Staying with my mother-in-law for the last week gave me the privilege of playing with some of her fabulous small appliances and gadgets.  She is the best resource for homemaking tricks.  Really.

Super Simple Smoothies with my MIL’s Blendtec

I didn’t embrace my role as a homemaker when I first got married, and would bristle with indignation whenever I received a kitchen gadget as a gift.  As if!  When I married her son, he and I both worked about the same amount of excessive hours that is typical for New York couples.  Maybe we’d leave the office around 7 or 8.  Have dinner and put in a few more hours from home.  Boy, I don’t miss those 60 plus hour work weeks with a pager on call 24 hours a day.  Pagers, remember those?  Although today I continue to be on call 24 hours, 7 days a week, my clients (kids) are much cuter than those cranky old Wall Street techno nerds (I say that lovingly because I married one, ha ha) and significantly more pleasant.

My son loves cutting up his own apples with this apple slicer gadget.

Where was I?  Oh, the kitchen gadgets.  Indignation.  I wasn’t exactly a hard core feminist when I met my husband, but I had been a professional woman supporting myself long enough in the wilds of Manhattan to have a heavy dose of tension when trying to divide up domestic duties with my new spouse.  Call it practical feminism, perhaps.  He worked for money.  I worked for money.  While the paychecks weren’t exactly equivalent, the time spent to earn them was.  We both needed and deserved equal rest and recreation, so it made perfectly good sense to me that we would both contribute equally in the care of our household.  So when I received gifts for the home and he got, well, socks, ties, games or puzzles, I wanted to shake my fists and scream.  This is not what I signed up for!  I’d swallow that lump of rage and try to accept my tools of domestic enslavement with as much graciousness that I could muster accepting that the culture from which he came would likely not be changed by me.

This mini scooper has been great for scooping up cookie dough. Especially the raw vegan kind :)

Time passed, babies came, and I’d like to think that I’ve mellowed with age.  He runs a company and I run a household, a couple of them, even.  Our roles and responsibilities are about as traditional as it gets and I consider it good fortune that I get to choose a career as flexible, creative, compassionate and gratifying as raising up my kids.  Not everyone finds satisfaction with child and household care, so I applaud all women who find work that fulfills them best.  Happy, responsible mommies, are the best mommies.  The end.  Only, to settle the age old pick-up-your-socks fight, we’ve hired a housekeeper.

Just got these Scrub Buds in my Xmas stocking. Steely and springy and won’t scratch. I think.

Today, I’m thrilled with my mother-in-laws nifty little gadget discoveries.  We get together and have a lot to share.  Last year I was all fired up from my Vitamix.  She was like, yeah, I’ve had one of those for ages.  My new dehydrator?  She scoffs (not really, because she’s too nice to scoff), kid, have you been living under a rock?  Ah, but I got her with my spiralizer.  Finally I have something fun and quirky (and useful) to share with her for our next visit – zucchini noodles.

What nifty little gadget can you never part with?

About a week ago I had trimmed my bangs and for once, was happy with the results.  They looked hip (I’m not), a bit edgy (I’m not, really), and in spite of my crazy cowlick, they fell smoothly into place with little effort.  They would have been perfect if they were only a few millimeters shorter.  Today, I awoke with a slight fever (flu – bleh) and decided to remedy that.  Not so great results.  In my feverish state, I ruined a perfectly good fringe.  I was sweating bullets as I tried to fix and fix and fix it.

Cutting bangs will go on my list of things not to do when having a fever.

I least it’s not as bad as this haircut…

He’s so cute, though, he can survive a bad hair cut.

Someone should really hide the scissors – from me.  Fever or not.

Update 1/10/13:

Now that I’ve updated my Gravatar and other profile images, I might as well share it here.  Alas, my hacked fringe.  I keep telling my son that the best cure for a bad hair cut is two weeks.  Three weeks later, and mine still seems just as hacked and goofy.

Back to juicing.  Needless to say, I am no longer juice fasting.  I got to around day four and simply admitted that I just want dinner.  Juicing throughout the day wasn’t such a challenge, in fact, I really enjoyed the simplicity of preparing the juice at the beginning of the day and having all my meals and snacks ready when I needed them.  Feeding the family was and still is my greatest challenge.  I like to spend time with them around the dinner table, and with just juice for dinner in the face of their meals, sitting there felt like sheer hell.  Overall, juicing has more appeal to me now from this experience and I can envision including a fresh juice into my daily routine.

I had the pleasure of spending the weekend in the country and got to play around with my Dad’s juicer.  He’s got one of those fabulous Breville Juice Fountains.  I could put an entire cucumber through the chute with no chopping.  Whole carrots, beets, radishes, no fuss!  It took minutes to juice for an entire day, versus the hour or more it takes with my own juicer.  However, before I start sounding like a cheesy infomercial, I’ve gotta say, it’s got some pitfalls.  The Breville is a centrifugal juicer and isn’t great with leafy greens, which is the base of most of my juices.  Cleanup is pretty simple, but the enthusiasm of quick and easy juicing faded when I saw that the pulp is still a tad wet and, well, juicy.  I feel a little guilty letting those valuable nutrients go to waste.  Now, I can see that if I included this in my arsenal of power tools, I’d probably juice more frequently.  I’ve just got to decide if I want to give up the cupboard space for another toy.  In the meantime, Dad’s offered me his to continue my test drive.  So generous.

Thanks, Dad.

PS:  This isn’t a sponsored post.  I haven’t gotten enough readers, yet, to make me interesting to Breville, I’m sure.  However, some day… if I am sponsored, I promise I’ll let you know.

I’m hosting Thanksgiving dinner.  Yikes.  I mean, Hurray!  With guests.  So exciting!  Busy, busy, busy.  No time to write.  But just enough time to pass this along in case you haven’t seen it yet.

This little ditty from Love Everybody put a smile on my face this morning.

Next, I’m googling “how to cook a turkey”.

Complete.  I even spent the day at Ikea, and while Dad and his friend gobbled down those fabulous Swedish meatballs, I drank my quart of juice.  Oh lord, and I even made dinner for everyone tonight, and survived.

I think the most difficult part of fasting today was explaining why I was doing this.  To write it seems easier.  When I watched those two men in the movie, I wanted that change for myself.  I want to wake up with less pain.  I want to believe that cleaning up my diet really will improve my health.  And I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I want to lose weight.  Want, want, want… meaningless words unless I take some action.

Can I really say that it’s day two of my juice fast when last night I accidentally ate a piece of pizza immediately after submitting my post?  It was an accident, really.  I wasn’t even feeling hungry.  I did need to get my little guy off to bed, and went downstairs into the pizza smelling heaven – no purgatory – that is my kitchen.   All the leftovers were left out.  Aarrgh.  While putting the food away, oops, I just took a bite.  Then the rest of the slice just disappeared.  Realizing that I was in enemy territory, I scooped up the kid and got out of there fast.

Looking back, I still count the day as a success.  Without my usual coffee in the morning, I had anticipated a terrible day with headaches and major brain fog.  I was more tired than usual, and my head felt a little tense, but it wasn’t as bad as I expected.  What I didn’t plan for was the 20 plus urgent trips to the bathroom throughout the day.  I should have listened more carefully when one woman who tried the 10-day fast described something similar.  But if I had listened, I probably wouldn’t have started.

Today was a little better.  I woke up with a clear head and 2 pounds down – mostly water, I’m sure.  I had expected much worse caffeine withdrawals, but I won’t complain.  Before leaving for my morning driving rounds, I downed some juice I had prepared the day before.  Ideally, it is better to drink the juice as soon as it’s made.  However, setting myself up for success also means preparing some juice the night before so I have something for the morning rush.  Juicing for the day took about an hour and a half.  That seems excessive, but I ruined a batch by added a particularly hot jalapeno, then had to juice more veggies to tone it down.

Usually when I juice vegetables, I grab whatever I have in the fridge.  But I’ve gone through so many veggies (especially greens) that I needed a little bit more of a plan to help with the shopping.  I went straight to the website, Join the Reboot, that was mentioned in the movie, Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead.  The plans are free as long as you make a profile.  I’m starting by following the Long Weekend, although I plan to extend it for 10 days instead of just 3.  They don’t have easy peasy shopping lists, but it doesn’t take much to transpose the recipes into a list of what’s needed.

Yesterday I tried both the Sunset Blend Juice (with sweet potato, carrots, red bell pepper, beets and apples) and the Gazpacho Juice (with tomatoes, cucumber, celery, red bell pepper, onion and parsley).  Both were delicious and a total diversion from what I typically juice.  I wasn’t so excited with the Citrus Green Juice, but it was much better after adding some ginger and lemon.

For tomorrow, I’ve got to plan a little.  Most of the day will be spent out of the house running errands with my dad, and a stop at Ikea is among them.  Oh, the Swedish Meatballs.  Sigh.