Baby Cecil is on his way!

Dan's brother and his wife are within a day or two of having a baby! The doctor pressed them to induce so they packed up their hospital bag and headed over to the hospital tonight. Little did anyone know, Kristina was already having contractions and didn't know. The doctor has held off the induction and is having them just stay there the night. Hopefully, she kicks off into labor on her own. I'm keeping my fingers crossed. This is their first baby and I know Kristina is really scared. Hopefully, I will see them tomorrow. Please send good birthing vibes her way.

I've got balls!

Coconut covered fruit balls. I made them today by processing some dates, raisins, figs walnuts, mixing with some OJ, then rolling them in coconut.

Duh...what did you think I meant???

You've got your minds in the gutter, people!

However....quite accidentally, it seems I have a little theme going on here. Maybe I need to re-title my post about vegetarian sausages....hmmm....

Vegetarian Sausages!

I finally made these! After seeing the photos and posts from Day to Day Vegan and Urban Housewife, I just had to try these for myself. They are pretty good! We stuffed them into whole wheat subs and poured marinara on top. The only minor problem I had with this is that the sausages are basically seitan (vital wheat gluten & water), which has lots of protein and a decent amount of iron, but little to nothing else. I'm used to eating a lot of veggies at dinner so I threw in a side of roasted brussel sprouts and we were good to go. Everybody liked it, even Lola. I'm planning to slice up the leftovers and scatter them onto a veggie pizza. Mmmmm!

Celebrity Sightings from last night...

Dyan Cannon, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, David Beckham and Penny Marshall.

Jack was nowhere to be found...and I know we would have seen him if he was there because we were right up on the floor and the court is way smaller than it looks on TV, so you can clearly see everyone there. I'm bummed...I was looking forward to watching Jack jump up and down, yell at the refs for bad calls, etc...
It was a really exciting game. I didn't think I'd like it, but when you're that close, it's hard not to get into it. The action is pretty much non-stop!

Back to L.A. again...

Tonight we are going to the Lakers game at the Staples center. Pretty exciting stuff even though I don't care for basketball one bit. Nah, for me, the excitement is in the celebrity-spotting potential!
I almost scrapped our plans since Lola was throwing up last night, but she does seem so much better today and she was just outside flying a kite with daddy a few minutes ago, looking cheerful as can be. Plus, our friends have had these tickets for months...they are floor courtside seats worth more than a couple of hundred bucks a piece. They were given to my friend's husband by some company that is shmoozing him.

So! Wish me luck oggling celebrities! Oh and...er...go lakers!

Catching up...

I'm just posting because it's been so long, but I don't feel like I have that much to say, really. Sorry! I'm lame.
I've been really busy trying to take care of a bunch of loose ends here at home so I was really stressed out yesterday. My friend was so kind and took Lola to the beach to play with her daughter and some other friends. That helped a lot! I've procrastinated on some stuff and now it's just gotta get done and off my mind, you know?
Anyhoooo....I did make a remarkable discovery tonight. After scrapping my dinner at the last minute for yuckiness, I looked around in the cupboards for something else to pull together. Well, I had bought these little pouches from Trader Joe's that looked interesting. One was an Indian chickpea dinner and the other was a pouch of precooked wild rice. Per instructions, I set both pouches in boiling water for 5 minutes and PRESTO!!! Instant dinner! It was really good too, I'm shocked. I don't know how they do it, really, because there was nothing but whole food ingredients on both packages. I had the punjab choley with rice. It was so insanely spicy, I could only eat about half. I had to stop since I literally could feel my throat burn! GOOD STUFF!

L.A.

We had a fun but exhausting trip to L.A. and we are finally home! I only say "finally" because we left our friend's house in Northridge at 3:30 pm this afternoon and we just got home maybe an hour ago. Crazy long ride home with tons of traffic and tons of Elise screaming.
Otherwise, it was a good trip. Lola had an interview on Thursday with a child modeling agency and they really liked her. Afterwards, we went to eat at a surfer kinda burrito place in Huntington Beach called "The Secret Spot". It was super non-descript and casual, but I picked that cafe for it's large focus on vegetarian/vegan type stuff. I had looked up different restaurant options before we left and even mapquested the directions!
But even with all that planning ahead of time, I still feel like we ate nothing but bean burritos, pretzels, z-bars, fruit leathers and brown rice chips. Not terrible for an "on the road" diet, but not exactly prime either. I think the only veggies I ate were in my bean burrito from The Secret Spot!
Dan had a golf tournament the next day (this morning) so the girls and I kicked about town for a while, then went to our friend's house to visit. We woke up early so I carried Elise on my back and Lola and I went down the street to get some coffee. On the way back to the hotel, we saw a cool place to get breakfast so we ate a nice meal...
We visited a huge Indian "sweet and spice" store and picked up some interesting stuff that I can't wait to try out.
We got to our friend's house by late morning and hung out until Dan was done with the tournament. We left right away but I'm still shocked at how much traffic we encountoured!
Back to our regular stuff tomorrow. Veggies. I'm actually craving veggies. I don't want to see another fruit leather for a long time.