December 2012 – Page 3

I am always trying to come up with quick, easy and healthy ideas for a toddler on the go! One that can be thrown in the bag and eaten on the trail. As I was perusing the Trader Joe’s refrigerated section a few weeks ago, I came across their homemade whole wheat pizza dough and it hit me! I could make calzones stuffed with anything! Freeze them and pop them in the oven whenever I didn’t feel like cooking! Of course, you could make your own pizza dough, if you’re good at that kind of thing, but I don’t have the patience for it. Ha! Enjoy!

Ingredients

1/4 cup chopped Onions

1/2 cup steamed Lentils

1/2 cup roasted Chicken

1/2 cup steamed Broccoli

1 tablespoon Olive Oil

1 ready-made Whole Wheat Pizza Dough

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Take the whole wheat pizza dough and roll it out, then cut it into evenly-shaped rectangles. In a pan, saute the onions, lentils, chicken, mushrooms and broccoli in the olive oil. Place about 2 tablespoons of the mixture in the center of each rectangle. Fold the dough over and sealed the edges with a fork. To freeze them, place the calzones on a plate, making sure they don’t touch, and put them in the freezer. Once they are frozen solid, you can transfer them to a freezer-safe container or ziploc bag! Then, whenever you feel the desire, pull one out and place in a preheated 400 degree oven for about 15 minutes! Quick. Easy. Healthy Food. Enjoy!

Like most mommy’s, I wear my title proudly. I try to remind myself to enjoy every precious fleeting moment, because becoming “Mommy” wasn’t easy.

We tried for 3 years to conceive and finally after 36 months of tears, we decided it was time to get some professional guidance. I was quickly approaching that certain age where woman are classified high risk and I just didn’t want to waste any more time! Lucky for us, one of Kerem’s basketball buddies, Dr. Aykut Bayrak, just happened to be a leading fertility specialist, so off we went!

I’ll save you all the gory details, but after months of tests & exploratory surgery we finally got a diagnosis: A unicornuate uterus. I was born with only half of a uterus. HUH?! My first response was to completely melt down into a blubbering idiot, then I wiped the snot from my nose and ask the doctor, “When do we get started?”

For us, getting pregnant was, popping pills, needling myself in the stomach and ‘making love’ to a turkey baster on a cold pleather medical table with a virtual stranger between my legs. Not really my idea of romantic, but it worked! On the first try!! Then came BEDREST. Well, technically it was called limited mobility restriction, so not full on bedrest, but I wasn’t allowed to be on my feet for longer than 30 minutes at a time. No exercise at all. Worst of all, no hiking! Boo!

I had always had this vision of my pregnant self, as I’m sure most people do, hiking up until my water broke! Yeah, well, I was going to have to get over that pretty quickly. I decided to look at this as my baby’s gift to me. Me time. 9 months of it. I started reading, meditating, cooking and just focused on keeping that little peanut safe inside. I did.

Photo by Kerem Hanci

On March 3, 2011 at 4:28 a.m. my grandmother died. She was my heart. At 10:10 a.m. Vivienne Emine Hanci was ushered into the world under the watchful eye of her new guardian angel. I wouldn’t have been able to handle it any other way.

Hanci-Fontaine Family Photo

Even before her first breath, much to the dismay of my mother, we had already planned Vivienne’s first camping trip! Four months later, our new family unit was nestled together in a lush, green glen in BigSur listening to the lullabies of a babbling brook. We had found bliss.