This recipe is based on Jennifer McCann's Banana Oatmeal Cookies. I've added sesame seeds and chocolate chips, and streamlined the process to make it a little simpler. Thanks, Jennifer!
Ingredients: Keep Reading…
These sweet, quick and completely healthy snacks are cheaper and better versions of the raw food "bars" – like LaraBars – that have sprung up everywhere and cost a pretty penny.
If you know a chocolate lover, you'll make them a friend for life with this recipe: Keep Reading…
Students in England's state schools are up in arms over the government ban on junk food lunches, according to an article in today's New York Times:
Five months after the celebrity chef Jamie Oliver succeeded in cajoling, threatening and shaming the British government into banning junk food from its school cafeterias, many schools are learning that you can lead a child to a healthy lunch, but you can’t make him eat.
The fancy new menu at the Rawmarsh School here?
“It’s rubbish,” said Andreas Petrou, an 11th grader… “We didn’t get a choice,” he said of the school food. “They just told us we were having it.”
Goodness! What is this evil and draconian menu foisted upon the helpless children of the Empire?
The government’s regulations, which took effect in September, have banished from school cafeterias the cheap, instantly gratifying meals that children love by default: the hamburgers, the French fries, the breaded, deep-fried processed meat, the sugary drinks.
Now schools have to provide at least two portions of fresh fruit and vegetables a day for each child, serve fish at least once a week, remove salt from lunchroom tables, limit fried foods to two servings a week and cut out candy, soda and potato chips altogether.
Why is this so objectionable? Two reasons: Keep Reading…
It's coming…! For many parents who commit to transition to a healthy family lifestyle, Halloween is the first big challenge that seems bigger than they are.
Let’s get a little ridiculous for a moment and compare junk food to heroin. Both are harmful (the larger the quantity, the more harmful, but even small amounts are bad for you) and both are addictive. And both junk food junkies and heroin addicts tend to move around in environments where consuming the substance in question is considered normal.
So you manage to break free of the addiction. You make major strides in getting your kids off the stuff too. Then comes a ritual where they and all their friends are going door to door, holding out bags and getting large amounts of it for almost no effort. The ritual is reflected in school, in the media, in conversations with friends, and a lot of it is really fun. Dressing up, being creative, meeting the neighbors; it’s a mostly positive experience, except for the addictive and harmful substance at its core.
What do you do?
Here's an interview and Q&A session with Greg Lynn Weaver, Spiritual Director of the PeaceWeavers. The topic: "Peaceful Parenting When You Feel Like Wringing Their Necks."
Greg Lynn answered questions about:
- how peace is related to fitness and health
- what peaceful parenting looks like
- how we get peaceful when we’ve had a lousy day
- how we can practice peaceful parenting so we have the skills when we need them
- how to break the cycle of guilt that leads to poor choices that leads to guilt…
- how to not beat ourselves up over not being perfect
- whether expressing anger verbally is appropriate or bullying
This call is not for the faint-hearted. The "s-word" is used three times, and Mother Teresa is described as "ballsy." Greg Lynn is not a mountain-top theorist – he’s living in the real world, and his language is real as well. His gentle and compassionate style and great sense of humor can help us remember what’s really important as we go through the impossible and wonderful task of raising children.
Turn on your computer speakers, and you can listen right now to a 5-minute excerpt of the call, in which Greg Lynn helps a member explore her question about expressing anger toward her kids:
The entire call is available as a CD (and soon as an electronic transcript).
Last month I accompanied my daughter Yael's 5th grade class on an overnight trip to the Haw River State Park and Environmental Education Center. After a day of exploring the outdoors and playing games in a steady rain, we had gone through all our dry and clean clothes, and were sitting together in the gathering pit for a closing event.
One of the resident leaders congratulated us for being such troopers. He said, "Some people think that if they're not in a dry, 72 degree environment, they're not OK. Some people think that they need to be clean to be OK. We need to remember that being a little cold sometimes is OK. Being a little hot sometimes is OK. Being dirty is OK. Remember: DIRT DOESN'T HURT!"
That short statement helped a lot of kids reframe their experiences of the previous 18 hours. It helped me, actually. When I look honestly at my assumptions about comfort and the outdoors, I find a lot of intolerance for discomfort. Keep Reading…
On Tuesday morning, I brought home my old (and I mean old) Schwinn unicycle, thinking, maybe someday I'll learn how to ride the darn thing. It has spent the last several years in a basement in Lawrenceville, New Jersey.
No sooner was it in the house than Yael became interested. On went her helmet, and chaos ensued… Keep Reading…
Mia (my wonderful wife) has been interested in seeing how far off the grid we can get. She's studying and playing with natural building, researching solar energy, and thinking and writing about the various ways we are dependent on the "Matrix" of culture and industry that maybe don't serve our families' well-being.
Keep Reading…
Here's a quick and simple granola recipe that lasts a long time in the cupboard without requiring refrigeration. It serves 4-8, depending on how hungry they are!
Do you want your kids to grow up fit and healthy, or overweight and prone to cancer, heart disease and diabetes?
What a stupid question, right?
Keep Reading…