I Have Scallops in My Freezer

I have scallops in my freezer, and I'm a little nervous about it.

I love scallops.  I could pop them in my mouth like chicken nuggets.  I crave them when I watch Top Chef with the Hubs.  Inevitably, one of the chefs makes a delicious looking scallop dish. 

The problem is, I've never made them for my family.  I've never made them period.  I hear it's not hard (the cooking part, not the feeding to my family part).  I got brave at Walmart today and bought a frozen package of those round fleshy little seafood medallions.  I hope I don't end up regretting it.  I know Patrick won't touch them, but maybe if the sauce is simple enough, I could force/bribe/trick my kids into trying a bite of one or two. 

I think my confidence has been boosted by Thanksgiving.  Jackson tried the turkey and mashed potatoes at my parents house AND a bite of each dish on his plate at Patrick's mom's house.  Macy tried corn.  Both of these occurrences are big successes for me.  My children have not touched a traditional Thanksgiving dish since they were babies and still eating mashed turkey and sweet potatoes. 

I've also invested in these:

My son's a bit of a know-it-all (where did he get it from?  I just can't imagine...) and if anything I think he will get satisfaction from making sure I've filled up all the bowls correctly.  Secondly, these plates will keep me honest and make sure that my meals don't lack for fruits and veggies.  They won't solve all my problems, but they might help a bit.

I finished my half marathon, by the way.  It was fine, a little cold, but psychologically not near as hard as my first half.  I was stiff at the end so I didn't finish in the time I wanted but I was happy.  I ran a lot of the race with a guy who was running his 100th (!) marathon.  He's done a marathon in all fifty states.  Amazing.  That's a lot of miles.

The rest of my time?  Pinterest, pinterest, pinterest:

A "mindful" jar.  I'm slowly coming around to this "mindful kids" movement.  Basically, train your kids to be more aware of their feelings so they can monitor and redirect their reactions.  My son is a REACTOR.  As am I, sometimes, so I am learning as well.  If he (or myself) is tired, hungry, stressed, anxious, etc, than he (I) tends to get more worked up about things that really are not that big of deal.  So when he is "freaking out", I have him shake the mindful jar five times and watch the glitter float to the bottom.  So simple it seems silly, but I have witnessed it working with my own two eyes.  It doesn't work as well with Macy, because she is a "retreater" when she is upset about something, so if anyone has a jar for that, let me know.

Puffy paint.  One tablespoon self-rising flour, one tablespoon salt, enough water to form a paste, and food coloring.  We used cardboardish type paper (old coloring book covers).  Let the kids paint and then pop their creations in the microwave for 30 seconds.  Macy couldn't get enough of this project.  Most of those were hers.  Jackson liked to make 3D relief maps of the city.  Man, I love my little nerd boy.

The Elf on the Shelf!  We got our Elf from Santa two days ago, and he's already up to no good.  I think my kids are slightly freaked out that this guy is watching them and then doing weird things at night when they are sleeping. 

Finding new things to do with my too long hair.  This is after I left the sock bun in my hair overnight,easy heat free waves.  What I most like about this picture is that it looks all bloggy and artsy from the waist up but....

This is what was really going on.  Dirty bathroom floor, toy box, emesis basin(?) and a shopping bag full of bathroom supplies that need to be put away.

Thanks for the Support

The advice and support I've received regarding my kids and their meals has really helped pull me out of my slump. I feel rejuvenated to stick with the plan, at least for a little longer. I've added a few changes to my plan, thanks to some suggestions. I now require my kids to take one bite of the main course before being allowed to leave the table. I had avoided this before, thinking dinner would turn into more of a battle than it already was. Last night, with tortilla soup, it was absolutely not a big deal. Jackson even volunteered to make up a sign with the new rule on it.

"New Rule 1) 1 bite befor being exused"

I love that boy.

  

On a positive note, I have discovered quite a few new favorite recipes, some off of Pinterest, some from other blogs.  My most fav right now, is the Cajun Chicken Pasta off of Pioneer Woman.  I highly recommend the blog in general, but I use her site most frequently when I need a new recipe for the week.  I pick a recipe that has the most comments on it and am guaranteed a winner. 

Ellis loved the Cajun Chicken Pasta, too.  It was chock full of healthy veggies and great flavor.  As a side note, I could not find "Cajun spice" specifically, so I purchased "Creole" seasoning, and ended up with a delicious dish anyway. Maybe those two are the exact same thing, I'm not very clear on Louisiana vernacular.

The best, and most repeated, advice I've received is that "this too shall pass".  Kids have phases and this is just an especially long one.  If I stick with my guns, something, at some point in time, will change.  If I go back to how it was, than I am guaranteed that nothing will change.  Sigh. 

I have decided that I am going to write a book for new parents, so they don't make the same mistakes I did.  It will have only one premise.  If you want your kids to eat what you serve for dinner, serve it to them from the VERY BEGINNING.  Don't ever ever make them something "special" for dinner, unless it is a special night.  Maybe I'll just write a pamphlet.

My friend Hillary had a very good observation.  Our generation as parents have more dinner time issues, including but not limited to being "short-order cooks." This might be tied to distinct differences in how our households are run nowadays.  When our mothers got married, the cultural assumption was that they would have dinner on the table,every night, even before they started building their family.  When kids were added to the table, the dinner time routine was already established. 

Fast forward to modern time and, at least in my house, when a couple gets married, dinner on the table is a special event, not a routine.  My husband and I had (and have) such wonky schedules that sitting down at the table together was the exception, not the norm.  When kids were added to the table, we had to develop those dinner time expectations on the fly, and obviously didn't do too well.  What's the moral of this story?  Couples starting out on that family journey should establish their dinner time patterns early.  Dinner is dinner, if you're old enough to chew, than you will be eating what is served. 

Whew, that's enough of that.  Here's what else we've been up to:

Family pictures at Antioch Park.  The entire Schumacher side was photographed in all it's glory.  Thanks to my sweet sister-in-law for setting up the sessions, and my slightly metro brother who picked brown and "peacock" blue as our color scheme.  The Hubs and I haven't had a professionally picture taken of ourselves since our engagement pictures.  Yikes.

Deep cleaning.  I think my internal calendar thinks all this 60 degree weather means it's spring cleaning time.  I am slowly moving my way through each room, scrubbing, sorting, and throwing out ALOT of crap.  I've recycled and donated what I could, and am still left with several bags at trash time.  The environmentalist in me feels a twinge of guilt, but Lord it feels good to walk into a decluttered kids room. 

Another big clean out involved my craft "area."  Not just a drawer or a box, but an entire side of our basement.  That purge felt good, and also made me acutely aware of my hoarding tendencies.  I'm pretty sure I could of stocked a Hobby Lobby store with the amount of crap I had saved.  Need glass etching supplies?  Check aisle three.  Wood carving tools?  Right there next to the modeling clay.  Magnets, wire sculpting, scrapbooking, beads, embroidery floss, I got it all.  And I'm not even going to get into the piles and piles of yarn.

Advice Needed

So it's November, 2011.  I completed my major New Year's Resolution, to finish a triathlon.  There is one uncompleted resolution that is nagging at me, though.  The one where I resolved to get my kids to eat better.

To bring you up to speed, I decided I was going to make one dinner for EVERYONE, at least four nights a week.  No frozen pizza for the kids, no salads for me.  The children could eat or not eat, but I would not be a short order cook.  I usually ended up putting Patrick's portion in the fridge for when he arrived home around 9:00pm or so.

So I stuck with this, but 11 months later I am highly frustrated that I have seen little to no improvement in my kids' palates.  This, combined with the fact that I am spending more on groceries on a regular basis but throwing away more of each dinner, REALLY makes me want to quit.  Even Patrick doesn't always eat what I've cooked, mostly because he's not that hungry at 9 o'clock at night.  So it's me and the baby eating about 25 percent of whatever I've cooked that night, and the rest either getting moldy in the fridge or being thrown away.  Frustrating.

Really, the only thing keeping me going at dinner time IS the baby.  God bless her, she'll munch on red peppers and cucumbers while she waits patiently for her Cajun Chicken Pasta.  I figure at least I can keep her palate from shrinking, right?  In the back of my mind, though, it nags at me that all of my kids were adventurous eaters at an early age.  I seemed to do everything right until they hit about 2 and 1/2.

So, my kids go to bed hungry every night (they really seem to be getting used to it, neither of them ever complains about being hungry) and wake up to eat seven waffles each, and meanwhile I drink more and more wine at dinner to deal with the stress of another failed meal... Likewise, my husband silently cringes at the growing grocery bills every month.  Where do I go from here?  I've ordered a couple of books from Amazon, hoping to get back on the right path.  I'm a little wary, however, because I've tried most of the advice out there, including, but not limited to: 

1. Let the kids help with meal preparations.  We do this a lot and the kids have fun, I get to clean up a bigger mess, and dinner still doesn't get tasted.

2.  Let the kids pick out healthy foods to try at the grocery store.  We did this frequently over the summer, but I ended up eating a ton of kiwi and asparagus all by myself. 

3.  Let the kids plant a garden.  We've had a raised bed garden for three years now, and my kids do enjoy digging, planting, and picking.  Sadly, at harvest time, everything they pick they bring to me and say "Look mom, a tomato for you to eat!"  My kids apparently think I am the only one in the family that consumes vegetables.

I've tried everything, people.  New recipes, new vegetables, new plates.  I'm beginning to think the damage is already done and I might as well cook the kids what they want, so at least they get some calories in them every night.  I'm seriously thinking of consulting a nutritionist, or possibly Dr. Phil.  I'll give these new books a chance, and then... I don't know.  If anyone has some sound advice, I'm open to suggestions.
 

I need a GPS, please.

First off, a few pics to illustrate life of late.  My running scheduled has been derailed by a few things.  One, Halloween.  I LOVE Halloween, folks.  It's a holiday without pretenses.  I don't have to make sure my kids get the "real reason" for the celebration. It's all about candy and fun.  I don't care if you dress like a slut on Halloween, it just gives Hubs and I something to laugh at.

My favorite costume of 2011 is sweet Alice in Wonderland.  We have worked our way through every Alice in Wonderland book that has ever been published, including the real one by Lewis Carroll.  That man was certainly tripping on something, there were some weird characters that I don't blame Disney for overlooking.  Thankfully, my imaginative little eccentric didn't seem to notice.

The three black ninjas.  Aren't they a hoot?  Mine is the shortest little ninja.  Trick or Treating was so much fun this year with school friends.  These two boys from Jackson's class also each have a little sister around Macy's age, so the group had crazy fun running door to door.  As far as I know, the three boys didn't know what the others were going to be until the week of Halloween.  I guess ninjas are just in.

And lastly, this chunky little monkey.  She was originally going to be a duck, her favorite animal, but the Alice in Wonderland costume took up my sewing time.  Then I got the bright idea to crochet a Cheshire Cat costume to match Alice.  I got through the body and wasn't really loving it, so I dug out the old standby.  The sock monkey has survived three little toddlers over the course of five years, I think I got some good out of it.  It really wouldn't be Halloween if SOMEONE wasn't a sock monkey, right? 

So Halloween preparations took up about half of my normal running time, and then something I've nicknamed "The Devil" took up the other half.  Pinterest.  If you haven't found it yet, stay far far away.  It's a time sucker like that of a million Facebooks.  Now that I've warned you, here is why I love it.

My Pinterest pages are made up of  a few different things.

Hippos:

God bless them, if I could have a hippo pet, I would.

Hedgehogs:

I will have a hedgehog pet one of these days.  Mark my words.

Recipes, and crafts, most of them so far fairly successful; and lastly, awesome funny stuff:

I feel you Debra.

You just laughed, didn't you?

So with all this time wasting, I skipped my long runs for a week and a half.  Not running really affected my mood, which I will delve into some other time.  Since the half marathon is in just over two weeks, I thought it would be a good idea to make up for lost time and run REALLY long yesterday. 

A long run is not a big deal to me.  Physically I felt fine, but mentally...I had some issues.  First off, I decided to try a new route.  Bad idea.  I am completely directionally challenged.  I do not know which way my house faces, I do not know which way I am facing at any given time, and I am not good at just "finding my way" somewhere.  Also, I have a very bad obsession with needing to know EXACTLY how far I have run.  If I'm going to wear myself out, I need to know that I went as far as I intended. 

So, to start out, my trainer husband and I worked up a plan for my run.  I wanted to go 12 miles.  So we figured four to the new trail, four on the trail, and four home.  The four to and back were no biggies.  I knew the route well and there was only one turn.  It was on the trail where it all went wrong.

First off, Hubs told me to run to where the trail passes under "College" street (a major street in our city) and then turn around.  Sounds simple, right? Well, after I had started, I realized I didn't know which way College was from the trailhead.  Hmmm.  It took me another mile to figure out that I didn't really need to go anywhere specific, I could just run until I hit a two mile marker and then turn around.  Problem solved, right? 

So I got to the trailhead, and God bless them, there was a map!  This was going to be great.  I may not be good at directions, but I am a hell of a map reader.  Hmm, funny thing, the map was not oriented to the trail...So at the star that said "you are here," the trail went north and south, but the trail that I was looking at in front of me went right and left.  See how I was confused?  Hell if I knew which way was north.  So I shrugged my shoulders and took the path to the right.  I still only needed to go two miles, turn around, and then head home.  How could this go wrong?

So I ran about half a mile (Still had mile markers at this point.  This is important.) and saw a cute little bridge that angled into the woods and had a "zero" mile marker for a different trail.  Awesome!  I'll just follow this trail a couple miles into the woods, and then turn around, and I'm done.  La la la, life is good, wait, a fork in the road?  Hmm, this shouldn't be a big deal, I'll just take the path on the...left!  So I'm running up a freaking mountain, looking frantically for a mile marker so I could turn around and run downhill.  And I'm looking, and looking, and then about 15 minutes later, I see a sign.  I get closer and it says "Thank you for using our trails, love, Olathe Parks and Rec."  Uh, what?  This trail is done?

No problem, I'll turn around and take the other path.  If I ran an extra mile or whatever, all the more better for me.  I still needed to run a measured distance so I knew with certainty that I ran 12 miles.  So I took the path on the right, took a cleansing breath, and waited for my mile markers to start showing up.  And waited.  And waited.  And came to the end of the trail, again.  Now I was pissed.  I was pissed at Olathe Parks and Rec for posting a "zero" mile marker, and then forgetting the rest of the posts.  I was pissed at Patrick for thinking that sending me on a new trail was a good idea.  And I was pissed because in the back of my mind I was thinking that maybe I didn't even run a mile into the woods and that was why there was no mile markers!

I started my run back home, physically a little tired, but mentally spent.  I cannot deal with that much thinking when my body is working so hard.  So I spent an hour on MapMyRun this morning and figured out that I did make it to JUST 12 miles.  I kind of wish I ran like 15 or something, to make myself feel better, but at least I ran as much as I intended to. 

And the moral of this story is, I need a Garmin GPS.