do you know the muffin man? muffin woman?
08 Jun 2010 5 Comments
in food
Are you tired of hearing about my weight? Well I’m tired of seeing my weight, so let’s call it even ;)
I have the most obnoxious little muffin top. I really do.
That little brat contains a good part of the rest of weight I have to lose. More
oh I’m craving baklava! plus a little time travel!
18 Feb 2010 2 Comments
in everything but the kitchen sink, food, photography
I saw Giada make baklava on the Food Network and I desperately need some. I need to bake it. I need to fill it with chocolate chips, almonds, walnuts, honey, mmmmmmmmmmm I have never wanted anything as badly!
Okay.
That might be an exaggeration.
But only slightly.
I may or may not have wanted fresh chocolate chip cookies more badly than I had ever wanted anything last week.
Hmph.
Baklava, I love you.
Okay, I think I’ve dwelled on that for way too long.
I’m a little embarassed now.
How about a quick jaunt to the past?
This is Ariana when she was younger. This is in our condo, so she was probably about 6 months old. Isn’t she a cutie? I’m fond of her.
More tomorrow :)
busy as a bee, I just don’t have a stinger
09 Feb 2010 5 Comments
in food, photography
Today really has been full of stuff that had to be done…
*laundry
*vacuuming
*cleaned the bedroom
*baked applesauce muffins, made grilled cheese sandwiches
*took 200+ pictures of the girls (in fairness, they are really cute and photogenic)
*uploaded and edited pictures
*sorted through vaccination paperwork for the girls so we’re ready for the free vax clinic on Saturday
*played with two almost-happy children
Are you jealous?
I knew you would be.
I still have dinner to make (turkey meatloaf) and I was hoping to go out somewhere so we can walk, but it’s been snowing, so I’m not sure how the roads will be.
And now, because I know you were concerned that you would miss out on pictures, here are a few from today!
Please ignore the fact that I didn’t wipe her nose off…
Squishy smiley face!
Posing!
For this picture, Ariana asked to push the button, so I let her and it turned out beautifully!
I went to the store and I bought… apple-pears!
29 Jan 2010 1 Comment
in children, food Tags: Ariana, Harper, TV
Last night as we shopped at one of our favorite stores, I ran across the most remarkable fruit: an apple-pear! I’ve never heard of such a thing, so of course, I bought six of them. The description said something about them having the crunch of an apple mixed with the sweetness of a pear.
I think that apple-pears are going to be the perfect substitute in one of my favorite side dishes: fresh tortillas with monterey jack cheese and pear slices. I’m going to make them tonight along with chicken enchiladas and I’m already hungry for dinner!
Yesterday, I went to the store to pick up a new stock-pot for my mother-in-law’s birthday present and while I did end up buying the stock-pot, I also bought a chair for Ariana, two giant muffin pans for me and an asparagus steamer for Terry.
Poor Harper got gypped, so I, being the fair and loving mama that I am, will have to buy her something when I go out today. I won’t mention that I love buying things for my family, so any excuse is a good one.
Terry is watching BSG again today, I think he said it’s season 4. When he buys all the seasons, I’ll actually watch it, but I hate jumping in when it’s not the beginning of the series.
Ariana is currently pretending to saw my leg off with a wooden knife, so I suppose that is my signal to stop rambling on such a boring post.
If you’re reading this and would like to give me some ideas of things you’d enjoy reading in the future, I’d appreciate it. If you’d rather email me, as many of you do, that is fine too! Have a good Friday!
I really am one of the biggest losers.
27 Jan 2010 Leave a Comment
in food Tags: dessert, weight loss
And I don’t mean that I have lost weight and should be inspiring people around the world to do what I have done… because that would lead to everyone gaining a total of 130 pounds rapidly over the course of 2 pregnancies and then taking way too long to even start losing it.
Last night, as I ached and griped and whined, I watched the Biggest Loser. I spent about 3/4 of the show dreaming about gooey, fresh-out-of-the-oven brownies. I imagined myself eating a whole pan of said-brownies and then running on a treadmill for three days so as to not gain weight.
But, I had the restraint to skip the brownies.
Okay, fine, I’ll admit, it wasn’t restraint, seeing as 1. I was sick and probably wouldn’t have been able to stomach the brownies and 2. we have no brownie mix.
But oh, they sound so good. Almost good enough for me to convince my sweet and extremely handsome husband to go to the store and buy brownie mix even though he’s not feeling great and is enduring the 3-day-diet without me.
Oh. I forgot about the 3-day-diet until I was typing that. Nuts. (Ooh, nuts would go well in the brownies!)
This is not the way I thought the 3-day-diet would go… I figured I’d lose another 8 pounds this week and feel amazing and proud, then eat brownies and gain 2 pounds back and feel like crap. But no, I’m sick and and desperately imagining warm chocolate nutty brownies that I technically could eat since I’m not on the diet but shouldn’t eat because I need to lose weight.
Incidentally, I have lost 75 pounds since Harper was born. I still have at least 40 pounds to go though. Sigh.
Oh, brownies. How I pine for you.
Mmmm.
oh, hello 3-day diet. back so soon?
25 Jan 2010 1 Comment
in food
Ah, it’s Monday, meaning it’s time for the 3-day-starve-a-thon-diet to start. I am fairly sure I have never wanted scrambled eggs as badly as I do this morning, as the prospect of a piece of toast with peanut butter and 1/2 of cup of *shudder* grapefruit juice looms over me.
Terry and I (as I’ve mentioned 5000 times) went to Ohio for Ariana’s birthday and while we were there, Terry decided to go through some of our things that are stored in my parents’ basement. We ended up bringing home two totes full of scripts and parts to his computer so that he can set up the computer and find out whats on it. Too bad for him, he’s going to have to set it up in the basement because there’s no room upstairs… I’m sure he’ll enjoy the dank, dingy smell of the cold basement as he sits there to go through old documents and pictures. And BONUS: he can watch my laundry while he’s down there, so not only do I get quiet time, but I don’t have to run up and down rickety stairs! Awesome!
As he went through one of the totes, he found an old cordless phone he had back in college, which looks like a dinosaur compared to most of the cordless phones that are out today. This phone is bulky and looks like it’s eaten several of the new, slimmer versions of itself. As we don’t have a landline (or care to in the near future), we threw it out. If we pull it out of the trashcan, I bet it will have eaten everything and will be alarmingly larger than when it went in.
We’re getting Ariana the mattress for her toddler bed today, I think. Then we have to toddler-proof the room, aka remove everything from the bedroom so she can’t destroy anything when we leave the room, which she does even when we’re in there… so maybe there’s no point to doing it anyway. That means that I just put WAY too much effort into writing this sentence since I’ve changed my mind. Fail.
One of her birthday presents was Mr. and Mrs. Potato head. Do you remember these? I do, but I remember them being a heck of a lot easier to play with. I had Terry hold the body then proceeded to pull the Mr.’s arm. I braced myself with my feet on Terry’s leg and continued to pull and pull and pull (are you envisioning this? It’s fairly entertaining). After that failed, Terry pulled out the chainsaw and we attempted (no success) to saw off the offending arm (Mr. Potato Head’s, not Terry’s). Okay, so maybe I’m exaggerating, but only slightly. It honestly took me a couple minutes to get the arm out. How can my kid play with a toy that even I, her extremely buff (ha) and strong (kinda) mother cannot get apart?
We decided to put the Spud Heads away for a while, at least until Harper is old enough to not eat the pieces, and long enough that I forget about the anguish I went through trying to yank a toy’s arm out.
Goodness, you must be asleep by this point with all of my rambling! I’ll let you ponder the meaning of life (I’ll give you a hint, it’s 42) while I go running and dream of delicious amazing scrambled eggs. Mmm.
did you know arby’s serves breakfast?!
21 Jan 2010 Leave a Comment
in food
We made it through the 3-day diet (which seemed like the 3 year diet) I had an 8-pound loss to show for it! I’m proud of myself. My mom-in-law treated us to breakfast at Arby’s this morning- until yesterday, I had no idea that Arby’s has a breakfast menu! Ariana had french toast sticks (huge hit!) and Harper ended up eating about half of my sandwich biscuit because after 3 days of less than 1000 calories each, the sandwich was not as appealing as I thought it might be. The vanilla cappuchino was divine though!
Ariana has discovered that Harper’s walker moves. And by ‘she discovered’, I mean that as soon as she bumped it and saw it roll, she started pushing the walker (with Harper in it) around the living room. I’ve never seen a child cry so hard when she was pulled away to sit down and be fed yummy lunch. You’d think we were ripping her hair out, not setting her gently in a booster seat and offering her goldfish, but apparently the love of a pink and purple walker outweighs the love of salty snacks.
Sometime this afternoon, Terry and I are going to have a wrestling match, aka make seafood stew and baked apples for dinner/dessert.
Hang on, I hear sudden loud wailing in the other room.
*drags body off couch, grumbling something about this being the only 10 minutes I get to sit and relax in the middle of the day*
Ahh, just Ariana eating lunch. Yes, we are cruel, cruel parents. We often do the meanest things to our children, like feed them, clean their faces and bundle them in warm clothing.
Let me tell you, these girls have it rough. They get up around 7:30 in the morning and play together in Ariana’s pack-n-play while Terry and I pretend that we aren’t almost comatose until 8am. We dress them for the day and I feed them cheerios while I get their breakfasts ready (bananas, apples and graham crackers usually). Then we force them to play with us and their toys for a couple hours until Harper naps and then we strap them into their chairs and insist that they eat AGAIN. I mean, c’mon, twice in one day?! Ridiculous.
Ariana naps, Harper plays, then they play together and have an afternoon snack of cookies or an apple (aww man, food AGAIN?! This is the worst place ever!), Harper naps, Mommy and Daddy wish they were napping, we all eat dinner (ok, this food stuff HAS to stop), they girls play and go to bed screaming.
Yep, just slap the ‘worst parents of the millenium’ award on us! *eyeroll*
I hear a small child grunting, so I guess that’s my cue to go in there………………….. and tell Terry to take care of whatever surprise she has in store hehe 8)
