I'm losing it, but getting better

Prepare for rambling, the pictures are at the end if you want to skip to those. :)

It's a proven fact for me that when I wake up early, exercise, eat right, study my scriptures and say my prayers that my days go so much better and I'm happier and more patient with the kids.....but that still doesn't make it easy to do. Part of my goals for the new year, or life in general is to be healthy and that's probably the hardest part. When I'm home with the kids and hanging out with food all day, I tend to snack all day long. I have found that if I set small goals for myself, like, drink my whole water bottle before getting a snack or eating anything in between meals then I really work hard to drink that water and usually I'm too full to actually eat the snack right after, but at least I feel like I accomplished a small goal. I decided to set weekly goals, this week: no chocolate. It is a another proven fact that chocolate is not good for me, I don't particularly even like it, but I eat it against my better judgement, I usually have a sugar high for about 30 seconds and a two hour crash, and I get cranky and the baby gets cranky. So this week I have been purging myself of chocolate...and then Morgan brings home a bag of mini chocolate bars from a scout training. I'm 4 for 4 though in not eating it. Yay me! So in that sense of "losing it" I'm trying to lose the last 10 lbs of my Tragon pregnancy, the worst by far and I gained about 55 lbs, so I guess on the flip side losing 45 lbs in 6 months is pretty good.

Today I was determined to eat a bit better though, not just cut out chocolate, because really when I have a bowl of ice cream, some apple crisp dessert, and a handful of Nutter Butters, I would have been better off eating one little mini chocolate bar. Since doing Bountiful Baskets on a weekly basis I have been getting lettuce every week. I think I bought about 10 heads of lettuce in the past 6 1/2 years of marriage, but in the last 6 months I've had more lettuce than I know what to do with. Taco Salads are good and we have been doing that more, but I'm going on a limb and trying new salads and making some of my own dressings. The one I had today was particularly good and pretty easy to throw together with what I had on hand, so for posterity I'm going to share. I'm not sure what to call it other than a Fruit/Veggie Salad with Citrus Dressing, I know, not very creative. Here goes:

Salad:

-roughly 1 cup of chopped lettuce (I have about 4 Tupperwares of lettuce ready for this week)

~1/4 cup of Craisins

~1/4 chopped Granny Smith Apple (added a really good tartness to the salad)

3 grape tomatoes cut into quarters

~5-6 slices cucumber, also quartered

~1/2 orange peeled, sliced (leftover from making the dressing)

I thought about adding some kiwi too, but my plate was getting pretty full by this time.

Dressing:I found it on allrecipes.com, but cut down the portion and changed a few things

1 TB lemon juice

1/2 TB lime juice

1/4 cup orange juice (didn't have any, but have tons of oranges so it took about 1 1/2 oranges)

3 TB white sugar

2 TB mayo

1 1/2 tsp honey

1/2 cup oil (I used 1/2 olive and 1/2 canola)

Put it all in the blender (or magic bullet:) and voila

It had a very subtle orangeness to it that was just enough to make the salad good. I've decided that I really like to add some fruits in my salads instead of just veggies. The dressing made about 1 cup, so I have enough leftovers for a couple more salads. Yay! I guess this counts as part of the "getting better"

On the other side of "losing it" I think my brain is officially toast, I think I gave the last half to Tragon. Case in point: I bought some veggie dip at Smith's the other day and it was on the Manager's Special for .59 cents. Typically this means that it's going to expire soon, but not always. The expiration date was Feb. 11 I looked at my calendar and saw that it was the 17th and I berated myself for buying week old expired dip, even at a cheap price, I then saw that my cottage cheese "expired" on Jan 24th (at this point I was thoroughly convinced that it was February 17th, not January). and my milk expired on the Jan 28th, that was at least two weeks ago! I was ticked. How could they sell stuff two and three weeks past the due date? I grabbed the phone to call Smith's and see if I could get a voucher for free dairy food when I saw the calendar, it was on JANUARY. It took me a few more minutes to process that I still had a good week or two before all my dairy would go bad. Boy did I feel sheepish, I'm just glad I never got a chance to make that call!

As far as "getting better", I am 3 for 3 on my weekly blog posting. :) Okay, now for pictures.

Last Saturday was a great day to go outside and play, it was quite warm for what it has been lately, so we bundled up the kids and took them sledding out in the hills by our house.
The snow has been melting a lot lately, and with the recent rain we can actually see our grass and rocks again. We still have the 5 foot high drifts though where it all got piled, we might have to turn those into sledding hills next time we get some good snow. I love how big and puffy the boys look in their winter gear.
Look, proof that I do get out. It was even warm enough that Tragon got to come out for a little while, it was a very unique day with no wind!
The boys liked getting rides on the sled across the field and up the hills and I think Morgan just enjoyed being out during the day and the sunshine. Winter is hard when he leaves for work when it's dark and gets home when it's dark.
I sure love my boys! Morgan is such a great dad to his boys. As much as we want them to be older and able to play sports and stuff, we're getting better at enjoying this age too.
Lately, they have been waking up around 6:30am which I guess is okay when it means Logan can go through the night without an accident, but we spend more time in jammies some mornings when I haven't quite been able to prepare myself for the day. This was probably after lunch one day this week. They made a train, or car, or rocket, I can't remember.
But they were actually playing nice and interacting with each other. I love those moments, this is my proof.
I finally got a picture with all the boys in their Christmas jammies. Whenever one of them wears them, they all have to or I get an earful.
I was even able to get them to all look at me at the same time. :)
Then I told them to do a silly face and this is what I got. We'll have to work on that bit. This month has gone by pretty slow, probably because we're now basically done with the basement except carpet which will be a while, so we're not spending every waking moment on it now. I'm not sure we'll know what to do with ourselves once the project isn't looming over us....well, yes I do, then we'll grab the shovels and dig ourselves out of debt, oh how we love student loans. :) Until next time....