Life in March...

I've been feeling a bit overwhelmed by the staggering amount of photos I need to blog from our trip to England. I keep looking at them all and mentally trying to compose posts and think about which pictures I will bunch together or whether or not to pop them all into a slide show but it's just too much for my little brain to organize so instead I give you......the last few days.....

We're back in Tofino. Sully is happy but that's nothing new. We've had some beautiful sunshine and some lovely rainforesty rain. Weirdly I missed the rain while we were away. I actually like it when it's bucketing down especially when I'm snuggled into my bed listening to the downpour outside my window. Soothing :) Anyway, we've been here a whole year now and I can't quite believe that. I'm excited that the hummingbirds and the gray whales are all on their way back and hope to see lots of both in the next few weeks.  I'm also looking forward to the sprouting of the swamp lanterns, I'll get a photo for you as soon as I see one.

On the subject of sprouting I was pretty excited to see that my long dead rhubarb (a pressie from my Mummy last spring) seems to have miraculously come back to life. Maybe it's not so miraculous, maybe I just don't know a lot about rhubarb, but I'm happy either way.
The sprouting of the rhubarb inspired us to do a little gardening. The kids helped me pull some weeds mostly because they had earlier in the day persuaded me to buy them each a pair of gardening gloves.

We continued with our green fingeredness indoors and have begun the process of sprouting some seeds . With a bit of luck we'll be producing some nice crisp sprouts for our sandwiches sometime in the next couple of days.

So far we have only got to the soaking stage of sprouting and I'm amazed at the level of excitement aroused by basically tipping some seeds into a jar of water. I can't wait to see the kids faces when (if?) these things actually grow.

Each of their sprouting jars has been marked with a coloured ribbon and is being guarded by a specially selected sprout protector as seen below. 

In other news, Belly had a day of sudden and mysterious illness, always horrible and a bit scary. My poor little monkeypants spent the morning puking and sleeping and I've no idea where or how she picked up a bug.

Yes, she almost always sleeps with her eyes open, sometimes much more open than this...

My action plan was...get some greens into the girl! Spinach, spinach and more spinach! (We happened to have a lot of spinach in our fridge that day). I made a spinach and cashew pesto, yum and easy peasy! I just whizzed up a big bunch of fresh spinach with a handful of raw cashews, a big squeeze of lemon, some olive oil and salt and pepper to taste. It was GREEN! And green = healthy. I mixed it into some pasta and told the kids it was special Hulk pasta, Seb wasn't fooled but was forced to eat it anyway. Belly, who is generally much more open to green things, wolfed it down. Good girl.

I also cunningly whizzed up some spinach in a smoothy. Now this is a trick you MUST try if you have kids who are picky with their veg. 2 cups of fresh spinach, 2 cups of delicious fruit of your choice and 2 cups of water. Depending on the fruit you choose and it's natural sweetness you could add just a dash of maple syrup to sweeten. Anyway, the smoothy this creates is so fresh and energising it makes a really extra good breakfast. I love it and so did the kiddies. Score!!!

Thankfully Bel's mystery bug disapeared as quickly as it arrived and she seems to be back to her normal energetic self. To celebrate her healthyness, today we ate chocolalte :) 

I was driven by a sudden and overwhelming desire to make chocolate crispy cakes! I used nice 80% cocoa solids cha-loc-a-lat and a spoonful of coconut butter (oh-my-god-that-stuff-is-sooo-good!), not to be confused with coconut oil, coconut butter contains some coconut meat as well as oil and has a creamy consistency similar to thick peanut butter, it's so yum. The resulting crispy cakes were nothing short of perfect and we made another batch as soon as Neil got home :)

This is Sully's jealous face....

 Being a dog he isn't allowed cha-loc-a-lat and this upsets him :( so he went off and pretended to be a kitchen rug.