Hi Friends!

Today I’m excited to have my cousin Ellie share some ideas for ways to implement a nutritional lifestyle into the center of your children’s world!

Ellie spends so much time outdoors doing activities and gardening with her kids, making healthy recipes with them, and overall focusing on wellness for her family. I’ve always been especially intrigued by her tower gardens and home grown veggies and thought it would be fun to have her share some of her ideas with us as part of this month’s motivation challenge!

Let’s get to it!

Hello!  My name is Ellie and I am a stay at home mom on a mission to help friends and family find easy wellness solutions to live their best lives.  I have 2 kids – Bea (3) and Eddie (18 months).  I’m thrilled to offer this post highlighting the ways our family is trying to live our best life.  The first couple are to do with getting more whole foods (plants!) into my family.  I am particularly interested in this topic because I have been reading that it is the number one way to protect our immune systems.  This is such a stressful time for parents because we don’t know what the school year will look like and we want to keep our families safe while living some semblance of “normal”.  Strengthening our immune systems has become a topic that keeps me up at night and I love swapping ideas with friends on what is working for them, or what they are excited to explore.

My favorite way to sneak more fruits and veggies into my kids is through smoothies!  We love making them every day and my go to recipe is:

1 cup unsweetened almond milk

1 scoop of my favorite smoothie mix (chocolate or vanilla both work here!)

1 big handful of greens

Frozen cherries (enough to have your preferred flavor and texture)  

The smoothie mix that I love is seriously the best.  It is so tasty, plant-based, NSF certified, vegan, gluten free, non-GMO, and has the glycemic index of broccoli.

The next way we are trying to get more fresh plants into our body is by growing our own!  We have a small vegetable garden outside in a beautiful raised bed that Nick built and we are growing 40 plants in our little basement through an aeroponic growing system called the Tower Garden.  I love this little garden in a box because it is so productive and easy for us non-greenthumb people to have success.  Not to mention, there are no weeds or bugs, and it uses 2% of the water that traditional gardening does.  The sound the water pump makes when it runs is very soothing too :).  At the moment, we are growing several lettuces, a couple types of kale, basil, parsley, cilantro, and jalapeños.  Bea planted 2 purple snap pea plants and I have to tell you, these are the BEST to watch; I swear they grow 6 inches every night!  Bea loves to eat the snap peas as she finds them.  Nick and I love knowing where our food comes from and that there were not multiple hands on it inbetween when it was picked and when it arrived in our kitchen.  This is also something we are being intentional about showing our kids and I think Bea is starting to notice the miracle of starting a plant from a seed and watching the fruits of her labor (particularly with her snap pea!).

The final thing I want to share with you is our experience working out together this summer.  In particular, we have truly fallen in love with our long bike rides.  95% of the time, the kids love having their snacks with the wind in their faces as we cruise around.  When I’m climbing a big hill, Bea knows to cheer me on and when we are going down, everybody cheers “weeee!”.  I try to make stops to keep them entertained and for now, that has meant a stop at my parents’ house and some days a stop at a local bakery for a treat.  It is so important for our kids to see us doing the things we love to take care of ourselves and integrating them into that.  Some days we do yoga together which typically means they are running around or climbing on me but they are still soaking it in.  Other days we go for long walks (I quit trying to run with them now that they combine to 60 lbs!) and talk.  I have started to hear Bea say she is going for a ride and she’ll see me later when we are playing in the backyard, so I know she is taking this routine in and hopefully that means she’ll think about doing it herself some day when she is old enough.

I would love to connect with anyone also interested in nutrition, children’s health, wellness, etc.  You can find me at @elsasmorris on instagram!