It’s Saturday. And at the moment, I am home alone.
The kids are out, the husband is out, I am in.
With the house cleared out, I opted for a few of my favorite things.
I tested out my knee with a short run (3 pain free miles + 1 naggy mile) on a cool, breezy, temporarily sunny, autumn afternoon.
I listened to The Biggest Loser on Hulu while I stretched out my IT Band and did some unplanned push ups too. Bob Harper screaming “LAST! CHANCE! WORKOUT!” is curiously motivating.
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.
-Chinese Proverb
That’s great, but we’re not going to talk about fish today. We’re going to talk about cookies.
One of the best things that happens when you learn how to cook is learning out how to get along without a recipe.
If you make something a couple of times, soon you begin to understand what ingredients and steps are most important. Make something a bunch of times and soon you begin to see the variety of ways you might be able change it up. Make something a couple of dozen times and soon you start see cooking from a whole new perspective.
On the weekends, I’m apt to be a bit less motivated to cook and a bit more motivated to goof around.
Instead of attempting to go out to eat and playing the Kids in a Restaurant game (wheeeeee!) – sometimes it’s a lot easier (and arguably more enjoyable) to hit up the grocery store and let everyone pick out a bunch of their favorite foods.
Vegetables optional. Manners too.
So this weekend we did exactly that. We loaded our grocery loot into a basket and hauled it to the backyard. An impromptu picnic was in order as we watched dad finish up some yard work for our meal time entertainment.
Let’s not call her the picky one.
No, let’s call her my muse. A source of inspiration. A fruit and vegetable avoiding force to be reckoned with.
See, I can make a fruit smoothie for Ava – no problem.
Frozen strawberries, frozen blueberries, banana, a couple glugs of almond milk. Sounds good, right?
For Ava, yes.
For Maxine?
No.
But!
Thanks to a bit of experimentation, I have come to discover that Maxine will eat that exact same fruit smoothie when it’s poured into a mold,
I’d love to be able to tell you that my kids are vegetable chow hounds. I have blog with “vegetables” and “kids” in the tag line after all, shouldn’t it follow that I get to tell tales of my little posse begging for broccoli, beans and beets? Shouldn’t I be writing posts about how easy it is to get your kids to eat fruits and vegetables? I could even use lots of exclamation points!!! I could say “all you have to do is try!!!!”
That’s what some people might like to call “Irony”.
Recipe for an hour of peace and quiet.
Ingredients:
3/4 c Arrowhead Mills Organic popcorn
2 Tbsp butter, melted
1 tsp salt
Barbie: A Fashion Fairytale
Directions:
Pop popcorn in your ancient air popper from the 1980’s, top with melted butter and salt. Insert Barbie DVD into laptop, plop two small children in pajamas (or not) with popped popcorn on the couch. Back slowly out of the room to dash up the stairs with your yoga mat in hand.
Serves one mother an hour and twenty three minutes to do as she pleases at the end of a long day.
The holidays are over. We have moved into our new house and are mostly settled. A formal complaint was filed yesterday over the lack of home cooked meals and several informal complaints have also been filed over the lack of regular posts in recent weeks as well. It would appear that I am officially out of excuses for not cooking or blogging per usual. Your break is over lady, time to get back to work.
Zak didn’t exactly get to go home early today due to garlic breath, but he did get home earlier than usual tonight. We loaded the whole family into the car and hit up the pool at the fitness center for some family fun and exercise too.
Swimming is probably my least favorite form of cardio, but I rather enjoyed it tonight. Maybe because I haven’t swam laps since the spring? Whatever the reason, it was a nice change of pace and I swam laps for 30 minutes, alternated 100 yards of freestyle and 100 yards backstroke while Zak entertained children in the shallow end. He got his turn to swim laps while I took cold, wet girlies into the locker room for nice long hot showers on someone else’s dime (forgive me, Mother Earth), blow drying hair and hiding in lockers until dad was done and ready to go.
Now this is what I call a real salad.
I guess I’ll just have to be my own fruit and salad company. You know what they say! If you want something done right you just have to do it yourself. Can do.
We kept ourselves busy today, both in and out of the kitchen.
Let’s make more MamaBars!
Let’s make something with glitter! *insert insane shrieking here* ANYTHING WITH GLITTER! Let’s make it! Gliiittteeerrrrrrrrrr…
I’m not so sure though that the “do it yourself” cliche applies to Christmas ornaments. Some things really are better store-bought.
More Mama’s Weeds
