The Wednesday Write-Up

-I have pink eye. Again. That is all I'm going to say about that. *sob*

-I've been disappointing my pedometer lately with the sad little number of steps I'm getting in a day. It must be known how hard it can be to attain those 10,000 daily steps in winter. Some days it feels nearly impossible. But I've made it a priority again this month and I've been making great strides in my activity levels. At first I made a daily date with the dreadmill.....I mean treadmill. As long as I had a new magazine or game on the tablet I was good to go. I'd get on it for 30-45 minutes at the highest incline. That would ensure I'd get all my steps. Then even that became a complete bore. So my new goal is to just get moving more throughout the day. I turn on a little Luke Bryan on iTunes and Greta and I dance. Or while I make dinner I jog in place. Sometimes I race Wesley to the South fence and back (the kid beats me more often than not). Occasionally during the day I'll start jumping as high as I can fifty times. The kids think I've officially gone off the deep end I'm sure. Although now they've stopped asking what I'm doing and ask if I've gotten my steps for the day. All these crazy things I do in a day add up and at the end of the day I get my 10,000 steps (which is five miles by the way). It feels good and it's so much more fun than the treadmill.

-Wesley is doing great in school, I'm really proud of his progress this year. He's becoming a reading pro. We are reading a book a day in an effort to increase his confidence in reading. Keep it up dude!

-Greta's newest hobby is going outside and collecting odd shaped branches and twigs and transforming them into her "stick men". She glues googly eyes on them and "paints" them with glitter glue to make clothing. One even dons a hair bow. Naturally she prefers to play with them rather than the oodles of store bought dolls and toys. She's pretty creative for being four years old I think.

-Lately I've been getting a case of the munchies in the evening around 8 pm. I got in the habit of getting a big  snack nearly every night and I knew I needed to quit it. So I decided to start having a nightly cup of decaf coffee. The warmth filled up my stomach and stopped the cravings. It worked like a charm. Then I was reading online different ways to flavor your coffee without all that store bought artificial stuff. There are a lot of interesting ideas out there, for instance adding a teaspoon of pumpkin pie spice to the coffee grounds. That one is delicious. The key is to not add too much which makes it overpowering. But my favorite idea, which is a very simple idea, is to add cocoa powder to your mug then pour the hot coffee over it. I tried adding cocoa to the coffee grounds and it plugged up the filter making it very slow to drain through. But cocoa in the mug makes this lovely hot chocolate decaf coffee which is delish in the evening as sort of a guilt free dessert. I was just using plain old baking cocoa up until this morning when my shipment from Amazon arrived. I decided to order some organic cacao powder. Not familiar with cocao? It's got a great flavor and now I'm getting all sorts of health benefits from it as well. 


*Cacao contains more antioxidant flavonoids than red wine, green tea and blueberries *Instantly transforms smoothies, desserts, pies, and other recipes into the healthiest chocolate *Great source of magnesium, calcium, zinc, iron, copper and potassium

Here is the stuff I got on Amazon. All around good stuff to add to your diet. It's got a decent amount of protein per serving as well ( 6 grams). Anyways, thought I'd share.