What if Someone Asks Me Why I'm a Vegetarian All the Sudden?

So I was thinking, what do I say when someone asks me why I'm suddenly a vegetarian? Nobody has asked me that yet. Well, except for Pete. She said, "Why don't you eat [meat] anymore?" and I said, "Because it's gross," and she said, "Oh." But someone who has already been 7 years old might need more of an answer than that so I've been thinking.

It started as kind of a personal challenge. And it really was all-of-the-sudden in that I didn't say to myself awhile ago, "I'm going to stop eating animals in early March." But I had thought about it here and there. Mostly I thought, "What will I eat if I don't eat meat?" or "My family won't give up meat so how can I?" But then I talked to Meme who said that I don't have to eat meat just because Husbandguy does and a couple weeks later I stopped. And my reason was simply to see if I could do it. That's how I quit smoking too, but that was harder.

The more I think about it, though, the more reasons I find for why this is a very good thing. First of all, I feel better. We talked about this a couple of days ago. Remember? It's nice to feel clear-headed most of the time instead of muddle-headed all of the time. Also, I can have carrots and peanut butter for a snack (I could before, but now I justify the peanut butter as needed protein and feel better about it). Another reason is that I was always worried about undercooked meats and stuff. HG will testify that it was especially tricky to cook chicken for me; if it was even slightly almost pink looking, it grossed me out and I couldn't eat it because I didn't want to be poisoned. Hamburgers were the same way. I did like my steaks cooked medium, but if they bled when I cut them, I couldn't eat them. Also, when you're eating that stuff, sometimes you take a bite and get a chunk of something, gristle, bone, goo, whatever, and there's no way to know for sure what it is and that always grossed me out too and made me have to stop eating whatever it was. And now I don't have to worry about that, really. Vegetables don't have bones. Some have goo, but I just don't eat those vegetables.

Randomly, I have learned a few of things that probably won't interest you, but here they are anyway.

• You can't really replace the meat in sloppy joes with lentils unless everyone is on board with that because it's hard to pretend like they're not lentils. It's good if you like that kind of thing, but not if you're HG ("It would be good as a side dish," he said). Plus, it's kind of wet and might make the bun soggy, but it's tasty if you mix in some rice.
• I don't like eggplant. Not yet. I'll keep trying.
• HG and I thought a good name for tofu bacon would be tofakon, but I don't know anything about tofu or whether you can make it look like bacon so I'm not inventing that today.
• I hadn't planned on giving up fish, but I really don't like fish and so have given it up along with all the other animals. But not eggs and milk because I'd really miss ice cream.

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Oh, by the way, I am disappointed in the lack of response to my poetry challenge from the other day. Mommy T is my only taker so far (Yay Mommy T!). You don't have to commit to a daily poem, but come on! You can try to write a little, can't you?

One Less Sippy Cup for Lulu

This morning, Lulu was playing in the play kitchen and reached into her microwave and pulled out a sippy cup. A sippy cup that wasn't empty. And had clearly been in the pretend microwave for a while. Ew! I'm not sure what had originally been in the cup, but whatever is in it now is solid, yellowy-orange, and has mold on the top. Like Dial soap with fur. Apparently we need to do a better job searching for dishes when we clean the real kitchen. Or be better about encouraging Lulu to return her dishes when she's done. Needless to say, I'm not interested in cleaning the cup (or experiencing the smell when I take the lid off to clean it) so we now have one less sippy cup. Oh well.

Is It All In My Head?

I used to blame the fact that I always felt dizzy to some degree (anywhere from just mildly foggy all the way to nauseating vertigo) on my MS. It made sense. It seemed like it was probably neurological. You know? But I noticed today, after not eating meat for almost 2 weeks, that I feel WAAAY clearer all the time. When I'm upright and all normal and stuff, I actually feel normal. Not like I'm underwater or just getting off a roller coaster or any of those other ways to feel that had become "normal." And I have to wonder: was it what I was eating? There's no way to test it. I'm not going to Arby's just to see if a beef and cheddar makes me dizzy. I suppose I'll just enjoy it and hope changing my diet really has changed my life (more than I expected it to).

I tried to turn this into a cute. clever story, but I just couldn't come up with anything so here you go:

Lulu gets her big girl bed tomorrow.

It's Coming... DuhnDuhnDuuhhnnn...

April is coming. Are you ready? Got your quills and ink pots ready? I guess a regular pen would work too. Or your keyboard... You're doing this with me, right? We've got a whole month to explore together. All the different forms, themes, topics. Did you know that you can find rhyming dictionaries online? Wanna challenge each other? A little friendly competition? Who can write a sonnet first? Better yet, a good sonnet. You know. Or something obscure. Will you make this pledge with me?

I pledge to post a poem a day in April.

Your turn. Are you in?

I'll remind you later...

2 Declarations, a Confession, and a Wish List

Hi! I'm ready to tell you these 2 things. I believe I am actually committed to these 2 things.

• THING 1: Lulu is Potty Trained. She has accepted that Pull Ups are only for sleeping in and abandoned her lunch yesterday for an unprompted potty break. She needed to go and she went. And now the Grandpa will babysit for us!
• THING 2: I don't eat pigs or cows anymore. I had hesitated to mention that I was considering this before now because I wasn't sure I could do it, but I've been red and other-white meat free for a week now and am really enjoying it. HG and the girls are not with me on this. Well, they support me. But they're not joining me. That's okay. It's not about them. For the moment I still eat poultry and fishy-things. Baby steps, I say. Although I've had several meals in the past week that were totally animal-meat-free. Eventually I should be able to declare myself a vegetarian, but I don't think it will be so easy to become a vegan. I like dairy too much.

And now I must confess that I had pudding for breakfast this morning. Rice pudding. Actually brown rice pudding with maple syrup and vanilla. Homemade of course. That's okay, right? It's breakfasty.

Now for the wish list. I would like to have:

• berry bushes in my yard
• a food dehydrator
• a rice cooker (because I never get it right on the stove top unless I use the boil-in-bag kind, which are actually very convenient for rice pudding cravings)
• many, many yummy, high-iron, meatless recipes (if you've got those, will you share with me please?)
• another visit with the Grandpa and Meme (I'm working on that - the snow days, all 3 of them, are making it hard to plan).

I hope your day is productive and healthy. And fun! Now I'm going to go vacuum. WHO AM I?!

A Reprint From Last April 20

The big
Disadvantage
Of never saying 'no'-
They don't ever listen to you.
Yes Man.

I'm needing to repost this today. I would like to add that if you're going to tell the child that she has until the count of 3 to do what she's been asked, then you need to count all the way to 3, not stop at 2 and negotiate while you wait for the other parent to follow through with the promised time out.

Vegetarian Burritos (with a side of steak)

I'm trying to have more meatless meals. It's difficult. Mainly because Husbandguy believes he will die of deprivation if he doesn't have some kind of meat for his meals. But during a recent discussion with Meme and the Grandpa, I realized that just because he eats meat, doesn't mean that I have to too. I just need to make sure that everyone has something to eat that will satisfy them.

It's also difficult because I'm only just recently learning to like vegetables. And there are some that I just don't like no matter how many times I try them.

And also, I really like smoked sausage...

So but tonight I made black beans and brown rice with peppers, onions, and tomatoes, and then I George Foreman-ed a skirt steak and cooked some peppers and onions fajita-style. And we made burritos. Mine had beans and rice with cheese and shredded carrots and HG & Pete's had EVERYTHING and Lulu's had cheese and carrots. You know what's weird (other than the cheese and carrot burrito)? I think HG liked my vegetarian meal better than some of my other "real" meals. Probably because I "grilled" skirt steak, which I don't think I've ever done before. He agreed that the side dish* I made this time was one of my best.

I bet he encourages me to make more vegetarian meals with meat on the side.


*the steak

Bread Bowls and Truancy

I have been looking for an excuse to keep Pete out of school on a day when Lulu has school so Pete and I could spend some time, just us. I didn't want to just give her a day off because that would send the wrong message. Plus she's been having some trouble focusing at school and didn't really deserve a day off. But an opportunity presented itself the other day when I was picking her up for her piano lesson and one of her teachers mentioned that she had been complaining that her ears seemed clogged ("It sounds like I'm talking out of a speaker," Pete said). Ah-ha! This cold that's been hanging on to her for the last 2 or 3 weeks has finally done some real damage. Ear infection! Woo-hoo!! Oh wait... That's not actually a good thing. Is it?

So since she's not sick-ish except for the speaker thing and a cough and runny nose, I thought about sending her to school and just picking her up early for her doctor appointment. I considered it for just a moment because that's what a responsible mom would do. And sometimes I'm a responsible mom. But here's the thing. Ever since Pete turned 3 and started going to Montessori schools (school-for-real, in other words), I feel like I've been missing out on those days when we would just hang out together and read or paint or go shopping or whatever. We still do that stuff, but now Lulu is with us all the time when Pete's not in school, and you're really not supposed to just take your kid out of school to hang out with you because you miss them. But if she's sick or has a doctor appointment or something? Then it's okay, right? So, again, yay for ear infections... but only minor ones that don't hurt and stuff. I get to spend the day with just Pete and no one else. The morning, anyway.

We shuffled Lulu off to school first, and then we spent the morning visiting the doctor and doing some shopping, then went out for lunch. The lunch thing was very important, to me at least, because Lulu and I have lunch out every other week or so, and Pete always looks disappointed that she missed it and that makes me sad and so this time she didn't miss it and that was fantastic. Plus, she got to pick the place (she wanted broccoli soup in a bread bowl from Panera). Then we picked up Lulu together.

It wasn't an extra special Pete-Day-of-Play or anything. In fact, aside from the visit to the doctor, it was pretty much just a normal Mom-Day (plus lunch out), but she seemed content to be tagging along and we had a very sweet time. It was better than when she was little and I would blow off work to keep her home from daycare just to be together because she's that much bigger now.

The next day, she didn't hesitate at all to go back to school. In fact she seemed kind of refreshed. I think she needed the day off as much as I needed her to have it. Apparently 7 year-olds need Mental Health Days as much as grown-ups do.

Who the Heck Bought All This Pumpkin?!

When I got home from the grocery store this morning, I was putting the black beans in the pantry and noticed a can of pumpkin sitting where the beans should go.

That's not right, I thought. The pumpkin goes over there behind the 2 cans of tart cherries.

This sounds just like your pantry, right? Everyone keeps pumpkin and cherries on hand for pie emergencies, don't they? They're staples. Right? Like milk. Or flour. Or grapes. Right? (Just say, "Right.")

When I reached to put the pumpkin where it goes I found 2 more cans of pumpkin!

Who bought all the pumpkin and what kind of emergency were they planning for? Seriously. I don't remember buying all that. If I had, I would have thought at some point, You need to stop buying pumpkin. You already have 3 cans. And I definitely did not think that (before today).

I worried for an instant that maybe I was turning into one of those crazy old ladies who hoard strange things like newspapers or slippers or cats. But see, I'm in therapy and the biggest thing I've learned there is that it's usually best to say, "So what?" about situations that worry me. So I did. I thought, So what if I'm the crazy pumpkin lady? and then I made cookies.

4½ dozen pumpkin, raisin, chocolate chip cookies with walnuts. 4½ dozen. Now I'm also the crazy pumpkin cookie lady? So what?