Family reading night, turned soda geyser

Last Friday night was an activity called Family Reading Night an my kids school. They are having a reading competition at school and basically this month they are suppose to read as much as they can to win. They are competing against other schools and if they win they get to have a Jazz player come to thier school and an ice cream party. It must be a good incentive because the boy next door (same age as Ashlin) told me he has spent some extra hours reading because he really wants to win and meet the Jazz player. His mom at separate times has told me how little he cares for academics and reading and that he would rather, anyday, be outside playing basketball, or doing jumps on his bike or rollerblades off a ramp etc. My daughter enjoys winning as much as the next person but told me she does NOT care to meet any of the Jazz- but the ice cream sounds good. My kindergartener doesn't quite understand, but really likes winning and meeting cool people and ice cream too, so he wants to win.

Back to reading night. Every minute of reading done that night was to count toward this competition. It was Friday and my husband just got back into town late the night before and it sounded pretty nice to us to put the kids to bed and watch our Netflix "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix." The last thing he or I felt like was going to the school. My kids were begging me and I knew once I got there it would probably be pretty fun. I also realized that since it was Friday not many people would go and so it shouldn't be overly crowded and that was a nice thought.

So we went. As a nice sidenote I was grateful when I got there because the sign-ups for parent teacher conference were still out and I had forgotten to sign-up that week even though I had been to the school like 5 times! So even if the evening did turn out to be a bomb, that would be worth it. :) The evening wasn't a bomb though. There weren't tons of people there, but just enough. The kids got to pick out candy like it was a movie theatre. Then we rotated to different locations around the school and heard some really fun stories. One was about how a little boy wanted an Iguana (it was cute- called "I want and Iguana") and they had a real iguana there for the kids to look at. We went on to hear several others "Bad Dog Marley" also cute and they got to hold stuffed animal dogs (Bonus: Alex's said "Yo quiero Taco Bell" when you squeezed it). A older man read part of "The Hobbit" and he used an English accent when he read and did a decent job, only I am not sure if he was actually British or not- I think when he said "thanks for listening goodbye" that he might have lost the accent. He might be getting his tutoring from Brittney. There were a few other cute books (in case you want ideas for your kids) "No Talking" a chapter book by Andrew Clements. Also, I can't remember the name but one was about a french mouse (no, not ratatouille he's a rat) and the lady dressed the part in a french princess-ish outfit and she used a pretty good fake french accent.

The kids each won a $5 coupon to spend at the bookfair which was open for shopping at the end of the night. This is our second bookfair this year-- we have a bookfair that coincides with each of the two parent teacher conferences, that way they know the parents will get to the school to spend money. It works and I always spend too much, kind of a sucker for books. The books they have there are always really good ones and they are usually paperback and pretty cheap. Plus the school gets like 50% of the profit. I was looking for "Twilight" -have you all heard of that New York times best seller about vampires?? Everybody I know has read it but me. They didn't have it. I do have a copy from the library now.

Each of my kids were very excited to go in and find something to spend their $5 on. Ashlin found a chapter book called "Lily B. On the Brink of Cool." It is all pink with a cartoon diva girl pictured on the front. Alex had picked out a really cute tadpole counting book (like the ladybug one if you have seen that) but he was willing to put it back along with anything else that I asked him to, AND his left leg if I was just willing to buy him... a scientific soda geyser kit he found. It was $15 (the price of 3 books) and it came with a tube of mint mentos (50 cents at the grocery store), a foam rocket that looked like it cost them 5 cents to make (cheaper looking than happy meal or dollar store toys) two types of salt- rock and table (both of which we have at home) and one last thing that I guess was what was suppose to make it worth $15. It was a tube that screws onto your soda bottle with a pin that holds the mentos up until you pull it out using an attached string, allowing the mentos to drop into the soda while you are far as the explosion immediately takes place. I bought it even as I watched so many parents around me say "no" to similar items and listening to others say "well you don't have enough money for that, how about this?" See, I'm a sucker. He did have $5 to put toward it...

Really I knew that Alex wasn't the only one who would enjoy it. All the kids would enjoy it, including the grown-up kids, my husband to be specific. He was pretty excited about it. He picked up 1 bottle of diet coke (didn't realize we needed LOTS more), which we now know performs the best for this experiment. We also tried non-diet sprite, and a bottle of seltzer water, which both barely put up a fountain at all. We have been fans of Mythbusters and others performing this experiment before and were excited to do it ourselves. I have video of it below you should give it a watch.

I got "tagged"

I'm new enough to blogging that I have never been "tagged" before so I am actually kind of excited about this- Mandy. That is not an open invitation to everyone else to tag me (I already get asked to sub for everything in church because people know I won't say "no") it is just my first time and the first time is always kind of exciting. But beware you might get tagged by me now! I have answered about a million things like this via email, but now bloggin's the in thing.

10 years ago I was... Barely pregnant with my first child, while going to school part time at BYU and working full-time for Utah Valley Regional Medical Center at the Family Practice Residency Clinic.

5 things on my 'to do' list today: Well this is for tomorrow now. My only plans tonight are to relax for a bit and then go to bed.
1. Get up and get Ashlin off to school so I can exercise and shower before my VT's come at 9:30
2. Get Alex's school work done, get him lunch and off to pm kindergarten .
3. Go VT at 1pm
4. Fold the loads and loads of laundry that I have been avoiding for a couple days now.
5.Take the kids to the library to return the books we finished reading and get new ones.


Things I would do if I became a billionaire:
1. Pay someone to finish our home (the addition parts we haven't finshed yet and to do what remodeling we have on our list) I guess that is if I didn't just decide I had enough money to just scratch this home alltogether.
2. Give some to charitable places anyone or thing that needed it (not necessarily a particular organization)
3. Travel to some really cool places all over the world that I have never been before... NY, HI, Cancun, all places tropical, Germany, China, Africa, France, Itay.
4. Invest
wonder if I should switch anything above out for lipo?

3 of my bad habits:
1. Staying up too late
2. touching my food with my fingers (I am a lot better at this now- because Ed asked me to be)
3. being late (getting better- we have 9am church and I haven't once been late AND I have to get all 3 kids ready alone because Ed is at PEC)
boy this subject wasn't a fun one, fessing up not easy.

5 Places I've lived:
1. California
2. Washington state
3. Arizona
4. Utah

5 jobs I've had:
1. Hostess and Server at Mel's Diner and the Skyroom Restaurant at BYU
2. Janitor for OBGYN office
3. Museum of Art Cafe at BYU (did catering and food prep- was the designated smoothie maker at Skyroom)
4. Did a lot of regular babysitting and nannying. Not just for my aunt every friday, but later for the owner of Mel's diner -was the afterschool mom while their mom worked, also came home from college one summer to work full time for a mom while she worked as a nurse.
5. Patient service rep for the Family Practice Residency, at UVRMC Hospital in Provo. That was fancy for scheduling appts and checking patients out.


Things most people don't know about me:
1.I originally studied to be a dietician but have since changed my career path several times and am currently unsure what I will graduate as- because I will graduate.
2. I held and office in the future Homemakers of America while in High School and even went to a regional meeting representing that office instead of school one day. I don't remember which office. The reason I joined was to have it on my admission papers to BYU- I figured they dig that kind of stuff. I didn't take it seriously enough, but maybe I should have since I currently am a Homemaker of America.

Now I tag: (sorry)
1. Erin Ginos (I didn't do any other sisters or sis-in-law, because I didn't want to use up their options)
2. Becky Parker
3. Kim Johnson
4. Erin Allen (but she will have to do it when she gets her internet up and going she just moved to London!)

PS. I realize the time stamp on this is for when I started it at around 6pm, but I had to stop and didn't get to finishing it until 11pm. So don't think I am THAT lazy, to say that I am relaxing and going to bed at 6pm.

Not a recipe

It has been a while since I have posted a "real" entry, not a recipe. I write entries in my head all the time, but then forget them later and never post them. Well this morning my entry was all about how my pants are fitting so well!

I have really only lost about 5 pounds and because it isn't ALL that much I wasn't very excited about trying on old clothes- I was afraid that they wouldn't really fit much better. Still, I feel better and looking in the mirror, can tell just a bit that I am looking better. A friend told me the other day that I look better. Well I thought she was just saying that because she is really nice. She knows I am working on my weight and she too is doing Weight Watchers. She worked hard to convince me that she really could tell- I still don't know. For the almost 2 years that I have known her (since I moved here) she and I have talked about losing whatever stupid pounds we have in mind. We run together, we ran a half marathon together. We have had a lot of good talks on our runs, but the overriding conversation is losing weight, during which time neither of us were really having any results. So at the same time that I started to get serious and decided I would make a concerted effort to get the weight off once and for all, she coincidentally had started Weight Watchers with the same determination. She's funny and tells me about how her husband gets grossed out because she weighs herself before and after pooping and she will be down like a whole pound. So you are getting the point of what a nut she is. She served a mission in Paraguay and has worked a lot in politics before becoming a mom and has some really silly stories-- many about poop.

So that was a nice tangent. Back to how my clothes fit. Today I was getting dressed and most of my pants choices weren't right for the shirt I had on. Then I spotted a pair of pants that I haven't worn in months because it was just one more pound at a time that caused them to not fit right or comfortably. I nervously pulled them out and slipped them on. Then came buttoning the button, the one that last time I had tried it, I was afraid it would come off from being pulled so hard. It buttoned pretty nicely, I would have no problem with it being looser, but I would qualify it as "fitting". So then came checking out the butt, I've seen better, but definitely passable! The legs, no problems there, they looked great. So there you have it, only 5 pounds and I am regaining some of my wardrobe. I'm not there yet, I want to say goodbye to another 5-15 pounds, I'll just have to see where I need to be to take full advantage of my wardrobe and also to make sure that I look OK in a swimsuit. I'm not asking to look like a model, just like a mom who is trying to take care of herself with some level of success.

I was talking to my sister Erin today, we were discussing the new exciting development of being able to wear these pants and other weight loss things. We both have found that one place we are thinning down to our chagrin is our chest. C'mon of all the places to keep and lose weight on my body why does it have to leave there first and leave my butt, thighs and belly last! She and I have both started weight training and this includes exercises which increase muscle in the chest, but seems to effectively be shrinking that area. Whats a girl to do? Maybe we ought to work out every other area and leave the chest flabby! We are just hoping that it stops soon so that we don't look like the chick on the front of Runners World Magazine, Paula Radcliffe. Don't get me wrong she is totally amazing. She ran the NY city marathon 10 months after giving birth and she won. She ran and trained throughout her entire pregnancy. She did slow it down from 5:30 min. miles to 6:30 min. miles and found it very REALAXING! She ran through the WHOLE THING.
She said this same guy would always see her out running and say "should you be doing that?" I mean she was obviously booking it, big ol' belly and all. She was even 10 days overdue. She's amazing!, but I don't want my chest looking like hers.

So there you have it no recipe today, just a bunch of blabbering about weight loss.

Have your lasagna and eat it too

My friend requested that I post this recipe...

My sister Julie was talking the other day about how she made lasagna but couldn't eat more than a couple bites because it was so high in calories. This is a lasgna that you can eat without it ruining your diet. It doesn't taste much different than the good old traditional kind, but it is.

There are a couple reasons it is lower calorie. The most effective change to lower the calories in this dish is using spaghetti squash instead of noodles (trust me it tastes great EVERYONE in my family ate it up). I got the idea to use spaghetti squash from Roni's website, she has a lot of good ideas. I still don't think I would have tried it had Erin, my other sister, not tried it first and told me it was really good. Spaghetti squash has 35 calories per cup, while pasta has 215 per cup- that is a lot of difference in calories, and pasta offers very little actual nutrition.

The next reason it is lower calories is I use very lean ground meat instead of fattier kinds or sausage. It still tastes like I use sausage though, because I put all the sausage seasonings in my meat when I brown it. Then a few calories are cut by using part skim ricotta instead of the full fat kind. You could go fat free too if you wanted, I just was a little afraid to go that far this time- I was going to be feeding it to my family and the new spaghetti squash thing was enough new for one meal. I like the ricotta alone without egg or parsley added so I don't add that (and even keeping the egg out saves some calories). It also saves dishes and time.

It is sort of like making lasagna using spaghetti. My husband said several times how surprised he was at how wonderful it tastes and how you can't even really tell its squash, it tastes like vermicelli-- which he loves. If you don't want to go through the trouble of making the lasagna you could even make meatsauce and eat it over the spaghetti squash noodles. Ok onto the recipe

SPAGHETTI SQUASH LASAGNA

take a whole spaghetti squash and stab holes in it with a knife, then put the entire thing in the microwave for 12 minutes on high. Then set aside until ready to use.

Brown:
1 lb lean ground meat (chicken, turkey, pork or beef or a mix- I used 90% lean beef)

While browing add:
1- Tbl fennel seed (this is one of the biggest factors in giving it a sausage flavor)
1 tsp sugar
2 tsp garlic (just throw some in - I don't measure well)
1/2-1 tsp pepper
1/4 tsp cayenne pepper or some pepper flakes(like you put on pizza)
1 tsp salt
1 tsp italian seasoning (or use some basil and oregano)

Add: 3 16-oz cans of tomatoes however you like, crushed, diced, whole(then crush them) some tomato sauce whatever. Also another way to lower the calories here would be to add some cooked pureed veggies, carrots and celery- or shred some carrot in. I had some leftover tomato soup that called for pureed veggies and I threw that in.

Add more to taste:
garlic 1 Tbl or so
salt
sugar
pepper
italian seasoning
then let it simmer for about an hour. Simmering is important so that your meat is tender and you don't bite into something rubbery or hard to chew. It also gets all the flavors of your seasoning to come out into your sauce.

Then its time to layer:
-start with some sauce on the bottom so nothing sticks
-then an even layer of the spaghetti squash
-then ricotta (spread over top, right from the carton)
-mozzerella cheese
- then sauce again
- squash again
-ricotta again
- then do more sauce and end with mozzerella on top

This is all the layers I was able to fit. Bake in a 375 degree oven until warm through- about 30-45 mintues. I put a larger pan under the dish because mine was full and overflowed some.
I just made an 8x8 for our family and I had stuff leftover.

When you serve it, it looks good (and tastes good) to spoon some sauce over the top of each individual serving.

Cinnamon Sugar Popcorn

I was starving today when I got home from errands. That is always how my day goes, I've got to start packing healthy snacks. I wasn't even gone very long. So I ate and apple and when that didn't touch it (the hunger) and I was about to start eating things I knew I had better not, I remembered this recipe- if you can call it that, for popcorn that was low-cal. It is SO easy. To me it has a similar idea to kettle corn in that it is lightly sweet and also addicting. It really hit the spot.

So what you do:

Air pop 1/2 cup of popcorn - it will make a nice sized bowful.

Then spray it with pam and toss it to get the pam to coat evenly (this makes the cinnamon sugar stick)

Then sprinkle on cinnamon sugar (whatever ratio you like) but only about 1-2 Tablespoons to control the calories.

I also sprinkled a very little bit of salt to give it the kettle corn, sweet and salty flavor. But really you don't need much salt at all if you choose to do that, like one or two shakes.

Nutrition info: I didn't divide it into servings because I almost ate the whole thing but also because it is easier to figure out that way. So the popcorn alone has 345 calories and 1 tbl of sugar has 50 calories. I used only 1 tbl of sugar, so the whole bowl wass just under 400 calories.

This was good to fend of my sweet tooth. I hope you like it-- I obviously did. I don't know about my family because the kids were at school when I made and ate it. And like I said there wasn't much left after I got done with it. Alex ate the other bowl- the one with just salt and pam on it, I made that incase I didn't like the cinnamon one. If you are scared you will eat the whole thing like I did, then just make half-- I know I will next time.

How to lose 3 pounds in one day...

Weak stomach? Read with caution...

It all began with an insatiable appetite late Thursday afternoon. I got home and was ravenous and did not stop being hungry for more and kept eating until 8pm. (Sound pretty good so far huh?) I started to notice troubles as I put the kids to bed that worsened as the night continued. A lot of gastro-intestinal upset. I went to bed and as I laid there I said to Ed that it was weird that I was feeling dizzy and that it wasn't the first time that night. When I closed my eyes I felt like I was still moving.

I fell asleep to wake up to increased discomfort. My body felt bad and I couldn't get comfortable. I gave up and went downstairs and turned on the TV. It was 3am and almost all the channels were off air, but there was a great episode of "Christine's Court" (who the heck has heard of that?) I watched it anyway. I kept getting worse and not knowing what to do with myself went upstairs at which time I new it was going to happen. Yep, to the toilet and threw up--there was nothing left. It was horrible. I admit the thought did come to me that my voracious appetite of early that night had been forgiven. I even thought that I had gained my place back in the running for the throwdown competition! I felt a little better and the indigestion left, but I was still very aware of my aching body. I went down stairs wanting to feel horrible alone, with nobody to bother. I slept on the love seat-scrunched up. I should have chosen the couch.

The next day I continued to feel really bad. If I got up it became much worse. I was nauseous and laid in bed all day falling in and out of sleep while I watched TV and sipped water and a can of lime soda. I can tell you how happy it made me to have my husband tell me he took the day off of work and he was handling everything! I honestly can't remember the last time I just got to be sick and heal. Usually I have to get up anyway. Somtimes Ed couldn't take the day off, or I had a newborn that needed to feed or Ed was out of town or whatever. It was heaven for a sick person. He was awesome and got me things I needed and checked on me. Too bad we had to cancel a babysitter for that night, we were actually going to get out!

I started to improve a little by that night and by the next morning after a great nights sleep I felt tons better. Still had that day after feeling like you got beat up, but it sure beat the way I felt the day before. I got on the scale in the morning before eating and the results were crazier than I thought. Down 3 entire pounds in 24 hrs! I couldn't wait to call my "throwdown competition" sister Erin, who knew from when she called the day before that I was sick. I had to rub it in. We both knew it wouldn't last, but it was still really pretty cool. Of course most of it was water weight. After weighing today I know that some is already back on. Not all, so let me see if I can run with this and turn some lemons into good ol' lemonade! Of course when your body has spent the last few days with very little food and had to fight a virus it can make you hungry. I am going to have to be on my best behavior to not destroy the one good thing that came from this crappy weekened.

So it isn't really a useful method in the end. However if you are unlucky enough to get hit with stomach flu this season, just think of how skinny you will get. Believe me that is the ONLY thing that you could possibly enjoy from it.