in her bed she says, 'some puppies go arf arf, but other bigger dogs say arf arf too.' What a profound statement from the girl who was just recently unconscious. Where does it come from?
Or how about this morning at 3am when I went into their dark room to comfort a crying Kalei. When I opened the door and the glow of the night light passed over Kinsey's bed she sat up and said in a sing song voice, 'the dog has no bones, the dog has no bones,' and then she asked if I liked that song. What the heck was she doing awake at 3am thinking up a song about dogs having no bones. It was so funny.
I later discovered that it was some song they had sung in the children's church at the church she visited this past Sunday, but still, what was she doing singing it at 3am? Weird is the information she picks up and retains, and weird also are the times she chooses to spout off that information.

Topic #3
The power of observation in the hands of a 3 year old. Kinsey talks with me about everything she sees, and sometimes it terrifies me. Today as we walked into the bathroom there was a woman in the stall that we tried to go into, but then we went in the one next to it. Kinsey asks, 'is she peeing?'. It's a bathroom, everyone can hear everyone, and I"m left to say as lightly as possible, 'probably so', although there was an uncomfortable silence from the stall next door.
Then later, when leaving the library we walked out to see a little baby boy sitting with his mom in the grass as she talks on the phone. Kinsey spots them right away and asks, 'what's that little baby doing?', I say, 'sitting with his momma,' and then as we walk by even closer, I notice that his momma is sitting forward and her butt crack is showing above the edge of her jeans and I cringe inside. The girl with the eagle eyes could see this, I thought, and I feared the next words out of Kinsey's mouth (who only runs on two volumes, loud and louder) would be, 'why is that girls butt showing?' or 'is that her butt cheeks?' There were several steps where I might have failed to breath and administered a few quick arm jerks to distract my 3 year old from the scene. Thankfully it worked and the butt crack was not discovered, but that is what I deal with daily folks, a girl who sees everything and says what she sees. She calls it as it is. One word for this phase, awkward. But also severely funny.
Even if Kinsey had spotted the crack and mentioned it, who really cares. The woman might have looked at us, hiked her pants up and moved on, and I might have blushed and tried to move my kids on, but really, what are the chances we would ever see that woman again. So I guess I need not be so up tight.

Topic #4
Loved making fresh salsa tonight, but seriously, the hot peppers I used were hot. I don't even think they were jalapenos. Yet as I worked with them I chopped the ends off, cut them in half length wise and then ran them under cold water as I pulled and washed out all the seeds. Simple enough right. Wrong.
Somehow running them under the water stirred up some water spray laced with hot pepper fumes and juice and as I inhaled unknowingly, I inhaled flames of fire. My throat began to constrict and I began to cough and wheeze and cough some more. I feared my throat would close up because of the burn, but it didn't and finally after hacking loud enough to draw the attention of my husband, I felt better.
So then I moved on to chopping them, and even then there was fine pepper mist rising up from them and causing me all sorts of problems. They were not even that hot tasting, but to breath the fumes I would have thought them way hotter.
Then, like an hour and half after dinner, the skin under the thumb nail I used to scrape all the seeds out with started throbbing like it was burned. So I stuck it in my mouth, like you do when you burn your finger and suddenly my entire mouth was on fire! The peppers struck again,  even an hour and a half later. The juice that must have dried up under my thumb nail was burning me and was still potent enough to burn my entire mouth with one taste. Wow, that is some powerful stuff!

Topic #5
Bug bites and the power of meditation. Last night my poor Kalei was stung or bitten by some bug. She has bad reactions even to mosquito bites, so this new bug had her skin in all kinds of reactions. First it swelled up to the size of an egg under her poor skin (on her back) and then it got red with a little tiny bump where the actual bite was. Freaked me out, we were only outside for 30 min. tops.
So I got online and started looking up bug bite photos and trying to figure out what kind of bug bit her. I gotta say, it is a pretty useless to search if you didn't see the actual bug that bit her because most of the bites I saw for different bugs and such looked all about the same and most of them did not cause near the reaction my poor girl had.
So, I searched and searched though, and couldn't decide if it was from a black fly or not in the end, so then I prayed over her and put her to bed. Then soon after, I went to bed.
That night I dreamed that I was trying to stop an alien from eating a car that was in the garage, but to get to the alien to pull it off (it looked a bit like the blob) I had to run through this garage with a dirt floor that was filled with tiny biting insects that you couldn't see, but would attack as soon as you stirred up the dirt. After my first foray into the garage, I realized I was being bitten and my whole belly and upper thighs were covered with bites that were filling up with puss. I freaked out, but I had to keep the alien from eating the car, so I ran around the car, stirring up the dirt floor and was being bitten almost continually. When I finally succeeded at getting rid of the alien, I ran for the door as if I was a child running through a sprinkler, trying to keep the bugs from reaching my face as I ran.
By the end I was covered with welted up bites and puss filled bumps and so I went to an Amish rummage sale and asked them if they had any yarn or muffin tins for sale. They didn't and I was so disappointed but I stayed around and helped them sell vegetables.
Weirdness, eh? The funniest part to me was about the bug bites. A prime example of the power of meditation. So tonight I think I'll read the fourth chapter of Revelations and then go to bed and see what I dream about. I hope that it ends up to be more than a dream.

This concludes the second edition of the randomness postings. Hope you enjoyed it.

What Not to Do

When embarking on a sugar detox, one should not completely detox and then go and eat real ice cream, especially any ice cream containing both sugar and chocolate. Not only will it make you feel slightly ill to have that much sugar again, it could also give you a severe headache and make you toss and turn all night in misery.

I've been fully detoxed from white sugar for over seven days, and then last night, I went to Bruster's Real Ice Cream stand and indulged in a Mint Chocolate Chip scoop on a waffle cone. It was divine tasting for the first 20 minutes, and then, but the time we got home, I felt ill. The headache was starting, my neck muscles were tensing up. I went to bed, felt like puking, but never did. Tossed and turned all night because my body was exhausted and my muscles all ached, but my mind was rushing on a sugar high, so I couldn't really sleep.

What a horrid experience! I share it only in hopes that it will spare you from doing something equally dumb. Once you've detoxed, your body will not be accustom to the amount of sugar you use to consume in a day, so don't try to consume that much in a day ever again.

Now onto something else that I thought might be interesting to the rest of you sugar detoxers. For some time now I've always felt that brown sugar was better than white sugar. Less refined, and molasses is suppose to be good for you right, lots of vitamins. Well, maybe you all know what I didn't, that that is actually false. Brown sugar is just as refined and then the molasses is added back in. I googled it and found several websites that told me the truth, but there was one that explained it the best, in plain language. So look here and be horrified. It is just as bad as white sugar and so after your detox, keep that in mind when baking and stirring in sweeteners. Raw sugar is best, and although organic is always going to be the best choice, I have a budget to maintain and so just plain 'raw' is fine with me. You pay a lot more for that little 'USDA Certified Organic' stamp, and for some things it is worth it, but overall, I don't think sugar is.

Guess that is all I have to say today about the detox. Keep at it girls! You can do it and be free of that wretched addictive white substance (sugar)! Be blessed today.

Randomness

Tonight I am thinking about lots of things. Some of them are probably boring to the rest of man-kind, but a few are kinda fun/interesting, so I thought I would just write down this randomness in a place where others might benefit.

found this photo under 'randomness' and it fits

Topic #1: Yarn dolls are not faring so well in our house, even without eyes or facial features. It seems as though my girls are bent on destroying them. I guess it isn't that big of a deal, but hey, I made those dolls, let's try to keep them around for a couple days. Maybe 3 years old is too young to have dolls made out of yarn? Perhaps dolls made out of something more sturdy, like bricks or rocks or super duper hard plastic.

Topic #2: I am loving a new kids book I bought at the library called 'Little Beauty' about a gorilla and a cat who are friends. It is so cute, but that isn't even my favorite part. The illustrator, who must be amazing, used all these really cool patterned papers in the pictures and it makes me wish I had those same patterns on fabric so I could make a quilt with them, they are that cool!

Topic #3: Is cottonseed oil really that bad for you? I try to eat healthy, but I got these super yummy cashews on sale at Target and have been devouring them like they are candy. Then someone mentioned today that cottonseed oil is not the best oil, and turns out my beloved cashews have that on them. Is it worth not eating them? I'm leaning toward still eating them, but I don't know much about cottonseeds. What could be bad about it?

Topic #4: Started a new homeschooling schedule thingy today where I set a new time allotted for Kinsey to do 'learning' type stuff. It was really good, but I have to wonder if I am really ready to maintain this new schedule. If I'm honest with myself I lose a good portion of nap/quiet time, and that is me time, and I'm very sad to see it shrinking. Today was day one and already I am feeling the cramp in my style. I actually had to stay awake all day, that is a hard thing these days now that I don't rely on caffeine to boost me up.

Topic #5: Reading a book about the prophet Amos and I'm loving it, but after reading about how stubborn those people of God were back then, it makes me want to come down on them with some wrath of my own. Bless that poor prophet's heart, he was so patient, just like the Lord. I'm glad I haven't been called to be a prophet because I would probably mess it up pretty bad and speak all kinds of things to tell the people what I thought of them and their sin, which is not the same as telling them what God thinks of their sin. It must have been hard for Amos to hold his tongue.

Topic #6: My Kalei for some time now has come into the knowledge that when she poops in her diaper, she has access to that poo only a leg hole away. I've lost count of how many times I have come in at nap time to find her with poo all over her arms and face. Thank the Lord she doesn't eat it, but being smeared with it is bad enough. I have no idea how to keep her from doing this. It is hot and so I can't keep putting her in long zip up jammies every time I put her to bed. This is one of those crazy things and I'm totally lost on how to parent in these moments. I've tried to explain it to her, flick her hand and tell her 'no touch the poo' and I've even gotten quiet upset and cried which made her cry. Nothing has kept her from doing it again though. Do I need to buy a video monitor? Kinda expensive. Anyone got a clue what else I can do?

Topic #7: On to Kinsey who loves to paint. I have this huge stack of drawings and paintings because she wants to do 'art time' every day and although I sift through them a lot and toss the ones that are just a few scribbles on a page, they just keep mounting up. What to do with them? Am I a bad mom if I toss a few more when she isn't looking? I am not about having stacks of papers lying around, no matter how cute they are. I'm serious, she has at least 20 new drawings/paintings from just the last few days. She's gonna be an artist type, I can tell, but do you think its too early to try to sell some of these masterpieces? What would you do?

Topic #8: Coconut flour, it is expensive but is it worth the cost? I read all these posts about healthy eating and at the moment it just sort of overwhelms me. The newest one I've read is coconut flour and it sounds great, but who can afford to buy it on a regular basis, I need new eating habits that are sustainable for my budget. I guess then I should stop reading all those posts about healthy eating....

Topic #9: Today was the first day in five days that I haven't cried about missing Kansas City or from feeling utterly overwhelmed by my new life in South Carolina. I think partly it was the new and improved schedule, but it was also partly because I took some quiet time to be with the Lord. He always makes things feel and look better. I'm just glad to know that I won't wake up tomorrow dehydrated again from all the loss of moisture...that's been escaping from my eyes. I really am a big wimp, but I think the Lord has been telling me that that is okay. His love for me brings me to tears sometimes, but not right now, because I'm running low on those, and so now it is time to say goodnight.

Hope you enjoyed this randomness edition. Those are just a few of the thoughts floating around in my head before bed. Aren't you glad I shared them all? If you have answers to any of my random questions sprinkled through out, please feel free to add them to the comment area. I love feed back, but if you think this is the stupidest post I've ever posted, keep that to yourself.

Be blessed.

Fast Fruit

Tomorrow is the day I officially go on my sugar fast and cut white refined sugar from my diet (July 14th). Two weeks of harsh regulations and then I will begin to allow a few minor inclusions after that, but the key is to break my addiction and then teach my body to like healthy sugars better.
I have a confession though. Although tomorrow is my official start date I starting cutting a lot of sugar from my diet, including my morning teaspoon of sugar in my coffee.
I felt it was necessary since I still have to be around people and my last full cold-turkey detox left me with a lot of rage, so I started cutting back rather than going cold-turkey. Tomorrow though, I cut it all, all the rest that there is in my every day diet.
Got some good local raw honey that is a good substitute for my coffee and baking. For the rest of the time, I got fast fruit. Not fast food, fast fruit, the kind that is already prepared and is good for impulse sugar cravings.

Fresh apples and peaches, cantaloupe, pineapple,
and in the back some tomatoes and pears. Yum!

Which brings me to a topic that I have wanted to blog about for a while now, but every time I'm in one of my new favorite spots, I forget to take a snapshot to share.
Fruit stands!
Local, by-the-side-of-the-road fruit stands, and they are everywhere down here. There are big ones on the weekends like in Kansas City, but there are also tons of other smaller ones that are all over in parking lots and most of them are well known and run all week long. I'm in love!
Today I went and bought a pineapple, fresh ripe tomatoes, sweet peppers, sweep potatoes, melons, strawberries, blueberries, Bartlett pears, and fresh south carolina peaches. Oh, and local raw honey. Total $40 even, which is better than I would do at Target or Walmart for as much as I got.
So, now you can see what I mean by fast fruit. I get it all washed, cut up and ready for those cravings.
So who is with me? Who wants to be free from white refined sugar and crave natural sugars again?
I can honestly say that since having sort of started this detox last week, fresh fruit seems sweeter somehow and I crave fresh fruit and veggies a lot more than I ever did.
Another thing I will mention, and this will not apply to most of you, but I've been suffering some anxiety and culture shock like symptoms in the last few weeks and lost most of my appetite. With the sugar detox, I've been having a bit more of an appetite. One of the only things I have an appetite for though is fresh fruit. I can't get enough of it. If I've gone all day without anything to eat and I realize around 3pm that I haven't eaten, then I eat some fruit and it somehow kick starts my appetite and I'm able to eat dinner. It's kinda cool.
So, again I ask, who is with me? The benefits are worth it!

Yarn Doll Tutorial

I've mentioned that I was going to do this tutorial for months now, and finally here it is. It takes one of my daughters baby dolls having a birthday party for me to get revved up into action.
When I was about six or somewhere around that age, my grandma taught me how to make these. The more yarn you use, the more plump and plush they turn out. The styrofoam balls are 2.5" if you care to know. The bigger the ball for the head, the more yarn you need to make the body look in proportion to the head. You'll see what I mean as I show you pictures of the process.

Step 1: Gather supplies, yarn, scissors, and styrofoam ball. It takes at least half of a 7oz. skein of yarn, but use more if you want plumper more fluffy looking dolls.

Step 2: Determine how long you want the entire doll to be, include length of hair, head, torso, and legs/skirt.

Step 3: Start cutting your yarn into strands at the length desired, or you can cheat like me and find an object to wind the yarn around and then cut it off to have your strands all the same length.

Step 4: Determine the length of the hair and tie a piece of yarn to divide the hair from the head.

Step 5: Turn the whole yarn thingy inside out so you can find the middle of the inside where you tied the string.

Step 6: Put the foam ball in place, then quickly turn it over and let the yarn fall all around the foam ball. Then secure the ball in place, by tying another string around where the neck will be.

Step 7: Lay the doll which is just head and hair and body right now and divide out small portions of yarn on each side to be the arms.

Step 8: Tie string where the wrist will be. Then cut off the extra length of yarn just leaving enough for her 'hands'.

Step 9: Find her waist and tie another string, and you are done if it is a girl with a skirt. You can trim her skirt if you want, or you could even go into the center of the yarn and make two little legs, doing what you did for the arms, tying off at the ankles and cutting the yarn to make a poof for the feet.

My second attempt today I got a little fancy and made a girl with a skirt, but you can see her feet poking out from under the skirt. She also has a longer pony tail and her whole body is longer in general.

I like the longer pony tail look rather than the mullet look of my first one. I even tried to trim the bangs a bit, but it looks even more like a mullet now. For a boy, crop the hair sort of close to the head. Here is a pic of the blue mullet up close.

Google eyes are an options as well, and/or felt eyes, nose, mouth. Be creative. I didn't want faces on these because I'm pretty sure my girls would just spend the next twenty minutes ripping them off. :-)

For boy dolls, you divide the yarn below the waist into two legs and tie off at the ankles and make poofs for the feet. Super simple, super fun project for little girls.

The end.

Birthday Parties

Kinsey has become obsessed with birthdays and birthday parties. When she meets new people, she proudly announces her name, age and that she will have a birthday in 'ecember' where she will have her party at 'chick-a-lay'. That's right, new friends and old, she wants to have her 4th birthday party at Chick-fil-a, because her very best friend in Kansas City had her party there (Gloria Sundby), and it has left a lasting impressing even though it was over two months ago.

December is a long ways away though, and for a three year old that is almost unbearable. So today, after spending a short while sitting out on the back patio watching Kinsey make her daddy a birthday cake in a sand bucket, complete with rocks, grass, and dirt I decided it was time to have some sort of party.  As Kinsey said to me this morning, 'everyone has a party'! So I think while the girls are napping I shall bake something special for a birthday cake for Kalei's baby doll, 'Rosie'.
It may seem as though this is some random excuse to make something filled with sugar before I go on that sugar detox in about a week, and you could be right, but I also just want an excuse to do something totally ridiculous and have a party for something.
If I had thought things through far enough in advance we could have invited a few of our new friends over to celebrate with us, but I am a last minute sort of girl. My new friends also might think that I am terribly ridiculous to have a birthday party for a doll, but hey, who cares. Maybe I am.
So, look forward to some silly pictures from the psuedo-birthday party tomorrow. It is going to be 93 degrees here today and 103 degrees tomorrow, what better than to eat cake and drink 'tea' out of tiny plastic tea cups (complete with saucers shaped like flowers). We may drag the festivities out into the next couple days as some sort of homeschooling lesson. I could entitle it something like, 'how to plan a party' or 'hostess in training week'. I'm sure I could make it educational, like, this is how we fold the napkins. We will make some yarn dolls to give away as hostess gifts. Wow, is my planning getting out of hand or what.
Yes, but it's July and we've miss our KC friends birthdays who were born in July (Zuriah and Ana). I need a party!

The party girl 'Baby Rosie' who will officially turn one tomorrow.

You might suggest swimming to me instead of baking in my house while baking, in which case I would assure you I would melt in the parking lot just trying to reach the over crowded pool. Baking heat is bearable with air conditioning and a party just still sounds better!
Stay tuned!

Did I mention that while I was writing this blog
that Kinsey's barbies were swimming in my kitchen sink.
We are just having all kinds of fun here trying to beat the heat.

Starting Fires & Making Friends

Since one of my dear friends replied to a recent post about making friends and said she though it was one of my strong suits, it got me to thinking about why it is so hard to make new friends in new places.
I've come up with the following analogy. I'm a visual person, so I like to make strong parallels for things in my emotional life to things in my physical life.
Here we go.

I think I am decent at making friend, but mostly when I'm in the comfort of my own environment. I think most people would agree to that admission.
Like a wife who already has the comforts and benefits of a furnace running well at home to keep her warm in the winter, it is sometimes fun to venture out into the wilderness and start a fire by hand. She has no worries about starting the fire because even if its a total flop she can still go back to her humming little furnace at home.
Most time the wilderness fire is not a flop and then she can bask in the glow of the new and wild and interesting feel of real heat from an open fire. So much fun!

What is not so much fun is leaving your home and furnace behind and moving to the wilderness on purpose forever and building a new home from scratch. Now all of a sudden if that fire you are starting by hand is a flop, then you know your very life could be in danger. So you work and work and work, but the work isn't necessarily fun, it is for survival, it is something you need to succeed at. Even as little tiny flames begin to emerge from the kindling, you don't show too much excitement so as not to exhale too strongly and put the flames out, but you wait and watch and nurture those little fires.
Once the fire is blazing, then you start to relax a bit, and then you can start thinking about building a new home and turning the wilderness into your sanctuary.

Maybe some of you will think that my analogy feels a bit overly dramatic for the topic of making new friends, but for a woman and her true need for real friendship, I feel it is a very real parallel. I would say I am the part where I'm seeing the tiny flames... sign (but not to strong so as not to put out the flames).

Moms are moms

Sigh. I know that seems so simple, but it was a huge relief to me in the last few weeks to realize this truth all over again in this new place. Sometimes you can get so comfortable in a place (that you live) that you forget that those who live else where can still be so similar to you. I don't know how it happens, but this move threw me into all kinds of fears.
Come on, I'm a hormonal woman moving 17 hrs away from her home of nearly 5 years, some fear is to be expected, but not to be meeting other new moms. It was a weird fear, I'll confess.
New moms sitting on the park bench? What to say? It should be a no brainer.
"Hi, I'm Katrina, and I see you have children, so do I.  How old are yours? Mine are such and such. Great, have you lived in the area long? I just moved. Where is the nearest super Target? Where do you take your kids on rainy days? Is there a chick-fil-a near here? Want to have coffee some time?"
Those are all so simple to say and the flow is usually pretty smooth too.
I've had a lot of luck with this opening line, "Wow, your kids are cute, what are their names?" and the rest of the conversation comes along great.
The fun thing is though, I haven't had to start all the opening lines. On my first Sunday morning at Morning Star (the Sunday where I also spent a good portion of the morning sobbing and hiding in the bathroom missing IHOP) as I went to pick up my baby from the nursery one of the women working asked me if I was new and invited me to her mom's group.  It was that easy. The next easiest step was to actually go and meet a whole room full of new moms and it was great. We talked and drank coffee and our kids played. Just like in Kansas City and those are just a few of my favorite things to do with moms (the coffee and the talking and the kids playing, but not in that order necessarily).
So I'm saying all of this as a triumph, an answer to my prayers, that making new mom friends is not hard at all. The Lord has given me boldness and He has opened doors almost everywhere for me to strike up conversations with other women. It has been a lot more fun than I thought it would be.
And then, a bunch of my new mom friends decided to go on vacation, so I made friends with my local library and complied a summer reading list.

Some people have expressed interest in this list, so here it is, in no particular order. The ones in red are books from my childhood that I am re-reading to sensor them before deciding whether to read them to my children or not. The rest are because I'm interested in them or have heard of them at random.

1. The Strong-willed Child by Dr. James Dobson
2. The Centurion's Wife by Davis Bunn & Janette Oke
3. The Priest, The Prophet, The Warrior, The Prince, The Scribe (5 book series) by Francine Rivers
4. Unashamed by Francine Rivers
5. The Circle Series by Ted Dekker
6. Wesley & the People Called Methodists by R. Heitzenrater
7. Ashes & Ice by Tracie Peterson
8. Rivers of Gold by Tracie Peterson
9. The Good Master by Kate Sered
10. The Singing Tree by Kate Sered
11. The Trumpeter Swan by E.B. White
12. The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven by Kevin Malarkey
13. Quaker Summer by Lisa Samson
14. Plain Perfect by Beth Wiseman

So there you have it, my book list. Titles may fall off as time goes on and new ones could be added, but that is what I have so far and a good new library system to borrow from. Yeah for books! 

The end.

Honey Wisdom

My husband is wonderful and I'm sure most of you can relate because you all think yours are more wonderful. Well I am especially loving him today because he isn't afraid to say or suggest the hard things to me and despite all my petulant whining and excuses, he keeps affirming me and encouraging me to go higher.
I wish I could say after our little argument discussion last night about a new suggestion that I felt that highly of him. The argument ended though with me stating like a spoiled child, 'well I just don't want to and that's my answer.'
Wow, smooth.
Today however I'm able to coherently look at all that was said and begin to agree with his point and see the value in the change. Oh, it will be a hard change to make for sure, a real sacrifice and it will probably nearly kill me, or at least really severely injure....my flesh.
He suggested I stop making........cookies.
What a crazy thing to suggest! That was my first thought.
I love cookies! Love them! I make a batch at least once a week and that is a real cut back for me, because if I had my way I would make them three times a week. I would like to say that I cut back because of health reasons, but to be honest, it was because butter is so expensive. I like butter almost as much as I like cookies.
So I thought I was doing ok with just once a week.
Ken, though, has a major issue with my cookies, physically. He can't control himself, he gobbles them all right up. Maybe I should be flattered that he can't resist my delectable desserts, but I'm not flattered because he then ends up with a horrid sugar induced tension headache. Every time, for real.
Back to the issue though. I love cookies. How could I go without them? It is not affordable for me to buy store bought on a regular basis, and I simple love the process of making them. Also, about once a month I feel as though I may die if I don't eat something with large chunks of chocolate in it.

So we talked about why it was so hard for me to give them up, which led us to my attachment to refined white sugar.
That was the real issue, the reason I love cookies. Those raw cookies with healthy things in them and low calories are boring in my opinion. White sugar is what makes a cookie worth eating. If I wanted healthy I have healthy raw cookie recipes that utilize my dehydrator, but alas, I almost always choose the recipes that call for white sugar. I crave the white sugar.
You are probably wondering how much I am going to over-dramatize this whole story. Well I'm about finished. Be prepared though. I'm about to challenge the rest of you to examine yourselves. Are you addicted to refined white sugar? Wanna be free of it?
You gotta detox then.
I detoxed from white sugar about a year ago and it was the most crazy experience. I've never smoked or drank or done any other drugs, so I wouldn't know about hardcore type addictions. Yet I would compare the experience to quitting caffeine, which I also did about a year ago. There will be physical symptoms like fatigue, headache, and depending on your level of addiction to sugar, there could be other symptoms.
The ones that really shocked me were the emotional symptoms. Before doing my sugar detox I had thought myself a friendly, loving person.
You take away my security blanket, the comforter of my flesh though, and watch out! I had rage, I had anger, I had bad attitudes. I had the most violent thoughts I've ever had while coming off of sugar. Most people thought I was doing really well with the detox, but they couldn't hear what I was thinking and most of what I was thinking was horrific. The simplest things would set me off into a tantrum, and some days I would just cry I craved sugar so much.
It was weird....and sad.
So now I"m about to do it all over again.
Who's with me?!?
I'm starting officially Thursday July 14th and eating nothing with refined white sugar until Thursday July 28th.

Two weeks. Two weeks to be free.
After that then our cravings should be under control and hopefully we will crave things that are actually healthy for our bodies.
Notice how I"m saying 'we', that's because I'm still inviting you to detox with me. You can make this an official fast for the Lord, but I'm not calling mine that because I remember all to vividly how 'unspiritual' my thoughts were during my last detox. I will try a fast maybe after I kick the sugar.
So stay tuned, I plan to blog about the irrational and crazy journey to freedom from sugar. Hopefully it will make you want to do it too! I hope.

PS, then after I'm free I plan to start exploring the wisdom of using other sweeteners....like raw wildflower honey and molasses and real maple syrup.