Not so good...

Okay, so I'm not perfect. I've slipped a bit on the whole raw thing. We're looking at about 90% raw now :) But we've done some fun new things. We've decided to do a raw food night every Thursday with Aaron's sister, Janae. Last Thursday Janae made raw macaroni and cheese and raw brownies. Man, they were SO good. Aaron and I made raw sushi and raw carrot cake. I'm not even goign to bother putting the raw carrot cake recipe up here because it was not very good at all. I guess that's what I get for waiting until the last minute to make something. It wasn't horrible but it wasn't the best either. But I did learn a new thing... if I want something raw but I want it warm, use the dehydrator! Janae put the brownies in the dehydrator for like 24 hours and it made htem all crispy on the outside and warm and toasty but yummy and moist on the inside. They were so good. I would have those any day. hmmm..... the key to healthy but good chocolate... 3 main ingredients.... raw cocoa butter, raw cocoa powder and agave nectar. (and a little bit of salt). SO yummy and SO healthy but unfortunatly also fairly expensive. But worth it for guilt free chocolate! I'll give more details on the recipe later.

This weekend is conference and Easter! We're so excited. Aaron's sister Angella is moving into town from Washington so that will make for an even bigger party. Aaron finishes his last day of clinical tomorrow for the semester! It's just downhill from here :) He walks in August and graduates in December! WOO HOO!!!! Mother's day is coming up and I get to have my mother here for this one. Matthew and Andrea and their kids and my mom are stopping in town on their way to Disneyland and so they will be here for Mother's Day. I'm so excited.

Beets and Pesto

So, today was the first day of raw food!!! So, for breakfast I had the normal green shake. It was about 3 cups raw organic spinach, half a banana and a little bit of fresh apple juice for the liquid. Blend it up and you have a yummy, simple nutritious green smoothie. The best thing about this is because the spinach is blended up already, the enzymes get released so it gets digested SUPER fast and is really tasty. Then for lunch I tried doing what is called mono eating. Basically the concept behind this is that you have a really large portion of one raw thing.. .like a whole bunch of bananas... literally a whole bunch, or quite a few apples, or pears or something like that. The concept behind this is that if you're only eating one thing but in bulk, your body only has to release one type of enzyme and therefore your food gets digested faster but you're eating a lot of it so it fills you up and is super nutritious. So, I had a whole bunch of sliced apples for lunch... I'm still practicing this and didn't know that I needed something heavier like avacadoes or something nutty to go with this otherwise I would be starving. I noted that for later though :) When I got home I had some yummy raw chocolate pieces and some raw trail mix from my sister in law for a snack so I didn't eat my hand until dinner was made. She gave me some really good advice though. She said that if you're hungry, you're not doing it right. So she said that next time if I want to do a whole bunch of apples for a snack or for a meal, try adding some raw almond butter with it. It's super yummy and fills you up really well. Nuts and avacadoes are really good filler foods. From what i've learned so far and there's super yummy ways to encorporate them. Then for dinner, I had sliced beets and pesto sauce with a yummy large spring mix salad. I'm not a huge fan of salad dressings so my favorite thing to do is to just eat big leafy greens with whatever main course i'm having and just make sure I take a small bite of the main course and then add a big fork full of the greens with it. Aaron and I have a spiral slicer that takes veggies and makes makes them into noodly looking strings. It's really cool. It takes the place of spaghetti. Then Aaron made a really yummy pesto out of pureed pine nuts (just put them in a magic bullet), basil leaves, garlic cloves, Bragg's Amino Acids (it tastes just like soy sauce only its all amino acids, totally healthy and about 1/8 th of the sodium), lemon juice and some pepper. It tastes JUST like pesto and it's super filling and healthy. It's probably one of my favorite raw food meals. So far, it's filled me up for the night without needing anything else ( I ate it around 5:00pm) and I feel super light. If you try this recipe, don't be surprised if when you have to go to the bathroom, your urine is red. It's from the beets... you're not dying most likely :)

Other than that, life is good. We're doing more spring cleaning today. We did the living room and more of the kitchen. It looks so clean and fresh :) We also bought our plane tickets for Colorado in June!!! Aaron has a medical conference to go to and I"m going to visit my best friend Manda and her husband Nick. I'm so excited. Aaron also had an interview with APX Alarm for a job over the summer which will be nice because we'll get to work together again ( I also work there). Life is good.

My Raw Food Challenge - Begins March 29th

So, call me lame... or not... but I have to admit I did steal this idea from the movie Julie and Julia. Bottom line is... I love cooking. But the thing that facinates me about the movie Julie and Julia is how she managed to stay so skinny cooking all of those things with butter and many other unimaginably bloat-you-up ingredients. And then it dawned on me... why not do the same thing only with healthy cooking! I've been wanting to get into more of the raw food cooking for health reasons and I think this would be a perfect thing to do! So, as of next Monday, March 29th I will be starting the raw food challenge. Aaron and I have spent this weekend spring cleaning our kitchen and have purged our cupboards of anything processed or unhealthy. Our fridge emenates life with only organic spinach, fresh spring mix, strawberries, apples, carrots, fresh basil, green onions etc... all live foods. During this time, Aaron and I (and my sister in law:)) will all be going on an extended herbal cleanse as well as a raw food diet for the next 7 months. We're trying to clear up some health problems and just have an overall healthy lifestyle. The extended herbal cleanse is from our Master Herbalis program that we're both going through and involves cleansing the blood stream, the liver and gall bladder, the colon and the kidneys. We're so excited to start this and I figured since I probably should get into actually using our blog, this would be a good use of it. So... I'll post my recipes... ones that I end up making up and ones that come out of recipe books or online and I'll keep an updated list of when I notice things about my health changing. I'm so excited to finally start this!

So, my work has decided to do fun days every week to promote the enjoyable atmosphere. It started out with crayon day where everyone wears their favorite color head to toe. THen we had crazy shirt day. It was awesome. I didn't participate in those but I'm started getting into it for crazy hair day last week. I brought wire to work and my extensions and I turned out looking like the statue of liberty. But...apparently everyone thought it was great because I won the contest! It was really fun. Here are some pictures of the group that participated at work as well as just me and then me and Amanda's hair.

For the longest time...

Man, it's been a long time since i've updated this blog. I'm starting to get the hang of it though so hopefully it will be more frequent that I get on here. Life has been hectic for our family in the last few months but it's been fun. Aaron is finishing up his first year of nursing school and in just two weeks we get the whole summer to ourselves! We're planning on making the most of it too.

Over the last few months, we were able to go back to Washington to visit my family for Christmas. It was SO much fun to be able to see everyone there again as they weren't able to come for our wedding :( We had our plane canceled at first because of the severe storms that both Utah and Washington were having. We ended up flying in really late at night and almost having to stay in the airport and sleep because the roads were so bad. I just happened to run into one of my friends from my old singles ward and her parents were on their way to get her. So, we hitched a ride. Finally, at 4am, we settled down for the night. It was so nice to see my house again and to see everyone. Here are some pictures from Christmas break...

This one is of my Patrick and Jenny and me and Aaron before going downstairs to see what santa claus brought us. We were SO tired and so excited. It was like 4am :) What can I say, we still get excited about that.

Aaron was really excited about what he got in his stocking from Santa. I'm really glad too cause santa barely made it to the store to get stuff for stockings with all the snow that was there. I got a really good stocking as well.

We also had our first Halloween somewhere in there too. I decided to be a Fallen, gothic, vampire fairy and Aaron was a Gaucho from Brazil. I came home from work as well and he had made me a surprise Halloween treat and card. It was sitting on our bed. It was Rice Crispy Treats that say I Love You. It was so cute.

There are more pictures to come. A lot has happened but I'll try to keep this more up to date!

Here are some pictures from our honeymoon. We were originally going to go to Palm Springs, CA but since the wreck, we changed it to a resort in Park City. It was SOO much fun. It was the most relaxing time of my life. It was labor day weekend so there was something on main street going on everyday. There were tons of new restaraunts to try and a ski lift that we alone probably funded :)

Our last day in Park City. It was snowing!!!

This random creepy moose on Main Street

(above and below) Riding the ski lift for the millionth time

During the car show, we saw this TINY car with this tiny little boy standing next to it. He was waiting to be judged along with the other cars. It was seriously the cutest thing ever.

When we first got to our resort room
Aaron posing with his cowboy hat at the market

me at dinner

Our resort kitchen

Aaron posing on the bed

Aaron's seductive bending-down-to-get-his-laptop pose

Conference freedom and breakfast

Okay, so I'm FINALLY trying to get some pictures up on this thing. A little bit at a time...but it's coming a long. All of the other pictures are on Aaron's laptop, which he is using to study something about the uses of a esophogogastroduodentiscope....or something...and yes, that's a real word. You'd think they could shorten that a bit but that's ok. Me remembering it was a feat in itself. Anyway, so here's some pictures of conference weekend that we took. It was SO nice. We had the whole weekend to just play and snuggle and sleep without pretty much doing anything else. It was quite funny actually. I woke up really early on Sunday morning in hopes of surprising Aaron with breakfast in bed. He woke up with me going into the bathroom and quickly realized something was up when I never came back. So about the time the bacon was sizzling, he came down and was like "what the heck are you doing?" anyway, so we ended up making a gourmet breakfast together. I made him go back upstairs when we were done and pretend he was asleep so I could give him breakfast in bed anyway. He then came down and we made pancakes on his "man griddle." It was great.