A Real Blog Post

Updates! Fun! Pics of a cute little boy! Now that's a real blog post.

Isn't he the most adorable thing you've ever seen?! I know I'm not supposed to say that (according to my mother, who has told me this over and over), and I have a few friends with seriously cute sons, but still. I may be biased, but I think he's pretty darn gorgeous.

Part of it, I will say, has to be the photographer - my boss, Kathy - who joined us at Prairie Farm with her adorable daughter Katelyn that day. Katelyn was trying her best to tell Ethan all she knew (which was considerable!) about the animals at the farm, but all Ethan wanted to do was dance around the cow, goats, and donkey. Oh, and look at their butts. I had to keep ushering him away from the hind ends of the animals lest he be in firing range.
The cow getting friendly with Ethan is named Storm (I know this because of Katelyn!), so of course I encouraged Ethan to go home and tell Daddy the cow's name. "Ethan, do you remember what the cow's name was?" "Ummmm....cow was brown." Good enough.Ethan also wanted to hug each and every goat there. I'm not sure they appreciated his affection.

Our trip to the farm was actually a couple of weekends ago. Bad blogger, I know. Most recently, we all went to one of Urbana's favorite end-of-summer activities, the Sweetcorn Festival. We told Ethan it was the "corn party" and he was pretty happy to join us for anything with the word party in it. We ate everything that is bad for you, listened to some really loud music (which Ethan was mesmerized by), and let Ethan throw himself around the bounce houses until I (literally) had to pull him out screaming. Very, very fun.
Above is the "before" picture. Below is post corn, post ice cream, pre-bounce house:
I mentioned that we ate everything that is bad for you. Yep. Ice cream, corn dripping in butter, and my meal Saturday was: a hotdog with pulled pork and mac & cheese on it. Needless to say, I've taken a step back from that. Hence my blog post from yesterday. The 100 Days of Real Food website caught my attention a couple of weeks ago when I saw it on Kim's FB page. After reading it over a few times, I thought, "We could do that! At least for 10 days, anyway." But whoa, it has taken way more planning than I thought it would. I never quite realized how much I depend on the quick fix when I'm hungry - a frozen meal here, vending machine snack there, pancakes when all else fails... But I'm getting the feeling more and more that I want to know what's in my food, where it came from, and I want to have as few ingredients as possible in what I buy. So we (I use the term "we" loosely, as I expect Brian will be making daily trips to Einstein Bro's for bagels or Dairy Queen for Blizzards) are two days in, and so far doing pretty well.

While eating "real" is harder than I thought (and disappointingly, more expensive), I'm having kind of a great time getting Ethan involved. I do love a bowl of cereal in the evenings, and all of the cereals I like have a ton of crap in them. So Ethan and I made our own granola tonight! Oats, honey, soy butter, pumpkin seeds (soooo much tasting before putting it in the oven) - and it turned out GREAT. Ethan ate more cereal for dinner than what I had actually prepared, which was fine with me. So far, so good! But two days out of ten isn't much. We'll see how far we get with this.

Real Food: Day 1

It's all Brian's sister's fault. She liked this site on Facebook, which forced me to look at it, which hooked me into planning a 10 day stretch of only real food. When I mentioned it to Brian, he was dubious. I think he said, "I don't want to eat nothing but sprouts for 10 days." :)

So I didn't force him into a full 10 days. I usually pack breakfast and lunch and take it to work, so that's easy enough for me to eat real on my own. However, everything I cook at night will be "real," so he'll get 1/3 of the effects of it.

This morning, blueberry banana pancakes. That was kind of a cheat, since I used non-real syrup and white flour. So I may have to add an extra real breakfast to this week to make up for that. But those pancakes were darned good. Even Ethan ate one! Lunch was a sandwich from our health food store, and dinner was farmer's market stir fry. Not bad!

I have to say, though, that I am dying for a Diet Coke. This is going to be harder than I thought! I like chemicals in my food. :)

The Countdown Begins

I should have posted this on August 13, but as usual, the weekend went by without me even noticing! But in a few short months (six), I will be turning the big 4-0. My mom is nice enough to gasp every time we discuss it, "Are you really turning FORTY this year? How can I have a forty year old daughter?!" Thanks, Mom. :)

To celebrate, I need to do something. Something that proves that I am not getting old and decrepit. When I was anticipating turning 30, I decided that I wanted to run a marathon before my 30th birthday. So, my first thought: A marathon. My second thought: Who the hell am I kidding?! I have no time for 4 hour training runs these days, nor do I really want to spend that much time away from home breaking my knees apart. So then I considered a half-marathon. There is actually one in Austin, TX the weekend right after my birthday. I would love an excuse to go back to Austin - the last time I was there was in 2006 for a history conference, and I really loved it! Great town. If you have to live in Texas, you should definitely live there. But the flights for the three of us would just be too expensive.

So I cheaped out. I revisited the Roadtrip!!! website and decided that's what I'd do. I found a "trip" that is reasonable for me to do in about six months, and I'm going to try to accomplish a tour of Michigan by the time I turn 40 on February 13. So far, I have 2.5 miles logged out of 297. I'm going to need to get a little more ambitious if I'm going to make it by February! Or, I could just delay this birthday thing entirely...that's looking more appealing by the minute.