The Last Day of Summer

Emily's Kindergarten has a "staggered opening", which means that 1/3 of the kids in her class went to school on Monday, 1/3 on Tuesday, 1/3 on Wednesday, and then all of them start going together every day after that.  Therefore, I got my daughter back for one last day of summer yesterday before turning her over to the county!  Continuing in my pattern of shameless child-indulgence, I asked her what she wanted to do with her last day of summer, and she said "Go to Pump it Up AND Chuck E. Cheese!".  I told her I'm not THAT indulgent, so we just went to Pump it Up this morning.

Charlotte had a bit of trouble with the bouncy horse

The girls had a blast, and you know what?  I had a fantastic time too.  The girls actually played together practically the whole time, and that made things #1 adorable and #2 so much easier for me.  Sure, I crawled through the inflatables with them enough to get the obligatory friction burns on my elbows and knees, but I also got ample time to just sit outside of a particular bouncy thing and enjoy the giggles and calls of "Come on Emmy!" and "Here Charlotte, I'll help you climb up" floating out from its depths.  

Sisters conquering the world together

Time for a rest

There was calm playing...

...heart-melting snuggling...

...and voluntary sharing.

I was so high on motherly affection after playtime was over that I decided to tempt fate and take the girls to a SIT DOWN RESTAURANT.  I have been meaning to take them to Lunchbox, but last week when we were nearby Emily was NOT listening to me so I yanked having lunch out as a punishment.  The girls were disappointed, so I figured I could take them yesterday instead, as a reward for excellent behavior.  But then I decided that as long as I was considering one Voltaggio restaurant, why not go to the one that was directly on our way home and has free parking instead?  So with trepidation, we walked in.

The provided crayons and coloring sheets were appreciated.

And despite my girls tiredness and a fairly long wait for their food to come out, they were excellent at remembering to use their "lady manners".

I started with the Gazpacho.  

All Emily wanted were duck fat fries, because we had mentioned them to her before as a slightly (very slightly) healthier kind of fry.

I convinced her to get some macaroni and cheese too.

Charlotte ordered the kids cheeseburger and didn't touch it.  The fries and fruit were hit hard though.

I had the CLT sandwich (cucumber, lettuce and tomato plus avocado and goddess dressing), and I meant to order it on wheat bread but forgot.  I just made sure to leave most of my bread behind when I ate it.

Since the girls aren't watching their weight, and since this restaurant uses local/grass fed/organic ingredients whenever possible, I didn't feel TOO guilty about the fact that they both basically had fries for lunch.

They sure didn't feel guilty.

And hopefully they never will feel guilty about food.  One of my biggest wishes for my girls is that they don't inherit their mama's eating issues!

Sleep deprivation

Today was not bad, but I don't even really want to talk about last night.  If I let myself get too detailed I will end up whining on for paragraphs, so here is the summary:

10:30PM - I get into bed
10:45PM - I fall asleep
11:30PM - Emily wakes me up to kiss a boo boo because she pinched her finger in a door on the way to the potty
2:30AM - Charlotte coughs until she barfs
3:30AM - Charlotte's stomach problem moves through to the other end
4:30AM - Charlotte barfs again
6:30AM - I finally fall back asleep
7:00AM - Emily (and by extension Charlotte) wake up for the day, and Charlotte experiences several more bouts of "evacuation" from her hind end.

The return of barf to my life is simply splendid.  It had been like a whole week since someone barfed around here, I didn't know what to do with myself anymore.

I was pretty dead this morning and I am pretty dead again now, but I had a decent chunk of time this afternoon where I was actually quite productive, and the girls were super well-behaved which made today SO much better despite the inauspicious beginning.  I took the kitchen from an AWFUL state to a company-ready level, I did 3 loads of laundry and I moved a storage bench-y thing from Emily's closet (where it wasn't being used at all) down to our family room and filled it with organized containers of sorted toys, which will hopefully make it easier for the kids and myself to pick up all the annoying little toys that are always laying around the family room.  I'm really trying to take advantage of all this time stuck at home to attack some of the more involved organization projects I so desperately need to do.

Without further ado, here is my food for the day.

Husband-made banana oats

COFFEE x2

Repeat footage of my egg

Greens, broccoli, cauliflower, 6 large olives, pine nuts, gorgonzola, bell pepper, orange champagne vinegar

Afternoon berry yogurt smoothie after my failed nap attempt...too thick for a straw so I ate it with a spoon!

Veggie and avocado hummus snack

Dinner!  Cajun-rubbed flank steak, roasted bell peppers and onions, baked potato with greek yogurt and fresh chives

Dessert - Theo toasted coconut dark chocolate chunk, dried cherries

BED!

Goodnight.

The morel of the story

My sleep was decent last night, although Emily awoke me at 6:30 to say that I hadn't hugged her goodnight. It was true, I hadn't, but that was only because she was already asleep by the time I finished singing her song.  I hugged her quickly this morning and sent her back to bed, but spent the next half hour laying awake listening to the sound of my girls "quietly" waiting for their clocks to turn green.  

I did some thinking yesterday while I was laying around feeling yucky.  I thought about how to rearrange my eating and reduce my calorie intake, and one of the most obvious things I could do is to eat an egg as a snack instead of WITH breakfast.  I rarely finish the main part of my breakfast and think "I'm still starving!", I have the egg to add protein so my breakfast will carry me as far through the morning as possible, but it would actually carry me much further if I have the egg an hour or two AFTER breakfast.  So that's what I did today.

Overnight oats...1/2 cup oats + 1/2 cup nonfat plain greek yogurt + frozen berries + cinnamon mixed and sat overnight in the fridge, with walnuts and some unsweetened vanilla almond milk added in the morning

 Then a couple hours later, my egg!

Sprinkled with smoked sea salt and TJ's 21 seasoning salute

 One of the OTHER things I was thinking about while laying around feeling yucky yesterday was the fact that my mindset whenever Will is gone is "I only have 4 more hours until the girls' bedtime...now only 2 hours until their bedtime..." and how that makes me sad.  I shouldn't look at a full day at home alone with the girls as something I have to get through, even if I'm sick.  I think that's probably a habit I developed when Emily was a baby and it was all I could do to stand sitting in the house and nursing this fairly non-interactive infant every 3 hours all day until someone else came home to hold her for me so I could shower.  Now my kids are old enough that I can actually DO stuff with them.  I like to play with my kids, but I don't always like to play what THEY want to play.  It sounds kind of immature, I know.  I'm the adult, I should be able to handle not getting my own way but I think it's pretty common among parents, and I am able to be actively engaged for a lot longer when we're on an "adventure" I planned that I enjoy watching them experience vs. sitting for hours and keeping up my end of the conversation with Emily's ponies.  I know it's important that I play Emily's games too, but it's better for everyone if I take the initiative to propose activities sometimes myself.  It's very tough to explain without sounding like I normally neglect my children, which I DON'T, unless you're comparing me to those moms with homeschool blogs who love nothing more than to take gorgeous pictures of their children happily engaged in wholesome, neatly presented educational activities in dedicated "classroom" corners of their spotless houses all day.  I'm glad they exist because I get good ideas from them, but they sure make me feel like a lousy mother!

I guess when I'm coming up with things for the girls and I to do at home I feel like I'm in good mommy mode.  I'm sure the girls enjoy me more, they behave better, and I end up enjoying my time with THEM more just naturally.  It takes some effort to get and keep myself in good mommy mode though vs. just chatting with the girls when they run through the kitchen while I'm doing the dishes.  It's been tough to be exciting and dynamic recently since we've had at least one person in the family sick more days than not, but I decided to make an effort today despite feeling like crap.

So we played the letter games together on Emily's laptop toy.  We played with the talking shape (Charlotte) and alphabet (Emily) puzzles.  We danced and sang to the Brainy Baby ABC's DVD.  We worked on galloping (Charlotte) and skipping (Emily) across a sheet of bubble wrap on the floor to make nice popping noises.  Charlotte played with the noodle box while Emily and I did monkey math...

Turns out two plus three still equals five, even though it seems like MILLENNIA since I was a kid learning this stuff myself

...which she is REALLY good at!  She much prefers numbers to letters, and yet when I suggested we do monkey math she said "But math is hard".  It makes me so angry that this child has barely even learned her numbers and already she has picked up on the anti-math sentiments prevalent in society.  Of course math will be hard if you convince yourself it is from the time you're 4 years old.  Since she seems to be good at it, I am trying extra-hard to show her that math can be fun and satisfying, not automatically hard.

After that the girls chased me with a dolphin toy and a whale toy that were "biting pieces off of me".  I was gone in no time, since I didn't have the energy to run very fast.

By then it was 10:30.

Phew.

When you plan to actively entertain young children for an extended period of time, believe me, you'll need about 10x as many activities as you think you will need.

Since we were stuck at home all day and I had the time to prepare, I decided to pull out a lunch idea I saw on Pinterest.  I filled 24 eggs with small dry snack foods and hid them on the back porch.  Then I had the girls hunt for their lunches.

I didn't feel like pulling out the Easter baskets so we were ghetto and used a toy bucket and a paper bag

I love watching Emily discover eggs, she gets so excited!

Charlotte did pretty well too

The girls LOVED doing this, and had a great time discovering what snack was in each egg too.  

As a courtesy, I retouched about a gallon of snot off of her face before posting this picture

This one too

Everything got eaten, except for the pumpkin and sunflower seeds.  Those were summarily rejected, even though they've been consumed with enthusiasm before.

Beef jerky, tamari almonds, raisins, kale chips, roasted nori seaweed, dehydrated mango, TJs lentil curls, grain-sweetened chocolate chips, sunflower and pumpkin seeds

I had a salad instead.  To save on calories I just did veggies with roasted chickpeas and 1oz ricotta salata.

Luckily after lunch the girls wandered out to play on the playground for a bit which gave me a change to rest and do a couple dishes.

Once I got Charlotte down into her bed (notice I don't say "down for a nap", because she didn't end up sleeping at all) I made myself another of my banana peanut flour smoothies.  I threw ice in this one because while yesterday's thick, compact smoothie was tasty, I prefer a thinner and more voluminous smoothie.  I forgot to toss in some spinach though, as I had planned to.

Enjoyed to the sound of Charlotte keening from her room upstairs

I took the girls out front after Charlotte's "nap" and let them run around while I weeded the front garden.  I'm not sure why I did this today, as leaning over made my head POUND and the weed situation wasn't dire yet.  I guess it was so that I could hang out with the girls outside while getting a chore done at the same time.

I only made it until 4 before I was starving again, so I had some veggies with TJ's hummus/guacamole.

Dinner was Dover Sole (it was on special at Whole Foods) prepared in this fashion, plus quinoa cooked in 1/2 water 1/2 light coconut milk with mango and cilantro, and turkey bacon-wrapped asparagus.

Holy bland, is there a fish less tasty than Sole?  It didn't taste BAD, which I guess is a plus, but it was completely flavorless and only one step above mealy.  It fell apart like crazy after it was cooked.  I will not be consuming this type of fish again if I have any choice in the matter.

After dinner, Will got home!  Hooray!  He feels as crappy as I do, unfortunately, but Daddy's arrival at home is always a happy point in the day, and is always good for a momentary distraction.  It was nice to have a bit of adult conversation too, even if it was pretty much just:

Sara: Welcome (snarf, hack) home sweetie.  Did you have (sneeze) fun?

Will: Yes.  We almost (snork) blew up the porch (blows nose).

Sara:  Nice.  Let's collapse on the (a-HEM) couch and drink tea.

Will: Ok.  I'll get the (cough) tissue box.

He DID bring me a present though!

Do you know what this is?

What if I back up and get (a bit) less artsy?

Why it's a morel mushroom, of course!  As a child, I remember my mom going out into our woods and bringing back grocery bags full of morels, which I declared "gross" because they were mushrooms, and I hated mushrooms.  Boy do I wish I could time-travel back to those days and chomp down on some of those morels, because never since I developed a taste for mushrooms have we been able to find practically ANY (or anyone willing to share).  

There is one place though that reliably offers up a single morel every year.  It's not near a dying elm tree or in an old apple orchard or any other place that people typically find morels, but in the courtyard up at the farm.  

Straight ahead in this picture.  Doesn't look very morel-y, does it?

Anyway, The Morel was early this year, and while Will was up playing paintball at the farm he picked it and brought it home for me :-)  How sweet!

Morels are so wrinkly that they have to be soaked for awhile to get the dirt and bugs out of their folds before you cook them, so I might fry it up for breakfast tomorrow morning.  I certainly will not be breading it with Ritz crackers or Saltines and floating it in butter like most recipes online tell you to do.  

After being hungry practically all day long, including immediately after I finished both lunch and dinner, I decided it was ok to have my favorite dessert (but mostly because I just wanted to eat it).  

After an episode of South Park and a grapefruit, I will crawl gratefully into my bed.  I feel lame that #1 I'm being so whiny about a freakin' cold and #2 it wore me out so very much to actually be a good and involved mother today.  I guess my grand nonexistent plans to be a homeschooling mother will never come to fruition.  I need the help of the outside world to entertain my children.

Cereality is merely an illusion

After a rough night, Will woke up feeling worse today, poor guy :-(  And when I picked up my camera to start shooting my breakfast, it wasn't working!  After some fiddling I determined that it's the auto-focus that is misbehaving, and I managed to figure out how to work around it (without having to manually focus every picture myself!).  I blame the trip to the floor my poor camera took yesterday thanks to Charlotte.  It's upsetting though :-(

Breakfast, however, was not upsetting even though the pumpkin in my fridge that I was looking forward to adding to my oatmeal was funky-smelling and had to be tossed.  As luck would have it though, I had a spare sweet potato sitting around so I threw that in the pot with my oats instead.  It was just as yummy as I had hoped, although higher in calories and carbs.  Some apples and raisins completed my "vision".  

I had my first bowl of pumpkin apple raisin oatmeal at Cereality in Chicago, and that's what I was trying to replicate today (minus the delicious streusel topping and maple syrup drizzle the original bowl was covered with).  Cereality was one awesome place, but it would appear they are pretty much all closed down now :-(  Its absence is sorely felt whenever I visit Chicago these days, but I still remember it fondly when I recreate their bowls of deliciousness in my kitchen.

Plus a scrambled egg with dill + salt

Since I have opted to make Tuesdays my rest days exercise-wise, I had a free(ish) morning today.  I thought about what errands Charlotte and I could run while Emily was at preschool, and decided that instead of going somewhere to inevitably spend money I could just go home, make myself some coffee, pack some lunches and clean up a bit.  It was nice to be able to take my time putting my salad together instead of just haphazardly tossing things into the bowl during the 45 minutes we have at home for lunch between preschool and dance class.  Today it was pumpkin seeds, Irish farmhouse blue cheese, juice-sweetened dried cranberries and pretty much every veggie I could find that would taste good in salad form.

You can't really see anything but kale and cucumbers, but here is my salad

And strangely enough, although I was home all morning I didn't feel the urge to snack, and I didn't even have my traditional daily Babybel light (gasp!).  I actually enjoyed eating lots of veggies today...I guess it takes about a week of clean eating for me to actually start LIVING it.  

I've thought a lot about my food/emotion/organization link lately; how when I lose control of my eating I tend to lose control of everything else at the same time (my house falls apart, I stop blogging etc.).  I hate blogging when I'm not eating well...who wants to type (or read) "I ate like crap today and gained weight...I'll try again tomorrow" every day?  Forcing myself to blog every day is easier than straight-up forcing myself to stay in control of my eating though, however when I'm blogging every day I tend to eat better too.  When I eat better I feel better, and have a lot more motivation and energy to get things done.  So perhaps for now the most important piece of the puzzle is making sure I blog every day?   That may not be the best news for my 10 or so readers (I don't always have much to say, and even more rarely is what I have to say actually interesting), but its something I can usually do pretty easily that helps me a lot.

That's enough pontificating for today.  On to my afternoon smoothie, which was REALLY yummy.  

nonfat plain greek yogurt, skim milk, frozen strawberry/blueberry/blackberry/cherry mix, spinach, 1/2 banana, and some flax seeds

 This smoothie held my hunger off nicely until right before dinner time.  Luckily by then I had these roasted kale chips made so I snacked on them to tide me over.  I am still not nearly as proficient at making these as my dad is...I need to ask him his secret.

Kale + cooking spray and spike seasoning

 I had a pork loin from Common Market sitting in my fridge that needed to be used, plus a ton of couscous crowding up my pantry, so I Googled "Pork loin couscous" and happened to have all the ingredients for the second recipe that came up, save for the feta cheese which I didn't think was necessary anyway.  It was quite delicious!

It was enjoyed on the back porch of course, with my husband, an Emily wearing a Cinderella ballgown and a Charlotte who likes to stand in her playsink instead of sitting on a chair for dinner.

I completely forgot the onions I had laid under the pork loin during cooking until I went to wash the dishes after dinner!  They were still quite tasty cold though.

After dinner we hosted an impromptu preschool party.  We have a 6 year old girl living across the street to our left and a 5.5 year old boy living across the street to our right and we ended up with both of them over at our house this evening.  We added our own 4 year old, a 2 year old and a moon bounce and it was loud and fun and crazy.  There was only once instance of pairing off/ganging up, which I guess is unavoidable if you have more than 2 kids together.  I think every mother wants her house to be "the house" where her kids' friends like to gather, but that house is usually the one with the best (i.e. junk) food.  It's nice to know that for now the moon bounce makes up for my lack of acceptable snacks (I only offer the weird healthy stuff).  We might have to put in a pool to keep the kids here through their teenage years.*

My dessert was a small-plate tasting selection of grain-sweetened chocolate chips and pumpkin spice chickpeas, made from the recipe in Mama Pea's cookbook.

I have been feeling bad recently that I've been depending more and more on processed snacks for the girls so I plan to try out some more homemade things in the next couple weeks.  Charlotte loves chickpeas so these were a hit with her, but Emily spit hers out :-(  I'd love to be able to find some things both girls will reliably eat.  Even better if it's something kids who are  used to "normal" snacks will also eat.

Because I don't want to have to give up my already at-a-premium backyard space for a pool.

*My friend's mom actually did this when I was in elementary school and as a pre-teen I thought it sounded like a really crazy and super-controlling reason to put in a pool.  Now I totally understand.

**Since I post what I eat every day anyway, I decided to link up to Peas and Crayons' What I Ate Wednesday!  Hopefully I have enough greenage in my day to qualify :-)