love(s) of my life

Coffee Date Link up (yay!)

my FIRST coffee talk with alissa at rags to stitches. and guess what? I wimped out on the vlog part. I know, I know. I had all the intentions in the world to work on it last night, but then my third grader and I made the world's WORST space hat for a parade he had today and we had to re-do it a 10 p.m. YUCK!

That said, I never made the vlog. (sad face). And trust me, ya'll wouldn't want to see me without the make up right now...so I'll just do my typey typey thing and promise that NEXT week I will get on the video camera and babble away.


EDIT!

I felt terrible. I loved all of your vlogs this morning so I busted out the camera, skipped the makeup that might have masked my awful chipmunk cheeks and tired eyes...and vlogged. I cringe at my voice and my cheeks..but whatevs. It's for ya'll and ya'll are sooo worth it!

if we were to sit and have some coffee right now...

no kids allowed!

i would try not to talk about my kids. but then i'd have to tell you that my Boo is FOUR today. FOUR! ohmaigosh. he's such a big boy.

we're going to have some birthday donuts later, swing by our favorite park, have a pizza party tonight with the family, and hit the zoo tomorrow. i know, right? big deal around here!!

weight watchers

this was week two for me and i totally bombed on the tracking thing. last week, week one, i was a good girl and wrote down every miserable bite i took and lost almost four pounds. yaaaay! this week, for some reason, my hand is broken and i can't write it down. booooo! i weigh in at 7 a.m. tomorrow and i'm just a-hopin' and a-prayin' that i didn't totally undo all that hard work from a week before. i eat my meals just fine...it's just the snacks. they kill me. and having a house full of four kids means their cruddy snacks are everywhere...even the carpet. hahah! (i promise i don't eat ground up cheez its...thought it's crossed my mind in my darkest hour...)

blogging

i'm a little more than a week into my blog everyday in february and i haven't fallen off yet! wahoo! it's actually not too hard since i combined my food blog over here...now when i am lazy i can muster together some old recipe of mine and it counts as a post. is that cheating?? hahha. and photoblogs...ohhhh photoblogs are my favorite way to take up space. what about you? how do you keep blogging when you have nothing to say?

i'm also still in the planning phases of a hyper local blog but i am just stuck on the content. do i want to focus on writers and things to do in the awesome creative writing community here in the houston area (there's tons) or do i want to do a family fun on a budget thing? there are lots of online family calendars but none of them attempt to help out large families like ours by suggesting tricks and tips to do fun stuff without re-financing the house or selling the car to buy zoo tickets. i guess if i don't know, it means the idea isn't solidly formed in my head. so i need to keep doodling, brainstorming, and learning about wordpress...because when i finally launch it, i'm going to go all in and go wordpress for the first time. wheeeee!

so enough about me?

how are you?

did you vlog, you overachiever? (i'm proud of you!)

did you blog like me? (it's totally ok, too. you're still a rockstar...)

what's going on with you this week?

lotsa love!

how not to meditate

if i see that "if every 8 year old in the world knew how to mediate" meme again, i'm probably going to scream.

it's not that i don't agree with the sentiment... i do. it's just that the kid in the picture makes meditation look so damn easy...like she's curing cancer and solving a quadratic equation all in one sitting. damn overachiever...

my sentiment is that if this 34 year old knew how to meditate, then maybe there'd be less drama in this zip code. not that i'm rife with drama or anything, but my head, well, it can be anarchy sometimes and i wonder how much more productive i'd be if i could wrangle it into submission.

the kids cooperated relatively early this week and went to bed before midnight. p wasn't home from work yet and i had a huge living room floor all to myself, no nba games on, and nothing but boring ol' castle reruns to ignore. let the meditation begin...

i sat.

the first thought that floated through was how hungry i was.

"i just ate," i argued with myself.

"i want a cookie," my meditating mind said. "there's a stash you bought the kids in the pantry. it's just four steps away. get me a cookie. get. the. damn. cookie."

i'm not a big cookie fan, mind you. i mean, if i made them i can snarf the whole batch...but those things from wal-mart that are good enough for my kids are really more like chemical equations some baker/scientists figured out than actual food.

i gave up the cookie thought and watched it roll on down the meditation highway. so long, cookie.

then i got antsy. and fidgety. and my quads burned like i'd done sprints all morning and the thought made me laugh because i haven't done sprints since sometime long  before andrew was born.

and while my imaginary muscles were sore, i thought about mma. and my mind got aggresive and wanted to make me some badass action hero so i thought about fights except i couldn't picture an opponent's face...i'm 34 years old, i stay at home with my four kids...i don't really have enemies or rivals anymore so the best thing i could drum up was the girl who kicked me out of our club "girls with style" in fourth grade.

wasn't much of a fight seeing how i'm well into my third decade and tiffany was still 9 years old. i felt sort of like a bully as the timer on my phone went off.

i stood up...hungry, sore from an imaginary workout, and feeling guilty for beating up a fourth grader.

meditation: 0, megan: 1.

Sketchbook: Riley's Pink Pajamas

lol. i laugh at this one. doesn't exactly look like riley...but it captures how much i absolutely LOVED her pajamas that night. love you, riley!

crowded kitchen: meyer lemon pudding cake

my oldest child is a lemon fanatic.

he chews them. he sucks them down to the rind. he covets them. he plots to steal them from neighborhood backyards when we see them growing on trees.

 it's almost kinda strange, but thankfully i love lemons, too. i should rename this "boy wonder cake" for as much as he goes bananas (or lemons, ha!) over it.

meyer lemons are just coming into season here in houston and i picked up a one pound bag for about $2.50. I still have four of these beauties on the counter, just begging for some awesome recipe.

despite the seventy-two bowls it takes, the cake is simple and not ingredient heavy... you just gotta decide you don't mind filling an entire dishwasher with bowls of every imaginable size.

according to my weight watcher points, it totals to about 6 points plus. not exactly cheap, but, hey, it's amazing and it's indulgent and if you plan your day (or week) accordingly, it's so doable.

someday i'll tinker around and see if i can lighten it.

but not today.

 not today...

boy wonder's mega-awesome meyer lemon pudding cake

ingredients:

3 Meyer Lemons (from this, you'll need 2 tsp zest and about 1/3 c of lemon juice, so go ahead and do that work before you start the baking process)

3/4 c. sugar

1/4 c. all-purpose flour

1/4 tsp. salt

3 large eggs, separated

1 c. milk (i used 2 percent, i wouldn't go lower than that) at room temperature

4 Tbs. butter, melted and cooled

directions:

1. preheat oven to 300 degrees. butter and prepare an 8 by 8 baking dish.

2 . get your zest and juice together and set aside in a small bowl.

3. in a medium bowl, whisk dry ingredients and set aside.

4. in another bowl (yes, we're up to three now...four if you've separated your eggs!), mix yolks, milk, butter, zest, and juice. combine with dry ingredients and stir well.

5. bust out your hand held mixer and attack those egg whites until they're at the soft peak stage. fold into your batter gently and in smallish batches (i did it in three).

6. bake 35 to 45 minutes until just set in center. serve warm.

...happy lemons!...

Sketchbook: The Writer (I)

crowded kitchen: one super strawberry smoothie

i hate dieting.

to take it one step further, i have never ever, ever EVEREVEREVER succeeded on a diet.  (that sentence makes me so sad to write, but it's true.)

three times in my adult life, i have been overweight. twice i have shed the weight. neither of those times did it happen thanks to some awesome diet where i got to eat bacon and eggs all day and skipped fruit. it happened when i started a sport (first judo, then jiu jitsu) and trained like a crazy person. the weight fell off without me stressing about it.

fast forward a kid or two. or three. and i just can't make it to the gym to roll anymore. period. it sucks, i cry and lament about it with patrick when i'm really down, but the trade-off is this wonderful family we're blessed with, so i've accepted that it's just not my season to be a jiu jitsu purple belt all star ...yet. (i'm stubborn and haven't given up on my dream. it'll happen.)

but that still leaves me stuck in the middle of a really long journey. i weighed about 200 pounds a couple weeks after riley roo was born this summer. ugh. i hate reading that. the good news? i burned through about 25 pounds in the early fall. SUHWEET! christmas came, and with it came five of those pounds back. damn.

so here i am with no real way to work my pounds off as my life currently stands and yet i want more than anything to be in shape, active, healthy, and full of energy. and lugging these damn 35 pounds around on my carcass isn't making anybody happy, least of all me.

so i made this crazy promise to myself that i'd lose the last 35 pounds by my 35th birthday and write about it here. i ponied up some bucks, marched my defeated self into a 7 a.m. saturday morning meeting at weight watchers and nearly barfed when the scale spoke it's awful, ugly truth. but then it was over. and i went about my life for the past week. and i lost 3.8 pounds when i went to my meeting on saturday. hell yeah!

the whole point of this story is that this is damn hard. i love food. i love to eat. without hours of sweating my a$# off in a gi, well, i don't get to eat like i used to. but i don't want to trade chemicals and food-like products with the real stuff just to get skinny. chemicals suck.

to satiate my god-awful sweet tooth, i started making this smoothie for my mid-morning breakfast. boo loves it so much he calls it his smoothie, but it's cool. i can share. the bonus? for those following points, it's only 4 points plus. woooo!

it's so easy i almost feel guilty posting this as a recipe. i said almost...

megan's fantastic strawberry smoothie

1/2 cup lowfat coconut greek yogurt (it's what i had on hand from yoplait and turned out great)
1/2 cup lowfat milk
3/4 cup frozen strawberries (or whatever 0 point fruit you have on hand)

bleeeeeeeeeeeend away.

easy peasy, right?

note: you might yours a little sweeter. no problem, use a little stevia for zero points or calcuate what a little splash of honey will cost you. i also think it would taste fantastic with almond milk, as i'm pretty partial to the stuff.

...happy eating...

Let's Make a Deal

Road Warriors: Stephen F. Austin State Park

"In 1814, we took a little trip...along with Colonel Jackson 'long the mighty Mississipp...we took a little bacon and we took a little beans..."

Well, not so much. It's 2013 and the fam hit the road this afternoon and headed west on I10 toward a little town called San Felipe. Twenty minutes or so on the highway and we were in San Felipe...the "Cradle of Texas Liberty" and the original site Stephen F. Austin lead his group of 300 families to settle Texas in 1821. 

The park's website has more info, but here's the gist: 

"The park is located on the Brazos River, near the old ferry site and a part of the Commercio Plaza de San Felipe, just a few miles from the site of the township of San Felipe, the seat of government of the Anglo-American colonies in Texas. It was here Stephen F. Austin, the "Father of Texas," brought the first 297 families to colonize Texas under a contract with the Mexican government." 

We packed some food, grabbed a couple coffees and hiked through the woods. And we didn't see a single snake, ya'll. BONUS.

Me and the Kenna girl.

Dem boys. Love them.

Does a wood pecker live here?

Dom channeling Gandalf..."you shall not pass!" Kenna looking for the Billy Goats Gruff.

The mighty Brazos

More mighty Brazos

We packed a yummy picnic...we ate a yummy picnic.

Historic church in San Felipe

Sketchbook: Jig the Blogging Maus