Tropical Storm / Hurricane Isaac & The Worm

With Jim heading out of town on business just as the bands of Tropical Storm/Hurricane Isaac are expected to lash/beat/batter/rampages/impacts/viciously rages through/unleash it’s fury on us ;) Erring on the side of preparedness, we have pulled everything in off the lanai (the picture below is only about 70% of what we had) & even placed shutters on the exposed bay window in Jim’s office. The last thing either of us want is to try having Jim step me through patchwork repairs over the phone from Philadelphia!

To outsiders we probably look like we have prepared for an imminent Cat 4 to come barreling through, but with school cancelled tomorrow and Jim leaving, the nice thing is it is all done & whatever will be will be. I can guiltlessly spend a day cuddling on the sofa watching movies and playing games with Abby. If nothing happened, it just turns out to be a great opportunity to pressure & do some post-storm shelling!
 

On a truly ridiculous note, our downstairs bathroom shower stall has become home to furniture cushions and our inflatable farm. Of course, there is still a 7’ latex alligator roaming somewhere upstairs somewhere, sigh...

Last night while hanging out with our friends from the neighborhood, I grabbed some pictures of the kids who were having too much fun getting their dance groove on. Abby & Jack were particular fond of the worm & Funky Chicken that Will Smith made famous on the Fresh Prince of Bellair. The Funky Chicken involves placing one hand on the back of your head with your arm bent & the other hand holding the ankle with the leg bent while moving the bent leg/arm forward & back.

With regards to the icing faced children, I'm still unsure why we didn't just pretend there was no dessert, lol. Energy abounds

 

 

Roofing Contractor for Hire!

I am ridiculously proud of myself for the roofwork Jim talked me into doing! With Hurricane Isaac on it's way with some extra rain, we had some concerns about cracks in the stucco that aren't scheduled to be repaired for a few more weeks. To be on the safe side, Jim talked me through climbing the extension ladder, getting on the roof and filling the cracks. I have to admit, getting down was scary and it did require him coming up and literally putting my foot on the top rung and walking me through where to position my hands, feet & bum. Other than that though, I'm thinking I could bring in some cash on the side with my mad roofing skills :)

 

In other news, Abby has been wanting her friend to meet Rootie and it worked out that she was with us today when we headed over for Abby to rake the pen & scoop undesirables out. You know you have a good friend when they help you scoop pig poop, lol. And how can you not love Jim's expression as the girls work in the pen, I chat from the side and he watches from the sidelines :) Tending to pigs is actually not super time intensive and involves raking, scooping, checking on water & feed, spraying with Skin So Soft to keep mosquitoes away & eventually practicing walking with them so they can follow her lead.

Abby bribed Maddie to go for a final pre-rainy week swim. As I type this I hear them throwing poppers on the front driveway and playing pretend games with their Webkinz they carry back & forth between their houses. I love that she is still a little girl, even though I feel like every day I'm thinking that she feels so grown up and it is all flying by!!

 

Juicing Days 5 & 6 1/2

We started with...

Motivation from Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead and Food, Inc. (Both available on Netflix streaming & the former available for free here on HULU)

Recipes & general plans from Join the Reboot

Breville Juice Fountain for $99 at Best Buy w/$15 and a 2 year parts warranty so that when a blade breaks on a sweet potato I'm not bitter.

One week later on a juice & herbal tea only diet, we ended up 11pounds lighter for Jim, 8 lb lighter for me (my second half of summer weight gain, lol) and both feeling really good. I think we both look & feel less puffy, bloated, are more conscientious about the small food decisions we are making, exercising more and excited to continue this. For now we've decided to move to juicing in the mornings, continuing to minimize our caffeine intake, substituting juice for lunch when possible & eating healthy dinners no later than 6p. A "cheat" day on the weekend and we are on our way to balanced healthy living. Proof of that is in the fact that with Abby at a friends house tonight, we had a long overdue date night and went to a Sweet Tomatoes for salads. Our first meals in a week centered around veggies. So all in all a great success and fun!

Abby's thoughts after the movies are also very much health food oriented. She is so horrified by the meat industry profiled in Food, Inc. that her thought on the 4H pig is at least she is contributing something healthy to the food industry by providing meat via a healthy, humanely treated animal. That being said, she isn't really into the whole meat thing herself and very concerned about beef, pork and the yogurt like consistency of what she is now referring to as Toxic Chicken from McDonalds. LOL, I've turned into a bit of a dork with 38 fun facts about all things fast food everytime we drive past one, so I might be responsible for it's new name. Until moving to Florida, I think Abby had pretty exclusively dined on Chick Fil A as a treat, which it turns out is still alarming with MSG & butane products illegal in the UK and will land you in prison with a hefty fine in other countries. However it seems that when you show your child yogurt texture chicken nugget paste, it can impact their appetite...that and insisting they refer to it as toxic chicken, lol. For those curious, here is a quick rundown on McDonald's chicken nugget paste. In the 60's they figured out they could make more profit by scraping animal bones 100% clean of meat. This is done my machines & filled with bacteria, which leads to it being washing with ammonia and then because it tastes LIKE AMMONIA, it is reflavored artificially. Then, because of the weird pink color, it is also dyed to look like chicken again. In all fairness to McDonald's, due to outrage and probably more likely insistence from the FDA that meat products be labelled if they are mechanically separated from the bone, they no longer do it that way. The ammonia and re flavoring still go though (this is also the process for bologna, hot dogs, pepperoni, etc...). While I'm not becoming a fanatic like Food Babe (too much time, money & I'm pretty sure an eating disorder, lol), I'm definitely reading more of her stuff to weed out the good information from the loopy stuff & also visiting 100 Days of Real Food for information.

And THAT is the summary of juicing in the Gentsch house!

Rootie is a Blue Butt Gilt

(My camera battery is dead, so I've just got some random grainy pictures from my cell phone to accompany some of the random pig knowledge we've collected & that I feel compelled to share :) This first picture is of the 1000lb American Yorkshire sow that is Rootie's mother. She was rather intimidating (especially when irritated that strangers were near her litter) and my level of general comfort with this half ton of fun can clearly be seen in

 

 

 

the picture Jim got of me next to her, lol. This is the Hampshire boar that fathered Rootie & as I share all of this, I am going to attempt to speak authoritatively and repeat all that I've overheard ;) This York & Hampshire (third picture) made a good pairing because the sow was long, tall & narrow, but the boar is short, wide, stocky & a lot of muscle. With the average weight gain factored out, it also looks like Rootie will be right on target growing from 17lbs today to the ideal 260lb range. Weight range for 4H is 220-320lbs, which despite knowing better, Abby insists on saying  260 libs. LOL, My child is a nut. It is a one woman revolt against the nonsensical reason lb is the abbreviation for pounds! In a world where Google is a verb and saying 'ish roughly translates to "more or less", Latin origins have very little weight :)

 

Now for my Random Pig Fun Facts: (1) Pigs do not have sweat glands, overheat easily and have a body temperature is 102.5F. (2) Pale pigs can sunburn easily, are good swimmers & highly susceptible to pneumonia. (3) A good "toy" for a pig is an old bowling ball. It gives builds neck muscles and gives them something to do to encourage them to stay moving, drinking & eating. (4) A pig is young, a hog is an adult. A gilt is young female, sow is an adult female. A barrow is a neutered male, a boar is an "intact" male. (5) Rootie is a "blue butt", which you get when you cross a white & black pig. In this case a Yorkshire sow & Hampshire boar.

 

All I have to say is I have a VERY happy little girl.



Rootie & Juicing Day 4

On Sunday, the Gentsch family donned our rubber boots and travelled in caravan with two other families to pick up Abby's 4H pig. She was 3rd in line to choose a pig & was so pleased that no one else wanted the runt :) She of course wanted it because it was the least intimidating weighing in at just 17lbs (vs. the boys weighing in at 27lbs). Because this process will end with the pig being sold at auction, the goal is to keep the kids remembering that these aren't pets - they are food - so it has been suggested that if she is going to name it then she might want to consider a cut of meat like Pork Chop. Abby wasn't planning to name it at all, but then cracked her self up (there was literally knee slapping involved) when she thought of the name Hamella. She has since decided that doesn't really roll off the tongue and changed the name to Rootie, since pigs spend much of their time rooting around in the dirt.

 

Our pig knowledge is limited and as we prepared to pick up Rootie, we fired off an email to my friend Jenny who is for all intensive purposes our Swine Guru. We had lots of questions like can the pigs eat scraps, like everything left over from our juicer…answer was no, by the way…they need their high protein feed). Where can we buy some of the basic supplies and of course, the one I was most concerned with, which was if we got the male pig, would it need to be "cut" like the wild boar's that people catch in this area. “Cutting” an animal = castration done there in the pen and makes the meat less gamey, but would require a lot of preparation from the Gentsch’s to deal with, lol. Her emailed response said that her husband Ed said to Jim “bring a pocket knife, alcohol, white sheet and a need with thread and he’ll watch” and I seriously wish you could have seen the color drain out of Jim’s face when I read that aloud to him, lol. They immediately called to let us know they were amusing themselves and this process had already been followed at birth for the male pigs. In the meantime though, I can’t not express the relief felt by the Gentsch grownups who were really unsure how to handle that one, haha.

 

So on Sunday afternoon, we loaded up with our juiced roadies and headed to their place to follow a horse trailer out to pick up the pigs. We were met with the guys ribbing Jim about if he brought the needle & I love my husband so much. 100% out of his element, Jim owns it and isn’t remotely self conscious about it, but is also interested enough that at the end of this experience he WILL be the swine expert in 99% of all social situations we are in, lol. We arrived, checked out the 1000lb sow that is the mother of these pigs (WOW!), the kids selected their pigs, we loaded them and took them back to the pen to get acclimated. And so the experience begins!!!!!!

 

And as for juicing...we've decided to migrate off juice Friday night :) Jim's travelling next week and I've never been so eager for a chicken breast in my life, lol. The good news is that separation from food for the last few days really has altered my outlook in a lot of ways. I find myself being more particular as a whole about what comes in the house and focused on keeping the ingredient list as minimized and pure as possible. We aren't big processed food junkies, but there are a lot of little hidden bonuses we get in our food that is there just to keep packaging fresh so that it makes it to the grocery store. Countdown to Friday starts now :) On a serious note, how good of a sport is Jim to take a neon green drink as a roadie to buy a pig? LOL, best husband EVER!

5th Grade & Juicing Day 3

Abby turned 10 in April & I am sooooo glad that I took the time to have her pictures taken, even if it took another four months to have prints ordered! In just a few months so much has changed and I already look at these and wonder where my little girl has gone. Her braces have come off, her hair is longer, she’s grown an inch and a half and most definitely a pre-teen. In fact she recently brought that up during one of our nightly bedtime chats, which can sometimes be the best part of my day. She was musing that at 10 she is only three years away from being a teen and that means she is really a PRE teen now, “tween isn’t really a compliment to call someone, I don’t want to be one of those though” .

With that in mind, my little PRETEEN (*gulp*) started 5^th grade yesterday, marking the first time she’s ever been enthusiastic about returning to school. With her close friend Maddie moving on to middle school this year, I was a little worried about her being bummed, but things went great. She is so excited about being on Safety Patrol and the student representative for SAC (School Advisory Council), not to mention Treasurer of 4H. I think she is feeling the fun of being the big kids on campus. Off to a great start!

Now, let’s cut to the chase about juicing…when it comes to things like a Juice Fast, I’m the genius with the idea, but Jim is the one with the discipline to see us through. Tonight I roasted some broccoli & asparagus and “cheated” with chewing. Jim on the other hand was steadfast and nonjudgmental, sipping away happily on a cup of herbal tea not remotely tempted by the awesomeness I created. Has Eve’s perspective been fully examined when it comes to getting Adam to eat that apple? Maybe at the end of the day, she was just really feeling lame for having such little discipline and wanted a companion in her lame feelings ;) As it is, Jim’s un-phased determination managed to re-inspire me so back to juice it is (with an occasional raw radish just to keep it exciting).

Juicing Day 2

In addition to juice, we've also added a treadmill to the Gentsch house & not surprisingly, Abby LOVES it. This child was born with a natural love for exercise that I would do anything to have!

 

The quick update on juicing is that it doesn't take nearly as bad as it looks, even the orange/green combo here. At the end of the day though, an apple, a pear & lemon will make any combination taste good. Cucumbers & celery are good for creating more actual juice and making a bigger cup, but like spinach really offer very little flavor. Today I managed to sit through a WooHoo Breakfast with neighbors as the kids headed off to the first day of school with a lone cup of herbal tea. While we haven't really been hungry or at least nothing a fresh glass of juice can't cure, my stomach did growl through an omelet, coffee & mimosa laden breakfast! I felt very hard core and dedicated when I left to go purchase more kale, lol.

Juicing Day 1 (For Real)

Our first full day of juicing from sun up until sun down started out with a lot of enthusiasm. Jim and I embraced 24oz servings of another variation of the Mean Green juice, with Abby helping out. Of course, for herself she chose a more fruity combination :) The green color is misleading and for the most part the juice tastes healthy, but not nearly as grass like as it looks. At 11:30a when friends checked in on the status of our juicing, I was kind of excited to boast that it was all good. Jim moaned about a general lack of caffeine until around 10:30a, but overall we seemed content and weren't hungry. And then it happened. Half an hour later, around the time that Jim not-so-jokingly laid down for a power nap and told me he wasn't speaking to me, my stomach began to growl and I began to have thoughts like "tonight when they go to sleep, I can get up and sneak food from the kitchen." Seriously???? How little self control can my sub conscious have?

Overall the day has been okay, but I did have a cheat and "ate" a radish and a bite of a pear going into the juice. The good news is that I'm committed to this enough that cheating involved a 28 calorie consumption of a root and a fruit. The bad news is that I didn't make it an entire day before deciding that the urge to eat the aforementioned radish was too strong to resist, lol. The afternoon was better, I made a ridiculous sweet potato based orange/green concoction that I think fooled us into thinking we had consumed something starchy for a bit. In all fairness though, Jim has only spoken roughly 10-12 words today - so I'm mostly speaking for myself :)

This comes as no real surprise, but I'm the idea & Jim's the discipline in our duo. So after bringing actual roadies with us for afternoon errands, cleaning the juicer no fewer than 8 times today, I did crack a little (this was prior to caving and indulging in the radish) and suggest that coffee wasn't really that bad...also that maybe a nice chicken breast for dinner would be a plus, not a negative. Jim held strong though, so he is up to 20 words, dedicating some to tell me "we should stick to the plan." The best part about that advice is it is also his exact phrasing when it comes to not changing lines at the grocery store when one is moving faster than the other, lol. I love that Jim saved the juice fast, although won't yet admit he likes it :D

Juicing Day 1'ish

6 Kale Leaves, 1 Cucumber, 4 Celery Stalks, 2 Green Apples, 1/2 Lemon, 1 piece of ginger

This is the official recipe used in the film Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead, which promotes "rebooting" your system with a heavy increase in the micro nutrients consumed. I pulled the recipes we are using from www.JoinTheReboot.com and even though we are going to really try 10 days in a juice only world, they have lots of back up recipes for us to try if we want to "eat" the veggies too.

We only made juice for our afternoon snack & dinner, but it is agreed. "One piece of ginger" is a subjective assessment and should be used a bit more judiciously in the future. We survived though and on an odd note, it was surprisingly filling. On a funny note, Jim had a wave of anxiety over the juice he had today and insisted I purchase Benadryl to have on hand in case he has a bad reaction to so much vegetable juice. I love both his willingness to do this with me and his general fear of this much vegetation in his diet.

The Last Meal Before Juicing

And so it was....our final meal before purchasing our juicer and starting our 10 Day Juice Fast. Thank you Fat, Sick & Dearly Dead for being such a warped family night movie pick that we are jump starting healthy living with a heavy increase in our kale consumption. Jim deserves some kind of husband award, because today consisted of him letting me rearrange his office (!!!!!!!), purchasing a treadmill & driving halfway to Ft Myers to buy the exact juicer I wanted. There were also visits to multiple grocery stores to insure that all of our veggie juicing possibilities were in stock when we begin. So in combination with the first week of school, we will be monitoring our juicathon!

Crazy Girls

I started out with the girls making me look like a butterfly, but then revenge face painting came in to play with me being told “this is what happens to people who spend all afternoon gloating about winning at laser tag.” And to think I felt we were even when Abby asked me to “unroll my forehead and make it smooth.” LOL

They eventually turned me into a green glob and the fact that my skin had to be washed 10+ times and there was a burning sensation that required taking Benadryl was just icing on the cake!

Laser Tag QUEEN

It was Back to School Night & my first time in a LONG time that I wasn't at the PTO Desk. It is seriously a little bit tragic how happy it made me to walk in, meet the teacher, visit with friends, stop by the Spirit Wear table & leave, lol. Abby's friend Jenny has just returned from her summer in the Philippines and after meeting Abby's teacher I took the girl's to play laser tag. 10 minutes in the laser tag arena in a game of Abby/Jenny vs. Me ended with me doing a SPECTACULAR "in your FACE!!" victory dance. Ha! 37 & wearing a dress, but still able to school these girls! The best part is Abby's continued disbelief over losing to me :D She keeps trying to say it nicely, but I think it boils down to horror that an old person beat her, lol. The picture is hard to see, but it is of us going into the arena.

Random picture of the girls giving Tinkerbell a bath. Best. Dog. Ever :)

Moon Jelly Madness

We met friends on Casey Key today & the water was filled with massive moon jellies! Abby was of course all over it and fully aware of the purple flag at the lifeguard stand, which "everyone knows means Dangerous Marine Life." Lol. Moon jellies will produce a mild sting when they have all of the burgundy clover and hair bits. We've never seen them like that here though & normally just find the little clear blobs like this one. You've got to love that every day at the beach is a little different!



Special Recipes

Thank you Science Club for the recipe for making "wounds." GROSS!!!!!!

Never too Old

10 & 48, never too old for a mid-day, daddy & daughter tea party!

Holy Cow, errr....I mean PIG

Today was our first 4H meeting of the year and it is official. Hang on to your hats, the Gentsch girl is entering a PIG into 4H. This is the picture of the mile long driveway out to our 4H leaders house and that pretty much sums up how out of our element we are, lol.

We have great friends who have offered to let us house the pig at their house and who have been really encouraging as Abby's clear interest & love for their livestock has grown. In a few weeks, we will pick up an 8 week old pig & Abby will "raise" it, monitoring & tracking it's food & growth. She will also be working with it so that she can "show" it at the County Fair. This requires spending time training it to walk next to her and respond to her. This is an Abby driven initiative and as part of the deal, we are having her put up $75 of her own money towards the purchase of the pig and then she will pay us back for the remaining cost & food after the auction. We've told her to expect to be on hand to work with the pig or help with chores at the Ference's home 3x a week and 1x on the weekend and on the list goes.

The short answer is yes, in January this pig will be sold at the auction and provide meat to a family of four for the year. Abby understands this, what "working a pig" means, etc... However, she seems comfortable with it and insists that she will be fine when the auction day comes. In fact, when I mentioned to one of her friends that she would be showing the pig at the Fair, she told me "Stop there mom. Not everyone is comfortable with the idea of the butchering process." HOLY COW child. LOL, feel free not to mince your words. I actually think it is kind of cool that while watching Food, Inc. turned her into a fairly committed and horrified vegetarian (LOL), it also has made her appreciate that if people are going to eat pork at least she will be contributing a healthy pig to the food chain for consumption.

These last two pictures are of Abby exhausted after 4H and falling asleep in the backseat under a table cloth. LOL, I had to wake her up to make her sit in her seat belt and was not very popular right after this picture. The second photo is one Jim took of the steer that our friend's son will be entering into the Fair. Abby loves visiting them & their steer, pigs, chickens, etc... We had to stop by their house to check out the pen Abby will be sharing with their other son for the pigs and Jim made a friend :)

Paradise

These are unedited pictures that Jim took on his cell phone of the sun coming up over the back of the house & the pond. Seriously???? How lucky are we to wake up to this every day?????

ZOMG!!!! Insane Fish Story

Longest, most ridiculous water change in a fish tank EVER. EVER. EVER. EVER. Quick history of the fish tank...Abby won a fish at the County Fair in January. I was bitter. However, it came with a little tank the size of a man's wallet. So when the goldfish was still alive after two weeks, I committed to a $12 one gallon tank. We transferred the cleverly named Goldie into the tank and she promptly rolled over and died. For the record, yes I did give her time to adjust to the water & purified it, etc... So now I have this silly tank and around that time Gramommy comes to visit and bought Abby five little fish for the tank. It turns out five fish in a one gallon tank is a bit of overkill and one lone yellow fish rose to the top of food chain, slowly taking out his four tank mates. However, the little guy survived and for that I was grateful. Fast forward a few months and we have even committed to a name for the fish (Jewel), but the tank is getting dirty and I ignore it. Then it gets gross and I ignore it. Why? Because the last thing I want to do is mess with the water or anything that will kill this fish who is very happy in it's tank.

This is a good time to mention that the yellow fish in the picture above is NOT Jewel.

Once it reached a really embarrassing level of dirty, I decide it is time to clean the tank and risk it. In doing so I managed to let several loose pebbles from the tank slip through the colander and get into the garbage disposal. I'll skip that story, but the short answer is YES it broke the garbage disposal and NO Jim was not amused. I get the fish back into the reassembled tank and things are good. I do a sigh of relief and then the bubbles aerating the tank suddenly stop. They were working prior to the cleaning, for 2 seconds after and then BAM it stops. After involving Jim, some tension and my unsuccessful and rather heartless request to just toss Jewel into the pond and be done with it, I ended up going to WalMart at 9p for an air filter. Turns out it was out of stock, as was a similar tank and by the time they will arrive our fish would be dead. So I buy a new tank. The tank you see in the picture. I come home, I set it up and it has some sort of insane bubble thing happening that pretty much puts Jewel through something like a F5 tornado every time it got away from the edge wall. Jim decided to replace it with some tubing and parts from the original tank and along the way bumped a butter knife into Jewel, giving her a mild concussion. When it was all said & done, Jewel lasted about an extra 45 minutes and then was a floater.

THIS IS WHY I DIDN'T WANT TO CHANGE THE WATER.

So now I have a great functioning fish tank and no stinking fish. That is when we purchased Ruby, see photo above. For the record though, this is why I was so stinking bitter about Abby winning the goldfish in January. Nothing good comes out of winning a goldfish from a Carnie.

Legoland

 Topsy Tail Rocks! :D

We spent the day taking advantage of a $25 pass to both Legoland's Amusement & Water parks. We also spent the day braving apocalyptic heat, but having a great time!



With almost no lines at many of the large attractions, the kids were able to ride all of their favorites back to back!

These poor, insanely hot children could hardly wait to get back to the water park after a few hours in the main theme park. Dean's expression sums up my feelings about the heat pretty accurately, lol.