House setback

Hopefully this isn’t the start of a bad trend. After hours of work perfecting our house plans and finalizing everything, we found out yesterday that there is an easement going through our lot so our house can only be 55 feet wide. Our original plan was 65 feet wide. Cue my puppy dog eyes…..

When I first heard the news, I literally wanted to throw up. Brad and I were so excited about the plans that we already had and now all that work and dreaming were for nothing.

So now we are back at square one. And probably set back a few weeks as far as the move-in date goes.

We started looking at plans again last night and we think we found the one! It will need a few tweaks, but overall we aren’t as bummed about the setback as we were at first. The new plan is actually bigger and is very similar to the original plan.

Happy weekend everyone!

I’m no chef

Remember the Protein Brownies recipe I posted? I made them a few nights ago.

My supplies:

Mix dry ingredients:

Then add wet ingredients:

Make into patties and add coconut:

Eat or freeze for later!

Now for my issue. After calculating from the Nutrition Facts of my ingredients, my brownies came out to 199 calories each. NOT GOOD! I need to majorly tweak my ingredients for lower calorie options! Hopefully they will come out closer to 50 calories each on my next try! :)

Our weekend

Friday, Noah came to work with me for a few minutes until his Gammy could come pick him up. He loves coming to my office and playing with my grown-up things!

We were up bright and early on Saturday to get our back-to-school haircut! Noah loves ‘helping’ me put on my makeup in the mornings (although it makes his Daddy cringe!).

Saturday afternoon, we went to a friend’s birthday party.

A bouncey house+cake=Noah’s love language.

Here is the birthday boy and his super cute cake! (Did I mention that my child stuck his fork in to the side of the cake before they cut it? Yes. I was MORTIFIED.)

And I also spent some time snuggling this little guy at the party.

Sunday morning, we headed to church. It was Promotion Sunday so Noah got to move up to the 2 year old room. He was excited about the new toys and new scenery! After lunch and nap, we headed to his preschool’s open house. He was not thrilled about cutting his nap short, so afterwards we made a stop at Dairy Queen for some ice cream. (No picture, bad Mommy). Then we went out for a little caching!

And Daddy gave Noah some driving lessons…

:)

Then we came home and worked on cleaning out/sorting through our closet to get ready for the move in a few months! We did our yearly purging of our clothes to donate to the Honduras missing trip.

It was a busy weekend at our house!

We’re moving!

We finally picked out a lot and we are 99% finished tweaking our house plan. EEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!! I don’t know who is more excited about our new house, me or Brad.

I’ve heard that if you can build a house together, your marriage will survive anything. We haven’t really argued about anything yet, just a small disagreement on the paint color for the kitchen. :)

We close on our lot tomorrow and then the real fun begins!

In addition to molars…

So Monday, I noticed an eczema-looking splotch on Noah’s thigh. This didn’t surprise me because just about everything makes his skin break out. I put some medicine on it at bedtime and didn’t think anything else about it.

Tuesday morning, we started noticing a few red dots on his face. I again assumed that his eczema was breaking out because he had been crying so much from his molars coming in and the lack of sleep the night before.

Tuesday evening when I got home from work, I checked on his thigh and this is what it looked like…

The red dots immediately concerned me. I sent this picture to my sister and she said it looked like hand, foot, mouth disease. That’s when I started investing his extremities.

Excuse the cookie remnants on his fingers! :)

He had a few spots on his feet and a HUGE ulcer on the tip of his tongue. It’s bigger than any I’ve ever gotten in my life!

I called the doctor this morning and they confirmed what I already knew. He has HFM. There is nothing you can do for it, you just have to let it runs it’s course. The nurse told me that they are contagious until 24-48 hours after they have the fever spike (Sunday) or if the blisters pop open. So he’s not contagious anymore, but it could take the dots 7-10 days to disappear. :(

We don’t know of anyone at church or at school that has HFM so I have no idea where he got it from. I just hope he didn’t pass it around in the church nursery on Sunday!

I could tell he felt a lot better this morning and the blisters seemed to already be fading. Hopefully he will get better soon (and out of our bed…). I hate seeing him so miserable.

Cutting molars

Sunday morning, the church nursery paged us because Noah had a fever. He had been acting fine all morning so I was really surprised. We took him home and gave him some medicine and let him sleep it off. When he woke up, he started acting like his (almost) normal self.

Yesterday afternoon when we got home from work, I noticed that Noah was really irritable and whiny. Then all of a sudden, he just burst into tears and said his mouth was hurting. I peeked in and saw that his back molars were half way cut through his little gums! It’s been so long since he cut any teeth that I felt like I didn’t know what to do at first! :)

We gave him some more medicine before bed last night, but he still woke up around 9pm crying about his mouth. So Brad and I made the decision to let him sleep in our bed last night (for the very first time EVER) because he would only stop crying if I was cuddling him. Well now I know why we’ve never let him sleep with us before. We all slept terribly. Noah and I both like to move around in our sleep and we kept waking each other up all.night.long. AND at 5:15am this morning, I open my eyes to see Noah’s little face 2 inches from my face saying, “Mommy, where’s the remote? I wanna watch cartoons!”

Look at those little red bags under his eyes! Hopefully we will all get some decent sleep tonight and those molars will pop through soon!

I’m getting a new niece!

My step-sister had a gender reveal party this past weekend. Everyone was asked to wear pink or blue to guess the baby’s gender. Reece and I chose team PINK!

Katie (my sister) and her husband opened up a big box of balloons to announce the gender.

GIRL! Paisley Katherine will be making her arrival in January and we are SO excited to get another little girl in the family!

That one has me wrapped around her finger so I can only imagine how bad another girl will be! :) But seriously though, is she not the cutest?!?

Katie will be a great mommy, and I can’t wait to meet Paisley!

Protein Brownies!

I had a comment left asking for the recipe of my Dad’s protein brownies, so here you go! I haven’t attempted to make them myself yet, but I plan on it soon! They are yummy and will satisfy your chocolate craving.

Protein Brownies

6 scoops chocolate protein

1 1/2 cups oatmeal

1/2 cup flax seed meal

3 tbsp dark cocoa powder

1 tbsp cinnamon

1 tbsp oil (coconut, almond or olive)

3/4 cup skim milk

1 tbsp honey

1/2 cup peanut butter

1/2 cup shredded coconut

Place all the dry ingredients in a large bowl (except the shredded coconut) and mix together. Add oil, milk, honey and peanut butter and stir well. Keep mixing until evenly blended. Scoop some of the mixture with a tablespoon and form patties. Place each patty in the shredded coconut coating well. Place patties in Tupperware and store in freezer. Remove from freezer and allow patty to thaw and enjoy!

____________________________________

Once I make them myself, I will give an update along with the exact calories in them!

A healthy lifestyle

I made the decision several months ago to get healthier. I wanted to lose a few pounds and with my health issues (arthritis, lupus, blah blah blah), I just wanted to feel better. So I began changing my eating habits and started working out at the gym several times a week. I’ve lost about 15 pounds since I started! Of course, I fell off the wagon tons of times, but I’ve always gotten back in to the swing of things.

Now, I am trying to lose another 5-8 pounds and I will be at my goal weight! I decided to record my typical day of eating and working out for my future reference and for you in case you are interested!

Breakfast:

4 boiled egg whites (I threw out the yolk): 68 calories

1 small red plum: 30 calories

1 can of Diet Mt Dew: 0 calories

1st bottle of water with Mio Energy: 0 calories

Workout:

I just started doing a Couch to 5K program and today I did Day Two. That burned about 96 calories.

2nd bottle of water: 0 calories

Lunch:

Chicken LoLo (grilled chicken tenders on top of sautéed zucchini, spinach and squash) from FIG: 300 calories

Side of fruit: 70 calories

3rd bottle of water: 0 calories

Snacks: (I usually have a snack between breakfast and lunch and then another snack or two between lunch and dinner!)

Skinny Cow Heavenly Crisp Bar: 110 calories

Protein Brownie (My Dad made this…it has coconut, protein and cocoa in it and that’s all I care to know!): 50 calories

19 Garden Veggie Ranch chips: 65

12 cocoa roasted almonds: 75

4th bottle of water (Propel): 0 calories

2nd Diet Mt Dew: 0 calories

Dinner:

Subway-6 inch Turkey on wheat bread with cucumbers and pepperjack cheese: 310 calories

1 bag of Subway apples: 35 calories

5th bottle of water (Propel): 0 calories

1 Sugar free Reese’s peanut butter cup: 36 calories

Snack:

2 Fun Size pieces of Hershey’s milk chocolate with almonds: 146 calories

____________________________________

My caloric goal for the day is 1200 calories. If you counted, my net (calories consumed minus calories burned at the gym) caloric intake for the day was 1199. The only problem with that is that after I got home from church at around 8:30pm, I couldn’t resist having a small bowl of ice cream… that probably added on about 250 more calories. That puts me at about 1450.

Based on my sex, weight, height and activity levels, I burn about 1800 calories a day just doing normal things (breathing, walking around, standing up, changing diapers :), etc.). So I still burned more calories than I consumed, but I like to keep it under 1200 calories a day for my optimum weight loss.

My problems are (1) I REALLY love chocolate (2) I like to snack in the afternoons (3) I like to munch in front of the tv at night. If I can just get some more self control in those areas, I will get to my goal weight much sooner!

Brad’s Honduras Trip

I had high hopes of lavishing you with beautiful pictures of the Honduran landscape and heart-wrenching pictures of the sweet Honduran kids, but leave it to a man to go out of the country for a week and only take 11 pictures.

And only 3 of them weren’t blurry. He just can’t help himself. :)

I’ve never seen my husband wearing so much jewelry. He will do anything for those kids!

Here is my hubs and his best friend, Brian, hugging kids at the orphanage. I’m kind of surprised he didn’t bring one home in his suitcase!

I know that was just a tease, but I will try to get him to take more pictures next time! He already can’t wait to go back next year!

I’m back!

I have been in a MAJOR blog funk lately! I love reading blogs every day, but for some reason I just got burnt out on actually writing on my own. But I know I will miss reading about our family in years to come, so onward we go! :)

We have had a lot going on since I last posted so in an attempt to catch up, I’m going to post iPhone pictures!

Of course, we have been geocaching!

Noah had a parade at school for the 4th of July and he got to ride his Thomas. He was SO excited!

My fabulous friend (and neighbor!) has been keeping Noah for me when he’s out of school. Noah LOVES Natalie! I’m sure the ice cream dates have something to do with it!

Brad went on his yearly Honduras mission trip (the second time this year) in July. Noah and I had to rough it out and eat McDonald’s by ourselves!

Noah discovered an affinity for sour gummy worms. He gets this from his Tay Tay.

Sunday afternoon naps with my peanut. Which reminds me, Noah has started to call me “Mommy-Lou” now. Where he came up with this, I do not know. But it’s super cute. And kinda weird.

We have been looking for a new house. Our current house is a great starter home, but we are ready for our forever home. And when I say forever, I mean the house we can raise our kids in and stay there until they are grown! In this picture, we were looking at a house and Noah was roaming the back yard. He suddenly turned around to me and said, “Mommy! Take my picture of me at my new house!” So I did! (This is not where we are moving…just in case you were wondering!)

I have been wanting to try some healthy new recipes and I found a recipe on Pinterest for a lighter version of PFChang’s chicken lettuce wraps. These were pretty tasty!

Bella. My super spoiled first born.

I took Noah to the Children’s Hands-On Museum. He had so much fun! His favorite part was this ‘hospital room’. He loved playing with the ‘hospital food’.

A few weekends ago, Brad and I travelled over to Atlanta to visit our best friends and we took Noah to the aquarium. He had fun but he wasn’t as interested in the fish as I thought he would be. He was just happy to run around the building. He did love watching the otters and the dolphin show. We bought him a stuffed otter and dolphin from the gift shop and he is still sleeping with them!

While we were in Atlanta, we ate at The Varsity. We had never been before. It was packed out (I’m told it always is!), but we still enjoyed it! That’s my friend, Jenn!

On our way home from Atlanta, Noah got a strawberry shake from DQ. He thought he was so big getting to have a shake all by himself! He did SO GOOD on the car rides to and from Atlanta!

This past weekend, my sister went to the beach so we happily agreed to feed her animals…including the chickens! Noah said, “I need my BOOTS!”

Alrighty. I think that about catches us up! Hopefully I’ll quit being such a slacker and I won’t get so behind again! If you made it through that whole post, gold star for you!