Family photo time!

Hello,

meet my family! My friend Erin from Hello Pinecone Photography takes our family photos once a year. It is so lovely to have so beautiful good quality photos of our family. For once we are all in one photo! It is incredible to see how my boys grow - they look different every year in these yearly photos! Here are a few of the photos from 2015. They were taken at Descanso Gardens where members are allowed one shoot per year for holiday cards or something like that.

Packing a healthy real food school lunch is super simple.

*** UPDATE: I don't know why the Blogger keeps sending this post to the subscribers of this blog! I will look into it! :) Sorry about extra emails. ***

Grilled chicken, olives, pomegranate and rutabaga sticks.

No-one brings lunch to school in Finland. The lunch is provided by the public school (most children attend public school) for free - well, not free, but paid by everyone's taxes. I grew up eating warm home cooked meal type school lunches in Finnish school cafeteria: Fish soup, ground beef soup, cabbage casserole, meat sauce and potatoes, meat balls and mashed potatoes, liver casserole, spinach pancakes and blood pancakes with lingonberry preserves (yes, you read that right). You can find a lot of those recipes from my other blog Rootlicious.

Here in the US I pack my children's school lunches and snacks (I still don't get it why they would need a snack in between breakfast they've had right before school at home and school lunch, it is just a few hours and the snack just spoils the appetite for lunch in my humble opinion). I pack them mostly paleo foods and the lunch consists of a protein (meat, mushrooms or nuts or seeds), a serving of vegetables and a serving of fruit or berries. Leftovers from last night's dinner are great. For snack I add one serving of veggies, fruit or nuts.

I use a bento box type lunch box with compartments to separate the different foods. My favorites are Planet Box and Lunch Bots. They are durable stainless steel lunch boxes with compartments and they are free from plastic (which I am afraid can contain chemicals that leach in to the food). I pack the stainless steel box in an insulated lunch bag.

Cucumber slices, spinach plantain pancakes,
water melon and blackberries in a Lunch Bots.

Packing a paleo school lunch is super simple. Even your children can do it themselves and save you a lot of work. They actually can find it fun to pack their own lunch starting from chopping vegetables or fruit. Even my three year old can chop most veggies and fruit with a knife. I like to give them sharp knives instead of dull ones (in fear of them hurting themselves) because the dull knives slip easier and can hurt them too. It feels good to use a proper knife and with supervision even very small children can totally do it. I also often leave vegetables or fruit whole, they don't always need to be chopped. An apple or banana are in perfect packages as they are!

Pick one from each category below and put them in a bento box. You can of course use two or more different kinds of fruit or berries or vegetables at once.

Spinach pancakes with apple sauce and
prosciutto wrapped grilled mushrooms

Category 1: Protein
I prefer to buy organic, grass fed and sustainable and without additives.

• Ground beef patty in lettuce wrap (fried the same morning)
• Mushrooms wrapped in prosciutto or bacon grilled in toaster oven that morning
• Nut butter with veggies or fruit
• Nuts or seeds
• Cooked/canned fish
• Larabar
• Epic bar
• Cooked chicken strips (alone or with a Paleo wrap and guacamole, ground beef is nice with the wrap and guacamole too)
• A grilled chicken drumstick
• Lunch meat, liverwurst or fried bacon (some healthy options can be found from US Wellness Meats)
• Cooked shrimp
• Paleo fish sticks (click for a recipe - the same recipe can be used to make paleo chicken nuggets)
• A boiled egg would be perfect if we didn't avoid eggs due to allergies.
• Paleo meat balls
• Peas
• Green beans

TIP: Use tooth picks to pin liverwurst, lunch meat or sausage pieces together with cucumber slices

Category 2: Vegetables
I like to use seasonal veggies.

• Spinach pancakes with apple sauce
• Baby carrots or carrot sticks
• Persian cucumbers (whole), or cucumber sticks or slices (a quick ranch dip can be made with coconut kefir, garlic, Herbamare, lemon, parsley)
• Raw rutabaga or turnip sticks
• Radishes
• Steamed broccoli
• Raw cauliflower florets
• Sea weed
• Guacamole (or is avocado technically a fruit?)
• Olives
• Salad
• Pickles
• Sauerkraut
• Other fermented veggies

Category 3: Fruit/treat/dessert (or snack)
I like to use seasonal fruit and berries.

• Blueberries/raspberries/blackberries/strawberries
• A whole apple/peach/plum
• Orange slices
• Pieces of melon
• A plantain pancake with Sunbutter (we use this one) or nut butter or homemade paleo "nutella" (add raw cacao powder to a nutbutter or use a recipe like this)
• Strawberries with paleo "Nutella"
• Apple sauce
• Fermented apple sauce
• Fruit salad with seasonal fruit
• Grapes
• Paleo muffins (Google for tons of recipes!)
• Coconut balls (kids love to make these themselves)
• Chocolate pudding from avocados
  
  

Remember to add an ice pack if you have packed meat. Don't forget water. We use stainless steel water bottles (we use this kind except always with a regular cap, sports caps and sippy cup caps worry me for mouth development issues). We pack a cloth napkin too. The kids can help sew those from leftover fabrics, or choose their own fabrics from the store. My son made a few spider napkins and they are his favorite. It is a nice touch to add a little love note, a joke or a fun fact for the kids who are learning to read. I make mine in our secret language, Finnish.

Sailing in Sunshine

It was a beautiful day sailing today!

How to Keep Kids Busy So I Can Make Kombucha?

Someone asked me this week again how I have time to do all this cooking, fermenting and blogging. And do I put the kids in front of the TV to be able to do it. This is a question that comes up often so I thought I'd post a few ideas I have found useful to get to do my chores with small kids at home. 

(I do say though that there are moments I will have them watch a movie to get to do something but we have now limited screen time to weekends and days off. During the week we don't watch much TV except on some special occasions, I am flexible with rules :))

(I also want to say that things get easier when the kids get bigger. Mine are almost three and seven now and they just play together while I do other things. It is wonderful!)

(Oh and my personal choice is to choose cooking, fermenting over other things to do when the kids are asleep. It is my hobby. I use nearly all my free time in the kitchen. Apart from my daily short yoga practice. I don't have time to watch TV etc. that normal people do. I choose to ferment instead because I am crazy for food!)

Six tips how to get work done with kids at home (aka Alternatives to the Screen):

Borrowed this chart from Maria Montessori Facebook Page.

1. Ask the kids to help you in what you are doing. They love helping with real jobs. It makes them feel good too. There are many things in the kitchen the kids can help with. They can tear lettuce, chop vegetables (yes, I do give knives to even small children as long as they are supervised and they can't run around with them), hold the funnel while you bottle kombucha, measure ingredients, peel vegetables, grate vegetables, wash dishes etc. The little ones who are little enough can even just bathe in the sink (supervised of course) while you work next to them!

2. Have the kids busy with some other easy household chores while you do what you need to do: empty the dish washer, clean surfaces with a spray bottle of water and vinegar and a rag, fold towels or wash cloths, wipe tables, dust, mop the floors, vacuum, set the table, water plants, put toys away and so on.

3. I have noticed that if I am busy doing something, the kids often stay busy with their play as well. The moment I sit down to check my email they want something from me. But as long as I am on the move, they seem to stay happy in whatever they are doing too. On their own.

4. Little boredom feeds the creativity! The kids will most often come up with things to do on their own too if I need to finish something and they don't want to help with that. Maybe not right away and not without some complaints but eventually they do :)

5. My older reads books to the younger one. This is great because he gets practice in reading, the little one gets someone to read him to and I get to do my own things.

6. I can see our back yard from my kitchen window. I send them out to play in the sand box while I work in the kitchen and I can keep an eye on them the whole time.

I (we!) need more tips - please add yours to the comments!

Mothers Day Happiness.

This has to be the best Mothers day ever. Miio had selected the theme (Thomas the Train). According to the selected theme I got a Thomas the train card and Miio performed the Thomas tune and told me Thomas stories. Miio is also planning the same theme for Fathers day but it is a secret! Shhh!

I also got breakfast to bed and a shirt, text by Miio that says Äiti on meidän paras (Mom is our best), which in Miio language means that Mom is their favorite. :) And a rose from the garden, a big beautiful rose.

I loved the part of the morning where I was pretending to be sleeping and my husband and son were preparing breakfast in the kitchen. Miio kept running in and whispering to me excitedly things like: "We are baking you a cake! It is a surprise!" Four year olds just can't keep secrets (three year olds neither, it was the same thing last year). And why not, if the secret is so much fun, why not share it right away? ;)

Actually the best part of my mothers day is that I am now a mother of two. Leo Kiian is now 2 months old.

Photo by Erin Maher, check out her site!