Hopper Tots is a beautiful London-based collective Children’s Blog which features “new products, cool brands and great buys for babies and toddlers”. This week, excitingly Hopper Tots reached out to me asking what the 5 baby/toddler related items I could not have lived without being a new Mummy. (Note – update Feb 2014. This blog has now ceased)
When I was growing up one of my favorite dishes my Mum made for our family was a slow simmered hearty stew. Of course, it was made with minced beef, but I am sure back then there were no near as many hormones and chemicals in the cows most people eat today. I always enjoyed the taste of beef, but when I was around the age of 15 I stopped eating all animals, because I have such a love for them. It never made any sense to me to eat them.
A few months ago, while Miles Storm and I were out and about in Williamsburg Brooklyn I stumbled upon a bottle of Blue Print Cleanse’s freshly pressed organic Cashew Nut, Agave, Vanilla and Cinnamon drink (AKA known as White Juice). It was amazing and we both fought over the last drop…. seriously! I took a photo of that moment and put it up through the Willy B Mum twitter feed tagging Blue Print Cleanse on it.
We eat a lot of chickpeas (garbanzo beans) in our house. We bake them, put them in salads, make soup and create the traditional yummy Middle Eastern dish – hummus. Hummus is basically a concoction of olive oil, lemon, chickpeas, sesame tahini and garlic, and is supposedly one of the oldest dishes dating back to Egypt 7000 years ago!
My family really enjoy our Sunday trips to the Rhinebeck Farmers Market, upstate NY, where we spend every weekend. Miles Storm especially loves the experience, having visited the market with us since he was born, it is something he gets very excited about. This past weekend he particularly enjoyed tasting some of the produce. First he tried zucchini, then he tried apples and lastly he tried carrots. It was hilarious to watch, people were in stitches laughing at his antics.
Today, as it was so hot, I decided to go and visit my girlfriend and her 4-year-old where they live in the gorgeous seaside town of Rowayton, Connecticut. Rowayton is around 45 miles from New York City on the Long Island Sound. It is a sleepy aquatic sailing town which is one of the most expensive communities in the United States to live.
Ever since starting this Blog 6 months ago, I have become a domestic goddess with an emphasis on cooking (as my girlfriend Yfat put it). It is in part that now being a mother I want the very best for my Son. It is important to my husband and I that he eats good, healthy, mainly organic clean foods. Secondly, I also need material to write this blog!!
I never thought that I would still be breastfeeding my 22 month old Son, but I am. Years ago, I actually thought that I would never breastfeed at all as I worried about what it would do to my body, selfish yes I know. It was easy to say then as I really had no idea of the differences in cow milk formula and breast milk. I am not a big fan of cow’s milk, and my Son actually cannot drink or eat cow products as he breaks out in the skin condition eczema.
We always have so much produce in our refrigerator at home, and although my family eats an abundance of fruits and vegetables it is, at times, challenging to eat everything before it goes bad.
This afternoon for lunch I decided to take the ingredients we had available and turn it in to an awesome healthy salad. The strawberry puree dressing was something I have never done before, and I am really happy with the way my experiment turned out.
A few days ago we realized Miles Storm was not feeling well, and when we checked his temperature it was just over 102 (poor little guy). We took him straight to the ER at the local Northern Dutchess Hospital where we were for 3 hours waiting to see what was wrong with him. He just laid there on the bed as limp as limp, which was so heart breaking to see. It ended up, that he had a bad ear infection which we assume he developed because he had been in the pool the day before. My Son participates in swimming lessons at an amazing school in Brooklyn called Aqua Beba. He is already swimming under water so he had spent most of the time in the pool with his head submerged.