Happy mothers' day to all you (us) mammas! We even have a lovely sunny day to enjoy, ahhhh!
I'm honestly really sick and tired of buying more and more crap for myself and my loved ones, so I'm always looking for some different type of gift to give without so much waste. This year I made a donation in my mother's name to CARE. Here's some information that I'm copying from the email they sent out today:In countries throughout the developing world, many mothers never get to hold their babies, celebrate first birthdays or see them take their first steps. That's because 1,400 women die every day from complications in pregnancy and childbirth. The majority of these deaths are preventable. They take place in poor communities where access to basic healthcare and skilled health professionals is scarse.
With more than 50 years of experience developing and implementing maternal and child health programs in the world's poorest countries, CARE is committed to reducing the risk of women dying during pregnancy or delivery with programs that:
- Educate families and communities on the health benefits of family planning;
- Ensure women have access to health care and good nutrition during pregnancy;
- Remove barriers to maternal care and increase access to skilled care during labor and delivery;
- Strengthen postpartum care to monitor for complications and provide support to improve newborn health and survival.
I've recently heard a few people say this, that they'd like to stop eating so much meat, but don't know how to get by without it. How would they get their protein?! And meat is so fast to get ready! Once I saw one of those shows where a judge puts in his two cents' worth after two people fight it out in which a divorced and vegetarian mother was against the fact that her ex went out hunting with their son and they ate the meat together. The whole audience (and also my mother-in-law) kept saying that the mother was pretty much abusing her son by not feeding him meat because how in the world was he supposed to grow big and strong?! I can't remember the judge's ruling, perhaps because it was so stomach-turning that I had to leave the room.
First off, I want to say that I'm not a vegetarian (though I do eat very little meat) even if I would like to be. But I've found that very few people realize wat harm eating meat can do, not only to the poor animal, but also to the environment, your wallet and your own health. And people often don't realize that vegetable protein is very valid, as well as being better for the human organism without harming the environment or mistreating animals, not to mention while costing much less. There's a wide range of legumes (beans, that is) that can be cooked and eaten as they are or prepared into products such as tofu and seitan. And they are really really good.
I've recently started using soy protein, dried chunks of soy which can be used instead of meat. I made a lovely vegetarian bolognese sauce (bolognese is a sauce full of ground meat), first sauteeing garlic and chopped-up carrots, then adding whole canned tomatoes and the soy protein (after having boiled it for about 15 minutes to soften it). Tossed with penne pasta and... voilà! Preparing this soy protein this way, this bag which cost me about €2.50 was worth 6 portions of meat. Not bad! I also made a yummy fennel and orange salad, one of my favorites, cutting raw fennel into strips and peeled oranges into chunks, mixed with a little oil and salt (or gomasio, crushed sesame seeds, instead of salt). No meat and we were stuffed full at the end of dinner.
It can really be hard sometimes living in a country that isn't yours with a different culture and language to boot. But it's all worthwhile when you get nice happenings like this past Sunday. Camposano, a little town near Nola, had their annual Palio, or race. But not a horse race like the famous Palio of Siena, but a donkey race.
Today we finally started organizing our "box," our storage area on the ground floor of our building, where we'd dumped so much stuff that we couldn't even walk in it anymore. And we found lots of fun stuff we'd forgotten about. Such as the tray I used when I tried to potty train my cat. Yeah, like in "Meet the Parents." Like this nice kitty in the picture. That way you don't have to buy any more litter, or clean it, or step on it, carrying it all over the house under your shoes. Ecological and money saving to boot, cool!
I bought the CitiKitty kit, which includes a sort of tray that you fill with flushable litter and put on the toilet seat. It has concentric circles that are removed bit by bit so that a hole opens in the center and gets bigger and bigger until the cat is just forced to do its stuff into the toilet. And finally you take the whole thing off, but the cat keeps "eliminating" right where we do, too.
