Vegetable juice and bread

i'm not a fan of vegetables.  actually, I have pretty much hated most vegetables for most of my life.  they just don't taste good and I don't want them. that being said, I realize that I should eat them for a couple of main reasons:

1. vegetables are good for you
2. it's easier to convince your kids to eat vegetables if you eat them.

so I am making efforts to up my veggie intake.  having acquired a juicer in 2011, I am also trying to get it into regular rotation in my kitchen.  so after a trip to the market, I made a very... "interesting" vegetable juice.



recipe is a strong term but here's what I had: fennel, celery, cucumbers, ginger, carrots, green apples... I realize that a licorice-hater should avoid fennel. blech.




but i also found that after a couple of days, the flavors mellowed and melded and it was much more tolerable.  yeah you thought i was going to say it was "good"... not quite. but drinkable. 

so after juicing, there were tons of bit of veggie pulp with no purpose.  i also had a zucchini bread recipe sitting in my kitchen.  so i figured these bits are sort of like grated zucchini only much drier. so add some water and use them.  this bread was so tasty that pid, husband and i devoured it.  it was that good.  i think it would still be darned tasty with less sugar in it. will experiment with that next time.

cloth diapering... fun?

sometime before jellybean was born, i'd decided to reconsider cloth diapering.  this was something I thought about when I was pregnant with pid but for various reasons decided against at the time. back then I was considering gDiapers products and as it turned out they were still around when I considered it in 2012 so I did a little research and decided to go for it. 

i'll confess... part of the attraction was the cute factor.  gDiapers are just so much cuter than any disposable i'd ever seen.  so we started using them when jellybean was about 3 or 4 weeks old when we ran out of the limited newborn size diapers we had been given.  definitely a learning curve but the husband and I figured it out easily enough. 

PROS -

• adorable.  seriously.  these are the cutest.  I know you won't believe it without a picture so here's one. see... adorable, right?
• trim fitting.  ok, i'm not sure why they make skinny jeans in size 3 months.  i'm even less sure why I bought them.  but I did and gDiapers fit under them.  can't say that about a lot of cloth diapers from what I've read. 
• several parts to the system... if the absorbent insert is just wet, put it in the laundry, give the liner a rinse or wipe and reuse the liner and pant.  less laundry!
• hybrid system also has disposable, no... FLUSHABLE inserts available.  I used these when we traveled out of town and were in a hotel for Thanksgiving the other week. they flushed fine and were very convenient. 

CONS -

• counter-intuitive fastening... the Velcro closes in the back.  though if your kid is anything like a friend of mine's daughter, this is actually a pro because her daughter was a diaper Houdini and liked to break out of her confines on a regular basis.
• several parts to the system... outer pant, snap-in pouch, absorbent insert.  it can be a pain sometimes to put them all together. 
• learning curve on preventing leaks but once you master it, leaks are very, very rare