Life Lately

It's Friday night.  Both babes are asleep by 8:00 pm (not counting on it staying that way with Jack, though).  Chris is off celebrating a friend's birthday.  I'm caught up on work.  I have done some dissertation research.  What else in the world am I to do?

These days I'm trying to catch up health-wise.  I kicked sodas while pregnant with Jack, but I get these really bad headaches.  I always have.  Excedrin helps, but I can't take that while nursing.  My doctor suggested that I try to drink some caffeine too.  Before I knew it, I was enjoying a cherry Coke every night with dinner.  So yum.  Sooo bad.  Recently, I let myself run out of sodas and am drinking Earl Grey with a little milk and a littleeee honey to get myself some caffeine.  At first I tried drinking coffee with hopes of making my way down to black, but that was too much caffeine.  Black tea is just the best for me.

I've been working on our dinners more too.  I'm always hoping to work in more fresh veggies and step away from processed foods.  The problem is that we have been doing a lot of grocery shopping at Target every week and a half or so.  Target.  I love Target; however, they don't have all of the veggies that we need.  And I realistically need to go grocery shopping twice a week if I'm going to keep everything fresh.  The other night for dinner I made a veggie stir fry with zucchini, asparagus, and snow peas.  For the rice, I put cauliflower in the vitamix just long enough to chop it up.  With a little soy sauce, you'd never guess it was cauliflower!

Pretty much nothing in that cart is processed!  The black bag is pistachios (Eliot's favorite right now) and the white packaging is goat cheese.

When winter comes, I feel like I should be hibernating, which is pretty hard with a toddler and a baby.  So, to get us through, I've been trying to think of activities outside of the house for Eliot.  He is such a social boy, and I sometimes wish we had him in pre-school because I know he'd love it.  Instead, I'm looking into swimming lessons for later in winter and also soccer in the spring.  I'm not expecting Eliot to be some star soccer player right now, but he loves sports, running around, and I think he'll have so much fun.  I do know, though, that he would likely just end up tackling everyone on the field if we didn't get him in some kind of class to figure out soccer and the structure of playing games with other kids.  Chris found this group that offers little soccer skills classes, which I think we're going to start taking him to once a week.

We took him this past Wednesday and I was so proud of him.  He was very obviously outside of his comfort zone.  He didn't want to stretch with everyone at first and hid in Chris's lap.  However, then they played Red Light, Green Light.  Eliot opened right up and was eager to participate in all of the games and kick the ball for the rest of the class.  These challenges are good for him, and I know it is hard at first, but he gets over his shyness quickly.

I've been trying to think of other activities we could get Eliot involved in.  I thought about looking into karate for a second.  Just a second.  Then I decided that I don't need that insanity in my life.  Eliot is too young anyway, but he is already jumping off of every surface he can.  I don't need him punching and kicking the air in the house too because you know he'll end up punching a dog or Jack or a picture or me on accident instead.

Other than that, we've had fun with friends, reading for schoolwork, and LOTS of games on the bunk beds.