Baked Pumpkin Oatmeal

October 12th, 2016 | Posted by Alison Spath in Breakfast - (1 Comments)

I keep this blog ‘o mine up and running for a number of reasons:

1.  Around Thanksgiving every year the Yes, You Can Make Pumpkin Pie Without Evaporated Milk post gets a lot of web traffic, and frankly, that just cracks me up.  (The traffic to that post basically pays for the annual web hosting fees to keep this whole thing going, so why the heck not.)

2.  The Intermittent Fasting post continues to be visited regularly as well, and I still love IF and want to keep that post up too.

Healthy Oatmeal Pumpkin Snack Cookies

December 19th, 2013 | Posted by Alison Spath in Healthy Snack Attack - (Comments Off on Healthy Oatmeal Pumpkin Snack Cookies)

I’m calling these cookies “healthy” because a.) they aren’t loaded with sugar and b.) they contain squash.

(Well, pumpkin – but pumpkin is a squash last time I checked.  Consider this your homeschooling lesson of the day.)

They are sweetened only with banana and a little maple syrup, which makes them low enough in sugar that I feel I can throw the word “snack” into the title as well, while also keeping my conscience clear.

Healthy Oatmeal Pumpkin Maple Cookies

I whipped these together yesterday morning using this banana oatmeal cookie recipe as my starting point, subbing pumpkin for flour and using maple syrup instead of white sugar.

Recipe for a Clean House

November 27th, 2013 | Posted by Alison Spath in Motivation - (5 Comments)

I love to live in a neat and tidy house, but naturally-neat-and-tidy I am not.  Items collect on our dining room table, clothes gather on furniture, colored pencils and drawings scatter like plastic bags in a windstorm.  In a perfect world I would stay on top it of regularly – but the reality is that I get behind and end up needing to devote time to picking up and cleaning.

I feel like the Slobbiest McSlobberson to admit this, so I take comfort in messy house memes because it leads me believe I am not alone.

Messy House Prayer

Please allow me to veer off course for a post to share Maxine’s Minecraft themed 7th birthday party. There was lots of running, and watermelon too – so you might be able to say it had a healthy living theme.  Sort of.  Except for the blue jello.  Blue jello that was probably not made from Organic, Locally Grown Smurfs.  I’m trying not to think about it.

Do your kids play Minecraft?  Mine sure do.  I might even call them “Minecraft Addicts”.  This is why it came as little surprise when Maxine requested a Minecraft birthday party this year.

This outdoor pool is one mile from our house.  A house that we’ve lived in for almost four years and we’re just now getting our butts over there to take advantage of it.  It even meets the “Three C’s” (that I just made up) – Close, Clean and Cheap.  Don’t ask me what took us so long, I have no idea.

Outdoor Pool

Have you heard of Cuppow?

Cuppow

It’s a drinkable lid that you can use with a canning jar.

(I think I’ve made it obvious that we like to drink out of canning jars here?)

I love canning jars as glasses mostly because they’re so sturdy – when the girls were really little I was frustrated with how frequently regular glasses were breaking.  I soon noticed that the few small and wide mouth canning jars we had hanging around were the only glasses that were holding up.  I eventually stopped replacing our broken glasses altogether and just used canning jars and old almond butter jars instead.  Soon, our entire glasswear collection consisted of glasses with threading at the top.  Oops.

I have a confession.

The kitchen is not always clean before we go to bed at night.

This has been especially true this week with a husband who was laid up with a man cold. I’m picking on him a little, but we really are a team when it comes to keeping this house clean.  His sick time was evident based on state of the house for a number of days here, I fell way behind on the house work.

Now that we are outnumbered in our parents:kids ratio, our former man-to-man combat plan has become more of a “zone defense” over these past 7 months.

Weekend Dance Party Playlist

January 18th, 2013 | Posted by Alison Spath in Fitness - (1 Comments)

No baby fingers were stepped on during the making of this blog post.

Just Dance

We don’t have a Wii, but the girls have been playing “Just Dance” at a friend’s house and loving it.  We just recently discovered that you can find many of the dances from this game on YouTube – and now we are unstoppable dancing machines.

My absolute favorite is Mr. Saxobeat, especially the move at 0:36 where she swivels her hips and shoulders. LOVE THAT.  Once I get really good at this I’m going to put my hair in swishy ponytail and go shopping for an identical blue, yellow and pink striped palm tree dress.

Practice Staying Present

January 13th, 2013 | Posted by Alison Spath in Life - (1 Comments)

Two summers ago I was out for a morning run and passed a man running with a young boy who was probably 9 or 10 years old.  I guessed they were father and son, and that was probably a good guess because the boy looked like a miniature version of the man.  I was impressed to see a kid running a nice pace along side an adult, smiling and easily holding a conversation.  I felt a little twinge of something at that moment – a twinge of hope that my kids might take an interest in running with me one day too.

The Life Changers of 2012

December 31st, 2012 | Posted by Alison Spath in Life - (8 Comments)

At the end of last year I wrote about The Life Changers of 2011 – the books, blogs and other ideas that effected my life in a positive, meaningful way.  I’m here today to do the same for 2012!

Of course, the biggest life changer for us this year was addition of this guy to our family:

Kaz 6 months