Potty Training, yikes!

Well, we have embarked on this journey. Hope has been in cloth diapers since she was 3 months old and still got terrible diaper rash. There were a lot of foods we couldn't give her even though she loved them (grapes were a big one). So I started researching potty training. I saw a lot of conflicting research about whether or not to train your child before age 2 or after age 2. Hope is not in daycare, so it was going to have to be me who trained her. After all my research and talking to other moms and friends, I decided to potty train Hope at the end of July. We used the Potty Training Boot Camp method. Hope got a potty for Christmas last year so we had had it out for a while for her to get used to it. I read the boot camp book and got all my supplies. One Friday, we started with Day 1. The good news was we had 8 successes and 3 failures. She also figured out what she was supposed to do on the potty, so I didn't have to even keep her on their the whole 5 minutes. If she had to go, she went. So I felt like we made great progress, even though the book said 90% of children initiate going to the potty before the end of day 1. Days 2-4 we tweeked. Hope didn't feel comfortable wearing nothing on her bottom half, so we just did training panties. It was a lot slower progression than I had thought (again the book said 3 days was all I was going to need). But after 5 days, we were on the right track and by 7 days, we were doing well. It was very had work and frustrating at times (for everyone involved), but we in the end, we have a potty trained little girl.

If you have specific quesitons about what we did, feel free to post and comment and I will reply.

What else to do with sweet potatoes

I love to make sweet potato "fries" and I love a good ole baked sweet potato with some butter and brown sugar. But after do that over and over, I thought I needed a new take on the sweet potato. I found a recipe for twice baked sweet potatoes in a Fitness magazine and then tweaked it a little.

Ingredients:
2 medium sweet potatoes
1 teaspoon extra virgin olive oil
1/4 cup onion, finely diced
1/3 lowfat no salt added cottage cheese
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
1/4 teaspoon fresh ginger, finely chopped
1 tablespoon brown sugar
1/4 cup grated parmesan cheese

Directions:
Preheat oven to 400 degress. Baked potatoes for about 1 hour. Remove and cool .
Reduce temperature to 350.
Meanwhile, place oil in skillet over medium heat. Add onions and stir until softened, about 10 minutes.
Cut potatoes in half and scoop out pulp. Place pulp in food processor and blend until smooth. Add cottage cheese, salt, pepper, ginger, and sugar and blend again until smooth.
Return mixture to bowl and add in onions and most of the parm cheese.
Spoon mixture into the skins and top with remaining parm cheese.
Place on baking sheet and cook for 30 minutes.

Serve!

Healthy homemade brownies

So a friend of mine came up with a healthy brownie recipe. I thought it looked interesting, so I figured it I would give it a try. I didn't want to post about it until I had tried it though. Well, I treid these brownies and they are good! Here is a picture after both Adam and I tried them (his piece was bigger than mine).




Ingredients:

1 16oz can chickpeas (garbanzo beans)

1 ½ c semi-sweet chocolate chips

4 eggs

½ tsp baking powder

1 cup sugar (or 1/2 c agave nectar, or ½ c maple syrup)



Directions:

Puree the chickpeas and eggs together until smooth.

Melt the chocolate then slowly blend it in.

Add the sugar and baking powder.

Bake in nonstick 8x8” pan at 350° for ~30 mins.


I definitely recommend this recipe! Try it and let me know if you like it as much as I do.

A new lunchbox

So I make Adam's lunch 4 days a week (he goes out to lunch with some friends from work on Fridays). I felt like I was in a rut making lunches and needed some inspiration. So when I need inspiration, I hit the internet. I came across another blog. She also makes her husband lunches and she uses a bento box from Laptop Lunches. All of the products are BPA free and helps with portions. It will also reduce the amount of plastic baggies I use to pack lunches. I couldn't resist the urge to try them, so I bought the Bento 2.0 and a set of Bento Buddies (extra boxes with different sizes for more variety). The prices weren't bad. I got mine off Amazon so I could get free shipping.

Adam was very skeptical. He didn't think it was big enough for his lunch. He's a guy's guy when it comes to food. So I made sure his first lunch was a hearty one. :)

Here is Adam's first lunch with a bento box.

He had a salad with organic lettuce, organic carrots, and organic mild cheddar cheese with Newman's Own Light salad dressing, homemade trail mix, a pb&j wrap, edamame sprinkled with a little sea salt, and a granola bar.

I told him to try it out for a few months and if he didn't like it, then I would use it more on days that I work. I just thought it would help me with variety for him. I will try to post some more lunches of Adam's so you can see how I am doing on variety.

Ok, well Hope and I are off to Gymboree now. Have a good day.

Hope traveling with me

I mentioned a while back about Hope traveling with me on a business trip. My grandmother went with us to help take care of Hope while I was working. She was so good and a delight to have with me. It was great to have her so close since we were gone for 6 straight days. That would have been too long to go without seeing that cute little face. Here are just a few pics from the trip.

Hope does not get to watch much tv at home, but recently has become obessed with a few shows; one of them being Barney (I know, not my fav at all). So I got a few netflix videos for Hope for the trip. Taking them with the portable dvd player was a godsend on the airplane. She was so quiet, no one minded having a toddler next to them. ;)

Tryin to be mommy. In my bed, with my book pretending to read. So cute!!!

And of course, here we have her continued love for milkshakes.

I am glad I was able to take her. It is something I will always remember. Luckily, I don't have to travel much for work, so I get to see Hope everyday, but I am glad I was able to make it work for this long trip.

When the pantry is bare . . .

The fam was out of the town this weekend. We actually left on Thursday morning so I didn't even grocery shop last week. So when we returned home (extremely tired) last night I was already thinking about what I was going to make for dinner on Monday. I was able to wrangle up some lunch options for the family, but when I looked in the refrigerator, I didn't see much. We have no fresh fruit and only 1 russet potato. Yikes!!! So I looked in the pantry. Not much there, but I did see a great go to meal that would be perfect - Crockpot Spaghetti. It's such an easy recipe and I almost always have the ingredients on hand.

Ingredients

2 jars pasta sauce (preferrably ones that are on the runny side)

2 chicken breasts - can be frozen (I know, what's a vegetarian doing putting meat in there, well Adam would kill me if I didn't, it's easy to pick out though for me)

1 lb. pasta

Directions

Place one jar of pasta sauce in the crockpot.

Put whole chicken breasts in next.

Pour 2nd jar over chicken breasts.

Turn crockpot on low for 8 hours.

Cook pasta according to directions on stovetop.

While cooking pasta, remove lid of crockpot, break chicken breasts into large pieces with spoon, and turn on high (keep lid off during this time).

Place pasta on plate and top with as much sauce as you want.

That's it! It's that easy! I will probably look for some veggies in the freezer and steam them and add them to my spaghetti instead of eating the chicken.

This will be an easy meal for me tonight so I can work on finishing laundry and getting the house back in order (all before The Bachelorette comes on). :)

Happy Monday!

What to do with all those blueberries

Well I knew with almost 16 cups of blueberries that we wouldn't be able to finish them before they turned, so I put about 8 cups in the freezer. I read about freezing berries, and it's very simple. All you have to do is wash them, place them on a cookie sheet on one layer, and then put them in the freezer. Then when they freeze, they won't all be clumped together. Then you can transfer them into a storage bag.


I also made some muffins. I tweaked a couple of different recipes and came up with my own (recipe below). I did double the amount of blueberries though, so I knew they would be yummy! Here is my dough after I mixed in the blueberries.

Going into the oven (350).

My muffins cooling - look at all those blueberries.

Jaime's Blueberry Muffin recipe

Ingredients

1.25 c flour
.75 c ww flour
.5 c sugar
2t baking soda
.25t salt
.5 c light sour cream
.25 c canola oil
.25 c 1% milk
1t vanilla extract
2 eggs
2 c blueberries

Directions

Preheat oven to 350.
Spray muffin tin.
Combine flour through salt in large bowl and whisk.
Make well in middle.
Combine sour cream through eggs in well. Incorporate flour with whisk.
Spoon in blueberries.
Place in tin.
Cook for 20-25 minutes.

Each muffin has:
167 calories
6.5g fat
1.6g saturated fat
30mg chol
239mg sodium
24.4g carbs
1.0g fiber
9.3g sugar
3.2g protein

I did notice that my muffins were not as moist as I like them, so if do this again with another batch of blueberries, I will probably substitute the oil for either 1/3 cup applesauce or 1/3 cup nonfat plain yogurt. That would reduce the calories down to 135 and the fat down to around 2 grams.