A change will do us good

Gary and I are starting the Paleo diet around the 2nd week in July. It's going to take some planning as well as purging of the kitchen pantry and cabinets and then we have to re-stock with Paleo friendly items.

Just to name a few things we won't be eating anymore: dairy, cereal grains, almost all beans, POTATOES (cry), commercial condiments and dressings, fatty means (bacon - cry) and sugars.

I call this the nuts and berries diet as a joke but honestly the recipes I'm researching look delicious. It's just going to be difficult at first to learn to cook with all different ingredients and not with things I'm used to using.
Gary said he'd help with the menu planning (since he's so picky), shopping at first and obviously the cooking. He better keep up his end of the deal. <.<

Why? Well, for a lot of health reasons including my Fibromyalgia, arthritis and a few other things.

So, from now on 99% of the recipes I'll be posting will be "Paleo Friendly" and if you run across any that look delicious please feel free to send them my way!

~ Rachel

p.s. I'm NOT giving up my Diet Pepsi (yet)

p.p.s. Here are some of the books that I've purchased.
The Paleo Diet Cookbook
Paleo Comfort Foods: Homestyle Cooking for a Gluten-Free Kitchen
The Complete Idiot's Guide to Eating Paleo

What's this? An update??

Oh man, where to start.....

First off, most of you know about Quagmire. He was my baby boy Yorkie for 6 years. Well, he's been sick on and off for 3 of them but at the end of February he got really sick again and stayed sick all the way up to May 1st. He was VERY sick. He needed a LOT of care. So much care that I didn't even leave the house other than vet visits and a quick run to Walgreens here and there. Well, his last vet appointment was the morning of May 1st and we had a long talk with his vet and the inevitable hit us smack in the face. May 1st, 2012 we decided the best thing for him was to let them put him to sleep. When I look back through my life I know this was in the top 5 horribly difficult decisions and things that I had to do. I mean shit, it's been almost 2 months and I'm crying  just typing this.
I miss him so much.

On May 4th Gary got me a kitten. He made the pain of losing Quagmire soooooooooooooooooooo much easier than I thought it would be. We named him Walter so meet Walter!!!
He's the most precious, precocious, hyper little guy you can imagine. He's also a little piggie. Gary and I are used to smaller cats. Monster weighs in at about 7 lbs and he's lean as can be. Walter was 1lb 7oz when we got him (6 weeks old) and yesterday I put him back on the postal scale and he's sitting in at 3lbs 7oz... TWO pounds in 6 weeks. That's a lot for a cat. He's gonna be a big boy. I love him so much.

So where have I been since then? I've been SO busy. My sister (Amanda, my youngest sister) was deployed to Afghanistan mid-March. My nephew, Timmy, stayed in Hawaii to finish the school year and then came here. He got here May 21st and will be headed to Texas on July 1st. Also, Gary was TDY in Florida. He had left on May 19th and was there for 2 weeks. I never thought a 14 yr old boy would need SO much attention (and not in a bad way). When it's just Gary and me meals are sporadic. We eat when we're hungry. Well, when you're in charge of a child you pretty much have to keep a schedule. It was weird to get used to that but nice though because hopefully after 6 weeks we can keep it up. It's been a blessing having him here and I'm going to miss him when we put him on the plane. Hopefully, he'll be back to visit again soon. :)
So we've spent the month doing fun things like movie nights at home, we went out to the movies once, we went to the zoo and aquarium and just a bunch of other things to make his visit fun.


I've been so busy and preoccupied that I took a little break from swap-bot. Other than postcard swaps I've only done about 5 all month, but now that things are starting to slow down I'm running 5 swaps and joined a bunch of other ones. The 5 that I'm hosting can only be found in the I LOVE Kawaii group on swap-bot. If you're interested in joining the swap and meet our reasonable requirements to join the group please request an invite to the group! Here is a list of what I'm hosting. :)

Kawaii Sticker Flake Bags - June/July
~ILK 35 x 3 Kawaii Sticker Flake Swap~
Love That Deco Tape #2
High Dollar Large Kawaii Swap #6
20 Letter Sets Swap #1 

They should be a lot of fun!

Anyway, I should be updating the blog more often, especially because we have a lot of new things coming up in our lives. Stay tuned!!!

~ Rachel

p.s. I HATE THE NEW BLOGGER SYSTEM! THAT IS ALL!