Veggie Tales

i was blogger stalking the other night and came across a blog about a mother who is raising her children vegan. you can link to her blog here.

whenever i think of vegan parenting i think of the baby who died because his vegan parents only feed him soy milk and apple juice. according to this news article they were recently convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. i'll be honest, i approached vegan mom's blog with some (ok enough to feed a small country) cynicism about how she feeds her family.


after reading a few of her posts i guess you could say i was eating (vegan) humble pie. this seems like a smart and competent woman. her kids look healthy (i.e. not ready for leading roles in a world vision commercial). i liked her blog a lot and found myself slightly (ok massively) jealous of her glowing skin and shinny hair. it seems like this lifestyle really works for vegan blog mom and her kids.

but....

as a way of life for MOST people, i think it is problematic. to feed your children (not to mention yourself) competently, it seems like you'd have to spend all your time either preparing food or reading about preparing food. now i don't know about you, but spending all of my time doing either of these two things would land me in a mental institution faster that you can say roast beef dinner. i have better stuff do to like watch little dorrit, play axis and allies, and stalk the blogs of people i don't even know!

even for people who like cooking, want to be vegan, and spend a lot of their time reading about it---raising healthy kids on a vegan diet seems like an uphill battle. at least that is the conclusion that i reached after reading a study about the effect of a vegan diet on infants. according to the study all of the infants who participated in the study showed evidence of protein-calorie malnutrition, iron, zinc and vitamin B deficiency anemia, rickets, and experienced multiple recurrent infections. doctors also noted developmenal delays in all of the children.

(let me know if you want they study--i have it downloaded for my school library as a pdf).

so i have decided that in mercedes land the kids are going to eat frozen pizza and microwaveable hamburgers....but reading vegan mom's blog did make me think that we could stand to have a few more vegetables and legumes in our diet. i could never be full on vegan. i am from alberta for heaven's sake. telling people you don't eat meat will get you kicked out of the province. don't believe me....ask K.D. Lang. so to ease my troubled mind i threw an extra can of garbanzo beans into the white chili we had for dinner.

and after eating it....i feel so healthy. in fact i think i am glowing.

honestly though this is kind of something i am interested in. is anyone aware of studies, in peer reviewed journals, that talk about the positive effect sof a vegan diet for children and/or adults? i'd be interested to learn more. I read the McDougal Way years ago and thought it was pretty interesting....

My rock stars aren't like your rock stars....

meet kate jones and martin rifkin. these lovely canadians are the inventors of gummy vitamins.

we picked up some up at costco. they are good. so good in fact that i might have what health care professionals refer to as a vitamin abuse problem. i don't care if i am an addict though because i am as healthy as a horse. i didn't even get a cold this winter (and i didn't have a flu shot either). i attribute my health to the obscene amount of gummy vites i consume on a daily (cough, hourly) basis.

and just in case you are curious, yes, we bought the kids version. why? because the kiddie kind taste better and we are the kind of people who care more about how stuff tastes than if it is good for us (a position we may come to regret when we are both so fat we need a crane to lift us out of the house). until then, taste wins every time.

Daddy Like

remember when I used to scamper around the city looking like this?


(contrary to popular belief I am not wearing a black wig--read on for more insight into this seriously misguided hair colour choice)

when i moved to NYC to start grad school i'd just finished a stint working for MAC makeup. working there was glorious: my boss was thebomb.com, i had coworkers who were actually worth talking to, and a sixty percent discount on product (which lead to a serious makeup abuse problem).

if you want to work for MAC you have to just accept a couple of things:

1. at some point you are going to have to dye your hair black

which i did. totally caved into the peer pressure. when my mom saw me she told me if i kept my hair THAT colour i would never get married. worried she'd never live to see a grandchild, she offered to pay for me to get it dyed back to blond. even though part of me i wanted to say no just to prove i wasn't desperate, i've never been one to say no to free colour.

i wish i had because the colour session didn't go as discussed and i came out with a serious case of zebra hair which lasted for like three years (also not a great colour choice if you are on the prowl).

2. you are going to have to wear a truck load of makeup everyday.

i thought it was fun to get my creative juices going first thing in the morning. what to wear? blush or bronzer? gloss or lipstick? what type of coverage? why choose--i'd whore it up and wear them all--together--on a regular basis. usually it looked pretty good too.

when i got to NYC i kept up the makeup routine for several months. i liked wearing a truck load of makeup everyday--i thought i looked good and besides that, makeup was my artistic outlet (because i am a total artiste). eventually after being asked one too many times if i was a GOTH i decided i should maybe tone it down a little. i was 25! i was a grad student! people were supposed to take me seriously!

so i traded my beloved ruby woo and moxie lipsticks for oyster girl lip gloss, full coverage foundation for tinted moisturizer and eye shadow for eye cream (cause i am getting OLD). my application skills have deteriorated to a point where the other night when i went to put some eyeliner on (because we are going to a fancy party) i could barely draw a straight line.

anyhooo

while trolling the internet this afternoon i found this amazing website where they post makeup tutorials. the tutorials include application instructions and a list of all the products used. be forewarned, however, this isn't exactly the kind of stuff you'd find in instyle magazine. it is loud and out there, but also really fun and artistic so check it out.

here are some of my favorite looks:

(you can click on the pictures for closeups--the detail is amazing)



do you think there is such a thing as a makeup artist-anthropologist-librarian because all of a sudden i want to do makeup again.....

Summer Do

This morning I had strawberries in my cereal. Finally it feels like summer! While eating I started thinking about the things I want to do in the next few months. Here is my list:

(because writing it down and posting it keeps me accountable)

1. SEW a dress. I was thinking this one is cute-ish (i.e. doesn't look like something an Amish person would wear--which it one of my biggest hang ups about homemade clothes).

2. READ the following:

The reviews on this Susanna Clarke book all say that it's a hard read but amazing: Jane Austen meets mystery (with lots of footnotes, which I love. I also like books with LOOONG introductions).

Because it is the only Austen I haven't read....and there are only so many times you can read Pride and Prejudice (or watch it, which is why I took the advice of my friend Nikki Kelly and put a movie called "Little Dorrit" in my Netflix cue--watching it is also a summer do).

Reading Allan Bloom takes me back to Political Science 100. Professor Heidi Studer rocked my world that year. She introduced me to Allan Bloom and reading him makes me nostalgic for that first year of university (which is sort of odd because I have tried to suppress all memories of that time in my life. I was pretty much a big fat disaster! And I do mean FAT!). I don't agree with everything Bloom says--but that if half the fun of reading his work.

3. PLANT my own basil garden. This tutorial makes it look super easy....but I feel about plants the way I feel about babies....TERRIFIED I WILL KILL THEM. Time to conquer my fears. Noelle, Miriam you two know what you are doing--does this tutorial look about right?

4. YOGA at the Cambridge Baptiste Studio--because nothing beats a sweaty downward dog!

5. CRUISE around Cape Cod on one a bike (but only for an hour MAX because am I the only one whose hips feel like they are going to explode after sitting on a bike for about 15 minutes?).

6. LEARN about anthropological theory (ya sounds like a blast eh?)

7. RUN along the Charles

(ok maybe it will be more like a shuffle. We went hiking today and I was out of breath after about 30 seconds of climbing. Maybe yoga isn't quite the cardio workout I thought it was. )

8. BAKE some Lemon Bars

I have been craving them for like three months and Starbucks is always out. Curses.

9. Pratiquez mon FRANCAIS. I am taking a course. Friends and family who speak the french, be warned: I'm gonna be in touch a whole lot because I can barely remember how to conjugate avoir.

What is on your summer-to-do list?