Moving Forward

Here I am 3 years later. The PURE Bar launched in 2006 and now my kids have something fun and brightly colored to open in their lunch. They also have a delicious way of getting Omega 3 fats, vegan protein, lots of high antioxidant organic fruit and NO refined sugars. I believe so strongly in the PURE Bar and what it stands for. My kids make their own lunches now and they still choose one almost every day. I eat one all the time for breakfast and my husband always has them in his car and golf bag. My friends and their kids eat PURE Bars. My parents and in-laws eat them. My goal is to get a PURE Bar into as many hands as possible. This is why I will NEVER compromise on the ingredients or the nutritional profile. I truly believe The PURE Bar represents the way we should all be eating, as much as possible. And all this stemmed from a 6 year old’s curiosity turned into conviction.

My day to day consists of a lot of running the Pure Bar company, but also continuing to educate myself on good nutrition and of course being a mom and wife, friend and daughter. Trying to do what we all try to do -live a balanced fulfilled life, focus on what’s important and not stress about the little things, (like my husband making half the bed…his half. Who does that??), trying to find joy in whatever I can ( can joy be found in my husband making half the bed? Maybe tomorrow he will make 3/4^th of it?)

All of this is a “one day at a time” thing. And the older I get the more I really try to savor each day and enjoy the little things; like today when Noah (5) said, “Mom I’m glad you have me.” That was cool.

Daughter Becomes Vegetarian at 6

At the age of 6 my oldest daughter declared herself a vegetarian. It went something like this:

“Uh mom, what am I eating?”

“That’s chicken sweetie”

“Chicken? Like Chicken from the farm, like Chicken Little?”

“Um well yes chicken from the farm”

Long pause.

“So do we wait till they get old and die and then cook them?”

“Well, no”

Long pause

“Mom, what else do we eat?’

At this point I could tell this was not going to be good. I could see her little mind spinning and making connections…beef-cow pork-pig lamb, duck, etc. After I explained to her what we typically eat and don’t eat (dogs cats) I could tell she was horrified. And seriously I could see it through her eyes. We humanize animals in all the story books and then we serve them up for dinner, kind of freaky if you think about it. So a few meatless days later she approached me and very excitedly announced she was going to become a vegetarian (and then proceeded to explain to me that there are these people in the world called vegetarians who actually don’t eat meat… heard it on Animal Planet…)

So what does a mom do? I will say I have made some poor mom decisions in my life (like the time I MADE my daughter go to church “Get your butt in the car NOW” because I thought she was faking illness and she threw up all over my car) but this time I pulled out a good one. I told her we would research what it would take to become a healthy vegetarian, what foods we needed to eat, how we would have to change our diet. So we sat down and started to Google. I didn’t know it then, but this was a start of a drastic change in my family’s life. One I am grateful for everyday, and the coolest part is that it came to me through the wisdom of my child.