OttawaMom

Posts Tagged ‘family’

I have always been a big fan of Jamie Oliver’s, it started in his days of the Naked Chef. When I heard about his new show Food Revolution, I knew I would watch it and I also knew we would watch it together as a family. As much as I try to tell my kids how important it is to eat healthy, I thought it would help reinforce that idea if they watched the show.

As a family, we have taken Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution to heart and are trying hard to eat less processed food and eat more homemade things. We were already avoiding most processed foods but have taken it a step further and are making more things from scratch. I like knowing what is in my food and my kids are much happier with Mommy and Daddy’s cooking rather than boxed things from the store.

Making things from scratch may take a bit more time, but the effort is worth it to see my kids happily tucking in to their food. Even my son’s lunch box is coming home empty which is a huge feat!

The first big change we made was making all our bread from scratch. My husband is a wonderful baker, a trade he learned at the hands of his father. Watching him whip up a batch of homemade bread is amazing and our kids love to help him mix and knead the dough. In fact he loves making bread so much that he has built himself a bread oven for the backyard and sells homemade loaves at our annual garage sale, but I digress.

The next change we have made is to get rid of our boxed granola bars in favour of homemade ones. I thought I was giving my kids “healthy” granola bars, until I read the ingredients list. If I couldn’t actually pronounce some of the ingredients, why on earth was I giving them to my kids! So I searched the internet and found this recipe that is a winner with everyone (including my husband’s co-workers!). I did however tweek it a bit substituting whole wheat flour in place of all purpose, 1/2 tsp of cinnamon (instead of 1/4) and the first time I made it, I used 1 cup of chocolate chips instead of the dried fruit. I love the versatility of the recipe and plan to keep tweeking it to get my kids to try new things.

Homemade cookies, muffins and granola bars

So now we have baking Sundays at our house where we whip up batches of bread, muffins, cookies and granola bars for the week. Now instead of my pantry bulging with boxed, processed food, the freezer is bursting with yummy baked goods. When we need a snack on the go, we just grab a couple granola bars out of the freezer and they are good to go in 15 minutes.

These small changes are just the start of what I hope will be my own family’s Food Revolution. Are you watching the show and making changes too? Would love to know what other families are doing to eat healthier.

Now that Spring is here (and the rain!!) the busy birthday season has ended in our family.  Seems when we started having children, my sisters and I decided that all the grandchildren should be born in a three month span (years apart of course).  Starting in early January and ending near the end of March, we had 6 family birthday parties. Makes for a very busy but fun time, especially for me since I seem to be the family birthday cake maker, a hobby I love to do.

As a result, this poor blog of mine has been neglected.  I still haven’t figured out how to do it all and this other hobby of mine seems to be the first thing that gets shoved to the back burner.  But I did want to share some pics of the cakes that helped put smiles on my nieces, nephew and children’s (even my Dad) faces on their special day.

Optimus Prime and Bumblebee birthday cake

My nephew is a huge Transformer fan so I incorporated his two favourites, Optimus Prime and Bumblebee into his cake.  Turned out pretty well I think.

Next up was a Tinkerbell themed birthday cake for my daughter’s 4th birthday. Cake was decorated with buttercream icing with flower and butterfly accents.

Tinkerbell inspired birthday cake

March was a busy, busy month for birthdays.  We had 7 family birthdays, 4 of which required my services.

Strawberry Shortcake birthday cake

For my daughter’s “twin” (my niece who was born 8 days after my daughter), I was requested to come up with a Strawberry Shortcake cake.  Since I have yet to attempt to make figures myself, I relied on some plastic figures I  found at the toy store for the Strawberry Shortcake element. The cake was iced using buttercream icing with fondant accents.

Strawberry Shortcake Cake with figures

My Dad’s birthday was next and although his cake was simple, it was no less meaningful as he is a huge baseball fan.

Baseball birthday cake

Next up were cakes for my son and niece, who were born on the same day, one year apart. So far, planning their birthdays hasn’t become a logistical nightmare!

For my niece’s 6th birthday, she wanted a flowers and butterflies themed cake and this is what I came up with. Again I used buttercream icing and fondant accents. I’m not brave enough to cover the entire cake with fondant yet. Unfortunately, I had also created a flower and butterfly fondant spray which didn’t survive the trip to the party ;(

Flowers and Butterflies

We had a Star Wars Jedi Training party for my son’s 7th birthday (a post on the party details is in the works) and I decided to attempt a Death Star.  It’s not my best work, but my son loved it!

Star Wars Death Star birthday cake

Hope you enjoyed the pictures as much as I enjoyed creating the cakes.

My son has been the target of bullying at school. I always believed (naively it would seem) that school would be a safe place to send my child for the day, but I am quickly learning that is not always the case.

While the bullying is being dealt with by his teacher, principal and to some extent the bully’s parents, it has taken it’s tole on my son and as a result our family.

I should mention that my son is only six and in grade one!!

When school started in September I was an anxious mess. My son was starting full day school and I worried because I wouldn’t be there if he needed me during the day. Not to mention he would now be having recess in the school yard with all these kids who were much bigger then he was. Well I needn’t have worried because he quickly fell in love with school, even opting to stay at school during lunch time in order to have more time to play with his friends. Boy was I not ready for him not to need me anymore, but that’s another story!

Things went smoothly at first (or so I thought!) until I began to hear stories from my son about a certain kid attacking him for no reason. I will admit that at first I chalked it up to just rough school yard play (having been new to the whole recess thing I didn’t know any better) until the stories became a daily occurrence. It was always the same boy and he was always attacking my son for no reason! Even coming up to him from another part of the school yard, throwing him to the ground and kicking and punching him. Where do kids come up with this behaviour and at the tender age if 6! It just seems that this boy has some sort of weird fascination with my son and just goes off on him for no reason and always when a teacher is not looking (amazing to me how early these kids learn to be sneaky!). It happens in the school yard, the classroom, the hallway, even the library. For whatever reason this kid cannot keep his hands off my son!

Well my mother bear claws came out and I marched into the Principal’s office to discuss what was happening to my son! Now at our school we have had some upheaval with respect to Principals – we are currently on our 3rd one for the year. Although the 1st Principal heard my concerns and made the boy apologize by writing a letter to my son and miss out on a couple of recesses, the attacks continued shortly there after.

By this time we were on our 2nd Principal for the year who took an entirely different approach, opting to have the bully stay in at lunchtime to learn better behaviour for the school yard until she was satisfied that he understood and wouldn’t repeat the same attacks. It seemed to work for a while until after the Christmas holiday.

Shortly after school returned, this bully began again! This time not only did I hear about it from my son but also from my son’s best friend and his mom! And I even witnessed it for myself and believe me it took all the strength I had not to throttle him!!

Once again I found myself talking to his teacher. Compounding matters is the fact that this boy is in my son’s class and they were actually friends back in kindergarten. Try explaining to your child why someone who used to be their friend suddenly turns on them!

After many conversations with my son’s teacher and her discussions with our 3rd Principal, they came up with a new plan to try and prevent my son from being hurt. Unfortunately this new plan is not working and after the latest incident – my son being choked in the hall way at school – I will be back at the school looking for some answers yet again. To say that I am frustrated is an understatement!

My son is no longer the same happy go lucky boy he once was and it breaks my heart! No one should have to deal with a bully never mind doing it at 6!

Have any of you had similar problems with your children? How were they handled/resolved?