Silent Sunday – 10/11/2013
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Go Faster Food for Kids Review
Almost two weeks ago I was sent Go Faster Food for Kids, a lovely recipe book for busy children (and parents) to review.
As we have moved meanwhile and the time has passed I decided to include it on my possible Christmas presents list, which I will update regularly from now until Christmas.
The author, Kate Perry, has had a lot of experience in sports nutrition, going back to 2000, when she started researching foods that provide the best of fuel for athletes. As a result, Go Faster Food, her first recipe book was written and geared to help athletes achieve the best results in marathons and sporting competitions by eating the right foods, in the right balance.
Her present book was written to provide ideas and inspiration for parents of athlete children and their coaches. It offers an array of tasty, healthy and nutritionally balanced recipes aimed to power and support training and competition preparation.
The book is neatly structured into two sections: the first offers a lot of researched information on children’ nutrition and eating appropriately for a sporting event.The nice touch that the author brings, and what makes this book different from a simple nutrition for children book is the inclusion of interviews with children and teenage athletes and the way they approach nutrition in the context of sporting competitions. I would wholeheartedly recommend the book for any aspiring little athletes you have in your family, the role model interviews provided in the book are deemed to impress and inspire them!
The second section provides breakfast&brunch, mains and light meal recipes supported by mouth-watering pictures.
As a busy mother and wife who strives to provide balanced meals to a picky eater, a pregnant mommy and a training athlete, I was particularly impressed by the mains’ section and the fact that they have been structured into meals that can be ready in under 20 minutes(!!), under 45 minutes and slow cooked, when time isn’t an issue. This means I have no excuses now to cook a nutritious meal, even when I am short of time and with 101 recipes to choose from the book will definitely provide me with inspiration when I run out of ideas!
I have included this as my first entry for what I hope will be a useful list of Christmas present ideas I will be posting until mid-December. I would definitely recommend it for the budding athletes in the family and for their cooking mothers!
Silent Sunday – 03/11/2013
Transform Halloween into A Night Of Hope
We all have mental images and maybe memories to associate with Halloween:
“Tricks or treats” and buckets of sweets.
Rows and rows of scary masks, overpriced sweets and fluorescent nylon tights.
Pumpkin carving, pumpkin pie and pumpkin soup.
Scary movies, popcorn and warm fireplaces.
Witches and broomsticks, pirates and eye patches: little children playing at being someone fierce or scary. A controlled game of fear played in the first world under the protective gaze of loving and caring parents/carers. A choice of facing fear and retreating into loving arms when the scary bits get too frightening.
Unfortunately, for many other children in this world, there is no such choice to be had in the day to day life. No choice in NOT getting married to a man three times your age. No choice of NOT losing a parent in a meaningless war. No choice of food as maybe there is no food in the house. No choice of avoiding fear as fear permeates life the same way sound permeates the air, continuously and unavoidably…
World Vision has launched the appeal A Night Of Hope and on the 31st of October is inviting us all to carve a heart into our pumpkins and give a different meaning to Halloween. The appeal is as simple as this: “Let’s make 31 October 2013 the day we stand alongside children living in fear in the world’s hardest places and show we care!”
Please use your pumpkin to raise awareness for their campaign. And more importantly, use these special family moments to chat to your own children about the subject and make them aware of a very different reality for millions of children just like them. Compassion can never start too early and it ALWAYS starts at home.
Please do have a look at the Night of Hope World Vision webpage and feel free to download their “Guide to a Halloween free of fear.” It includes instructions on how to heart carve your pumpkin, tips on how to use your pumpkin seeds, and delicious recipes by Lesley Waters for sweet sticky pumpkin tart and pumpkin soup. But more importantly, it includes an awareness printout that can be stuck in the window and a touching story about girls, like Sylvia, facing the unbearable thought of a forced marriage from an early age.
Happy Halloween everybody!
My to-do lists…
I am a doer, so I am. I have always been one, come to think of it, but my lists shaped up and started to feature consistently in my life after a few summers of working in Switzerland in children’s camps. I learned so many things during those summers but most of all, I understood the importance of sanitation, organisation and discipline :-).
You see, I am a firm believer in “plan for success.” In my opinion, a mentality of “good things happen to those who believe in good things” characterises people who are too lazy to plan and work. As a family, we live our lives according to the slogan “good things happen to those who plan ahead!”
As I wrote in a previous post last week, when it comes to juggling modern parenting tasks, good organisational skills are essential for the smooth running of a household. I try at the moment to balance many “plates” and as any juggler worth his/her salt, I need to know my tricks really well in order to maintain harmony in our lives. I am, at the moment, studying, building a home business, expecting a baby and being a mummy, all at once. My tips?
- Prioritise daily and hourly. Be flexible about when things get done, as long as everything gets done in the end!
This week I will need to tick several very important things on my to-do list. I need to hand in my first assignment. Write five blog posts. Chauffeur Emma around to some of her after-school activities. Pack our belongings as we’ll be moving house on Saturday!!
How do I plan to do it? By breaking the days into hours and by filling every hour with a task, in order of priority and circumstances.
For example, Emma woke up this morning at 6.30. I was intending to read for my assignment but since reading is impossible with a small child around, I recruited hubby who started work late today and we managed to do some much needed packing in that hour and a half before he headed out!
- Plan ahead! Especially for big things like holidays, life insurance cover, Christmas expenditure…etc.
Hubby has started budgeting carefully our income a year ago, when we realised with horror that our outgoings were larger than our incomes! We also sat down and spoke about serious situations, like illness or sudden death of one or both of us, and we decided that life insurance was an expense worth making in order to provide a safety net for each other in the very unfortunate case.
He also budgets every month for our summer holidays and we think ahead when it comes to birthday parties (I paid for Emma’s in April, since the soft play area she likes was running a promotion!) and Christmas expenses (as I said in a previous post, I asked Emma to choose only two items, which I already got in the half price sales Sainsbury’s is running at the moment!)
- Don’t put things off, it will only make you stress out and ultimately cram your days!
Planning and to-do lists are not meant to “cramp your style”, as some people think, but they are there to help you uncram your days! If you have a written down or mental plan for the day you will be more efficient in achieving your short and long-term goals.You will also feel satisfied and happy once things get ticked off your list as you will know the end is in sight!
Avoid planning and you may end up running around like a headless chicken, trying to achieve unreasonable tasks for the amount of time and energy you have at your disposal.
This entry is my blog post contribution to the challenge the Mumsnet team and Aviva launched recently regarding life insurance. The opinions and views expressed are entirely my own. If you want to learn more about what life insurance is and what Aviva can offer you in this sense, please watch the video below:
Mama's Haven 