Hey bloggies! I haven’t officially announced it yet, so I figured I should…
I’m pregnant! Whoop!
The little one on his/her head. About 12 weeks here.
This is mine and John’s first little bun in ze oven, so to speak. I’m mid my 13th week. I’ve got a LOT more energy and a lot less morning sickness than I did from about weeks 7 - 11, thankfully. I’ve been on prenatal vitamins ever since I found out I was pregnant, which was around week 5. Still, I don’t take that as a free-for-all to eat whatever, and still try to eat as healthy as ever, although sometimes I get some flat out non-healthy cravings, i.e. fast food hamburgers. Luckily those don’t happen very often.
Anyhow, from what I’ve read about pregnancy and nutrition, important vitamins for both me and my baby include folic acid (i.e. folate, in its natural form), calcium and iron, among others. Those 3 just stick out to me as very important for the baby and important for me to get more of because I’m pregnant and thus need more of both for my increased blood supply and because my body is using more calcium overall.
This leads to an in-eloquent segway… A week ago I discovered a video where this little girl of 5, tops, was making green drinks while her mother video tapes. She basically spelled out and showed the ingredients and process. What remained was for me to do some guess work to figure out how much of each ingredient I’d need to repeat the recipe. I think I got it just about right and so wanted to share with you that recipe for a very delicious green drink, high in lots of nutrients and good for the wee one and mama combined…
Ingredients (for 1 serving):
1 orange, peeled and pitted if necessary.
One banana, peeled and cut or just broken in halves (for easy blending)
3/4 cup of strawberries, washed and cut in halves
1 cup of fresh spinach leaves, washed
1/2 cup of fresh, cool water
Tools needed:
Blender
Directions:
Measure, wash and cut all ingredients before hand.
Throw all ingredients in the blender, in reasonable sized pieces so that blending isn’t a pain.
Add the water to the mixture in blender.
Cover blender and start blending at a low setting, stopping if necessary to move the contents around a bit in order to help them get caught be the blender blades, always making sure to re-cover the blender before you continue blending.
As the items start to catch more easily in the blender blades, you can turn the settings up. I went as high as “liquefy” on my blender. In all it took about a minute, tops, to blend thoroughly.
Once everything is well blended get yourself out a tall glass and pour your delicious green drink to the tip, then simply enjoy your drink!
Here are some nutrition facts about what is included in this green drink recipe:
- Spinach: High in Vitamin A, with decent amounts of Vitamin C, Iron and Folate.
- Strawberries: High in Vitamin C
- Orange: High in Vitamin C, with decent amounts of Vitamin A, Calcium and Folate.
- Banana: High in Vitamin B6, Vitamin C, with decent amounts of Riboflavin and Folate.
In all this drink contains about 329 calories. Pregnant women generally need only 300 more calories a day in their diet than non pregnant women, so this drink could be a really beneficial source of those calories because it’s packed with nutrients. I’ll have to look around for different drink ingredients, just to mix it up so I’m not in-taking the same vitamins and nutrients every time I go for a green drink. If I find a decent source I’ll share it with you all later… Let me know how you like this recipe if you do try it. I think it’s quite delicious. You don’t taste the spinach at all as far as I can tell, yet it dominates the drink color and adds a lot of great beneficial vitamins to the mix!
People seem to dig my 
