Amazing Lasagna

Lasagna, its just one of those things isn't it.
 Its good. Not always great for you since most are full of cheese and meat and noodles, not much else.
This is even better.
Not only is it good for you. It tastes good.
Honestly, you don't even notice the sneaky healthy ingredients

Its a great great Brewer diet food too. We make this a lot to squeeze in a meal with Kale and squash.

There are three main parts

• The squash sauce
• Lentil Sausage
• Kale

The Squash Sauces

Take a squash, I usually use butternut. Halve it take out the seeds, lay the cleaned squash cut side down on a lightly oiled pan at 350 until you can easy piece it with a fork. (30 ish min, totally depends on the type and size of squash though)
Let the squash cool a bit peel the skin off and dice the squash meat.

In a pan saute diced oinions and garlic
Add squash
a can of tomatoe sauce
any Italian spices you like in your tomato sauce (I added rosemary, basil, thyme, oregano, cumin)

Use immersion blender to puree the sauce
you can add diced tomatoes or more canned sauce to get a texture and consistency you like in tomato sauce

The Lentil Sausage

I took lentils and cooked them in our rice cooker untill they were tender.
I put them in the food processor to blend them 
Then I added 1 part ground pork to 3 parts purreed lentils and mixed them together.
Then I cooked the lentil meat mixture in a sauce pan till it resembled ground meat

Kale

I washed the kale and in the food processor cut it up into very small pieces.

To assemble I layered sauce, gluten free noodles, lentil sausage, kale more sauce, noodles, sausage, sauce and topped it off with cheese. Depending on how much you like kale I recommend doing just one layer with kale otherwise it can overpower the dish (unless your a kale fan)
We cooked the  whole thing in the oven at 350 until the noodles were tender
so yummy.

This is a great prep a lot and throw together meal, or to do what we did and make it in bulk and freeze a few for postpartum or days when you just don't have the energy to care about making healthy food.

Blessingway

Last night was my Blessingway.
A Blessingway is celebration of motherhood and birth. Unlike a baby shower which is about giving gifts a Blessingway is about supporting the mom and giving her blessings and encuragment for her up coming birth. We did henna tattoos. All the guest brought beads and blessings or wishes for the birth. I got a few beads sent from family that are far away as well. I will be stringing all the beads onto a  necklace that I could wear during birth, I will probably hang it though, in a place I can see it near the birth pool. I will take all the wishes and blessings and hang them around the  birth pool to see them during labor.
Mostly it was a chance to see friends and have some much needed woman bonding before the baby gets here. It was so much fun. I feel so lucky to have such wonderful friends.

Beads

Beads so pretty, I can't wait to make my necklace with all theses pretty beads. I have all the blessings that I will frame and hang around the birth pool.

 Henna

 Henna.
I love henna, its a lot of fun to do. I did my belly in a mirror during nap time earlier this week and this is how it came out. It lasts for a about a week. C is calling it the baby heart. We still have a few tubes of henna left so I'm sure we will be doing hand henna again soon.

 

Henna hands 

Here are all the henna hands we did at the Blessing way. 

 Pregnant Bumps

Here are pictures of some pregnant baby bumps 

 Fun with Friends

 A few Pictures of most everyone having fun (We forgot to take pictures early and missed getting a few wonderful women pictures)

A great way to spend my birthday weekend and nice to see everyone before the baby gets here ( and everyone else has their babies) and hanging out gets to be a little trickier. 

Decorations 

Laureas was amazing and made the baby a blessing way banner like the one that C has. We will be adding the baby's hand prints to it each year and it will hang in the room where we are going to put the pool. Rob was sweet and hung a bunch of paper lanterns from our wedding from the ceiling in the living room to decorate for the party.

Cute Hats

Ali from Knittybutton made me these little Rutabaga hats, we have nicknamed this baby rutabaga . C is our pumpkin baby and my mom made him his cute pumpkin hat. I wanted to do a sibling photo with each kid in their vegetable hat. Ali was nice enough to knit up these hat (she made a tiny one and a slightly bigger one just in case.) I can't wait to do the photo shoot with theses.

Stash Update

Here is my stash so far. I am hoping it will be much much larger very very soon (I have 4 more weeks!!) and I can get it done fast enough to make some newborn fitted diapers.

 On the top are 8 prefold inserts sewn up in a tri fold for the right after, who cares if they are bulking I'm not getting out of bed stage of postpardum. On top of them are two contoured pads that snap on to the waterproof layers. (blue and pink)


The green are panty liners the 1st tip toe into sewing cloth pads. I've come along long way from when I started sewing them. Here is what I have so far, no where near as many as I need but I'm definally getting the hang of it and figuing out what I like in terms of size and shape. Hopefully all the online help from facebook groups will mean that they will have the right sorts of absorbancy on the insides. 





The stars are an all in one pad that is another ultra uber insert. I plan on making some that are a little less bulky that snap on to the pink and blue shells.

The blue minky with sushi print is a heavy day pad (and I just sold it!) by far it is the best design combination yet. I plan on making a few more that are the same shape.

 The pink and green skulls are longer panty liners (I love that print)

The one below it is also blue minky its sort of a semi failed hybrid. I had to take the wings off the original and ended up sewing it on to an early attempt at a panty liner that was a little wonky. Result is a cute heavy/pp pad.





The hears are basically wingless panty liners I plan to cover in witch hazel and freeze to make ice packs for the large postpartum pads

sewing projects

I have been fairly diligent about sewing and have added a few new pads, a new fitted diaper, made a pillow case and pair of pants for Caden out of an old sweater, and realized that I have a month left till my due date and so so much left to do. I think regardless of when I started my projects I'd feel like I was running out of time at this point.  Today I hope to get a few more projects complete and started. I've also got the house to clean and baby supplies to get to get her for our home visit next week.
I'll post more pictures and descriptions of my projects later today.

Fitted diapers a picture peek.

Mama Cloth- Sneak Peek

So I have a few posts about mama cloth planned, the hows and whys as well as a few tutorials. Here is a look at the start of my stash, that I started sewing up this past week. I've got plans to sew a whole lot more.

Holidays recap.

 Its been a nice little holiday break, the baby is growing and doing really well. We have had a few little issues with blood sugar and minor adjustments in diet have fixed them. (Nothing like adding the challenge of even more eating restrictions to our diet) Caden has been wanting to nap cuddled up to his baby. I've been letting him since the time he has to snuggle and dominate all of mommy's time is coming to an end soon. 
 He got a few new books and some new puzzles. He asked me to make him a Woo Woo Scarf  but couldn't decide which fabric he liked best so I quilted both of our firetruck fabrics together and made it red fleece on one side. He loved the snow when we had it and is getting quite good at going down the hill on his sled. 

Over all it was a good ending to the year.