A wanna be cook.

This is by no means a cooking blog, but I have been making an effort to cook more often and diversify our meals. I make a mean turkey spaghetti, but that gets old pretty quickly. Wednesday night was a perfect example of this experience as a whole. I’d been planning on making shepherd’s pie for a month or so. I bought the ingredients two weeks ago. Finally I put the meat to thaw on Tuesday and forced myself to put it together Wednesday evening. We were almost side tracked yet again with an offer to meet friends at BW3s but we kept our resolve!

6pm – Arrive home, play with baby, say hello to husband

6:15pm – Get in the kitchen to put on the potatoes, brown the meat, and pre-heat the oven all the while thinking, it’ll be 5 minutes and I’ll get right back to Michael and Elijah.

6:45pm – The meat, peas, and broth are simmering, the potatoes are boiling, and Elijah is crying to be fed. Crap! Where did the time go?

7:05pm – Baby is in bed, mash the potatoes, throw it all in a casserole dish and put it in the oven.

7:10pm – Review the recipe again “just to be sure” and realize I left out the flour and carrots. Oops! I guess I don’t have a perfect memory after all.

7:25pm – Take it out to cool and eat!

Despite my recipe fail, it was super delicious. Luckily, this has been the trend in my new food ventures. I don’t get it quite right but it’s still edible. Lol. I have also made stroganoff sans sour cream, pancakes without syrup, and turkey burgers without buns. You work with what you’ve got, right?

Next up: Crock Pot Beef, Potato and Quinoa Soup

A nursing mother.

I am a nursing mother. This feels a little awkward to write about and that’s why I’m doing it. I never knew what being a nursing mother was like until suddenly I was one, partially because it’s not something we talk about as a society.

Disclaimer: If you feel awkward, feel free to stop reading but I would love if you continued on anyways.

It’s not my job to shove breastfeeding education down people’s throats or to accommodate them because they feel uncomfortable. It is my job to be authentic about who I am and my experience as a mother. My silence just perpetuates the idea that it’s not something to be seen, heard, or talked about.

Breastfeeding is like a microcosm of motherhood as a whole.

It’s a confusing, overwhelming, consuming, frustrating, at times lonely, but overall rewarding experience. You are responsible for the well-being of this little creature and the decisions you make throughout the day have a direct effect on their functioning. Too much coffee, they might get fussy. Too much spicy food could give them gas (luckily this is not the case for Elijah). Work out too hard and your supply decreases or your milk tastes funny. If they have lactose or gluten intolerance or acid reflux… God bless you with the dietary restrictions you may have.

Then, you get to have those “snapshot moments” when you just want to press pause and soak it all in. I hold my calm little boy and feel gratitude for this moment to cuddle him, nourish him, and help him grow. I get to meet his half milk-drunk smile and kiss his forehead. Moments like those make me want him to stay little forever. They help me to keep going when he wakes up throughout the night, when he wants to pay more attention to everything going on around him than eating, and when (gulp) he experiments with biting.

I am 8 ½ months down, 3 ½ months to go. I am so ready to be done and a little sad for those snapshot moments to end. Sometimes I can’t believe I’ve made it this far and sometimes I want to throw my pump out the window because it feels never ending.

Feel free to share your own thoughts or experiences.

A wanna be health-nut.

Getting Healthy in 2012. This is the name of a group I helped organize at work. We meet together for lunch once a week to talk about what we’re doing to eat better, exercise more, and maintain a healthy lifestyle. We’re also challenging each other to complete four 5ks this year. I need this accountability.

Often I plan to cook a healthy dinner. I plan to exercise after Elijah goes to bed. I plan to walk at lunchtime. Then, we pick up Chick-fil-A, put on an episode of Modern Family, and I work through lunch the next day.

No more! Well… not much more. Let’s be realistic.

My tools for getting started:

• MyFitnessPal app via Android (or http://www.myfitnesspal.com/) I log everything I eat (including the 3-musketeers minis I picked up absent-mindedly, thinking: “I’m okay on my count. I can eat one. Or five. They are mini, after all.”)
• Cheetah Chariot Jogging Stroller/Bike Attachment. With all of this 5k talk, Michael and I decided it was time to break down and buy a quality jogging stroller so I couldn’t use “I don’t want to miss that time with Elijah” as an excuse any more. Then we saw the prices. Wow. Pay more for a decent stroller than we spend on 2+ months of groceries? No thank you. To Craig’s List we went. Even the used strollers made us cringe a little. Anything resembling a normal price was sold within hours of its posting. By sheer luck, Michael logged on right after “M” from southwest Houston posted a Chariot for a steal. 5 e-mails, 2 phone calls, and a 9pm trip to the South Post Randalls later, we have our stroller!
• Crock Pot. I’ve had a crock pot for almost 3 years now and have probably used it a total of 12 times. It scares me. “You mean, I leave it on all day and my house won’t burn down? That sounds wrong…” Before last week, I never actually left the house while using it which kind of defeats the purpose. I half expected to pull up to fire trucks when I arrived home around 6:00pm. Instead, I came home to the smell of pot roast. It was magical. The best part – I didn’t have an excuse to not cook dinner. It was already done! My goal is to make at least one crock pot meal a week.

Since writing this post a few weeks ago, we have actually completed our first 5k (in the rain, no less), I’ve made a few crock pot meals, and try to use myfitnesspal to keep track. I have not been as diligent as I wanted to be but we’re still going!

Ch-ch-ch-Changes

I’m changing up the blog. My life is not centered around one
thing so why should this blog be? I wear many hats and have thoughts, ideas,
and insightful or funny experiences in and about all of my different roles. I’m
a mother, a wife, a daughter, a social worker, a dog owner, a friend, a
wanna-be runner, a wanna-be chef, a wanna-be artist, and much more. I want to
write about all of those things and you can’t stop me! Well, you can stop
reading this I guess but that’s just fine ;)

I started writing posts a few weeks ago so I’m about to post
a lot at once. I hope you can enjoy, relate, or chuckle once in a while. I can’t
promise regular updates, but I’m trying once again. Here goes…