Self-awareness

Feeding the baby real food has forced me to acknowledge that I don’t eat enough fruits and vegetables. How can I feed her almost exclusively fruits and vegetables, tell her she’s had enough cheese toast and to eat more peas, and then turn around and eat a handful of semi-sweet chocolate chips?

The solution…When she eats, I eat. This involves a lot of sharing. Also, kale under everything is a really good way to add vegetables and a nice flavor to a lot of dishes (think soups, pastas, sauces, etc). Sautéed kale is pretty good on a sandwich too.

So this looked like someone else’s fridge after my trip to Trader Joe’s, and that bag of kale is GONE.

Look at all those vitamins!

And in addition to this crap that I got at Russo’s (crap being the best damn sourdough bread on the planet, a baguette, and chocolate cayenne cookies)

Delicious crap I might add.

I also got a bunch of kale, tomatoes, strawberries, bananas, a mango, and avocado, lemons, limes, and another basil plant. Not because I killed mine, but because I need more basil.

These ingredients made a fabulous panzanella (sans shrimp) last night.

 

FRESH

Then for lunch, I had leftover bolognese over kale, while baby had a piece of that fabulous bread with cheese on it, grapes, and peas. Hungry little bugger! We’ve had some good runs together the last couple days. The first was good because she slept and because I can run 3 miles pushing a jogging stroller without stopping, and the second was a good 2.5 where she was awake and kept looking at me. What’s cuter than that?

 

So very motivating

Starting to believe I can actually do the halfs that I want to run this fall. I’m going to need to be in shape anyway to keep up with this. Might as well get some races in.

Standing for a solid 17 seconds.         We took a video.

 

 

Cooler weather

Back in the swing of cooking, what a cyclical thing this is. However, it’s not random, it’s based solely on weather. When it’s cool, I cook, when it’s disgusting, I hope that Jon asks if I’d like him to get Subway on the way home.

Jenna’s vegetable fried rice….where do I begin? You guys probably know at this point that I tend to be someone who needs to be tricked into eating vegetables. I tend to like ones that not everyone enjoys, like brussels sprouts and more recently, kale. And then a lot of peoples standbys don’t do it for me. I don’t like bell peppers, cucumbers, mushrooms, fennel. etc. Anyway, this recipe is a great vegetarian option to mix in during the week and the only thing I changed was more egg for protein. It was, delicious. I didn’t even get a picture because, frankly, we ate it all in about 6.2 minutes.

Then, looking for a new way to cook tilapia in the summer that didn’t involve pan frying over a hot stove (our 3 window units are placed in such a way that no breath of cool air ever touches that kitchen), i found a recipe for baking it and then promptly lost it. Regardless, I mainly used it for time/temp so I will post what I did because it was delightful. It made a really nice lemon/butter sauce that was great for soaking up with ciabatta fresh out of the oven and a caprese salad with basil from our still growing plant.

And then tonight…this weekend was crazy. A family member passed away last week, the baby was sick during everything around the funeral/is sick now, my dad was in town, and in all of the chaos, no menu was planned, no groceries were purchased. Jon refers to these dinners as “Chopped” dinners. Where I look in the pantry, do a quick google, and try to figure out what the h*&^ I can make with what we’ve got. Tonight, we lucked out.

       In the words of Parks and Rec,
           “Start drooling fatties”
                     Just kidding 🙂

There were all of the ingredients to try my hand at a bolognese. Except celery. But who needs celery, really…

I used the Pioneer woman’s recipe because it looked like a perfect combination of complicated enough to be good and not so complicated that 4 hours later, we don’t have dinner…Modifications, I used white wine because I had it, diced instead of whole tomatoes, yellow onions instead of red, 2% milk and half and half, and the whole recipe was halved because if we make 2 lbs of ground beef, we shall eat 2 pounds of ground beef. I wish I had a more special pasta to put underneath there but, penne sufficed, and yes that is kale peeking out from underneath the pasta. Gotta get those greens.

It is sooo good. We each had 2 servings (it’s ok,(for me) training started this week). I don’t think that the modifications took anything away. If I had red wine next time, I’d use it. I thought a red onion would’ve been weird here? But who am I?

 

 

Murphy’s law

This morning had so much promise. We finally moved the baby monitor to Jon’s side of the bed because he is the one that gets up and gets her diaper changed in the morning. Why should I listen to the whining in my ear and not him? If I am the one who gets up to get her, eating has to come first. That is the nature of breast feeding, the complete mind-losing that a baby goes through in the morning when they see/smell their mom. 

Anyway, after a rough evening of teething, she slept from 6:45-6:30, no complaints here! Jon gets up, changes her diaper, I feed her, he utters the words “do you want to go back to sleep?” around 715, to which the answer is “seriously?” and I sleep until 8 while he plays with and feeds the baby applesauce. It was glorious. Then I woke up…

The eye rubbing and yawning has begun, signaling an early nap. She’s not quite ready so we play for a little bit, read a couple stories, change a diaper, and then I try to rock her. She’s already crying and arching her back and looking at her crib so I figure, ok, she wants to go to sleep. Laying her down in the crib, the crying escalates to full on melt down. I leave the room for a minute (sometimes this helps) and am informed that the cat has inhaled her food and already puked twice, Jon has cleaned said puke up. Yay! I go back to the baby and try rocking again. I try teething rings, we land on Sophie, and Sophie is annihilated for a few minutes but doesn’t do the trick.

This is from last night but, you get the gist. Note the red splotchy face but the smile on it. She wants to be happy!

 

We do Hyland’s teething tabs, no use, and finally give her a little Tylenol. She continues to scream. We’ve been at this since 8:30 and it is now 9am, Tylenol has had 15 minutes to work, but isn’t. She keep screaming, I keep holding her, we keep trying, she eventually falls asleep. For 20 minutes.

During these 20 minutes I manage to eat something, but only after I clean up yet another cat puke, on the ottoman. Where did this come from Lucy? Where?

Peacefully sleeping after she emptied her insides.

 Then the cat stops resting and begins to stalk me on my way to go get the baby who has started to cry again. I move my leg out of harms way and catch my toe on the wall (it is still swelling). Cursing quietly, i limp to her room and pick her up, determine a diaper change is again necessary, and lay her on the changing table, which results in a new onslaught of screaming. I get her diaper off (cloth), and set it aside, where the little baby poop that is on it proceeds to roll off the diaper and fall behind the dresser. Now I’m torn in horror between pulling out the dresser and picking up the poop, or picking up the screaming baby (who knows how long it will take to comfort her!?) and I just can’t. I strap her in and deposit the poop into the toilet, check her temperature, finish the diaper change, and pick her up.

While I’m nursing her I call the pediatrician because 100.2 seems high for having taken Tylenol, and now I am on fever watch. She’s been sleeping for 2 hours now, in just a diaper because it’s warm outside but additionally, she is sweaty today, furthering my suspicions that something else is going on. When she wakes up, we’re trekking somewhere that has ibuprofen (because Tylenol is bull sh*t) to maybe actually bring the fever down, and then we will be on air conditioned fever watch for the rest of the afternoon (Target seems like a fun trip for us both, I went yesterday but forgot my list, my coupons, they didn’t have the cat food we use, they didn’t have the moisturizer I used to buy there, and I ended up leaving target with eggs and butter…so disappointing).Doc said to keep an eye on the fever after ibuprofen and watch for other symptoms. I just want to FIX it. Welcome to motherhood I suppose.