2014 in review – wasn’t very active, maybe in 2015?

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.

Here's an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 390 times in 2014. If it were a cable car, it would take about 7 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

20 Minute Chickpea Curry

Tonight I’m trying out a new recipe from lecremedelacrumb.com.  20 minute Chickpea Curry.  So far it’s true to it’s name.  You just have to remember that when serving it over rice it may take a little longer.  Thankfully, I now have a rice cooker so as soon as I remembered that I needed rice with tonights dinner, I put it on.  🙂   The only prep for this meal is dicing the onion, slicing the pepper, mincing the garlic and opening a few cans.  The veggies sauté nicely and then you add in the coconut milk and the rest of the ingredients.  It’s simmering on my stove right now waiting for my husband to get home so we can eat.  It smells really good and the tasting I’ve done so far gets me hopeful that I both made it right and that it tastes good.  And there’s rice, so at least the kids will eat something.

No photo, sorry.  It doesn’t look very appealing just sitting on my stove.  Check out the original website, those pictures are gorgeous!

 

Salad spinners and juicers!

In order to keep with the healthy living goal and eating more vegetables, salads, juices etc, we’ve made a few recent purchases.  Today was/is delivery day!  When I arrived home from a morning playdate at the beach, (yes, we went to the beach in March) I had my salad keeper, salad spinner and salad knife waiting for me!  🙂  Very exciting, so of course I had to have a salad for lunch.

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Nothing to exciting, some baby spring lettuce mix, shredded carrots and ginger sesame dressing.  But… it did the trick and I think I can make it until supper.

I keep checking the tracking for our juicer, but it hasn’t updated since this morning.  Probably ok since I don’t have much in the fridge to juice right now.  Spending the afternoon researching different recipe’s so I can buy some ingredients at the store tonight.

Can’t wait!

We’re going gluten free vegan! Well, sort of.

So my family has been egg free for awhile.  For over a year now at least.  It hasn’t been that hard at home, but when we’re out at restaurants, it’s a challenge.  We’re not egg free by choice, it’s out of necessity for a family member.  And now we’re retaking the next step and trying gluten free. Again, not by choice but necessity.

My little guy has had irregular bowel movements pretty much his whole life.  It hasn’t been a huge issue, doesn’t seem to cause him much pain etc, but if I want any chance of getting him potty trained.  Something has to change. Without going into too much detail, his #2 isn’t solid like a normal toddlers.  If anyone that doesn’t know his situation changes him, they might think he was sick.  😦  He doesn’t seem to be bothered, but I am.

We’re not going to jump in with both feet on both things.  We’re going to do the gluten free for at least a week if we see a difference in Josh.  The vegan thing might be most of the time, but we still do love our meat.  It’s just going vegan is the easiest option to avoid eggs along with eating healthy.

We’ve found a lot of recipe’s on vegweb.com and have made a few of them already with great success.  Earlier this week I made a dish called Tomato, Basil and Pine Nut Penne that was really good.  Stay tuned on here for that recipe and review later.

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If anyone has any tips or recipe’s they would like to offer, please do!  It’ll be a challenge but I think we’re ready.

I think more visits to PCC and Whole Foods are in our very near future.

My so called Facebook life

I added a new friend today on Facebook.  She’s a fellow coop preschool parent and since I have worked with her in the classroom for the past two school years, I’ve gotten to know her pretty well.  Looking through her pictures, which are all awesome btw, I began to look back and think about what people see on my own Facebook page.

It’s not interesting.  At all.  I realize I post far more in a “secret” group that I belong to, a mommies group that I started and a book club group far more often than my own page.  And when I do post something on my own profile, it’s a kid pic or a running watch update.  It’s no wonder that when I post what I think is an awesome status or super super cute picture (of kids or not), I tend to feel a bit disappointed in the number of “likes” that I get.

Recently Facebook started giving everyone their own video’s of their Facebook lives.  Watching some of those I would see that their most “liked” photos and status had at least 4 times the number that mine did.  Granted, one of those friends is a professional horse trainer so she has way more many friends then I do, but still.  One can’t help but feel a little sorry for themselves when seeing something like that.

I’m really going to try this year to spend less time on social sites, besides my nike+, weight watchers and meet-up pages.  Hopefully this will help with me stop the feelings that come when things don’t happen exactly the way I expect them to.  Roll with the punches right?

Leaving with a picture that to-date, has probably one of my highest Like counts.

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Plants

Should I get a plant?

I was doing the dishes tonight and our kitchen window looks down into another townhouse’s kitchen window.  I am still trying to figure out when these people are ever there to accumulate any dishes themselves, but since it’s the only window I occasionally see lights on in and the blinds open; they do live there.  And they have a plant. 3 actually.

I’ve had plants in the past, usually the kind that are “hard to kill” or “easy to take care of.”  They do good for awhile, and I even managed to keep several alive until I decided that two kids were more important to water than a lily.

You know those bamboo plants they have in cute little planters made into cute little shapes at the Ikea checkout?  Yup, I killed one.  😦 My sister got the green thumb in the family.  I could keep plenty of animals alive and was the resident vet for the horses and cats, but she has an entire greenhouse in a room at their MI house.

So here is where I need your help.  Most plants need sunlight.  I live in Seattle.  We don’t really get a lot of sun.  What type of plant can I get that doesn’t need a lot of sun, is “easy to take care of” and “hard to kill”  but also looks pretty.

If anyone has any ideas… let me know!

Kids, Running, Greece

Kids, Running and Greece.  Those three subjects seem to be the only things I have to talk about these days. Usually it’s just the first two, most of the time it’s only the first one.  I am working on changing that, but for now, this is my life.

Kids, I have 2 of them.  An almost 5 yr old daughter and a 2.5 yr old son.  Most of the time when I tell people that, lately it’s been people from my running group) they say aw…  a boy and a girl, now you can stop.  Stop just because I have one of each?  My husband and I chose to stop for other reasons, but the sex of our children were not it.  That’s a whole different post.  Friends, strangers, family have heard me talk about all sorts of things regarding my children.  Everything from funny things they’ve said, their sleeping hours and bowel movements (I NEVER thought I would be as excited about seeing #2 as I have been lately).  Sorry.

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Photo taken by http://heleynaholmesphotography.com

Running.  Anyone who has talked to me within the last month or so, and those that haven’t, know that I am currently training for the Lake Sammamish 1/2 Marathon.  It is on March 8th, and my long runs are currently up to 8.  I run with a group in Seattle called Seattle Green Lake Running Group.  They are on meet up and Facebook and have generously offered up a free 1/2 marathon training program, organized group runs, and plenty of opportunities for coffee (my dream group).  Although… I quickly learned that they are very much morning people with Wednesday runs starting at 5:30 am.  I don’t care how much you love coffee, to have to run 3 or more miles before the sun comes up in order to get said coffee, is hard.  I was never truly a runner until after my daughter was born.  I started when I wanted to lose those last pregnancy pounds and found out a local Susan G Komen Race for the Cure was being held on my moms birthday.  I did the couch 2 5k program by myself and ran the whole 5k in 45 minutes.  Not great, but I did it.  From there I took a break for a little over a year to have my 2nd child and go to school.  When he turned about 6 months old, I decided I wanted to start running again to lose weight and signed up with a local running store for their 10k training class.  Natural step from there was to continue on with their 1/2 marathon program.  On June 23rd I ran my 1st 1/2 in 2:45:43.    A week later we moved to Seattle.  So now I’m training for my 3rd 1/2 and it’s been hard going, but good all the same.

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Greece.  It’s no secret that my husband and I are going to Greece in May.  It’s to celebrate our 10 yr wedding anniversary coming up in June and simply a chance to get away.  First question I get asked when it comes up, is are you taking the kids.  While it would be fun to go on adventures with them, I would like to wait until they are older and can remember the experience and enjoy it.  So no, the kids are not coming!  The trip leaves from New York, so we will be making a one night layover in WI to drop them off with the in-laws before just my husband and I continue on to New York for a couple of days before heading overseas.  We’re doing the trip with the American Sailing Association.  Which means we’ll be traveling around for almost 2 weeks with almost 60 people.  But…. over half of the trip will be spent on a 40′ sailboat with only 2 other people.  We’ve been trying to get out on the sound sailing as much as we can to get practice.  🙂

So…. sorry if you are one of those people that have had to listen to me talk all about these three subjects.  They will probably be the only things I continue to talk about until I get back to Seattle in June.  Then the order of those will change, but still probably be just those topics.  🙂  If you are already sick of hearing about it, don’t talk to me until maybe…. August?  😉  Or… let me know something you’d like to know more about that maybe I’ve discussed in the past.  I can try to do some research, or give my opinion and current knowledge on those subjects here.

Seahawks!!!!

If you know me, I’m not a huge football fan.  I did go to every home game in my 4 years of high school though.  I had to because I was in the marching band… but that’s besides the point.  I went.    I don’t fully understand all parts of the game, but I don’t really care.  It’s still fun to watch the game and cheer.  Last season, after only recently having moved here, my husband and were given the chance to go to the Monday night game between the Seahawks and the Packers.  We had seats on the visitors side so we wore our Packer gear and hurried home after the loss.  So having been at the stadium for a game, I knew how loud it must have been there and the excitement that was there last night.

So while we’re not super fans,  I think we’ve lived here long enough, shown our WA pride enough to be able to cheer on the “home”team at the Super Bowl.  Yay!!!!

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Snow!

I just witnessed my first true Seattle snowfall. And while I understand the necessity to close a lot of things due to the hills, coming from WI, it still seems crazy that 3 inches can shut this city down!

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