Home Sweet Home

My family has a serious hereditary condition. I think it can all be traced back to some serious gypsy roots somewhere or another (did they even have Cherokee, Irish, or Scottish gypsies???). We LOVE to travel. All of us. Keep us in one place for too long and we start to get kind of...fidgety.

This time last year we were prepping for our HUGE trip to Alaska, which you can read about earlier on my blog if you missed it. Those of you who are waiting for the rest. Um...don't give up. One day. Maybe.

This year we're just prepping for summer. Which is so far a blank slate desperately (in my mind) needing travel plans.

I LOVE being home. I was that kid who didn't like to spend the night at other people's houses (sorry Rachael!) because I wanted to be at mine. But for some reason the older I get the more I'm starting to be high maintenance about this travel thing.

I think my solution is camping trips. Three. Four. I'm still planning and convincing hubby that we WANT to go anywhere this summer.

What do you do for fun in the summer if you don't work as much then? Who all likes to camp? What fun projects do you do at your house when you get time off work?

Off to eat some mint chocolate chip icecream. Which is completely unrelated to this topic. But in case you wondered...

Goal Shapshot: Cooking for my Family

Yesterday I finally did it. I ventured into the organic section of the grocery store and bought my probably-pretty-allergic-to-milk toddler some foods I've been meaning to try with him (or re-try).

We bought:

*goats milk (he's not the biggest fan. He likes water and doesn't understand why that 'water' tastes funny. But it's good to confirm he doesn't have any kind of intolerance to that so I can bake with it now. If you can ever do that with goats milk...)

*sun butter (Basically peanut butter with sunflower seeds instead--since I have so many allergies we hear it's best to wait till he's 2 to give him peanut butter...and with the milk allergy issues, I'm not taking chances...unfortunately I couldn't get him to even put this in his mouth. Then again, I tried it on a banana and he's kinda so-so on bananas since they're slimy. Maybe in a cut up sandwich?)

*cheese. Mozzerella 'style' shreds, to be exactly. And yes, it disturbed me that it smelled funny, had a slightly gray tinge, and tasted so funky cold that I had to shove a spoonfull of Sun butter in to get rid of the taste.

BUT...BUT...BUT...BUT

Here's the exciting part. It turns out if you bake this 'cheese' it suddenly tastes yummy. And so for the first time last night, Little Man got to have pizza.

He giggled between bites.

It just made me SO happy to be able to give him a yummy 'kid' food that I haven't been able to give him. Thank you, vegans of the world, for inspiring companies to create foods that don't have dairy and making them taste good.

Last month, we discovered he loves vegan chocolate. (And seriously, with the kind I bought, you couldn't tell it wasn't the real thing. I promise.)

This month, pizza.

And I think because I've been wanting to make cookies with him for so long but never could find the dairy free butter (found it yesterday!) we might do that this weekend so he can have a chocolate chip cookie like a normal kid.

You have no idea how happy this makes me. We find out in June via allergy test if he for real has a milk allergy (still) or if he's one of the ones who outgrows it. Hopefully it will be gone by then. But just in case, it's so nice to know he'll still have yummy food and not be 'left out'.

Now off to figure out how to make a yummy dairy free cookie...