I always marveled at Sheila’s multi-tasking abilities. While I was struggling to get the breakfast dishes of the day cleaned up, Sheila and Dale were out mastering their lucrative careers, which sometimes sent them off travelling on overnight trips. In those days, a trip to the grocery store sent my family off-balance — yet Sheila managed her jet-setting with grace and style.

And her two boys, with their endearing bright eyes, were the epitome of balanced, happy kids.

How did she do it?

Now I know her secret. Sheila had foresight. She foresaw every imaginable scenario and she planned for it. Her planning led her to written lists, checklists and instructions. She had mastered the art of “leaving your kids” and documented every detail of the excursion so that it was  down to a hard science. While she had a regular caregiver, who knew her kids like a Grandma, there were always those unforeseen emergencies when Grandma, an Aunt or a neighbor had to step in. Thanks to those lists, anyone could step in and do what Shelia, and her boys, needed.

Of course, being the organizational wizard that she is, Sheila has collected her forms and documents in a handy-spiral-bound book, The Infant and Toddler Guide for Busy Parents™ .

Inside, you’ll find a place to list nap, sports and after-school schedules, places to record school and pediatrician contact numbers, as well as official documents to be used in the, heaven-forbid — emergency. But it’s not just for the kids — Sheila includes checklists for running the house (garbage day!) so that the entire household keeps running smoothly while you’re gone. This book is Sheila’s “science for leaving the kids” in one handy reference.  This is simply peace of mind in a book.

Visit Sheila’s website to get your copy. Also, check out her Pet Care Guide.

]]> http://www.susiej.com/reviews/the-infant-and-toddler-guide-for-busy-parents/feed/ 2 http://www.susiej.com/reviews/skip-the-yogurt-head-straight-for-the-chocolate/ http://www.susiej.com/reviews/skip-the-yogurt-head-straight-for-the-chocolate/#comments Thu, 24 Sep 2009 13:39:12 +0000 SusieJ http://www.susiej.com/reviews/?p=520 Probiotics, those essential microorganisms we’ve heard so much about lately, because they boost your immune system and restore digestive balance, are everywhere in the dairy aisle. Yogurt, we’ve always believed, is the vital carrier for these essential live cultures. Whether you want to eat it with a spoon, drink it or slurp it, there’s no shortage of yogurt-based drinks with labels touting those Latin names – everything from bifidobacteria to Lactic acid bacteria.

Chocolate, it turns out, is a much better carrier for these microorganisms. Chocolate — no kidding.

A study done at the University of Ghent in Belgium found that 80 percent of chocolate-based probiotics pass safety through the stomach vs. 20 percent of milk/yogurt drink-based probiotics. The cocoa butter in the chocolate protects the probiotics, eliminating the need for refrigeration, for up to one year – No need for refrigeration.

Joseph Maroon, MD and author of The Longevity Factor: How Resveratrol and Red Wine Activate Genes for a Longer and Healthier Life, worked with Maramor Chocolates to create an entire line of chocolates fortified with essential probiotics. These chocolate bars are individual wrapped (just one per day) and are packed with microencapsulated probiotics. A single bar of dark chocolate is 80 calories; 70 calories for milk chocolate.

Maramor sent me two box samples of both the milk and dark chocolate probiotic bars. Once I read the fact sheet about how healthy the chocolate was, I expected to taste cardboard.

I was wrong; and I was surprised. The taste of this chocolate is very good; addictively good; and my kids are sneaking chocolate bars out of the box when they think I’m not looking.

I don’t mind the the security of knowing that at least they’re eating something healthy, which just happens to taste delicious.

There are a scant 20-30 pages left of this historical novel, Stealing Athena,by Karen Essex; How will see tie the loose ends in the few pages left in this epic that spans centuries with parallel epics that cover art, romance and sex? Lady Elgin is in a perilous predicament with her husband — something even her own money and royal line can’t protect her from; while Lord Elgin uses her money to recover the Greek treasures. (What will become of her children?) Aspasia, courtesan lover of the great Pericles, has betrayed him with a secret, shaking the freedom of the artist who create the great sculptures.  Essex has roped me in with her historical facts of Napoleon’s ravages during the war, the customs of the Turks, where Lady Elgin served as an ambassador with her husand, the erection of the Greek Statues, mingled with the human, day-to-day drama of human weakness and passion.

Quentins, by Maeve Binchy, is a restaurant that serves as a meeting place in many Binchy novels. In this book, Binchy uncovers some of the clandestine meetings, heartbreaks, and stories of love and loss that have taken place in Quentins. The main character, Ella Brady, pulled me in, and I found Maeve to be a talented novelist, who know how to entertain and delight. Quentins, is nothing short of a delicious, saucy, plot-twisting great book.

For my recent trip to the lake, I picked up Firefly Summer, hoping to pull in the same penetrating characters, drama, and resolution as I found in Quentins.

The story in Firefly summer is also filled with dramatic characters, and Maeve is a master at giving us all the details of a lifetime in just two sentences. But the story here is much harder to bear.. this has been a tough read, full of hearbreak. My husband, watching some tears fall from my face as I read, asked, “Why do you keep reading it if it’s so depressing.”

“Because,” I said, “Maeve delivers not only the heartbreak, but also the lessons, the healing and the transformation that eventually comes as life continues to play itself out. For me, I must wait a lifetime for my own heartbreaks to be healed. Here, I can see almost instantly that time does bring healing, in surprising ways.”

It’s a lovely, lovely read.

Roxanne was also very popular. Especially with the boys. In true, Romeo and Juliet style, Roxanne fell deeply in love with every Mother’s worst nightmare. The town fighter, the town druggie, and the high-school drop-out. I’ll call him, Rocky. Dates, phone calls and visits were strictly forbidden by Roxanne’s mother. This, of course, made the romance all that more exciting. Love always finds a way, and with Roxanne’s brand new car, she drove to his house every day after school, while her Mom was busy at work. Rocky’s Mother saw Roxanne as an elixir of motivation for her son. Roxanne could “turn him around,” the Mom dreamed. This romance was his ticket.

The after-school visits soon turned to overnight ones. How did Roxanne pull those off, you ask? Simple. She simply told her Mom she was at my house. Roxanne’s mother called our house only one time. Not to check up on her daughter, but to simply ask her where she put the cookie sheet. My Mom answered. “No, Roxanne isn’t here, and I haven’t seen her for months,” my Mom honestly said. Roxanne’s mother laughed on the phone, and said, “Well, you certainly don’t know what your daughter is up to, because Roxanne has been spending quite a bit of time at your house with your daughter.” We had a very small house. Roxanne would have been hard to miss. Roxanne’s Mother had a severe case of “Ostrich Parenting.”

You could have put the book, Mama Rock’s Rules: Ten Lessons for Raising a Houseful of Successful Children, into Roxanne’s Mother’s hands, but you could never make her read it. Yet, this book, would have been the perfect straight-talk-about-parenting-advice that Roxanne’s Mother needed to hear. Practical, down-home advice, yet radical to her, that would have put things back in perspective, and put the Mom, the rule-maker, back in the driver’s seat. Rose Rock raised ten kids, and 17 foster children; and she’s proud of every one of them. Roxanne’s Mom could have benefited from Mama Rock’s advice about the role that family meal times serve in parenting:

Once the kids get a full stomach, things loosen up. They not only eat the beans — they spill the beans. Everything would come out at the table, especially the secrets. The higher the comfort level, the more talk came out.

Looking back now, I rarely remember a family meal around the table at Roxanne’s house. They were one of the few families to have one of the early microwaves. A tool that liberated them to eat whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted, so they could freely graze whenever they felt like it. This seemed to create an aura of “isolationism” in the family. Everyone was “on their own.” The girls relished this independence.

Roxanne’s family’s loosey-goosey family rules lies in direct contrast to Rose Rock’s household. In her book, Rock outlines her formula for teaching kids what’s expected, and how structure and consequences keep kids feeling secure. Tough-love rules, that will, in the long run, make your job as a parent much easier over the long haul; especially through the teen years.

The whole thing with rules is this: it’s all about responsibility. When you make guidelines, it makes life easier, it manages expectations. Don’t wait! Start early and start them young.

Mama Rock does give advice for starting them young, with an eye toward preparing them to make good decisions for the day when they will be without you. When you run downstairs to the laundry room, tell your little ones that you’ll be gone for a few minutes, and you expect them to stay right here and color in this book. When you come back upstairs and they have done that, praise them. With a wide-open view to her own family-table discussions, Rose reveals that life is never easy as a parent, and we are never prepared for what life throws at us.

I had already become a single parent when I moved with three young children to South Caroline from New York after the death of my husband. Those were hard times, even for the little things. I didn’t know cars didn’t come filled with gas until after Julius died.

This book is not a memoir, although the antidotes tell quite a few stories. This is a parenting manual, that teaches you how to be tough with your kids, but still show them your love. The book is full of wisdom, and humor:

I want to share with you one of the most important things I learned in parenting. NEVER ask a yes or no question, especially when it relates to crime and punishment. Don’t say, for instance, “Did you break that cabinet door?” Forget it; you’ll never find out because the answer will always be no. Nobody knows “nuthin’” ever.

If no one comes forward to discuss a mess, Wait a day or two. Then, let your children think you already know what’s going on. Sit down with the suspected culprit over a bowl of ice cream or have some cookies together — nice and casual. Phrase your question like this: “When you did this… “

I enjoyed this humorous, tough-talk parenting book, which was sent to me via the Parent Bloggers Network, much more than I thought I would. I’ve found myself picking up the book, time and time again, just to hear Rose talk, like a good, old, wise friend. And especially for this advice for the cookie jar:

The cookie jar should be kept at a kid-appropriate level so they can get at them when the time is right. Our cookie jar was not forbidden; it was no big deal. When we said to go ahead and have a few cookies, that’s exactly what they did. No one had to sneak.

What a difference, maybe it would have been for Roxanne, if her Mother had taken the same stance with boys, and not just the cookies. So, what happened to Roxanne? The romance faded, but not until it had done considerable damage to Roxanne’s habits and her reputation. Years later, when Roxanne’s Mom would pass my Mom on the street, she’d stop her and say, “My daughter was at your house that night,and you didn’t know it.” This used to really tick my Mom off.

So, I reluctantly let it go… but gently reining them in whenever we were in public places, or around other adults, so as not to offend them.

Alan Katz, has brilliantly used this well-known boy fascination to create a book of poems, specifically targeted to reach a young boy’s inner “grossness.” His books is called Oops!, illustrated by Edward Koren. If you’re a Mom, you will not like this book. Your son will love it. Better yet, as your son sits on the sofa reading the book aloud to his brothers, you will be pleasantly pleased.

A boy, we’ll call him Calvin, asked my son to carry his backpack for him, after an injury left him on crutches. I was proud. My son is kind, thoughtful.. and just an all-around nice guy.

Calvin had been in my son’s life in 1st and 2nd grades, but the the friendship had grown apart over the last three years, as my son’s interest evolved into sports, and Calvin’s didn’t.

Over the next couple of days, I began to notice the little snippets tacked on to the end of my son’s stories that revealed how much of Calvin’s incapacitation was influencing my son’s school day. It wasn’t just that Calvin insisted on walking the long way around the gym, making my son miss the regular group of guys he normally walks home with, there were other things. My son carried Calvin’s lunch tray, which moved my son to an entirely different “lunch table,” where the conversation introduced words to his vocabulary that made my ears burn. (He did share these new words with me as a “what do you think about this” conversation.) My son was no longer sitting with his regular group of friends.

Then, I heard about the funny trick Calvin played on my son.

“He left his binder, pencils and papers on his desk, and said I had to put all his stuff away for him.” Calvin’s hands and arms are fine — his leg is injured, I thought. “While I was stuffing his stuff in his backpack, Calvin left and went to the elevator, pushed the button, and left without me. So I had to carry his backpack, plus my backpack, all the way down the stairs. Calvin just laughed.”

Tell me more, I said. “Well, he calls me his slave… but he’s just kidding,” he said.”And, he snaps his fingers, and tells me to hurry up.” He added, “actually, he can’t ‘snap’ his fingers… he just pretends.”

Soon, my husband, overhearing the words from the other room, joined the conversation with, “He DOES WHAT!” Soon, our other son, joined the room, peppering the conversation his his version of “Why didn’t you just…”My son continued, “He forgot his lunch money on Friday, so I paid for his lunch,”

Did he pay you back?

“Well, he said he would… but then he forgot his money again, so I bought his lunch for him again today.”

At this point my husband and I are, in a word, steaming with anger. Calling his parents would have sent the wrong message: “We don’t think you can handle this on your own.” Besides, this incident was actually an opportunity, that laid the foundation for some growth. I had just finished reading Your Child’s Strengths: Discover Them, Develop Them, Use Them by Jenifer Fox, the night before, and we were already working on a “strengths chart” for each one of the boys. (The book outlines a how-to format for all ages, including the pre-school set. ) Your child’s strengths are not the acts that you observe in your child, the ones that warm your heart and then you spoon feed them to your child and pat them on the back, while you say, “This is what your strengths are dear,” as you tick them off the chart. No, Fox says, “Your child needs to come to a (strengths) epiphany on his own. You can lead him with your questions, but you cannot have it for him. Your job is to direct your child’s attention.” Chores, by the way create the perfect opportunity for your child to figure out what his strengths are, according to the book.

Fox says it is important to resist giving advice to your children… they will miss that internal shift that will make have the big impacts on minds. Rather, we need to teach our kids to accept responsibility, and “to see where he may have used his strengths to make poor decisions.” With no children of her own, Fox draws on her vast 25 years of experience as an administrator and teacher in both inner-city public and posh private schools. It’s tough to write a parenting book, when you’re not a parent… I found myself wincing at some of her advice. Yet, I knew what she had to say in this book was on-target, honed after her years of handling the toughest kids.

Right now, I needed my son to know, deep within, that Calvin was being disrespectful, and that Calvin, was in fact, a bully. As parents, as protectors, we just wanted to spit out the words, “You are not going to help Calvin anymore. You’re done. Calvin is taking advantage of you, and we won’t allow it.” We couldn’t do that. Yet, that’s exactly what we did. But, we were wrong; this was something I knew, especially after reading Strength’s. Yet, when your child needs help, sometimes you can’t help but try to rescue the one you love.

With or without Fox’s book to guide me, I knew I was wrong just by looking into my son’s eyes while I dictated advice to him, I could tell he didn’t “buy” what I was saying. “He’s just trying to be funny, Mom.” He felt uneasy about confronting this kid… he wasn’t convinced; in his mind, he wasn’t being bullied — although he did mention the word, on his own, earlier in the conversation.

I knew that once my son believed Calvin was wrong, the words, the motivation he needed to stand up to Calvin, would come to my son, all on its own. First, my son needed to believe it was right for him to say them.

Although we missed it on our first go-around in our strengths pow-wow with him, one of my son’s strongest strengths is that he is just a nice guy. He’s kind, and wants to help. He kept saying, “Mom, you told me how nice it is of me to help Calvin… and I couldn’t let him go without food at lunch time.” Deep down inside, my son wondered, “If I don’t help Calvin, who will?” Now, he needed to see how this strength was getting him into trouble. I didn’t want him to leave this thinking that it’s not a good idea to be nice to people.

This was a tricky situation, and it would take time, Fox warned, for this epiphany to occur. “Children’s innate strengths are like live wires connecting their unique inner qualities to their promise as adults. … when the energy is turned up and strengths are developed to their fullest, people’s passions light up. Life becomes meaningful and enjoyable even in the face of conflict, she wrote.

I began to ask my son how he felt when Calvin called him a slave, or how he felt when he left him at the elevator. I got nowhere. “I know he’s just kidding Mom… he laughs when he says it.” Doesn’t it bother you that you can’t sit with your regular friends? Nothing bothered him. His belief was still, “If I don’t help Calvin, who will?”

Exasperated, and trying very hard not to show it, I finally asked him; “Is there ANYTHING about helping Calvin that hurts you?” He said, well, yeah, “it makes my back and my neck hurt to carry both of these backpacks all day.” This was good, I thought. Physical pain is real, and he can identify with that. My son is, unfortunately, no stranger to neck pain. The weight in the backpacks they carry in middle school are close cousins to ball and chains, and they were already, before this incident, taking their toll. He had spent a few hours with ice and heat on his neck with pain.

“So,” I said. “Think about that pain, and now can you tell Calvin you can’t help him anymore because it hurts your neck?”

He looked away — almost as if he could no longer hear me, and he started to talk, “You know… yesterday, when I bent over to pick up his backpack, he left it unzipped, and didn’t tell me, so everything fell out and I had to pick everything up for him.” (Again, what is wrong with this kid’s hands?!)

What were you thinking?

“I thought, why does he need my help… I mean, Larry has crutches and nobody helps him carry his stuff. Why does Calvin need my help anyway?

Finally, I could see that my son had tapped into his on vein that got him thinking and processing information. The crucial step that Your Child’s Strengths claims is so necessary to helping our children develop their own self-esteem. My son began to see, and talk about, how helping Calvin was affecting his own life. Then, of course, I couldn’t stop him, which was great, even though it was after his bedtime. He talked about how the other kids were no longer laughing at Calvin’s jokes, and how people just don’t seem to like hanging around with him anymore.”

Update:

The subject of what my son would do was forefront in my mind all day long. When I finally saw him at the end of the day, he told me, as if it was no big deal, that he told Calvin he couldn’t help him anymore. Why, Calvin asked. “Because it hurts my back.” Calvin’s response was, “Come on, I carry it … you can do it… stop being such a wimp.” But the subject was dropped, and my son saw him later, with some other kid helping him.

Later, my son told me that he couldn’t say no to Calvin at first… he ended up helping him the morning, and then told him no. “So, what did you think about to give you the courage to speak up?” “Nothing,” he said. I was hoping for more “Epiphanies” but they didn’t come. So, you’re done, I asked? “Yep. I’m done.” It was no big deal, and I ate with my old friends.”

Although I am satisfied with the way this turned out, I wish I had refrained more from lecturing and giving advice. I wish I hadn’t given him the ideas… I wish I had been more patient and let him come to this discovery about how being Mr. Nice guy had turned sour, all on his own. It could have taken days, instead of hours. And it should have. Next time, I will try to do a better job, and show more restraint.. and do more directing, so that my children can discover these truths on their own. It was very hard for me not to “rescue.” Your Child’s Strengths is a work that’s under construction.

This review was written for the Parent Bloggers Network.

Brainetics Breakthrough Math and Memory System is a DVD/workbook math program designed to help kids learn math tricks and recognize patterns so that they can perform large multiplication problems in their heads.

When the box arrived, I showed it my son, 12, and his face lit up when he read the promises outlined on the package,

1. “Can you add up these numbers in 10 seconds or less without a calculator?… The secret is inside this box!”
2. “What number to the 5th power gives you 69,343,957? Figuring out this problem is a snap… all it takes is a little creativity and learning the pattern.”
3. And his favorite, “Tell you friends the exact day of the week they were born, by using the birthday and year.”

The box contains a five DVD set, with a 64 page playbook that follows the DVD step-by-step. The book has step-by-step instructions to follow along with the video, and so that you can do the problems yourself, on your own. The box also included 1 set of playing cards, (for the card tricks) and custom flashcards.

Mike Byster stars in the videos, along with a group of endearing 10-12-age kids. Byster engaged all my boys right off the bat… he bursts on stage with the perfect level of energy, tells the kids exactly what they’ll learn in a way that kept my boys mesmerized and chomping at the bit to learn every single math trick and shortcut Byster had to offer. Byster comes off more as a motivating athletic coach, rather than the math genius/teacher he truly is. Mike’s “can-do-it,” positive attitude, along with the promise of learning math secrets, was a key ingredient in helping my son get excited about Brainetics.

Byster is a math genius. He began noticing complex number patterns as a young child — When he was four years old he had memorized the birth and death dates of the presidents of the United States, in order. Throughout his life, he has continued to discover number patterns that are now a part of Brainetics. He worked as a trader at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and later began volunteering his time in math classrooms across the country.

When we watched the first DVD, my son was excited about all the magic square, birthday, and card tricks he learned. I wondered, “How is this going to help him with his math homework?” As we continued to move through the DVDs, I soon saw that my son was much more comfortable with numbers; his eyes no longer glaze over when he’s given a complex math problem. Now, when he gets a problem, he looks at the numbers with new eyes; he looks for patterns, he knows how — and does– break the problem down into subsets. Today, he sees math as more like a game. Yes,Brainetics has improved his memory, problem solving and organizational skills beyond what I thought was possible. I am very pleased.

The videos are done game-show style, with kids competing against each other on teams, and the viewers are able to play along too. Between each new game, there are hilarious animations that kept my boys laughing. The black and white graphics, with neon cartoons are first class.

Knowing the multiplication tables is a basic skill kids should have before they move through the Brainetics Program, which is geared toward 4-7th graders. I have noticed that my third grader, inspired by Brainetics, is picking up the flashcards and asking us to quiz him — he wants to master Byster’s tricks too, so he needs those “times facts” under his belt, and he’s eager to learn them.

The biggest benefit, and I can’t thank Brainetics, Byster or PBN enough, is the confidence my son now has about math. Once a child gets caught in that cycle of believing he just can’t do math, the cycle self-perpetuates, and child falls farther behind just when the homework keeps getting tougher. This program was strong enough to turn the tide the other way very quickly. After the first DVD, my son’s Math confidence shot straight up. The tricks he’s learning will last him a lifetime.

Which brings me to another important point. To keep these skills fresh, kids need to keep practicing them. This will be our biggest challenge in these first few months — his confidence is so high he thinks he doesn’t need to practice. Luckily, the Brainetics web site has fresh new math games, Magic Square and Brain Burst (beat the clock to see how quickly you can solve multiplication problems) available.

Bribing our kids to eat their vegetables does more harm than good. My wish is for my children to grow up enjoying good nutritious food; I want the short time I have with them at my dinner table to be pleasant; I want my children to eat healthy meals, without stress. Using the recipes from  my wish has come true. Like Seinfeld says in the book, “I had begun to dread meal time.” Those days are over, thanks to this amazing book.

During the last several weeks that I’ve had the privilege to work with Deceptively Delicious, I’ve found that this cookbook is more like a how-to manual. Yes, there are amazing recipes in the book, but that’s only part of the gift this book brings. Follow one or two of Jessica’s recipes, and soon, you’ll know how to sneak nutrition into anything your kids are eating — including hot cocoa. (The secret? Just add sweet potato puree. “It makes the cocoa thick and creamy, even made with skim milk.” )

For example, her recipe for pink pancakes is simply a basic pancake mix, with the addition of pureed beets. Lots of vitamins; and no one can taste the “beets” in the finished product. Using Jessica’s method, I took a simple white box cake mix, and added the pureed beets to the cake. The cake was an instant hit — even without the icing. My kids HATE beets. But they are FULL of vitamins — I REALLY want them to like beets. So, instead of serving them a plate of beets, and pleading with them to “just try one bite!” I served it in a cake. The loved it, and asked for seconds. Thanks to Deceptively Delicious, beets are now a part of my kid’s diet. No bribing involved. And now, our blueberry pancake recipe includes a 1/2 up of beets.

Seinfeld’s book has an introductory chapter that shows you her four-step method to make the purees for 20 different vegetables and fruits. These purees are then stored in the freezer in zip-lock bags. This is one weak spot in the book. I can easily see many Moms not having the time to puree the veggies every week, but more importantly, not having the time to defrost the veggies for a quick cup of hot cocoa. So, I offer you this. Just keep baby food jars on hand. Already pureed, the perfect serving size, and full of nutrition. Baby food, like most frozen and canned vegetables, has not been sitting on grocery store shelves, and then in your vegetable bin. Seinfeld also offers this short cut in her book; canned vegetables. Just puree them in the food processor. And did I mention the book has a hard-wire binding? The book is built for the kitchen. It is awesome in every way.

So, here’s my only complaint about the book. Despite all the emphasis on nutrition, there are no nutritional numbers for any of the recipes in this book. How much am I gaining by adding one or two tablespoons of pureed cauliflower to our mac and cheese? I’d like to know.

For some kids, it’s the “texture” of food that makes them “repulsed.” Pureeing foods they don’t like makes the vegetables go down much easier. For years, I’ve tried to get my 9-year old to eat my chicken noodle soup. He prefers the Campbell’s soup variety instead of mine. This time, I tried the Deceptively Delicious method and pureed the vegetables — all the onions, celery and carrots. (Seinfeld adds pureed butternut squash). I added the broth and the noodles, and finally I had a hit. So simple. So logical.

There are many recipes in her book that are so completely off-the-wall, that I just had to try them, out of curiosity. I did not expect to like a chocolate chip cookie made with un-mashed garbanzo beans. But, these cookies were nothing short of awesome. My kids ate them before I could help myself to thirds. I found myself wanting to make a second batch, because, if it’s full of healthy garbanzo beans one more cookie won’t hurt the waist line that much. Right?

But my favorite “recipe of deception” of all is the chocolate fondue. The “fat” in this scrumptious dip is avocados. Avocados, pureed carrots, cocoa powder and powdered sugar make the most amazing chocolate fondue you’ve ever had. How ingenious to figure out that avocados also turn brown when they’re mashed — just like chocolate.
So, when you pick up your own copy of Deceptively Delicious, your biggest problem will be stopping yourself from eating up all that fondue. Because, after all, you can eat as much as you want, because it’s SOOOO healthy. Right?