Drops of Awesome

Personal Blog of Author Kathryn Thompson

Poser in Granolaville

All About that Base…ball

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BASEBALL IS NOW!!!

At the beginning of each calendar year, there comes a point, and I never know when it will be, when I get an email that essentially says, “BASEBALL IS NOW!!!”

What this means is, “You signed your child up for baseball six months ago, not knowing when it would be, and then you planned your schedule and moved on with your life. But starting tomorrow you will have baseball practices and games 3-5 times per week in various towns all over the valley and you will no longer be in any way in control of your family’s schedule. You will not eat normal family dinner for the next 4 months.”

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And we do this every single year because, flying in the face of everything I thought I knew about genetics, I have a kid who adore sports, particularly baseball.

This year is especially special because not only is Magoo playing, but Wanda is six and it’s her first year playing softball. And she’s not the only one playing softball. Due to an utterly desperate coaching situation in our little corner of Little League, I am managing and coaching her team.

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Have I ever played softball before? No.

Have I ever touched a softball before? No.

Have I ever watched a single game of softball being played? Not so much.

Am I much more qualified to direct a theater production, conduct a band, or coach a team of mathletes? Yes.

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But I do know how to dial up the YouTube. And I know how to interact with kindergarteners. And I have great parent support and the sweetest assistant coach ever, Coach Laylee. So I’m doing okay so far. Our games start soon and then we’ll see exactly HOW okay.

Not only am I… ahem… coaching, we also decided to sponsor Magoo’s team this year. I have a business license in Washington State as an LLC for my writing and coaching work. So when the team asked if any of us had a business who’d like to sponsor the team and have our business name printed on the back, I could not resist.

Meet Team Drops of Awesome.

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While other kids go around with the names of local restaurants and hardware stores printed across their backs, our kids wear the banner of Awesome.

I love to cheer for them but my cheering is at best awkward. At the moment, I’m working to use phrases that don’t in any way come naturally to me to support the kids as they try to do the good baseballing.

When other parents call out things like, “Good cut,” and “Way to get a piece of it,” they sound cool and sports-like. When I call out those things, I feel like I’m dressing my vocabulary up in a baseball mom costume and the costume doesn’t fit so well and I sound silly.

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One seasoned baseball mom recently told me it’s all about yelling things with authority. It doesn’t really matter what you say. You just have to commit and sound like you know what you’re talking about. So here are a few I’ve come up with this season and I’m excited to try them out.

“That was high quality cutting!”

“Your arm is nice!”

“You swing with great strength!”

“Throw the ball with more hardness!”

“Knock it to Sammammish!”

“I like the way your bat touched that ball even though it didn’t go the right direction to allow you to run to a base!”

Okay, that last one’s a bit long but I think it gets the point across nicely. I could also go uber short with things like, “BOOM!” “Ska-DOINK!”

I’ll fine tune it and let you know.

Besides vocab choices, the main concerns I have during baseball season are how to feed my kids when we’re at baseball from 4:30-8pm and there’s no eating allowed in the dugout, how to get stains out of white pants that are worn exclusively for times when you plan to slide and roll around in the dirt and grass, and how to prepare for every possible weather situation.

We’re wet and freezing. We’re sizzling and baking in the sun. Sometimes we do both of those things during a single game. So I bring umbrellas and sunscreen, snacks and water bottles, sunhats and parkas.
This year Magoo’s level of Little League team chooses a Major League team for their team name, so we’re the Dodgers. I like this because it makes finding fan gear easy.

The Northwest, and online store that specializes in exciting, new and innovative products for the majority of the world’s most recognized and loved brands in sports, entertainment and lifestyle

9 Secrets to Raising Happy Kids

The Northwest, an online store that has all kinds of great MLB gear, reached out to see if I was doing a story on baseball this season and when I told them I was, they sent me this awesome Dodgers blanket which helps keep us snuggly warm on rainy days or as the sun drops behind the trees sunny days. It’s fun to be cozy and support our team at the same time. Their site also has tons of other cool licensed products from just about every type of sports team and entertainment companies like Disney, Universal, Marvel Bros, etc. Next time you go to a hockey game, played between Kylo Ren and Santa Claus, they can hook you up for that too.

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At least next time I yell, “Dodge like a Dodger baseball man!” I will look legit while saying it.

**Sometimes I get free stuff for mentioning it in a post. I always tell you when that’s the case.**

Sometimes Good Food Tastes Good

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I’ve been dieting and REALLY NOT DIETING and then dieting again for most of my adult life. I fluctuate in size and in most other measures of health and I work hard to shield my kids from my food weirdness. However I’m sure I shield them less than I intend to and it’s not ideal.

I’m a vegan.

Nope. I’m Paleo.

I eat whatever I want, dangit!

Whole 30 for life.

Chocolavores unite!

What my kids see is just food. On the table. Some of it’s good. Some of it’s less so. They know I’m always cooking some weird new thing and they mostly accept it, although sometimes with grumblings and rumblings.

Often, when I’m trying something new, I make two complete meals, one for me that I tell the kids is to help my body be healthier, and one for them to keep them happy.

Currently I’ve stripped it back to a Drops of Awesome approach to diet and nutrition. I try to rack up as many good choices as I can and I don’t stress too much about the junk that slips in now and then. It’s working at the moment, in that I’m not stressed about food and it’s become like a game to see how many vegetables and tablespoons of flax seed I can consume each day.

So you’ll see my plate overflowing with roasted vegetables and chicken and my kids are piling up on white rice and cheese. Everyone’s happy.

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However, I was recently reading Jonathan Bailor’s book, The Calorie Myth, an exploration of hundreds of medical studies about how our bodies actually evolve with diet and exercise. It had a section about helping our kids form good habits with food and I thought, “If I’m trying to eat more vegetables, lean meats, and good fats because that’s the healthiest way to eat, why did I give up the battle of encouraging my kids to do the same?”

They may not be having problems with health or fitness now, but if they keep eating the way they are, they will have problems in their future. It’s a difficult thing to figure out because, if anything, my kids struggle with being underweight, so I feel justified filling them up with empty calories to bulk them up when what I should really be doing is helping them eat more, higher-quality foods.

The problem is, I’m willing to eat healthful food simply because I know it’s good for me. My kids expect things to taste good. So, the past couple of weeks I’ve been working on adapting favorite recipes to make them a few Drops of Awesome better for everyone. I’ve had some hits and some misses, but more hits and it’s encouraging.

Yesterday when the kids got home from school, rather than letting them get their usual bowl of breakfast cereal, I spread lettuce leaves with a Greek yogurt dip they like, filled them with sliced turkey breast and made little roll-ups. They all gave me the stink-eye at first. But every one of them ended up loving the new snack.

Then for dinner I took a family favorite, cheeseburger pie, made it crustless, and changed the topping. Instead of topping it with a bunch of cheddar cheese, I topped it with a little cheddar cheese, some low-fat cottage cheese, an egg and several egg whites, and broccoli florets.

I held my breath. This was a major overhaul. But they all, LOVED it. Even the pickiest, Wanda, asked for seconds. And in the family prayer, Magoo said he was thankful for all the yummy food I’d been making lately.

We’re making progress.

The cherry on the top came at lunch today when I surprised Wanda with leftovers. She hates leftovers on principle. However, today she was ecstatic to eat her “new favorite meal,” the healthier version of cheeseburger pie.

“I like this better than mac and cheese!” she said. High praise, my friends. “What’s the real name of this dinner? I want to know because last summer in swimming lessons my teacher had me yell out my favorite food when I did a cannonball at the end of class and if she has me do that again next summer, I want to yell, ‘THIS THING!’”

THIS THING, indeed. Drops of Awesome.

Veganish – Review and Giveaway

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Veganish_hiresI am Vegan sometimes. Sometimes I’m Paleo. Every once in a while I’m a Dorito-tarian. (Don’t tell Jamie Oliver!) I love food. I dream about food. I consume it in ample quantities and I spend a lot of time thinking about what I do eat, what I should eat, and what I will eat.

One of my biggest goals is adding more vegetable into my life in a delicious and sustainable way. By sustainable, I’m not talking about composting and buying local. I’m talking about eating vegetables in a way that I’m willing to do over and over again till death do we part, which hopefully won’t be for a long time because, LOOK, I’m eating so many vegetables!

So I’m always checking out new cookbooks and I love vegan and vegetarian cookbooks especially because they focus so heavily on veg. I’ll take an awesome vegan casserole recipe and substitute chicken for beans or cheese for fake cheese. Because I like me some tasty animal products.

Mielle Chenier-Cowan Rose’s new-ish cookbook Veganish: The Omnivore’s Guide to Plant-Based Cooking speaks to the world of vegetable lovers who add in an occasional animal product for the health benefits. It’s pretty fabulous. The book has no pictures and a horrible index but the recipes and information are so good that I’ve gone back to it again and again. This is surprising if you know me and how heavily I rely on good indexing.

I worked through several of her recipes, cooking from it almost exclusively for a week and we enjoyed nearly everything. I think during that week I tripled my family’s veggie intake and not just for the meals I was preparing from her recipes. Veganish gave so many great veggie prep instructions and just plain motivation to live and eat healthier, that I found myself snacking better, sleeping better and drinking more water between meals.

In the introduction to the book, Mielle says she wants it to be more of a cookbook than a recipe book, to inhabit the nightstand as much as the kitchen. It did just that. I read it from cover to cover and got really fired up about eating better.

I’m sure you will too. If your New Year’s resolutions for healthy living are starting to fade, this book is a good refresher. I’m giving away a copy. Just leave a comment below, listing your favorite veggie and I’ll choose a winner the evening of February 6th. You need to live in the continental US to win, unless you want to pay the shipping. The winner is comment #5 – Valeri!

For those of you who don’t win the book, you get something too. By request, Mielle is sharing her Massaged Kale Salad with my readers. As a person who wants to love kale so I can feel superior to my spinach-eating friends, I was excited to find a salad that finally made this monster green palatable to me. I LOVE this salad. Maybe it’s because the kale is so happy and relaxed after its massage and happy food is tasty food. Whatever the reason, this one is a winner. I’ve made it for extended family dinners and neighborhood potlucks and it’s a crowd pleaser, among people willing to put kale in their mouths and chew. Enjoy!

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Football Agnosticism

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I don’t have anything against football. I just don’t necessarily believe in it. In fact, I ignore it most of the year/decade until something big happens and then I jump on the bandwagon of our winning home team. Die-hard fans are annoyed by this, but I don’t see why. I’m sort of like an agnostic who loves to decorate for Christmas because it’s tradition and it’s fun, it gives me a sense of community, and… OOOOOO Shiny!

As a fellow Christmas lover, I’m happy to see anyone celebrating Christmas, no matter how deeply their religious fervor goes.

And I thusly support the Seahawks at this time of year.

Last year when they went to that really great bowl, you know, the super one, we watched the game. It was the first football game my kids had ever seen and it was a doozy.

“What’s a safety?”

“What’s an interception, mom?”

“Does one team always get that many more points than the other team?”

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Two Sundays ago we wore our outfits from my sister’s wedding last summer (conveniently Seahawks colors) to church in support of the NFC Championship game. What does NFC stand for? “Um… National Football Something Niner…”

And we got out of church at 2pm only to see we’d lost the game. There were 5 minutes left and the Seahawks were behind 19-7. Three minutes left and suddenly they came back and won the game in overtime. Crazy. The entire city of Seattle and every surrounding town had a collective heart attack. It’s sad really because no one will be around to watch the Super Bowl in a couple of days. Even now, my ghost is typing this. Because I died listening to the game. On the radio. We don’t have cable this year because the Olympics aren’t currently happening.

So this weekend will see us in our Seahawks gear, cheering for the home team because we can and it’s fun and we love Seattle and we tolerate football, especially when we’re winning. Go Hawks!

Slug Friends Probably

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Slugs sick me out. They make me want to vomit. If you’ve never stepped on a slug with your bare feet and felt it pop, you might not be emotionally equipped to understand what it feels like to truly hate a slug the way I have come to hate them. That being said, I’ve made it one of my many diverse missions in life to help my kids be okay with slugs.

When they see a slug, I compliment it. “Wow,” I say, “What a cute slug friend. We should name it.” Or, “Aren’t we lucky that we have slugs to leave sparkly trails all over our front door and car door handles? People who don’t have slug friends wish they were us.”

Maybe this is disingenuous. I prefer to think of it as positive psychology or self-deception for the greater good.

So, Wanda is convinced that she loves slugs and they love her back. She talks to them, adopts them, cries when we wake up to a slug-free morning. One thing she never does is touch them. This is telling. I can say I think a boy is cute, but if the thought of touching him makes my skin crawl, I probably don’t like him all that much.

So, last night Wanda left her shoes out on the lawn by the trampoline… so the balls and shovels and popsicle sticks wouldn’t be lonely. Tonight when she was coming in after a parentally-mandated, screaming-fight-with-her-brother-motivated cease and desist order, I told her to bring in five or ten shoes from the area around the trampoline.

She began gathering them up and soon screams erupted. “AAAAHHHH! MOM!!!! They’re in my shoes. THE SLUG FRIENDS ARE IN MY SHOES!”

These were not screams of delight. They were screams of terror. They were screams filtered through tears, shaky tears.

“GET THEM OUT! I’m seer-yuss.”

I couldn’t help laughing. I could help taking a picture of her distress but I chose not to.

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My favorite part is probably the position of her fingers as she tries to hold the shoe with as little of her hands as possible. Eventually, I made my way out to the front porch to shake the slugs out of her super fast cheetah shoe. Four slugs people. Four invaders. Or so I thought.

There were five.

One more slug had somehow clung to my person as I came inside and several minutes later Laylee noticed it shlumped on the middle of the living room rug.

Chaos.

I was busy sitting, so I asked Laylee to get a kleenex and flush it down the toilet. She looked at me like I’d asked her to fill her own bed with rat babies, but eventually agreed. “Oh… kaaaaay.”

She left to grab the tissue.

She returned with hands full of half a roll of paper towel, bunched up into a toddler-elephant-sized wad.

“Aaand I guess you won’t be flushing that.”

She giggled nervously. But she bravely did the deed. Slug friend was disposed of and we salute the many trees who gave their lives so our house could be free of living slime.

When we say our family prayer each night, every person gets a chance to say one thing they’re thankful for that we then incorporate into the prayer.

Tonight, Magoo said, “I’m thankful that we got rid of all the slugs in our house… probably.”

Laylee said, “I’m thankful that the slugs are gone.”

Wanda said, “I’m thankful that there are no more slugs in my shoes.” She then gave a cheery smile and continued, “Isn’t it cool that we all said slug things for the prayer?”

I prayed tonight and when I got to the slug portion of the oblation, I said, “And we’re thankful that we got rid of all the slugs in our house.”

Magoo whispered, “Say, ‘Probably.’”

Probably.

Novica – Review and $75 Giveaway

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Do you remember when I became obsessed with only buying fair trade items?

Dan does. It was the year I told him exactly what I wanted for Mother’s Day but said I only wanted it if he could find it made of recycled glass by people in fair working conditions or previously-owned. He spent hours with the kids in an antique store finding me the perfect glass pitcher. I bought him a bathrobe and called the company to verify the working conditions of the textile workers. I wanted to know they had air conditioning, a fair wage.

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Yeah. We got tired and lazy and we just started buying stuff again, trying not to think about where it came from or how it was made. But I still think about it, a bit. It just takes work to know what you’re buying.

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That’s why I love Novica. It’s a website that partners with National Geographic to bring fair trade items from artisans around the world to consumers worldwide. Each of the items offered for sale comes with an artist bio and information about where and how it’s made. You can view these profiles online as you’re browsing and feel secure that you’re helping small businesses flourish, often in impoverished countries.

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Novica also partners with Kiva.org to provide microcredit loans to their artisans, allowing them to start or grow businesses, employ others, and preserve ancient artistic techniques. You can offer a zero interest loan to an artisan through their website.

To give me an experience to blog about, Novica offered me a $150 gift card, which I spent $75 of and I’m giving the other $75 to you.

There are a ton of great products to choose from. It took me days, and sadly, by the time I made my mind up, the item I wanted had sold. I’ll have to check back later. Stock varies from day to day as artists sell out and get back to work creating. So, if you find something you love, snatch it up right away. It’s a great way to buy gifts and feel good about what you’re purchasing.

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I went with this great Ica Traveler cotton handbag with leather accents. It is big enough without being enormous and has great organization with pen holders, cell phone pocket and two zipper pockets. It’s really pretty and well-made and I’m enjoying carrying it around.

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It came quickly, considering it made its journey all the way from the Andes in Peru. When I placed my order, the website was glitching so I called the number on the screen and they completed my purchase over the phone.

A few other items I like that are still there are:
Leather Wristband Bracelet
Family Love Elephant Necklace
Soapstone Candle Holders
Brown Leather Messenger Bag

They also have leather handbags, jewelry boxes, sterling silver necklaces, Mother’s Day gift suggestions, blue drinking glasses, and much more.

Leave a comment if you love shopping fair trade and want to do it for free. I’ll use a random number generator to choose a winner at 10pm PST on Thursday, April 3rd, 2014. Good luck!

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Tuppence Per Each Bag

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I’ve been trying to eat well lately. In theory I’ve been trying to eat well all my life, minus college. In practice I’ve been getting progressively better for the past 5-10 years. I’ve very recently turned to a hard-core, stop-eating-anything-that-doesn’t-taste-like-a-literal-nutrient way of eating.

I’m struggling with perplexing health problems and if you have perplexing health problems, eventually you turn to examining your diet and when you examine your diet, you find that if it tastes good, there are at least ten people who live on the internet who will tell you that what you’re eating is causing your specific problem.

I don’t listen to those ten people because they obviously hate brownies.

However, last week my naturopath told me that I should consider severely limiting my grains. Also, my “random thoughts that come into my head right after I finish praying” told me I should severely limit my sugar intake.

Blech.

So I’m trying to eat like a good girl, I am. Lean meats and vegetables, baby!

But there are days when Doritos must be imbibed. So, I was having one of those days but I was trying to have it Drops-of-Awesomely, focusing on the fact that I only bought the supersized personal-sized 50% more bag, instead of the supersized FAMILY-sized 50% more bag. I planned to enjoy every morsel.

Then Wanda walked in. She had many questions, questions about what I was eating, about why she was not also eating it, about, please please, could she please eat it.

So I shared.

Begrudgingly.

If I was going to unlimit my grains, I wanted to unlimit them all the way down.

But she had cuteness on her side and I really shouldn’t have been eating that much grain, much less that much grain coated in nuclear cheese dust. I should be feeding it to my sweet, growing child person.

She started plowing through the chips faster than I would have thought possible. She’d grab one, say, “Thanks,” and leave the room. Two seconds later she’d be back for more. With increasing dog-protecting-his-bone-ish-ness, I handed them to her. Grrrr….

We made short work of the bag and I continued my quest to eat things that are green and crunchy and capable of making me feel smug and self-satisfied when I notice them hanging around like a lump in my stomach and later coming out in Dr. Oz approved luscious deposits.

But, as I went outside later to pick up my kids from the bus, what to my wondering eyes should appear, but a mother lode of Doritos all over the porch and front walk.

“Look!” Wanda grinned, “I’m feeding ALL the birdies!”

It was obvious from the sheer number of slimy glowing orange chips that the birdies had absolutely zero interest, or they assumed that something the color of a construction cone was inedible, from previous painful personal experience.

So I smiled and congratulated her on her good deed-ery, sighing at all the lost cheesy goodness. And when she wasn’t looking, I threw them over the fence into the decaying bamboo forest section of my crazy-sauce back yard. I don’t know what goes on back there but we have found animal bones. And broken clay pots circa AD 1985.

Now all that’s left to do is put on all my Newsies-colored dresses and skirts in multiple layers, tease my hair like a crazy rock star homeless person and start singing on my front porch steps. “Feed the microscopic organisms in the decaying bamboo forest section of my crazy-sauce back yard. Tuppence per each bag.”

You know you’d pay money to see that. Way more fun than giving your coin to those mean old guys at the bank, right?

The 43-Dollar 4300-Calorie Tub of Sour Cream

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We sat down to eat some lovely Mexican lasagna for dinner when I decided I COULD. NOT. EAT. IT. without sour cream. I left the family sitting at the dinner table and ran to the grocery store to pick up that one thing. “I’ll be back in ten minutes. Time me.”

Well it’s a good thing that Dan laid down on the couch and decided to time me with the inside of his eyelids (not the most accurate of timing devices) because I completely lost all track of the time while pillaging the aisles of the grocery store.

Sudden cravings for anything unhealthy and remotely appealing took over my body. Along with the sour cream, I picked up yogurt, bagels, bread… frozen pizza, sherbet, popsicles, Jones soda, Cheez Whiz, sugar cookies and other things I haven’t purchased since probably college.

I sheepishly unloaded my purchases at the counter.

“I’m pregnant.”

Serious look from the cashier.

“Sometimes I just need things.”

Serious look followed by some sage advice, “Don’t eat it all tonight, okay? And when you’re done, go back to vegetables and other healthy foods.”

“I’ve only gained 4 pounds so far this pregnancy.”

Serious look.

When I got home and started unloading, Dan asked how my trip was. “Fruitful,” I responded. The Chief Cookie Buyer in our household stared at my haul with wide eyes. “Certainly was.”

Smart boy did not offer any sage advice. He mustn’t if he ever hopes to see another morsel of HFCS, Trans Fat or food coloring enter the house again.

I bought nectarines too, sort of to camouflage the rest of it. It was by far the most expensive and unhealthful tub of sour cream I have ever purchased.

Why Even Ask?

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If you order food at any Taco Bell restaurant anywhere in the country, and I know because I’ve been to at least 6 of them, the person wearing the Brittany Spears head set will ask you at the window if you’d like any hot sauce with your order. Every once in a while she will look you in the eyes and act as if she cares whether you want the spicy stuff or not. Most of the time she will mumble, “Youwantanyhotsaucewithat?” as she stuffs napkins and, get this, hot sauce into your bag.

I always, always say, “no,” not because I don’t like spicy things but because I don’t want one more opportunity for disastrous mess in my car. I repeat. I always say, “Negatory.”
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And I ALWAYS get one, if not several, packets of hot sauce in the bag. ALWAYS.

The same thing happens at McDonald’s. When you order a sundae, they always ask you if you’d like nuts to go with it. Over the years, I’ve become intolerant of hard chunks in my ice cream. I don’t trust them. “Was that a peanut or a pill bug?” I ask myself.

So I say, “No thank you,” when they ask if I want the peanuts.

“Does she get peanuts?” you ask yourself.

Yes. Yes she does.

ALWAYS.

If you’re just gonna give me peanuts and hot sauce, why are you acting like I have a choice?

At the grocery store, when they say, “Paper or Plastic?” they then proceed to give you the style of bag you choose, even if you’re like me and choose your own handmade reusable, 100% recycled, free range, biodegradable totes.