Day 1

 I did it!  I made it through a day eating reasonably.  It was very tough...I wanted to pig out quite a few times (especially while making mac and cheese for dinner, one of my WORST trigger foods) but I made it 1 day.  1 day at a time.

I have decided that when I get into the next lowest "decade" of weight I want to get some new gym clothes.  My old ones are fitting kinda funny and most of them have small stains on them since I have worn them around my kids for longer than 5 minutes.  I think some cute new gym clothes would help me maintain my motivation.  That is, if I can even maintain it past today.

Breakfast:

 I went to Bodypump today and wasn't really feeling it.  Squats were especially tough because my legs were sore from spin yesterday, and I took a bit of weight off for the back track since I've had this pain in the back of my right shoulder since Saturday (I think I did something to it while carrying boxes around).  I got a good workout and went up in weight on chest and triceps, but I just wasn't enjoying it like I usually do.

I ate a babybel on the way home, and I am amazed that this is all I had for lunch considering I was so hungry:

Now my salad was remarkable so I WILL tell you what was in that.  Greens, peppered goat cheese, roasted red peppers, toasted pine nuts (SO much better in a salad than on cereal!), roasted grapes, and honey + apple cider vinegar dressing.  Plus the lemons, but I didn't eat those, I just kind of stirred them around to get some lemon-y flavor into the salad.  I have been wanting to try roasted grapes for ages, ever since I saw on someone's food blog that roasting grapes is actually a thing people do.  They were really yummy!  Kind of like when you put raisins in your overnight oats and they plump up.  Which makes sense, they're kind of an in-between stage when going from grapes to raisins.  They added a nice sweetness to the salad that made me wish I hadn't put honey in there too.  

Shortly after lunch I had 1/2 cup of cottage cheese to get in a little more protein.

Then I made myself a green smoothie in honor of St. Patrick's Day later this week.  

I kept this in the fridge and sipped on it throughout the afternoon.  I REALLY liked drinking it this way because it stops me from heading to the fridge and grabbing cheese or some leftover dinner or whatever else when I get peckish, I just take a gulp of smoothie instead.  I will definitely be using this smoothie-drinking method in the future.

Our fun for the day was making slime.  Pictures from teachpreschool.org caught my eye on Pinterest and I decided I really wanted to do this project.  The woman who wrote that must be some kind of magical wizard or something because our experience (with only 1 preschooler!) was not nearly as neat and orderly and gorgeous-looking, although that was partially because I bought white glue instead of clear glue. But it did the trick, and we had some messy fun on the newly-reclaimed back porch.

It must be my phone's camera...looking cross-eyed like her mommy

Stirring slime with one hand, eating leftover breakfast oatmeal with the other

 We made orange and purple, and when Charlotte woke up from her nap the offer of slime helped her to bypass the customary half hour of whining that follows most naps.  She enjoyed poking it and discussing it more than actually digging in and playing with it.

We also ate our dinner outside today!  It was incredibly nice to be able to do so without POLLEN everywhere.  And I just finally ordered the table and chairs for the back porch so hopefully we'll be enjoying many more meals on the back porch this season.

I made macaroni and cheese per Emily's request, but I decided it should be green for St. Paddy's day (which is a GREAT excuse to sneak spinach into everything your kids eat!).  Then I decided that on top of the spinach I put in the sauce I would add puréed cauliflower and some pumpkin I froze last fall.  So in the end it wasn't so very green, but it was creamy and chock-full of veggies.  I served even more on the side, ensuring that I got about 500x my quota of spinach and kale today between my salad, my smoothie and dinner.

Sickly yellow but super-delicious

I ate 2 bites of macaroni while I was making it, but then stopped.  I can't tell you how rare it is for me to be near macaroni and cheese and not eat until my stomach hurts.

I decided I still wanted dessert, but I limited myself to 2 carefully measured Tbsp of grain-sweetened chocolate chips.

When I got hungry later on I had a grapefruit.

Repeat footage AGAIN, but for some reason this picture likes to hang out on my camera so it was more convenient to just recycle it.

Oh!  And I forgot...I drank half of an Ithaca Brewing Company Partly Sunny beer.  The rest went into the mac and cheese sauce because I'm not a HUGE fan but it was refreshing and satisfied my beer craving.  Since Will went to his beer club meeting tonight I was wanting some too!

So that's it.  Will has to wake up early tomorrow so I am going to head to bed right now vs. staying up any longer to think of a clever way to close my post.  See you all tomorrow.