Color Run!!!

    You would think that from the way I feel after run/walking my first 5k that I just finished a marathon. I am exhausted and everything hurts, but more then that, I accomplished a goal. This was the first fitness goal I set for myself with my doctor this summer. I forgot to wear compression shorts today and in turn paid for it with bleeding thighs....my mother in law informed me that was TMI...but I'm kind of feeling like that's valid information for anyone else who is slightly fluffier would like to know, so it stays. That contributed a whole lot to my ridiculously slow time because you kind of don't want to run anymore when you're legs are literally on fire.
   
    The first thing I learned (which wasn't really a new revolution, but was an awesome reminder) is that I have amazing friends. I am significantly more out of shape then a huge majority of my friends. I was definitely the weak link. They could have run all 3.2 miles and I asked/begged them to go ahead and I'd catch up (how I planned on doing this I have no clue) about a million times and each time, they very emphatically refused. I kept my ear buds in and tried to survive kilometers 2 and 3...One was fine and I think I was numb by 4...so I was good again then, but they stayed right with me.

    My second lesson learned is that I am still way way out of shape. I have been doing 5k's regularly in the gym... on a machine. These machines do not take overpasses into account. Overpasses hurt so good...This 5k had 2 just in case you were wondering...we went over them twice. I think I told the road how much it sucked over and over again while I was climbing up them. But I kept going and I finished.   I finished with multi-colored teeth...that's what happens if you don't brush people....it's scary.

   I am a perfectionist. I have admitted this to myself and to everyone else in the world multiple times. I was pretty ticked off with myself that I wasn't running more of the race then I did. Right as the I started the last kilometer and I was really really getting angry with myself and my inability to keep running through the burning in the top of my legs, my playlist pulls up some Matchbox 20 jams. The song it started was "How Far We've Come". The whole premise of the song is that we as a society are basically destroying ourselves for the sake of "progress" so while it's a song that I absolutely love (and for the largest part agree with) and regularly jam out to...mostly because of my love for Rob Thomas, it's also not necessarily one with an encouraging message. The statement "Let's see how far we've come" plays over and over through out the song. It reminded me at just the right moment how far I've come. It's a little victory, but it's a victory none the less

Shrinking and Growing?

      Lots of times through my lifetime of being involved in churches and ministry and Bible college, I have been told to never be afraid to tell my story of what has been done in me through Christ. Those of you that know me well, know that I am not one to be afraid to tell anyone anything about myself ever. I am very forth coming with just about every type of information available, but I've never felt like I had a story of any significance at all to tell. I never had a drug addiction or suicidal thoughts or a drinking problem or slept with multiple people or parents that hated me or anything else. I didn't have a huge moment of when I decided to become a Christian as opposed to living a lifestyle of sin or anything like that. I lived a pretty non-climactic life surrounded by my Christian family and my Christian friends and I chose to follow Christ because it's what the right thing to do was and still is. 

    I have never really thought of myself as a sick person at all, but looking at my medical history, I would definitely fall into that classification. I had 14 hospitalizations before I was 2 (near-miss SIDS, allergic reaction causing my gastrointestinal system to shut down, asthma, allergies, etc, I can't name them all, but my mom definitely could) and a ridiculous amount since them. I've had 14 surgeries (4 surgeries to repair a broken arm, 3 torn meniscus, tonsils and adenoids out (age 3), c-section, hysteroscopy, 4 sinus surgeries including basically an entire rebuild), 3 broken bones, more sprains, tears and strains then I could count and have been diagnosed with 3 chronic conditions (PCOS, Hashimoto's disease, and asthma) and have more allergies then what I could even list if I tried. I am crazy accident prone, but the other side of that is that I have been just a sick person. I never ever thought that the healing from these issues would grow to be my testimony, but I'm thinking that is the way that this is all headed. 

    Last night I was shopping and was talking to two girls who were both extremely extremely overweight and I mentioned that I had lost 28 lbs since this summer and the quick question is "HOW?!" because lets be honest, every fluffy girl wants to be skinny. Every single one ever. If they say they don't, they are lying to themselves and to you. We all want to be healthy. I started sharing with them where I was before June this year. At that moment I realized exactly how sick I was. It is not normal for every doctor you see to honestly know your entire chart without needing to look at it for a refresher. I began sharing with them how we eat, that I exercise regularly and they looked at me like this is something they've heard hundreds of times and were honestly sick of hearing. I then began sharing with them all of the documented objective improvements that I have had health wise and all of the failures I had had in losing weight before and I saw a glimmer of hope for health in them. I saw the flicker of "well maybe this will work" in a string of absolutely hopeless feelings that had been seen in our conversation up until this point. Both of them had similar experiences to mine health wise up until now and were frustrated with the lack of results that they have had. So maybe through this experience not only am I being shrunk and shaped, I'm being grown and toned spiritually and emotionally as well. Maybe God is using this experience for me to be able to give hope to others and to help them find success as well. 

Tastes like Home

     Jason and I had a quiet evening at home by ourselves tonight. We spent most of the evening doing very exciting things like cleaning and cooking...and we watched a Johnny Depp vampire movie.

     Growing up, we lived on 6 acres with most of my family. My grandparents were across the field in one direction, my aunt and uncle in another direction and for quite a while, various cousins lived in the little house at the back of the property. One of my moms childhood friends lived across the street and is still known as Aunt Nita, so still more family all around. My mom and dad always cooked dinner, It was a really special occasion when we went out to eat. We have definitely not succeeded in making this the expectation for Jonah, but we are changing that slowly but surely. Even though mom or dad always cooked, there were always at least 2 or 3 other meals to pick from for dinner if I wanted to run around and scope out the options (There are advantages to being the youngest in the neighborhood, with cute curly hair :-) ). My favorite childhood foods come from all sorts of houses, but they all taste like home. The most popular thing that my mom cooked that drew everyone else over to our house was the meatloaf. My mom makes a mean meatloaf :-). As we get closer and closer to time to go home, the more that I start craving the recipes that taste like home...We're heading home for Thanksgiving in about 3 weeks so hopefully the home food craving doesn't get tooo out of control in the mean time. I didn't make the same recipe that my mom does because hers has wheat in it, but a few easy modifications and we were good to go :-)

2 lbs ground beef (The beef came from our cow, so it wasn't labeled by weight, probably closer to 2 1/2 lbs)
2 large eggs
1/4 cup apple sauce
1 cup gf bread crumbs
1/2 medium chopped onion
1/4 chopped bell pepper
2 tsp gf Worcestershire sauce
1/4 cup homemade barbeque sauce
1 cup ketchup

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Spray 2 loaf pans (9x5x3) with olive oil. Mix all ingredients (except ketchup) into a large bowl together and then form into loaf pans. Cook for 30 minutes, top the top of the meatloaf with ketchup and then continue cooking for 30 more minutes. Let cool for about 10 minutes before slicing and serving. 

I also made an aluminum foil pouch and threw in some sliced squash and zucchini in with come coconut oil and lemon juice and pepper and put it in the oven to cook while the meat loaf was cooking and steamed some green beans. We had a full meal leftover, plus lunches which is awesome since tomorrow night is Halloween and Jonah will be ready to go make new friends with anyone he can find as soon as we get home, and dinner will already be ready to go. Success!

Breakfast

Breakfast is an under-utilized meal in our house. We put lots of thought into lunch and dinner, but breakfast is still a struggle during the school year because we hit the ground sprinting in our house. I am normally at the gym by 5:15 and Jason is NOT I repeat NOT a morning person so he is sleeping until the last minute possible to allow him to hopefully have a few minutes to drink coffee in peace and then Jonah wakes up either like me or like Jason depending on the day and there's no rhyme or reason to how he's coming out of the gate. Jonah eats some cereal (it's at least non-GMO and organic and obviously gluten free, and it has happy penguins on the front...) Jason drinks coffee and I normally grab a chicken sausage and yogurt once I'm already at school. See...we're kind of epic breakfast failures. This afternoon, I had a chiropractor appointment (I do pretty much every monday) and Jason had to run an errand in Conroe (he missed some dry cleaning when Sadler shut down a few months back and they've been there ever since) so he picked Jonah up from school and I came home and got started on dinner and realized that I had been a flake and forgot to get dinner out.

    I opened the fridge and saw the TJ's turkey bacon and thought that breakfast sounded good. I got ready to start my normal pancake recipe and decided that I would fall it up a bit and added some pumpkin and nutmeg and cinnamon. I cooked some eggs for Jason and got distracted mid grits make for me, so those didn't happen, which is probably for the better, but we had a really good, fairly healthy last minute dinner. Random side note: The Trader Joe's agave and maple syrup is A-MAZE-ING. I don't care if they wanted $15 a bottle, I'd buy it. So so good. We had enough left over pancakes that we took one over to the neighbor and Jonah and Jason will have them again for breakfast in the morning. I think Jonah actually ended up with one in his lunch...he really really liked them.

Pumpkin Pancakes

1 egg
2 tbsp sugar
1 tsp vanilla
2 tbsp melted butter
1/2 cup pureed pumpkin (I used the Trader Joe's organic)
1 cup All purpose GF baking flour (I use Red Mill)
1/4 cup buckwheat flour
2 tsp baking powder
2 tsp cinnamon
2 tsp ginger
a bit of nutmeg 
1 cup milk (it may also take some cream, we use raw full fat cow milk...It also may take a bit more milk, I had to add a few more splashes of milk to get the right consistency) 

Then cook as normal pancakes :-) I make mine about 1/4 cup of batter per pancake.

    We had Trunk or Treat last night at church. Halloween is basically a holiday created for Jonah. He gets to dress up and go around and talk to people. He has got to be the most social 4 year old I know. He has never met a stranger. I think he had more fun giving out glow bracelets (that was our substitution for candy) then he did going around the parking lot and getting candy. I still haven't figured out what we're doing with the tons of candy we'll end up with because he's cute and friendly, so everyone always gives him a ton. I hate to not let him trick or treat because he just likes talking to people so much, I just end up with tons and tons of candy and I don't want to give it to my kids at school either, which is what I've done in the past, I'm sure Jason has a plan for it...

     The other thing that happened which I'm still kind of trying to process is that one of our friends came to me and told me that our family and our healthy eating plan has been inspirational to quite a few other people. I hear from some people (not very many on here, I'm pretty sure I talk to myself on here) that we as a family have been helpful to them, but I guess I hadn't really stopped to think about it. I really try  and be encouraging instead of judgmental towards people and I think that helps as well. I know that I am still out of control overweight, but it's getting better, but I know that I don't want people looking at me and making assumptions and so I make a good firm effort to not to the same. It's hard to not come across that way because I really do think that everyone would feel better if they made different food decisions and strived to eat closer to the source of the food, but I can't force anyone to make that decision. I also know that I have felt completely hopeless before with health and weight loss and more then anything else, Jonah's health. I was confident to be honest that this wasn't going to be a whole lot different then anything else I had ever tried. I have always said though that I'll try anything in the world that would help and so I did and gave it everything I had, and wouldn't you know, that it worked. I am encouraged that other people are looking at what we are doing and it helps them to want to be healthier. Life I've said before, if we can do it, anyone can. :-)

More family? Yes, please.

My stepmom is a night owl and was able to find the pictures I was looking for. My dad's family is a much smaller bunch, so it has a much different dynamic. My dad is an only child so I don't have any cousins on that side, so family gatherings are way way different on one side of the family then the other. Jonah is the only great grandchild on that side and will be until we have another one (hopefully) or until my sister has a baby (which should be a while still). He is pretty much the rockstar of the family and my Nana pretty much thinks he hung the moon...which he did, so I don't see the confusion there. There's not much that brings her more life then Jonah running laps through her house and making up goofy dances on the spot. It makes me laugh to see her laugh.
   My dad and I have not always had the closest relationship through my teenage years. Part of it is that I lived 1000 miles away and part of it is just that sometimes kids have a battle with their parents through their teenage years. My dad and I don't see eye to eye on every single issue in the world, but we have a mutual respect about just about everything. I'm pretty confident that my dad thinks I can do no wrong. My step mom and my dad got married when I was an older teenager (17, I think) and she is a great balancer for him. They compliment each other well. She is more of a realist with my sister and I then my dad is able to be (basically she's not nearly as soft with us as he is, we can talk him into almost anything). I am blessed to have 4 people to call parents who all would do or give whatever they could to make sure that I am as successful in life in all aspects as possible. I am also blessed to have those same four people who love Jonah more then anything else in the world. There's not much more that I could ask for for my son. I am blessed :-)

When it all comes down to it...

     This is my family. Well most of it, My dad is already asleep, and I am missing the most recent family picture from that side, so they'll get their own post later, and my cousin Jennifer and her two girls (Tiffany and Kayla) are missing from this picture, but other then that, we're all there. This is just the direct lineage from my grandparents, not including the second cousins that were at this same party.  There's so much that you can get from this picture about our family.
     The first thing is the location of this picture. It was taken at my grandparents 60th anniversary party at the local Boilermaker's union hall. My grandparents got married when my grandma was 14 and my grandpa was significantly older, I don't remember exactly how much older, but quite a bit. They have worked hard their entire lives to become both financially and spiritually secure and to leave both of those legacies for generations to come. My grandpa was a boilermaker, He was disabled in the 70's from falling and had a big fall where he hurt his back permanently. My uncle is a boilermaker, my cousin is a boilermaker and other cousins have worked as boilermakers in the past. Even this legacy is something to be proud of.  I was in a parent conference last week and asked the student what he wanted to do when he grew up and he told me he wanted to be a boilermaker like his dad. I mentioned that my family was full of boilermakers and it was an instant source of connection that linked this students family and my own and gave me a deeper insight into his family. I am proud of the work my family has done and continues to do and the importance of hard work that they have always instilled in all of us.
     The next thing you notice is that there are a lot of us. My grandparents have 3 kids (my mom, aunt and uncle) who all together have 9 kids who have 7 spouses between us and have 17 1/2 kids between us (Chrissy is pregnant now). Not all of us are blood related, there are adopted kids, there are step-kids, but when it comes down to it, you would never know by watching our family who is who. We are family.
 My mom (go ahead and try and pick her out in the picture, she looks pretty much just like me) and I have been us against the world for as long as I can remember. She was my biggest cheerleader and motivator for as long as I can remember. She has gently and not so gently pushed and encouraged me to be as successful as humanly possible at everything I've ever wanted to do. She had a way of knowing when my pushy, over achieving self needed a break even before I did and was always the first to make me take one, even if I was doing everything I could to refuse it. That was the most helpful thing anyone has ever taught me to be honest, and it's still a lesson I struggle with regularly.
    My aunts and uncles have been right behind my mom encouraging me and protecting me through out my life. Our family is not real big on boundaries which is an awful thing sometimes, but is awesome in the way that regardless of the situation, people speak their mind. Not awesome in the way that everyone  is involved in everyone's business at all times, but with 4 extra back up parents hanging around all of the time, there was no getting away with anything.
     I was an only child until I was 12. My sister and I have a huge age gap so even after she came, I still was functional as an only child. Never fear...4 of my cousins lived across the field and the rest lived an hour a way. There have been times in my life when I've needed each one differently, but I can think of a specific time when I have depended on each one of them as if they were my siblings in my life. My cousin Ryan and I are 6 months apart, so growing up, we were the best of friends and the worst of enemies...at this point though, it's settled into a best of friends pattern. In college, we could be and were vicious to each other, but no one else has ever been allowed to say anything about the other. Growing up Shelley and Jennifer were the older sisters I never had. I got to go on dates with them (I'm sure that was not their choice looking back on that, but they never seemed to argue about it, at least not in front of me) but they always made me feel included. John was the big brother I needed. I knew that I took priority over just about any girl (or anyone else with John for that matter) when I was little. He also managed to terrify any guy I ever dated that he got to meet, including Jason. Chrissy has been who I have been the closest to out of that set of cousins as an adult. She and I parent the most similarly and tend to have similar outlooks on life. She willingly ran around with me for days at a time this summer with a whole brood of kids and even without them :-). Keri and Ronda have been the most honest encouragers for me. They let me know when I screw up and act like an idiot (well really anyone will do that for me) but then they also let me know how to help fix it. We all struggle together and hurt when the other hurts.
       I realize now as an adult that what we have as a family is not normal. There are some who are not as involved with each other as the rest of us are at any point in time, and that's ok too. Jennifer swears I'm the favorite grandkid, but I had to listen to grandma and grandpa tell me how wonderful she was for 15 minutes a few weeks ago :-). There are seasons for everything, but the one thing that never changes is that when it comes down to it, we have each other's backs.
       Most of our family has struggled with weight at some point in time. Some have struggled with wanting to gain weight, but most have struggled with wanting to lose it, and some with both. My whole family (and everybody else in the world) knows that I am in a season of trying to win a battle of health with my body. I get sweet encouraging notes from my family on a regular basis. It's amazing how they know my heart enough to encourage me, without making me feel like I'll be less then worthy if I don't lose any more weight. It's a sensitive balance for someone like me.  I am still not great at taking compliments, so I often times don't respond because I don't know how to. I appreciate the encouragement more then what any of you realize. I am working towards being able to take it without hesitation :-)

Confession Time

     It's confession time....I have fallen off the wagon. I haven't fallen off, gotten run over and been left for dead as the rest of the wagon train keeps going...I've simply lost my balance, slipped and continued walking next to the wagon. For anyone who knows me, a slip and fall is entirely likely in any capacity for me.
     Let's start with the food. I haven't completely lost my marbles, but I had forgotten about that gusto that made every single thing I put into my mouth a choice. Not as in obsessing about it (more on that later) but as in I can eat a peach (which I love) or ice cream (which I love), well the ice cream is closer, so there ya go! I have fallen off making sure everyone has whole food lunches for school/work and that there is legitimate dinner at night. I may or may not have stooped as low as Bob the Builder brown rice pasta one day this week. See...not an awful choice, but not the best choice I can make for my family.
    The working out...oh the working out. I have this fantastic man named Joey who makes me want to (and not so occasionally makes me actually) say not very nice words to him. I am making progress. I can lift things I couldn't before, I can hold Jonah with less effort. I can run faster and longer and can hold a plank for 40 seconds...all progress. It has gotten substantially harder to get to the gym every day. In fact last week, I made it there not at all. Granted, my asthma was really bad and I was on some meds that limit working out to get that back under control, but if I really wanted to I could've gone to swim or walk or something at least. Instead, I took my commercial grade cough syrup at 9 and then stayed asleep until 6:30 the next morning. It was blissful, and I don't think I coughed one time all night. Success!
    The weight loss....I am stuck bouncing right around my lb mark. That is the 10% spot for me. I have lost 10% of my body weight give or take a pound on any given day. I'm excited about that. It's the first time it's ever happened. Ever. My metabolic issues (thyroid and PCOS) still seem to be completely at bay (I am still on thyroid meds, just at a much lower dose, and my thyroid is way less swollen then it was 4 or 5 months ago). So healthwise...improved.
    I went to the doctor the other day for asthma junk and the MA who did all of my vitals and everything is someone who I'm pretty familiar with since the whole family uses the same doctor and has for 3 or so years now and we are not exactly uncomplicated.  She used the regular blood pressure cuff and it worked! None of this looking at my arm, deciding she needed a bigger one or starting to use the regular one and the walk of shame as they have to go find the bigger one, just the regular old every day blood pressure cuff. A step towards normalcy. I was super excited about the normal blood pressure cuff and she was a bit confused about my excitement until I reminded her that they normally had to use the bigger one...then she joined me in my excitement. Clearly it's not as much of a thought to them about which blood pressure cuff is being used, but I noticed it every single time. As Dr. H was leaving the room, he stopped and came back in and asked me about Jonah and Jason and how the healthy eating was going and told me that he was so amazed that food has made that much of a difference in helping us get towards healthy. I am blessed to have a doctor that encourages that sort of thing instead of trying to overmedicate for things that don't need medication. He also looked at my chart again and said my weight looked great and he wasn't worried about that at all. Words I've never heard from a doctor...ever. Even as a kid (when I really wasn't overweight at all) my pediatrician (who was a wonderful wonderful doctor from Thailand) would poke me in the side and tell me I was going to get a little pudgy if I didn't watch it. Now...is my weight really great, no...but in comparison, we're definitely making progress and it's noticeable, which is even more exciting.

    So all of that to say...I'm ready to stop walking slightly behind the wagon and get back on it. I'm still not feeling 100% from my asthma flare up/cold last week, but I'm better. I think cleaning up my diet completely again and exercising regularly again will get me back to 100% quicker.
    This week I'm shooting for the more attainable goal of the gym MWF and sticking to the menu plan all week. I made two different types of soup today. One is a cabbage soup (I'm not sure why, but my family always called it Dolly Parton soup) and a beef stew. Both are still simmering now and my house smells really good. I stole a bowl of the DP soup a bit early and it was good even without being completely done. I am also going to crock pot cook a chicken tomorrow and plan on cooking steaks one day this week and maybe do a spaghetti (with brown rice pasta) or something similar one night. We will sit down tomorrow evening as a family and make a meal plan everyone can help with and be excited about. I am also going to get back to blogging here...It seems to hold me a bit more accountable to myself and to everyone else if I know someone else is watching what I'm doing.

That whole job thing...

    I feel like since school has started I really don't have anything to terribly exciting to say. I haven't been trying new wonderful recipes or cooking gourmet dinners or anything. I really haven't even been exercising or even doing anything super productive. I have been maintaining our lifestyle changes and losing weight. I was stuck at 20 lbs of weight loss for what seemed like a month, and now the scale numbers are slowly starting to come back down again.
     We also started baseball with Jonah the week that I went back to school....because I'm crazy, that's why. I am pretty excited about the fact that even though we've been ridiculously busy, we have not become restaurant addicts again. I didn't realize seriously how much we ate out until we stopped. We do Starbucks still, but I get a tea that is only 1/2 sweetened (that's really really good for an almost reformed sweet tea addict).
    We have got to get a snack system down for Jonah between school and baseball. On Wednesdays and Fridays he goes from 7:45 when he leaves until 5 at school and then from 6-7:30 at baseball. We are also working out of our nap time routine too since the big pre-k kids get a 30 min rest time and we all know Jonah's not going to sleep unless someone makes him, so the naps are gone, but he does go to sleep faster at night. I am still amazed at how much healthier he is. I think he's going through a permanent growth spurt because he eats all the time...all the time! He eats just about anything, so at least he's not picky. Tonight he ate salmon, rice and peas so I guess I can't complain. He's loving his new class and having one of his favorite teachers back. He talks constantly about what Ms. Sinquefield says and what they dressed Chandler the frog in for the day and things like that. He's growing like crazy and changing every day into a boy instead of a baby.
   School is going well. Already this year I am ridiculously attached to some of my kids. My heart breaks for some of them so so much already. I have kids dealing with every family situation imaginable and with terminal illness of a family and all sorts of other crazy things. Pray for them....all of them. Kids shouldn't have to endure all of the sadness of this world. My classroom is up and running now. We've already covered 2 of the skills for the year in the first week and will be going this fast the rest of the year. I'm a little amazed their heads don't explode.
   There's my mini-update on all of our chaos. I'm hoping to get back to blogging more regularly once I get settled into my school routine.

Perfectionism at it's finest

     I am a perfectionist. Not with everything and certainly not for everyone, but I expect perfection from myself and I want to be the best at everything. My best friend since kindergarten (Jerrika) and I are almost identical in intelligence and academic strengths. If we both got A's on a test in school and her A was higher then mine, in elementary school, I was hysterical. It's totally ridiculous, I know. When I was dancing, there is no way to quantifiably be the best in dance, but I knew that I could hit milestones before everyone else...so I did. I had perfect splits way before everyone else. I worked on the for hours a day until they were perfect...I can still do a pretty mean split. I needed to be in the top band, top choir, top academic class, top everything. I lost some of that drive when we moved to Texas and I realized that people in The Woodlands were mutants academically and I wasn't going to be able to be the best of the best at everything, and I learned to live a little outside of my crazy expectations for myself. I was much happier and much more balanced once I learned to let some of it go. I have gotten some of those tendencies back as an adult, but not a whole lot. We have annual performance evaluations and if it's not marked as an exceeds expectations, it's not acceptable. I'm pretty confident it drives my assistant principal crazy, because she's well aware of my crazy.

    I was talking to a friend tonight and really charted my progression of weight gain for the first time. It's rough. I was about 140-145 my junior year of high school. I thought I was hugely obese. I had knee surgery my sr year (for the third time) and was completely immobilized for 6 weeks and on very limited movement for about 2-3 months. By the time I got married (a year and a half later) I was at 160 or so. When I was 19, I gained 60 lbs and hit 220. It's not abnormal for women with PCOS to gain 50+ lbs when they are about 19-20 when the hormone changes really kick in, it was actually one of the diagnostic questions my ob/gyn went through when he diagnosed me 6 years ago. So here I've gone from 140-220 in about 4 years. After a baby, and crazy life changes, and a ridiculous amount of steroids for my sinuses, asthma and allergies I added another 35 lbs in the last 4 years. I have now lost 20 lbs and am almost back down to pre-baby weight (which I only gained 8 lbs of the entire pregnancy, so I guess I can't really call it that).

    Here is where the perfectionism kicks in...I start school again tomorrow. I have made lunch, I have pre-made breakfast, I am making plans to avoid the eating out and junk school food and all that sort of thing, but I'm terrified that I will not succeed at continuing to lose weight. I am terrified that the positive changes that have happened for me and for my family will be wasted because I can't keep up with myself and my commitments and all that sort of thing. So there are my numbers that I have avoided putting out because I feel like in comparison to what I need to lose, my 20 lbs is insignificant. I want to be at 165 eventually, so I need to lose another 70 lbs to be at my goal and in a "normal" BMI range. I will be happy with 180, but 165 would definitely be nice! I'm putting out these numbers so I will have a   public commitment to continue finding success. I can fail myself, but I refuse to fail when others are involved.
   
     I SHOULD get released for exercise this week (from my sinus surgery last month and the awesome muscle ripping antibiotics I have to take since I'm allergic to the rest of them) which should definitely help, but leads to a whole new level of crazy.

Success!

  I made my first chuck roast today sans crockpot. Actually it was my first chuck roast period. I have always gotten the big thick roasts (to be honest, I have no idea what they're called still) and since we have been doing the farm fresh food and getting most of our meat from a co-op, which means ordering online, I accidentally ordered the chuck roast and you can't waste food...So I had to learn to cook it! I don't know what people did before google...I typed in chuck roast recipes and had hundreds of recipes sitting right in front of me. I picked one of them, modified it a bit, and off we went!

  I covered the roast in garlic powder, salt, pepper, red pepper, and chili powder. It's basically a homemade Tony Cachere's seasoning, so you can use that too and be fine. I let it sit for about 1 hour and then browned it on both sides for about 3-4 minutes on both sides in a bit of coconut oil. I greased the bottom of the glass dish with coconut oil and then put in the roast with some potatoes, onions and carrots and enough water to cover about 3/4 of the roast. I covered it with aluminum foil, then put it in the oven on 300 for 3 hours. I flipped it every hour and it came out wonderful! I took the rest of the juice in the dish (after pulling out the meat and all vegetables) and added a corn starch mixture of about 1/4 cup water and 2 tbsp corn starch to the juice while heating it and it made a really good gravy. It had just a little bit of kick to it, but it was great! Right as it was ready to come out my crazy neighbor (I only say that because I know he's going to read this at some point) texted me to come over and show me his new fence doorbell he installed for Jonah and we got distracted with painting stencils onto his house and I realized dinner was done and in the oven. Jason came back home and got it and we combined their salad for dinner with our roast and everyone was happy :-). It was a good night of friendship and food.

   I am working on coming up with some sort of schedule for myself on how to keep up this crazy whole foods mess when school starts. I think I'm going to have to start doing one major thing a night and going from there. I know every week I need to pack lunches (will have to be on Sunday night), prep breakfast stuff, make yogurt, meal plan, and fold laundry (I do it all throughout the week and lay it out as it comes out and fold it all at one time, normally on Thursday nights because the fabulous woman who deep cleans my house every two weeks so I can spend my Saturdays with my family comes every other Friday).

    I'm starting to get a little stressed about managing working full time + again while actually cooking and stuff because last year we did a whole lot of eating out or eating whatever you could find laying around. Luckily, I am blessed with a super helpful husband who doesn't mind riding the crazy train with me and helping me out with my crazy projects. At least I get a week to ease back into it by having a week full of training before I get my kiddos back, although I am definitely excited to get a routine back. It will 100% help with the weight loss since there will be no boredom eating and I run around like crazy with all of my little friends all day long, so it will be good :-) Jonah was asking today when he got to go back to school so he's excited too. I think we're all ready for routine.

Pinterest Praise

Look what I made! I am so horribly unartistic...I love that pinterest makes me feel slightly less then completely incompetent with all things artistic and culinary.

    That's really about it...We had a horribly boring weekend...this is my last week before school starts back...which is very very sad...

Jonah's 4 yr checkup!

    Jonah had his 4 year check up today (I'm definitely a little late, but it's not my fault, I promise...we were scheduling it right as Sadler Clinic was shutting down and then we went to Florida for a month, so we're just now getting to it). Our doctor is wonderful. He is a family practitioner, so we all see him. He plays with Jonah and makes himself completely available for us with him and is also proactive in taking care of Jason and I. He is not a fan of overmedication and strives to really use as little as possible. Jonah really likes him and responds really well to him (except when he's getting shots, and then he's really mad at everyone).
 
    Jonah is in the 88% for height and the 55% for weight, which is not surprising at all. I'm pretty tall, Jason's not short, and both of our dads are over 6 foot tall. The weight is a little lower then the height because of the controlled diet he is on, but he's had a 20 point spread at least in those numbers for as long as I can remember. He is doing great developmentally and passed his vision screening with flying colors...he was good enough with his letters that he could use the big boy chart instead of the picture chart.

    The really exciting thing about the whole appointment was how excited our Dr. was about how much better his skin and constant nose drip were. He was pretty confident this is the first time he's ever seen Jonah w/out a runny nose and black circles around his eyes. Even with the bad flare up last week w/his eczema, he still looked better then he has in the past and we're medicating him substantially less. His tubes in his ears looked wonderful and had no draining or wax build up or swelling. The Dr. was so amazed at how much of a change diet has made in both Jonah and I (he hasn't seen Jason yet, but I'm sure that will be impressive too).

  Jonah still has the heart murmur, but we're going to leave well enough alone with that one for another year and see how it sounds next year. We'll keep a close eye on it this year since he is starting competitive (as competitive as 4,5, and 6 yr old t-ball is) sports in a few weeks and will be playing most of the year, it should give us a pretty good indicator of if it's problematic or not. He did say at this point, it'll probably be a permanent murmur and could still be non-problematic for the rest of his life.

    We did survive the shots...barely. We are still playing catch up from delaying some of his vaccines and spreading them out until he was older so even though he had gotten some of his 4 yr old shots in January, he still got 4 today. We could've waited another 6 months to do the other 2, but I decided to go ahead and do them today because he hates them so much and is big enough to tell me when something feels funny. It took 3 full grown adults to give him his shots, the doctor sprayed his leg w/some numbing spray and then the nurse gave him his shots while I held onto him. He actually sat up to do them and didn't try and grab them or anything, so I think he probably could've done without me holding his hands, but I was probably the only one he actually wanted involved. He didn't even feel the first 3, because he was telling the nurse that he didn't want her to give him shots, but the last one is the chicken pox shot, and I've had that one as an adult and it is the most painful shot I remember getting. Before he left he gave both the nurse and the Dr. hugs so I'm thinking all is forgiven. He was so mad though that he was talking to me in a screaming cry all the way into the parking lot. He got in the car, took off his bandaids and told me it felt all better now. He's a bit dramatic, I think. So all of that to say, all is well in the world of Jonah :-) He's growing and developing without any problems and the biggest problem we did have is improving slowly but surely.

You know you're an adult when...

   I am definitely about to blog about cleaning supplies so hold on and get ready for the excitement that is about to come to you. I have been planning on doing this for months, but just now got around to doing it...which is really sad, because it took about 10 minutes to look up the recipes, gather the materials and make them all. I am really super cheap...and realized how much money I was spending on cleaning supplies and knew there had to be a better solution. This also goes with our quest to get as many toxins as possible out of our house. Most of these cleaning supplies were made with things that you can put directly on your skin with no questions asked. There is a bit of bleach and a teenie bit of ammonia in one, so I don't recommend drinking them, although they are all mostly water. There is one other one that I want to make, but will have to wait until I go get more rubbing alcohol and another bottle.

   The first bottle is window cleaner. This stuff will take dog slobber off the outside window and is less streaky then Windex. I come from a long line of people who are entirely to obsessed with streaks and it didn't skip my generation either. This is 6 oz of rubbing alcohol ($2  for a 18 oz bottle, so about 70 cents), 1 1/2 tsp of ammonia (I used some that was lemon scented because the smell of ammonia grosses me out, $2 for 64 oz so less then $.01 for each bottle) and a drop of laundry detergent (I used Free and Clear, I don't even know how to calculate the cost on that one...) and fill the rest up with water.  You use it just like Windex and it's AWESOME. It cost less then $.75 to make and would have cost about $2.50 in the store. Even with buying the bottle this time, it was $1.75...you could wait until you run out to make it and never have to buy a bottle.

   The second bottle is shower cleaner. I don't even know what to compare this to because we have tried just about everything to get the hard water spots off our glass shower and this works amazingly well. It's not completely perfect yet, but I've only used it twice, and it's got 2 1/2 years worth of build up to cut through (so gross, I know). It's got 16 oz of dawn dish detergent and 16 oz of warm vinegar (microwaved for about 2 minutes, makes it mix better) . At Sams, you can get 1 gallon of Dawn for $10 and a gallon of vinegar for $1.75. That makes 8 bottles of shower cleaner so that makes the cost $1.47 per bottle. I think the cost ends up about the same no matter where you get the supplies from compared to the Tilex shower cleaner (which didn't touch the hard water spots) for $4 a bottle for the same size. To use this, I sprayed it on the shower when it was dry and let it sit for about 2 hours (I've heard of people leaving it on overnight, the dawn makes it form a gel that stays on the glass instead of dripping down) then wipe it down and spray it down and prepare to be amazed.

    The third bottle is vinegar cleaner. I use this on everything...literally everything. I've used it on floors, kitchen counters, food, the refrigerator, glass, the stove, anything I have to clean in Jonah's room, my dashboard, any other surface you can think of. It is what I use as my daily cleaner. I do 16 oz vinegar to 16 oz water and call it good. It's $.22 per bottle to make and is so safe to put anywhere near your kids or dogs or food. Jonah likes to help me clean and this is the only thing I let him use. Vinegar is a natural disinfectant so I also spray vegetables and stuff with it. I kind of compare it to Pine-Sol...which is $3 a bottle.

    The last bottle is a bleach cleaner. I don't like all of the toxins it has in it, but I can say everything that is in it so that's a step in the right direction I'm thinking. It's possible that it just makes me feel better and really doesn't mean anything at all. It has 3 oz of bleach ($2 for 3 qts of Clorox which leaves it at $.06 per bottle) and 1 1/2 tsp of laundry detergent ($12 for 150 oz, so that makes it $.02 per bottle) and fill the rest with water. Serious...a $.08 cleaner. The Clorox Cleanup sells for $2.84 at Walmart.

The total cost of the cleaners listed here (store bought) is $12.34. The cost of my cleaners is $2.52. That saves you $10 on those cleaners alone! If it's your first time, and you buy bottles (like I did) add in an extra $4 (the bottles are $.97 at Home Depot) and you still save $6 the first time and then $10 every time after that and I rebuy these supplies at least once a month (I have a whole board on pinterest devoted to cleaning, and I have someone who comes and does deep cleaning once every 2 weeks for me as my gift to myself and my family for working full time, I'm kind of a cleaning supply addict). I have a friend who makes her own dishwashing detergent and her own clorox wipes that I'm very interested in trying (hint hint Jessica ) so hopefully you'll see a blog post about that as well soon. She also makes her own laundry soap, but we have to be so careful about J's skin, that I will probably wait a while on that one.

I'm kind of amazed at my body...

    So this may be entirely TMI for most of you, but it's my blog and you can close it if you want to...In the interest of transparency, I'm all about TMI...if you don't want to read about crazy hormones, then have a great day and we'll talk again tomorrow. :-)

    So as a bit of background...I have PCOS and probably have my entire reproductive lifespan thus far. I have never in my life (even on fertility drugs or birth control) had 28 day cycles. Never ever. I've never really had normal period symptoms because the PMS week or so that normal people get has been spread  out over a month or so while my body prepped for the one period it got every 4-6 months....a benefit of infertility...I don't get babies, but I don't get periods either...There is always a silver lining. I have also always had crazy bad, violently throwing up kind of bad, cramps, to the point that the school nurse in high school never argued about me going home when I needed to...and they almost always try and keep you in school, so the 2-3 periods a year thing was kind of OK really.

    Well, my doctor induced a period in June, then about 2 weeks afterwards put me on what he called the worst birth control ever. He said it would regulate and cause a 28 day-ish cycle, but people get pregnant on it all the time, so he almost exclusively uses it for prepping for fertility drugs. The plan was 3 months on that, then start the fertility drugs. I start taking that, and then exactly 2 weeks later, I get a period, and for the whole week before that I had all of those awful PMS symptoms that everyone talks about but I have never had the week before, maybe all spread out for a month before, but never a week. I thought that was really weird, and that the birth control really was crap because normally I don't get them at all, and here I sat 2 weeks in with a period. A few days later, I realized that it was exactly 28 days from the last period I had gotten. I was a little bit afraid to get excited about the possibility of regulation, but I went ahead and stopped taking the meds since they clearly weren't doing their job (which was definitely a God thing, because apparently, they were also reaping havoc on my liver, and it's anticipated that the fertility drugs would do the same thing, so those are a no go....awesome).

   Here I sit 3 weeks later, and notice that I haven't dropped any weigh in a few days and have actually gained 2 lbs (even with crazy cycles it is not uncommon for me to gain/lose 5-10 lbs every time I have one...I hold water like crazy) and I hadn't changed my eating at all...then notice that my skin is starting to break out...and I've spontaneously burst into tears like 3 in the last 24 hours... Only one of which was a little bit warranted. So I think it might have finally happened, after 15 years of having crazy unpredictable hormones, they seem to be functioning like their supposed to.. Pray for my poor husband and son as I figure out how to function and don't act like a 14 year old girl with crazy unpredictable hormone swings...

    I'm not sure what has fixed my body. Well...I really am, let me rephrase that. I'm not sure what changed medically, to fix my body. There have been a lot of people praying for healing for my dud ovaries for a long time. I felt prompted by God to remove every toxin possible from our lives and in turn have clearly become healthier. I'm not sure what we've cut out that has made the difference, but it's definitely something. I'm still shocked and amazed at how much better your body functions when it's being fueled the way that it was intended to be fueled.

    Today is my cousin's husbands funeral. Please pray for Jen and for Tiffany and Kayla (her daughters). They are packing up and moving to Florida to be with family at the end of the month. Pray for a seamless transition for Jen and the girls. I am selfishly a bit excited about them being down there because I will get to see them more, but am praying that they end up in the place that is the best for healing.

Ode to Pinterest...

   I think that I should probably dedicate an entire blog post to my love of all things Pinterest. I seriously use it at least twice a day...substantially more then that some days. I cook from it, I lesson plan from it, I organize my house and classroom from it, I get book ideas from it. I am helping plan a friends baby shower (more with that later) and am doing almost all of it from Pinterest. It's spectacular :-).

    Those of you that know me well, know that I am just not a neat and tidy person. My projects in elementary school were so messy that in 5th grade, I won the science fair at school, but my presentation was so ugly that before my teacher would let it go to the county competition, I had to redo the whole board. It took hours and I think she really wanted to do it for me, but she was an excellent teacher, and made sure I did it all myself. Ever single last glue stroke...myself. If I can do nothing else in life, I can follow directions...Pinterest makes it so that as long as I do that, my projects come out like they should.
 
    This is my project for today. I am sure that just about every teacher in our school will be using one of these this year.  I am constantly digging in my desk for supplies. No more! I feel like this year I finally have a grasp on what I'm teaching (when my Assistant Principal said it took about 3 years to get a good grasp on your curriculum, she was not kidding)  so that I can finally get a grasp on organizing the rest of my classroom more effectively. I have been day dreaming about systems to put in place for classroom organization since right after the beginning of last year. Apparently I look organized to the outside world, but I still feel horribly unorganized (I'm sure my team would agree). We're making progress though! Anyway...I am pretty excited with how this came out....It actually looks like it should...maybe even better! After I took this picture, I realized that the one big drawer with the stripes was crooked and it made me absolutely nuts, so I pulled it off and re-glued it. That's where my Sharpies will go...the site that I got the labels from didn't have a drawer for Sharpies, but had a drawer for "other tape"...not sure what that means...

   Today...while sitting at home doing nothing...I discovered Song Pop. Holy cow...biggest time waster ever but so so much fun. This clearly hurt my dinner planning skills...oops :-). So about the time Jason called to say he was on his way home, I started thinking about dinner... I bought a smoked whole chicken from Tejas Heritage Farms at the farmers market on Saturday. SO glad I did...I pulled out a head of Romaine lettuce and a whole bunch of salad veggies, threw them together as a salad and then pulled apart the chicken. I put the breast meat on the salad and put the rest of it in tupperware for later. Some of it will be lunches for the next few days and some will become chicken salad. I love that my family will willingly eat salad...I ate a ton of it while I was pregnant and I think that's part of why Jonah is so willing to eat it. My grandma always had fresh salad around when I was growing up and was always very willing to share it with me...as she tells everyone, I got two bites and then she'd get one. That is one of her favorite stories to tell about me...I'm not quite sure why, but I think part of it is because she always wanted to make sure that her family had healthy food to eat and was proud of the fact that she was able to help provide that whenever she could. Don't get me wrong, we definitely ate fried bologna sandwiches with ketchup (I have no idea why, but for some reason, all 9 of the grandkids really liked them when we were kids and would beg to eat them, now we're all a little appalled by them and how much we loved them) but there were always fruits and veggies to go with everything.

   Tomorrow Jonah and I are headed up to work in my classroom. It is already functional enough for Meet the Teacher (which is way early in our inservice week this year, before our work day, and always makes for a crazy long day) but I would really like to just be able to work on curriculum for the work day that we get so I'm trying to get everything done ahead of time. I'm also totally obsessed with Meet the Teacher night..if you are a parent, please feel free to let me know of anything that would be helpful for you to see/get on Meet the Teacher night for your middle school student...I don't have one of those yet, so would love to get some helpful info from anyone.

Pasta and cancer

   I somehow managed to not take a single picture today...Not quite sure how that happened but it did...Jonah and I had a pretty lazy day today. We went to go see "Mr. Brian" (our chiropractor) and then came home, had lunch and naps (and some cuddle time) and then made dinner for Jason's family to come over. Jason's brother Jacob lives way far away in Kansas City and is here for a visit and Jonah has been very anxious to get to play with Uncle Jacob so we had them come over for spaghetti. We use Trader Joe's brown rice pasta (the only ingredient is organic brown rice) and organic roasted vegetable sauce and an organic vodka sauce mixture along with some fresh sauteed onions, bell peppers, garlic and tomatoes. I also use some of the sun dried tomato chicken meatballs from Trader Joes. It always comes out really yummy and we do that about once every two weeks along with a salad. I used my handy dandy food saver and vacuum sealed the leftover spaghetti so that I can use it for lunches later in the week :-) LOVE that thing!

   Jonah's eczema is calming down quite a bit. He's almost clear again. This has been one of the most severe outbreaks (he had probably 12-15 mosquito bites which started it) but this has also been one of the quickest times he's gotten over it. His eyes never got black under them like they normally do as well, so I think we're making progress. We are still using the steroid / aveeno / aquaphor combo on him at night and then using coconut oil on the eczema spots in the morning, poor thing is like a little greased pig..but it works and it's getting better.

   My cousin's husband Jon passed away today. He had esophageal cancer. I hate cancer. I haven't spent a huge amount of time with Jon in probably 5 years, but he has been with Jen for as long as I can remember. Jen is 13 years older then me so she was in high school at my earliest memories (we all lived on one big piece of property, so I grew up with most of my cousins across the field from me), and I don't remember there ever being a time when Jon wasn't around in some capacity. I am so sad for Jen and for their two girls, Tiffany and Kayla. I can't imagine losing my dad as a pre-teen girl or losing my husband and trying to raise girls after that. Please keep them in your prayers, along with my uncle who is already up in Pennsylvania with her and with my cousins Chrissy and Shelley and with Chrissy and Jen's mom Carol who are all heading up there to be with her. Pray for safe travels and for them to be able to offer some peace and comfort to Jen and the girls.

   Cancer is an awful horrible disease that has no concern with who you are and what you want to do in life or how much money you have or how many kids you have or how old you are or anything else. Cancer runs crazy in our family. My grandma has had breast cancer and brain tumors, my grandma on my dads side has had kidney cancer, my aunt has had leukemia along with another type of cancer that I can't remember right now, my uncle has had esophageal cancer, Jon had esophageal cancer, my other aunt has had pre-breast cancerous cells and my step-dad has multiple myeloma. I'm pretty confident I'm missing some. Jon is the first one in my immediate family to lose his life to cancer though.
   
     I know that there's not a whole lot you can do to avoid everything that "causes cancer" nor would I want to really, because I'm pretty sure you can make a correlation between just about anything and cancer. It also makes me wonder though what we're doing to have such a high rate of cancer in our country right now. There are places in the world that have almost no instance of cancer at all and ours is crazy high. I am praying for a cure as quickly as possible, and praying for knowledge for researchers on what is really causing all of it.

It finally happened!

 It finally happened....I realized at about 2 that I had no desire to cook dinner and I didn't have a plan to get dinner into the family.

   We went to Calico Dairy this morning and had a really really good time with 4 other mama's and lots of little boys (and a lone baby girl). They were all about rocks and poop and all sorts of other boy things...and Matt Hines (the Logistics Manager for the farm) gave us a great tour and let us meet some of the cows and see the milking area and even pet brand new baby cows.

   After our farm trip, we went to Chick Fil A and had lunch...definitely nice to be able to enjoy adult conversation while the boys played in the play place. I am looking forward to getting back to school and having my kiddos back every day, but more then that, having adults to interact with on a daily basis between 7:30 am and 5:30 will be awesome :-)

   Speaking of back to school....Today the 6th grade math department came over to work on our curriculum for the first 9 weeks. I made a wonderful fruit platter to snack on and I have the most self disciplined food eaters ever that I work with....almost the whole thing was completely in tact when they left...It's ok though...Jonah will annihilate any leftover fruit.

    Which brings me to dinner....I didn't want to cook...not even a little bit. Fortunately, Chicken tenders defrost really quickly. I pulled out some chicken tenders, marinated them in the homemade barbeque sauce from last week and then sliced up some squash. I threw it on the grill and called it good. I figured I should probably make another vegetable, and then saw some leftover asparagus from a few days ago and threw that in the steamer and dinner was done!

   Random side note...Please keep Jonah in your prayers. He is covered in eczema....covered...probably worse then I have ever seen it. He got a bunch of mosquito bites at Schlitterbahn the other day and it just all flared up from then. I'm not convinced it's not some other sort of rash, but it's not on his belly at all and it all went out from the mosquito bites. Pray for healing for my sweet boy...it's so frustrating when he was doing so so good...He needs some relief.

Competition

    For those of you who don't know me, I think it's only fair to warn you that I'm a teensie tiny bit competitive. Just a little bit...Nothing too serious...I definitely don't have a permanent bend in my nose because I tried to take someone out to get a Bunco or anything. I'm pretty sure they stopped doing challenges at our faculty meetings for jeans passes because the teachers from our LC were so crazy competitive, that we really didn't lose very often at all. I'm not 100% sure that's the reason...but I know that at least 3/4 of us had to take a calm collective breath if we lost...it just wasn't pretty.

   Jonah played t-ball at the YMCA 2 years ago and he really liked the hitting and the running and the throwing...he did not like the standing or the waiting or the catching, but we pretty much chalked it up to he was only 2 (he turned 3 before the end of the season) and moved on with our lives and planned to let him play again the next year. Well registration came around, and I kept meaning to do it, but it never happened. I missed it...and I got crap about being the slacker parent for a good solid 6 months.

    My time for redemption has come! Fall Ball is here, and Jonah is big enough to play in the real little league instead of the YMCA (Yes, I already registered him, I'm not stupid enough to post a blog about it first, because then it's guaranteed that I will forget about it completely). I'm all about everyone getting to play (and they all do in this league), but if it's not his thing, lets go ahead and figure it out and move on and find out what his thing is. I'm not a huge fan of the everyone wins every time model if you can't tell. The problem comes in with me. I don't like to lose...and neither does Jason or Jonah for that matter. I am slightly terrified of becoming crazy over the top baseball mom who takes other kids out at the knee. I wouldn't really do that...I teach in the same district that the baseball league is in. Jonah has to do a draft for the league on the 11th, and I'm seriously a bit concerned that he'll place in the bottom of the draft...and if he does, that's ok because he's in the youngest age range of his bracket, please remind me that I said this if he does. Also remind me that he is 4...and not going to the world series next year... and to keep my crazy in check regularly :-) Also, please remind Jonah...that first base is to the right :-)

Random side note: Dinner tonight was spinach tamales from the farmers market. Yum! Even better is the fact that I didn't have to cook them :-)

Yogurt making

   And the question of the day is....how do you make yogurt? It is really easy! The further I get into the quest for real food the more amazed I am at how lazy we are. Seriously....I am the queen of as little effort as possible to achieve the maximum result possible, but I think that on the timeline of food, we've definitely missed the maximum result. You're looking at a peach yogurt, a strawberry yogurt and a vanilla yogurt....the vanilla is actually much lighter then the pic...I'm not sure why it looks so dark on here...

   My friend Kathie makes her own yogurt regularly so I asked her how she does it and took what she said, and the link she sent me with information on it, and put them together. First I took the biggest pot I have and the second biggest pot I have and I filled the biggest with water and put the second biggest inside it to make a double boiler. I filled the 2nd pot with milk. The amount of milk you put in here will be the amount of yogurt you get so you can make this as much or as little as you want. I then heated the milk up to 185 degrees and maintained it at this temperature for about 10 minutes (Next time I will try and maintain it for closer to the 30 min recommended for thicker yogurt). While this was boiling I put a large glass bowl in my sink and filled the sink around the pot with ice water. I dumped the milk into this bowl and chilled the milk down to 110 while stirring the milk to make sure it cooled evenly. When the milk gets to 110, add a few tablespoons of live culture plain yogurt (after the first batch, you can save some of your own yogurt to mix use as the starter, but the first time, use a store bought brand...I used Stoneyfield Farms). I went ahead and put the yogurt into jars at this point and sealed them and placed them in a cooler. I then took the water I boiled earlier and poured it over the jars and added extra hot tap water to the cooler to keep the jars warm. I closed the cooler, and left it there overnight. When I woke up, I had yogurt. I stirred the jars a bit and then put the jars in the refrigerator for a few hours in order to thicken a bit.

    A lot of people leave the yogurt plan and flavor as you eat it...I opted to go ahead and flavor a head of time and leave it jarred in different flavored jars. To make the strawberry, I took a quart of strawberries and pureed them in my food processor and added strawberry puree and blue agave sweetener to taste. I did the same for the peach as well. I then realized I had some frozen blackberries in my freezer from last year and defrosted them and used them as well. The last flavor I made was vanilla. I took about 2 tbsp's of vanilla extract and a tsp of blue agave and it came out great as well! I think I may like this better then the yogurt you can by and I know there are way way way fewer ingredients in mine then there are in the store bought ingredients.
 

    The even more awesome part of this was making the go-gurt pouches. Jonah is a go-gurt addict. Those things get expensive...and they have lots and lots of sugar in them...and if you've met my sweet boy, you know sugar is not something extra he needs. My dad got me a food saver for my birthday (I'm such a crazy crazy exciting person, did you know you could make vegetable steam bags with that thing??) so I took the bags and made little pouches with them, and cut the top of the pouch, filled it with yogurt and resealed it. It took a few rounds of practice, but then Diane and I got a nice little assembly line going, and now Jonah has about 20 pouches with more in them then a normal go-gurt with a much much healthier alternative.

   I really didn't think that this would work so well, so I wasn't really good about taking pictures while I was making the yogurt, so I definitely will take pictures next time. I think I will probably make it in smaller quantities so it takes less time next time. I will probably make a half gallon and call it good next time :-) I think I will probably let Jonah help me next time since it will be pretty hard for it to be messed up as long as the temperatures are controlled and he loves to be helpful. 

Slowly headed back to the real world

Today was my first glimpse into what the real world is like...just a tiny glimpse...I got up this morning with Jason, made breakfast and put a chicken in the crock pot (A SUPER easy crock pot recipe with not very many ingredients at all that my neighbors saw and thought of us) and was out the door by 7:30. It's not as early as I need to be out the door for school, and I still am missing an exercise component that I would like to have in my mornings, but it was something. I ran some errands and went to school to get my classroom started. When I got to school, I got some of the stuff off of my tables and put where it goes...then had lunch....which I had packed a head of time from the lemon salmon a couple of days ago and had a healthy lunch without much effort at all. I finished up at school and came home to finish my yogurt project (which gets its own post). The chicken was already done in the crock pot at 3 so I left it on warm for a few hours and it was juicy enough to not dry out. It literally fell off the bone. Loving my Yonder Way Farm chicken!

Crock Pot Chicken and Carrots:

1 whole chicken rinsed and seasoned with salt and pepper
1/2 cup of diced onions
1/2 cup of diced carrots
Fresh thyme
1 lemon, juiced.

Put all ingredients in the crock pot and set on low for 8 hours or high for 6 hours...that's it...you're done...awesome dinner ready when you get home. I steamed some green beans and my friend Diane made a fruit salad and she and Rod came over and we had a ::gasp:: KID FREE DINNER! It was very very exciting.

And then afterwards......Jason and Rod did the dishes :-) Don't they look ridiculously happy to be doing the dishes??? It's because Diane begged to go to Yogurt Worx as soon as Jonah got home so they were all very excited.