As my friend Holly pointed out, if you ask someone when they are having kids, the answer is that “you’ve either annoyed or depressed me.”

I’ve come to accept that my furbabies, Grigio and Nero (above, they’re Italian Greyhounds), are the only children that DH and I will have unless we choose to adopt. Which is unlikely at this point as we are enjoying being childfree. I know that for others, infertility is a daily struggle. Which is why I wanted to let my readers know about my friend Donielle’s upcoming ecourse.

According to Donielle, infertility now strikes one in six couples, one out of five known pregnancies end in miscarriage, and our children are increasingly suffering from disease and disorders like ADD, autism, learning difficulties, behavior issues, depression, allergies, and asthma.

She says, it’s time to become empowered and reclaim your natural fertility and have truly healthy babies.

This one-of-a-kind 12 week multi media course will be a breath of fresh air in an otherwise depressing world of unfortunate statistics. With these classes you will learn:

• How to cleanse your body of toxins
• Why common products you use may be contributing to your infertility
• What exercises can help you prepare your body for conception and pregnancy
• How to pin point ovulation
• What to eat…..and what not to eat
• Alternative treatments for infertility

Donielle is an online and offline friend, so I trust her. You can find out more about the class by clicking the ad below. Some of the topics sound great to me, and I’m not even able to get knocked up! But who isn’t trying to get more healthy these days? The state of our food system is truly alarming, as I’ve learned over the past ten months of blogging through Simply in Season.

P.S. FYI If you do click through and purchase the course, I will get a small commission. The FTC wants me to tell you that  

This post linked to Works for Me Wednesday and Things I Love Thursday

I apologize for being a bit late in posting the winner. With the power outage and subsequent computer frying I didn’t have access to the internet.

Barakoli Obama by Powered by Produce was the clear winner! Isn’t that super fun? Click the photo below to check it out!

Also be sure to check out the other entrants - we had some great entries!

Sunday morning my husband and I were rudely awakened by a severe thunderstorm. There was a large clap of thunder and lightning, and I could feel it in my chest. DH said, “That sounded close.” Then another one struck, our alarm clocks sparked, and the lights went out. The smell of electrical components burning filled the air. We jumped out of bed, threw on our clothes, and went around unplugging things and making sure there was no fire either in our yard or in our house.

The fire truck came and parked in front of our neighbor’s. They were sitting outside in the car. Apparently they mistook their electrics burning for a fire. Turns out our next door neighbor’s tree was struck, and they even had electricity shooting out of the wall!

We were without power all of Sunday until about 8 PM. When it came on again we were able to assess the damage. I had been hoping our dryer would be fried because it is on its last leg. No such luck, the only things fried were things we didn’t want to lose! Our window air conditioning unit, our cable modem, digital cable, two computers, and garage door opener were goners.

I took the day off work yesterday to call the cable company and insurance. This morning I waited around for the cable guy and am at work with access to a computer. It’s been a crazy couple of days, which explains my lack of posting!

So without further ado, for your enjoyment, just in time for Ohamanda’s Top 10 Tuesday, are the 10 Things I Did When I Was Without Power, then Internet and Cable.

1. Ate a delicious breakfast that DH made on the grill.
2. Went to my parent’s for lunch.
3. Went to our friend’s house for dinner and to do a load of laundry.
4. Dreamed about the new appliances I’d get if our appliances were fried and the insurance was paying for them.
5. Came back to reality when I found out our deductible is $1,000.
6. Cleaned the house thoroughly on my day “off.”
7. Realized how much more I get done when there’s no internet or TV.
8. Noticed that the peas grew a couple of inches from the morning to the afternoon.
9. Saw a bird eating the mulberries off our tree.
10. Secretly wished we had no electricity more often because it was so quiet and relaxing.

I am actually grateful for the experience. Being forced to be still and unplug was a good reminder that I need to do so on a regular basis. It’s good for the soul.

Join us for Gratituesday at Heavenly Homemakers!

To celebrate the 4th of July, I decided to host a little Cooking Contest and Blog Hop! I hope this will be a fun way to get new recipes and meet other bloggers. Sorry, Canadians and others, you’ll have to wait for the next event.

We are going to run this like an election.

Week 1: The Primaries

June 14-20 was the week for entries.

Week 2: The Elections

June 21-27 the polls will open! You will have the chance to vote for your favorite recipe. Polls will close on the 27th at midnight EST and the winner will be announced on Monday June 28. What are we playing for? Besides bragging rights, the winner will get this cool tote bag from Etsy.

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People sometimes complain about getting only a single zucchini or tomato in their CSA box. What can I do with just one? They ask. Oh, the things you can do with just a few seemingly random vegetables! Here are my top 10:

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I’m seeing green! This week’s menu will include lots of salads for lunch. I have so much left from my CSA that I need to start incorporating it much more into my diet. What else will I be making this week?

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My goodness, where has the time gone? June is more than halfway over, and our Food & Faith series is almost finished. Today’s post was the last one! I feel that even though we’ve covered so many topics, I could delve so much deeper into each and every one of them. I’ll be posting a poll next week to see which you are most interested in learning about. Even though the series will finish, I hope to continue to have guest posts about various issues around eating locally.

This week’s winner of Edible: A Celebration of Local Food is Greg, whose closest publication is Edible Iowa. He also writes that he loves my site. Random.org did not take that into consideration, but I appreciate it!

The winner of the Food & Faith Challenge is Dawn, who writes “This is our fourth year as members of a CSA, and each year I have gotten better at using and putting by the produce. Each year we have increased our share, the first year we did 3/4 share, then a full share, then our farm moved, so we joined a different farm, more locally, which ended up offering even larger shares. The CSA was a enough of an adventure to start, along with occasionally farmers market visits and membership in our small town co-op, but over the last year we have worked hard to Eat Local, as well as increasing our organic consumption.

We have long tried to decrease waste, but it is an ongoing process, and as our family grows, we target areas that need improving. Now that the kids are a bit bigger, napkins are something we are using too much of, and we were just discussing moving to cloth naps, but hadn’t done it yet. So, I was excited to see this giveaway, and I’ll definitely check out the Etsy store!”

Well, I hope you enjoy your weekend! I’m off to the farmer’s market.

I don’t know about yours, but my Dad is a great cook! I have fond memories of him making us buckwheat pancakes growing up, and he still is a grilling machine. If you have a foodie father, here are some gift ideas! Don’t forget, Father’s Day is June 20!

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