I'm speechless... well, Silas is, anyway.

Words can't even describe how much I love this kid. Just take a look at his absolute cuteness! Although he hasn't yet said a single word, he has no problem at all communicating.  He loves his big brother (despite the constant assaults) and he loves to do just exactly what everyone else is doing.  Today Eli and Andy were dressing up and Silas brought me his costume.   "Uhhh!?" he said.  That means, "Will you please put this Buzz Lightyear costume on me, mommy?"  So I did and I got a "Uhhh!?" Which means, "Thanks mom.  Don't you think I look wonderful?  Don't you want to take a picture of me? Don't you want to blog about me?"  How could I not, really?

And here's one of the three musketeers.  I love how "cool" Andy is being.

Killing Myself With Romance

While Jared and I are definitely madly in love, we are not really big on the gushy, romantic stuff.  We have often decided to forget about birthdays, or we just go out and buy our own presents and then call them our birthday present.  I bought Jared a pretty awesome mic for his birthday this year that I caught a quick glimpse of after he bought it for himself.  What a good wifey I am!  Last year we celebrated our 6th anniversary in Cody, Wyoming, where we only realized it was our anniversary halfway through the day when I was signing a guest book at a museum and noticed the date at the top of the page.  I yelled out the door to where Jared and the boys were lassoing fake cows "Oh Jared, happy 6th anniversary."  That was it.  Six years.  Yeah!  Don't worry, we manage to show our love for each other in many other ways. It has been six wonderful years!


Anyway, today is Valentines Day, a day we have always neglected more even than our anniversary.  I think Jared has brought home flowers a few years, which I dearly appreciate, and once he made me macaroni with an octopus hotdog on top (loved it!), which we ate on our china, but that's about it.  This year I really put myself out there and made Jared these. 

Okay, the truth of the story is that I made ones just like these for Jared for Christmas two years ago.  He never wore them, for he lost them.  This year for Valentine's Day Jared actually made these himself. I did go out of my way to find and buy the supplies all over again for them, I just didn't get it together enough to put them together, so Jared did it for me.  Call it his Valentines gift for me!  Love, true love!

They are authentic old typewriter keys.  I bought the keys and the cuff link posts of Etsy and epoxied them together.  I just love the look of men in cuff links, and so have decided to start Jared collection of them off with some personal, pretty awesome ones. I think the next ones I make will be Lego or Scrabble pieces.

Happy Valentines all!

A Baby Sweater, Finished at Last

Lately I have been making a concerted effort to finish projects before I start too many more.  This one I started while I was pregnant with Silas, and I got all the way through the body and halfway through one arm. 

Last week while I was teaching my sister-in-law how to knit I picked it up again and finished the first arm, knit the other and tonight I seamed it all together.  It really is darling.  Too bad for Silas, but at least my next child will be able to enjoy it! 

If you're interested I got the pattern from Knit Simple Magazine, Fall 2007, which I picked up on a sale rack for a buck.  Love it!

Blueberry Buckwheat Crackers

One thing I miss while on this Raw Food adventure is breads, crackers, pitas, etc.  Previously in my life I ate a lot of toast.  Let me clarify, I ate at least two pieces of toast a day, but more often than not twice or even three times that much.  Bread with peanut butter was my go to meal, for breakfast, lunch or an after dinner snack.  Reducing my dependency on bread has been a major breakthrough of this lifestyle. 

I have yet to find a truly suitable replacement.  There just isn't much out there that fills the same spot in my stomach heart. There are lots of good cracker type recipes though, and I find I would rather have some fresh fruit or veggies than those anyway, which is good. 

Eli's favourite thing is a creation of mine which I call Blueberry Buckwheat Crackers.  They are easy to make and nut free, which means we can send them with him to the YMCA and church without worrying.  He eats them most often as a cracker, but also loves to break them up into some fresh almond milk for breakfast.  For those interested, here's my recipe:

 Blueberry Buckwheat Crackers

2 cups of buckweat groats, soaked overnight - be sure to rinse thoroughly as they get really starchy
1/2 maple syrup
2 tsp vanilla
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp salt
2 cups blueberries (frozen is fine)

1. Place all ingredients in a food processor (or VitaMix blender) and pulse until combined, but still a little chunky-like. 

2. Divide onto lined dehydrator trays and spread to 1/8 inch thick. Dehydrate until the top is dry to the touch (8ish hours) and then flip over and peel off the liner.  Dehydrate for a few more hours until they are totally dry. 
3.  Break into pieces and store in a large zip lock bag. 


The original recipe from Raw Food Real World is for cinnimon and chocolate crispies.  I've tried them several different ways, but Eli likes my blueberry ones best, so we stick with those.  Like I've said before, the great thing about raw food cooking is that you can change it around really easy, so if you don't like blueberries you can use mango, or sun dried tomatoes, or anything else you think sounds yummy.  Enjoy!

Raw for 33 days

We did it. That's right, we ate raw for 30 days straight. Nothing cooked, nothing heated, nothing pasturized... We did it!

And when we hit 30 days, we decided we liked it, and that we'd keep on going.  Today is day 33, and we are still eating raw.  I think we will probably start including a few other foods, like raw milk and raw yogurt and maybe even an occasionally slice of bread (**shudder of joy**).  But then again, I am strangely afraid that by letting myself go a little I might just start sliding down that slippery slope and not be able to get back up again.  You see, I've never been very good at 'diets.' There was that one time when I decided that the only way to lose weight and feel good about myself was to never eat again.  Well, I got hungry.  End of story.  (Funny thing is, it took feeling good about myself to loose weight, not the other way around, but that's a story for another day.)  We have just felt so good eating raw, and have seen so many benefits, and have been having so much fun doing it, that I don't want to stop.  Yes, I would like to be able to eat whatever I want without ever having to think about it, I would like to throw the easiest thing in front of my kids and not feel guilty, I would even like to indulge every once in a while in something decadent and horrifically high in calories, but frankly, keeping myself and my family healthy is really, really important to me, and right now eating raw seems to be a great way to do that.  Not the only way, but the right way for us, right now.  So, bare with me for a while longer as I carry on this journey.  Eventually it is going to either become just something that we do, not blog worthy or all consuming, as it is right now, or we will find that it's not what we want to do any longer.  But for now, the Wiebe family is still raw, and loving it.

On another note, can I tell you that I'm completely annoyed by all the Valentines posts in Blogland right now. How I wish I had a house to completely decorate in red and pink hearts, but I don't, and even if I did, I've never considered Valentines a holiday worth rearranging any furniture for.   Although, if I magically do get around to doing some hearty crafts, this one is one I'd feel good about.  I may swallow my words next year, but for now I am steering clear of all the pink posts.  I'll rejoin the reading after the 14th, thank you very much!

Finally they are earning their keep!

Today we had some work to do on the house we are renovating, and no one to watch the boys, so we brought them along and put them to work!  That's right folks, you're never too young to pick up a paint brush and put in a few hours of good hard physical labour!

Somehow Silas knew just what to do with the paint roller.  Yes, he is wearing a sleeper, don't judge me.  We don't have a lot of 'paint clothes' around for our 16-month-old, so old hand-me-down sleeper it is!  He was in heaven, and didn't even realize he had no paint (or actual roller, for that matter). 

Eli, on the other hand, could not be fooled.  He wanted to help, and he wanted real paint.  I was a little nervous, letting him at it, but figured there wasn't much damage he could do, so I gave him a paint brush and some paint and let him at the baseboards.  He was a champ, almost helpful, and extremely proud of himself. 

 Once Jared's power tools came out, however, the monotony of brush painting could not hold Eli's attention any longer.  He quickly left me to the floor boards and joined Jared in changing up the hardware in the bathroom, wielding the drill all by himself.  And don't worry all, the pink toilet has stayed: nothing could convince us to get rid of that beauty!

The renos are coming along quite nicely, especially with the boys' help.  Soon the house will be complete and beautiful, and we will still be living in my parents' basement.

Time for a good ol' fashioned barn raising!

Remember when in "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers" the Pontipee brothers go to the barn raising and fight over the girls and sing all about it? Remember that?  Well, I'm willing to let anyone interested reenacting that very moment in musical history to come to our house to raise our metaphorical barn. Seriously though, I've had a lot of time to think about it, as I've been painting for a week straight, and I think it is very sad that we live in a world where we no longer rally around our neighbors to help them, just because they are our neighbors.  I'm certainly not suggesting that I am any better than the next person in this regard.  I've complained plenty of times about people who ask for help when I think they could very easily pay for the work.  But why not help out. Why not give an afternoon to help paint, an hour to shovel, a day to garden.  Who cares if they could afford to pay someone else, where did our ability to do good things just for the sake of doing good things go?  Since neither of my neighbors are building any barns this week, and since this has been on my mind, I am going to make a fresh batch of my granola tomorrow and bring it to them in a symbolic attempt at raising their barns.  Why not, eh?

If you didn't catch it through my preaching, we are renovating again!  This time we are ripping up the upstairs of our old house in Ranchlands.  The tenants that were in it last happened to be the filthiest people on earth and the flooring throughout the entire house needed to be replaced.  So absolutely disgusting! However, we are taking advantage of the opportunity and giving the place a well deserved face-lift!

No reno project would be complete with out some before and after pictures, so I've dug through my archives and found a few pictures to share of the house as we lived in it pre-Michigan (you seriously would be so grossed out if I put the pictures of it after the tenants destroyed it - except for that you wouldn't have been able to smell them, so maybe it wouldn't do justice to just how disgusting it was.)

Action shot.  That's right, we had a drum kit in our house. 

Ikea Christmas tree. This was the only room with new carpet. We put it in after we moved in.

This one is to show the cuteness of the late Napoleon the dog, but also to note the colour of the carpet, 20 years old, at least.

Our kitchen, this week, many years ago.

The front of the house.

Visions of Candlemas' Past

More Candlemas shots.

Our front door: yes, it's purple.

Wish we still had those beautiful couches. 

Guess what, I don't have a shelf like that anymore.  The bull in the room (Silas) would make very short order of it. 

I loved the colour of our master room.  It was very warm.

This was the day we found out we were preggers with Eli.  This room was yellow.

Our double bed.  Cozy.

On my way to the Stampede, on the scooter. 

 So, give me a week and I will have the AFTER shots.  You will be so impressed, I promise.  The painting is done, but if anyone wants to come "raise the floor" you are more than welcome.  I'll bring lunch, although it may be raw.