Food

For those of you that know us, food has become quite the chore at our house. Thirteen years ago I was diagnosed with Rheumatoid Arthritis. It became very severe as time went on and the drug therapies that I tried made it and my body worse. I turned to natural medicine. I tried EVERYTHING you can think of from acupuncture to NET (Neurological Emotional Treatments)treatments. What finally helped me was a natural path in Spokane, WA who does the Carroll food testing (here's there web site explaining what this is: http://www.windroseclinic.com/FIT.html) I found out, through this testing and a few other tests that they do, that I am potato, sea food and sugar intolerant. As you can imagine this makes eating and cooking hard to do. It's been about 5 years now since I went for the first time so I've gotten used to making lots of food from scratch and finding great goodies that I can have. As hard as this is, it's worth all the effort of being pain, swelling and symptom free. We had our children and Aaron tested as well, to help them with good health. Fortunately there are a few duplicates to make life a little easier. We find that vegan recipes work great as well as grass fed beef. We eat meat about twice a month with eggs often (Gwen gets dairy at egg times because she is egg intolerant). It's difficult because we don't get invited to eat at others very often and church is hard with the kids because of the amount of treats that are handed out. With time though our ward has become sensitive to us and has started working with us to help our kids eat healthy. Our dear friends the Nielsen's help us a ton in the beginning and Josef taught me how to cook from scratch (he has a Passion for cooking). He truly was an angel to me when it came to changing my diet. The first few months I would walk around the house crying because I was so hungry and did not know what to eat. When Josef would notice he would say "what would you like for dinner". My other great friend, Liz (who has a culinary arts degree), helped a lot by sending me two of my most favorite cook books, Laural's Kitchen and Real Food Daily, not to mention the little tips she gives me here and there.

Often times people ask "what DO you eat?" Well here's what we eat on a typical day:

Yummy Mexi Chop Salad!!

My homemade bread baking in the oven (don't mind the dirty oven...does anyone want to come clean it? ;) )

Every time we make bread we also make pan fried bread. We bring out different spreads like, hummus, peanut butter and honey mix, almond butter and our favorite agave, coconut and chocolate sauce!

Gwen enjoying her good eats

Aaron's favorite treat is this yummy Root Beer by Dr. Tima. It's made with honey and actually tastes like root beer.

The remodel

For Christmas this year we decided to do a little bit of a remodel to our home. We finally got ride of the white carpet in the dinning room, front room and halls and had a little color put on the walls. Here are some before and after pictures for you to enjoy. These before pictures were taken when we first moved in.

BEFORE:

Front room

Dinning room and kitchen

Upstairs hall

Front entryway

Upstairs bathroom

Kids Room

AFTER:

Was the kids room, now a plush guest room for any of you who would like to brave coming to Utah!

Upstairs bathroom

Upstairs Hall

Front Entryway

Kichen and Dinning

Front Room

More Front room

More about us...

(photo to the right) Our Kent house that we sold before we moved to utah

So Aaron and I are from the Seattle, WA area where we were both born and raised. We were actually born in the same hospital in Seattle, just 4 years apart. Funny thing is that my parents were also born in the same hospital in Salt Lake City, UT. We come from two different worlds, I was the 4th of 5 children and raised in Bellevue (no, I’m not a Bellevue brat!) and Aaron was the 3rd of 12 children raised in Burien, then later Kent. We have lived all over the Seattle area since we’ve been married. Our longest stay was in our “blue” home in Kent, WA. Our current location is in the Salt Lake City Valley in Utah where Aaron is now working for the LDS church and loving every minute. There’s nothing like knowing your work is going toward complete service to other people in need. After 3 years I'm still trying to get used to Utah as a whole. I miss the trees, clean air, kind people, good food and most of all our family. There has been a lot of good that has come from living in Utah like Aaron being so happy in his job and our amazing Homeschooling group. Yes, I do homeschool our children and love it so much! This is part of the reason I started this blog. I’m going to be posting our projects that we are working on or have completed so our friends and family can see how much fun we have and the can all so observe our progress. I will be encouraging my children to write their own posts as well. I hope you enjoy learning about us and what we are up to!

This is us... The Kibbies

Here's a little history of us. Aaron and I met back in the spring of 1997 on a "lets pass Craig to Tina date" (hosted by my wonderful friends Christy and Janel) Fortunately for me Craig brought the most good looking guy I had ever seen with him, Aaron. When I first saw him a little voice said "you are going to marry him" my thought said "What! I'm only 19!" Well that little voice doesn't lie. Sure enough 10 days later we were engaged, 5 months later, July 18, we were married. I found out later that my parents knew his parents through Civic Light Opera in Seattle where Aaron's dad worked with my parents doing musicals together. So I'm sure at some point we ran together through the halls of that theater. Me, being a huge flirt and Aaron being so good looking. :) A year and a half later we had our first beautiful daughter Robyn Mackenzie. She was born two weeks late (no, I wasn't patient about it) right before Christmas. She's now 9 year old and such an amazing big sister and little girl. 19 months after Robyn was born our beautiful blond, Emma, was born, coming a week and a half early. What a relief that was, after having Robyn so late. I love how passionate she is and she has an ability to love that is so wonderful. 23 months later we finally had our first little man, George Aiden, named after his father, grandfather, great grandfather, etc., etc. A boy, what a great change this brought to our family. He has a sense of humor all of his own and is so good at making us laugh, even when he's not trying ;). 3 ½ years later came our little Gwendolyn Hope, named after Auntie Gwen, Grandma Gwen and Aaron's grandmother Hope. This spacing was something new and quite refreshing. Due to the amount of help that flows from my wonderful older children, it's been an easy ride to have another baby again. I am so grateful that my older children have been a delightful help to me. Gwen is so extremely cute in her little two year old way. I really did take advantage of the "little" time with my older children and wish I could rewind and do their "little" time again with the knowledge I have now! If you have your first "little" one, love them, hold them and laugh as much as you can. It goes SO fast!!!

Us at Steven's wedding in 2005

Here we are at Christmas in 2003