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 :-)