More Weekend Adventures and The Cleanse

Vacation in Park City

Once again we've been busy and I've neglected to update you on our happenings. Okay, in this edition of Weekend Adventures with Andrew and Willow we will be talking about Park City, our Green Smoothie Cleanse, the After (cleanse) Party, and other fun things. A while back we planned a fun vacation to Oregon with friends. Those plans fell through and we were kinda sad about it. In order to still have a bit of a vacation, we rescheduled and moved our vacation spot to the oh-so-majestic and very-much-closer Park City. Our friends (same ones we were going to go to Oregon with) have a house in that area (okay, actually it's their parent's house, but you get the idea). We drove up to Park City on Thursday and partied it up until Monday!

Continue past the break to see more pictures of our last two weekends:

Loss of Identity

Recently I was talking to my mom about our family holiday traditions. It's interesting to be at this stage in our lives and realize that we are not only combining our family traditions, but making our own as well. I't's less than a week until Christmas and it is just starting to feel like it. Luckily (almost) all of our Christmas shopping is done! I always have a hard time buying for my grandpa. He was born in 1919, lives with my parents, and only has a few things that he enjoys and is able to do now. Don't get me wrong, my grandpa is still completely with it. I often call home and just talk to my grandpa. He cracks me up! So, when I called him and asked what he wanted for Christmas and he said, "Anything I want or need can't really be bought with money," I knew I had to go back to my old boring stand-by gifts for him. We decided to go with Germade. Since we now live right by Lehi it is easy to get this for him and I know he enjoys it. My grandparents had either hot cereal or eggs for breakfast every morning except Sunday, because Sunday is the day of rest. Sunday mornings they had cold cereal, usually cornflakes, with a large helping of sugar from the sugar bowl on the table. I don't really know what makes Germade different from Cream of Wheat. I've always thought that it's consistency is a bit courser and it might be healthier.

Okay, back to my conversation with my mom about traditions. While we were talking I mentioned an episode of No Reservations where Anthony Bourdain tries to find the perfect traditional Christmas fare from all over the world. I was mentioning how sad it was that the generation that was my grandpa's grandparents got to the US and was pressured to assimilate and become "American". Their kids didn't bother to learn their parent's language or traditions. What would my Swedish Finn great-great grandparents do for Christmas? My mom (who actually remembers her great grandpa, a ship builder that immigrated from Finnland, singing songs in swedish) told me that she had written a paper on this exact subject - the loss of identity and demasculinization of the fathers in that generation. How sad. The strong, proud fathers get to America in order to create a better life for their families and they have to accept work that they are overqualified for, lean on their children because they don't know the language, and ignore their heritage in order not to embarrass their family. I'm not saying it was all peaches and cream for the children of these immigrants, but it had to be hard for all involved.

Caga Tio

In ways I want to bring back some of the traditions from my genealogical heritage (thank goodness the traditions aren't as strange as some of the ones in Spain, like the Caganer or Caga Tio). In other ways I'm glad that Andrew and I get to make our own traditions. It's hard enough to decide what traditions from our adolescence we want to keep in our family and which ones we will change or let go of. Weirdly enough Andrew's family does heavy, heavy hang over for birthdays just like my family did. Now, if they also started hiding gifts and singing boola boola, I'd know that they were spying on my childhood!

Merry Almost Christmas !

Minute On Your Lips, Forever on your Hips

I always seem to overindulge this time of year. When my mother asked if I wanted to participate in Dr. Fuhrman's holiday challenge this year I decided (after a lot of hesitation) to go ahead and do it. It started on Monday and I decided to post what I eat over on a blog that my mom and I use for just such occasions called As the Lettuce Spins. Yes, my mom let me name the blog, she should have known better...

Since my holiday focus has been completely introspective, I received a much needed kick in the pants after reading a post over at our friend's blog Stroked to Life. She talks about holding her newborn nephew and realizing that things could have been completely different for her after she had her stroke. In Kendra's words, "I feel so grateful to have another holiday season to celebrate with my family and friends. I can’t imagine not being with them nor can I imagine what it would be like to not have one of them with me."

Her whole post was great. That is the right perspective.

Now, I would like to preface this next comment by saying that all of my thoughts do not come from watching television. You probably don't believe this due to my mention of TV shows in my last couple posts, but it's true! Okay, so this week the History Chanel had a show on about the real story of Thanksgiving. I didn't watch the whole thing, but on the show someone mentioned that Thanksgiving is the perfect holiday because it is not too religious and it combines two of America's best-known traits: gluttony and sentiment. Now, who doesn't love a little gluttony and sentiment now and again?