Year: 2013

Categories
asia places to go

hiroshima and miyajima, japan – ’12

 almost exactly a year ago, we were visiting hiroshima and miyajima.  so i’m posting this on the anniversary of the bombing of hiroshima.

traveling is so easy in japan, even though we had to figure out the system in each city (because the JR tickets don’t work everywhere). here, we took trolley cars like in san fransisco. there were more tourists here than any other place we visited on this trip besides tokyo and we met an americanji on the trolley. it’s always nice meeting other americans when traveling because we usually always like chatting. we also met a little japanese girl at breakfast who wanted to come over and say ‘hello’

more indoor malls, the japanese love their indoor malls!

the a-bomb dome. crazy that this is just right in the middle of the city. but what’s more crazy is that the bomb basically took out the entire city of hiroshima, and 67 years later, the city has increased six times its previous size! it’s a beautiful park with really great memorials to commemorate the day and wish for peace.

i love how everything was so linear, see how you can see the dome in the background below..

for dinner, we were recommended hiroshima style okonomiyaki. that literally translates to ‘as you like it’ they are like crepes on the bottom with cabbage and noodles, then you add anything you want to it. we did eggs, cheese and green onions and they make it right in front of you. it reminded me of a tostada, and we shared it, it was delicious! they came to be during WWII when the troops introduced flour to japan.

that night we wandered into an area labeled on the map ‘night life area’. we thought it might be a good place to grab a drink or a snack…turns out it was pretty sketch and was more than likely a red light district…whoops!! so we headed back to the covered mall and hung out at a three story starbucks instead.

we had also found out about a really cool island right off the coast. we were heading to our next destination after, so unfortunately we had to carry all our bags. but it was still a cool little random side trip. we took a boat (which took our JR passes!) and there were these temple gates in the water (o-torii gate).

surprise, there are tons of deer everywhere. at first we (ok probably only me) were excited to see them, and they were tame so you could pet them, which of course i love. but we soon realized that these deer are basically pests. if you plan to grab any food, you are suddenly surrounded by them and they start pulling at your clothes or anything you have with you. one chewed a hole in my bag.

here’s the bag this deer ripped into…there wasn’t even any food in there!!

this island is known for their flavor filled ‘cookies’. they had a variety, as you can see below. we loved the sea eel one…kidding! we got chocolate 🙂

we also got mango smoothies and french fries, random!

Categories
eat things to do

you are what you eat part 6

you are what you eat part 6 – after a year and a half, what we’ve learned

this is part 6 (and the last installment) of a healthy eating series, to read the rest go here: Read part one here, read part two here, read part three here,read part four here and read part five here.

if you are reading this post for the first time, be sure to check out our whole journey above.

now that we’ve been a year all natural, here are a few things we’ve learned:

i get WAY less headaches. i’ve tried and tried to create food journals over the years to figure out why i get random headaches (i.e. i’m not tired, dehydrated, pmsing, stress or had one too many glasses of wine) and i could never put my finger on it. over this past year and a half, i pretty much only get one headache a month (you know, that time…), and sometimes i don’t even get that one! what’s nice is that going all natural has just fixed that problem for me. now i don’t even have to bother with figuring it out and avoiding that one thing because i just avoid all those things that were bad for me anyway!

we both lost weight. this may sound obvious, but that wasn’t our purpose for doing this. we lost weight as a side effect of eating healthy and it wasn’t because of doing a ‘diet’ for a short period of time, counting calories, or working out more. all we did was create new habits!

habits are easier to keep up when you meal plan. meal planning has always been a huge struggle for me. you would think that a two person family would be easy, but when my husband says he’s fine with oatmeal for dinner most nights, it’s hard to be motivated to cook ever. but i know that we need to get in good habits before children or else we’ll never get into good habits. another problem with meal planning for us is that i’ll have it all set up and then one of us will just not be hungry for a full meal or we’ll go out with friends and i have to push everything back and since i’m still learning to cook, it’s tough to rearrange things. but i’m learning to be flexible and just make sure to use everything i buy. so the meal planning is still a work in progress but we’re definitely getting there!

this leads me to the pantry challenge. i saw one of my friends was doing this on facebook and thought it was a great idea. you take inventory of everything in your cupboards (which was a shocking amount since i feel like we never have food!) and then you make sure to only buy fresh items to go with those things you already have. you have to get creative and it really forces you to pay attention to what you have. my favorite part about it is that it prevents food waste! i hate wasting food when there are so many people who don’t have any, it seriously kills me to throw away a bunch of expired food that i paid good money for. so i did this for a few weeks, and it was fun!

balance…one of the hardest things about changing your diet so dramatically (sad that going all natural kind of feels like a dramatic change, it’s not like i went vegan!) is finding a balance with others. what i mean is that you can completely control what you cook and buy for daily things, but if you go over to a friend’s house for dinner or go out to eat at a place that is likely to have ‘no’ list items, it makes it tough. on the one hand you really don’t want to go back to eating certain things or getting symptoms from troublesome foods, but you also don’t want to be rude. we’ve decided that we will do everything in our power to eat an all natural and organic diet, but at the same time, we don’t want anyone to bend over backwards to try to figure out meals they can make for us. we’re also not going to be ‘those people’ at a restaurant asking a million questions about ingredients (but that’s mostly because i’m afraid i’ll get an extra special ingredient if they don’t like me…)

this wraps up my series on healthy eating! i’m sure i’ll post some about my garden which has helped a lot this summer, and other projects related, but i’ll leave you with a very cool video from chipotle’s ad campaign. i haven’t researched anything about what they really use in their food, but i just love the commercial and the story they tell, enjoy!

Categories
oceania places to go

Rotorua, NZ ’10

 here’s another post from our super last minute new zealand trip in 2010. we posted a little teaser from hobbiton and now here’s a little something from rotorua. it’s a stinky town because of all of the thermal activity around there. on our way there, we had some lunch and we were laughing at the chicken flavored chips they had. the girl there wondered why we would laugh at that since she heard we had jalapeno flavored chips in the US.

right outside of our hotel room was a thermal hot spring! we saw it go off every hours or so. as we headed out of rotorua, we went to two thermal parks, waimangu and wai-o-tapu. we got a good deal getting into the parks because it had been raining non-stop since we left auckland and there was flooding on part of the trail. luckily they also had these nice large umbrellas for us to use like in hobbiton, we apparently were not prepared with our dinky little san diego umbrellas 🙂

these two parks were huge and unfortunately because of the rain, we had a hard time taking photos…it was actually good practice for us to get the shot right the first time rather than having all the time in the world to take photos.

it was cool on the hikes that there were all these open places with the thermal activity but then we were also walking through forest, it was beautiful!

all of the places at wai-o-tapu were named after the devil and hell, we found where he lives!! run away! the funny thing was that there were all these dark names like devil’s ink pots, devil’s bath and inferno, but then there were also places like bridal veil and champagne as well.

love the detail in the rocks from all the bubbly acid over time.

such pretty colors from all the elements

at the end of the hikes we were soaked and actually got picked up by buses because of the flooding. i asked the lady if they ever worry about volcanoes or earthquakes. she said volcanoes but they usually have 2-3 weeks notice, that’s nice!!

we need to start finding vacation spots that don’t rain 100% of the time, i guess that’s due to our general poor vacation planning…oh well still fun!!

Categories
eat things to do

you are what you eat part 5

you are what you eat part 5 – sweets
this is part 5 of a healthy eating series, to read the rest go here: Read part one here, read part two here, read part three here, read part four here
another common thing that people say to us when we say we went all natural is ‘wow, you guys are so good’, ‘how can you function without any bad food?’ well, honest answer? we don’t. just because we eat all naturally doesn’t mean that we avoid sweets. when we made this decision, it was spring. we forgot we’d have to deal with saying no to a lot during holidays, especially halloween. for me, it’s almost easier to just say to myself, ‘well, it has high fructose corn syrup or dye so i just can’t have it’. but sometimes, we just really need a piece of candy or chocolate. so here’s what we’ve found…WARNING: don’t read this post if you are hungry, tired or at ‘that time of the month’ because you will probably go out and buy everything…
red and black licorice – trader joe’s has an all natural one, colored with beets. it does have corn syrup but supposedly trader joe’s doesn’t make anything with gmo’s…take it for what you will. vons also carries a brand of red licorice that is all natural.
fruit chewy candy and salt water taffy! – trader joe’s has this as well, colored with vegetables, also with corn syrup
chocolate – this has been the most tricky thing for us because as much as i’ve researched it, i just can’t figure out if soy lecithin is bad for you. we’ve cut out all soy, but they say that soy lecithin is from fermented soy which isn’t bad. other places say, well it’s probably gmo so it’s still bad, and others say that because it’s such a small amount, it doesn’t matter. so it’s up to you on the soy lecithin issue, but trader joe’s has a mighty plethora of delicious all natural chocolate products, YUM!
another thing i do to get around the sweets issue is just bake things myself. this is actually a great way to talk yourself out of junk food because you have to decide if you REALLY want it since you have to make it yourself. i do love baking but i don’t always have time, so i can usually talk myself out of the sweets this way. but, if i NEED chocolate (you know what i’m talking about ladies…) i bake with chocolate chips or chunks from jimbo’s. they are all natural, NO soy lecithin ANDDDDDD they are fair trade, yippee! they also have baking m&ms at jimbo’s with all natural coloring. i also found all naturally colored sprinkles at sprouts so cupcakes can have some color once in a while 🙂
there are a lot of cookies at trader joe’s but again, much of it has soy lecithin or enriched flour, so i just bake these myself to be safe. plus, i can buy the flour non gmo at jimbo’s.
sweet breads like pumpkin bread or any kind of muffin i also bake myself. this is mainly because most of the muffins out there are full of all the things we cut out and so full of calories. i sometimes steam my own pumpkins, puree and freeze them in baggies until i need it for recipes, that way i don’t have to worry about pesky aluminum (see, everything is bad for us!!!)
so enjoy some goodies! hopefully i’ll post some fun recipes soon 🙂
read part six here
Categories
places to go stateside

Boston, MA – ’12

the first and last stop of our new england trip

we actually had planned on only going to boston because we just had about a week to travel, but when us californians realized how much we could drive in a short amount of time, we decided to do all the new england states! so we started in boston, had the first evening there, then at the end, spent the last day/night there.

so the first day we were there was the coldest day of our trip. this is what we packed for having gone in spring, but we were surprisingly hot the rest of the trip. so at least we got to pull out the jackets and beanies one day!

boston tea party 🙂

mocktography

oh hey, there we are!

i loved that they use these historical buildings for modern businesses rather than tearing them down

more mocktography and some chowder! [which jared wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot pole]

so on the way back through town, it was pretty warm! we did some of the freedom walk and pretty much walked through the whole city. what a fun city!! we got directions from this girl and her bostonian accent was just amazing. we kept asking her more details so we could just keep listening to her talk 🙂

loved this old guy!


yum! dunkin!!

hope you enjoyed! no crazy stories this trip, just a bunch of fun photos 🙂

Categories
celebrate nest things to do

Expanding our Family

 after two years of marriage, we thought it would be about time to start expanding our little family of 2. we were very excited and anxious about the unknown, but month after month, nothing happened. we watched as all of our friends had their first, second or third children while we still waited and longed for just one of our own. we had a lot people asking questions and making comments all along the way that were really tough to answer or respond to because we didn’t share this part of our life with many people. i was so shocked at what people were willing to say and ask and it was usually too sensitive in the moment for me to tell the truth. so i just always defaulted to ‘we hope to’ or ‘soon’. it can be a very long road full of sorrow…

“Hope deferred makes the heart sick…”

but when it takes three years to finally be blessed with the one thing that seemed so easy for everyone else you learn a few things and are blessed by things.

we learned to be patient even when we don’t, and probably never will, undersand why we went through what we did. we learned how to approach talking about children with others, not realizing how hard comments and questions can be to handle in the midst of grief.

we learned to really live this verse: Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice! Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near. Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Philippians 4:4-7

even through the toughest times, I was still able to live my life, rejoice with friends who were having babies, and get through it.

though i have always had strong feelings about everyone having the human right to life, going through this experience has only deepened my feelings and beliefs about the issue. see below images for more.

i’ve always believed, but this has only reminded me that god really does provide. i deepened a friendship with someone going through the exact same thing, i’ve had a wonderful group of women there for me through the tears and praying for us all along the way, and i’ve gained new friendships. but god especially provided by giving me such a wonderful husband, i can’t imagine anyone else to live both good and bad times with than him.

we were blessed by growing together during the last 3 years, making our marriage stronger, crying together, traveling together and just learning to love each other more. as much as i would have given everything to have children when we first wanted them, i now wouldn’t trade anything for all this wonderful time we’ve invested in our marriage. this will make us better to handle our marriage in future trials and make us better parents.

“…but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.” Proverbs 13:12

we finally had our prayers answered and the answer was yes. we are so thankful for this wonderful blessing of life. because we had some help to get where we are, we got to have a few more ultrasounds than the average person. it was incredible!!

the above is at 6 weeks. it’s basically a ‘diamond ring’ as the doctor said, and the ‘diamond’ is the heartbeat. yes, at 6 weeks, before most people even know they are pregnant, their miracles have a beating heart, drumming life through their bodies and capable of love.

the above is at 7 and a half weeks. just a week and a half later and there are visible arms and legs!

and again at 10 weeks, almost fully formed. we could see both hemispheres of the brain and when she moved the wand around we could see the shape of a little human 🙂

the above three images are from 19 1/2 weeks. these just amaze me and bring tears to my eyes. i was barely starting to show and there is a fully formed human in my womb! we found out that she’s a girl at this appointment and she even started sucking her thumb during the ultrasound (3rd image). look at her little hand in the second image! at this point she was only about 10 inches long but she has all her parts including finger prints which she had developed weeks ago. she has an identity and yet in california i would legally have until week 24 to terminate if i had wanted. it breaks my heart that little fully formed humans who can suck their little thumbs can be dumped into the garbage. she’s perfect and we’re already in love with her.

this is how we told our parents her gender on mother’s day (there’s a little slip of paper inside the eggs that says ‘it’s a granddaughter!’) our parents were so excited!

four generations of women!

our friends made us these when they found out we were pregnant…

…and they inspired this video which is how we shared the news with everyone else:

 thanks to everyone who was with us from the beginning. and don’t feel bad if you didn’t know what we were going through, we just emotionally couldn’t handle sharing with everyone. we appreciate everyone’s continued support, love and prayers until our little one is safe at home in our arms. we’re so incredibly happy and thankful! and we wish everyone we know going through the same thing will be able to share in their own joy soon 🙂