"Mommy! What's...THAT?!" *sobbing* Real food eating plan drawbacks...

We'd been doing so well, I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised to finally have a bad night with regard to this bright idea of mine. Dinner with the kids is still far from perfect, but we moved from them having "something else" (inevitably, highly processed) instead of the meal Mike or I had prepared, to never asking for a separate meal and at least taking a few bites of the family meal, sometimes even enjoying and eating a significant amount of a healthy new item. There are still lots of complaints and declarations of hating certain foods, but we've made measurable progress. I was feeling good. Then came last night.

I got home from work all gung ho about making my black bean patties with pineapple rice. I set right to work. Everything was going fine until the kids had a disagreement. Next thing I know, Anne is alternately crying and screaming, and then demanding that I hold her. I'm trying to juggle her while cooking and that isn't going so well.

"Can't Daddy hold you?"

"NO!"

"How about you stand next to me on a chair?"

"NO!"

This pretty much set the tone for the rest of the evening. :0 I got the rice going, and was working on the patties. I even used the food processor successfully.

*gold star!*

About an hour later, I was removing the completed patties from the skillet. They still looked a bit mushy to me, but they were starting to stick to the bottom of the skillet despite my non-stick efforts. I thought my consistency was off, but after talking to Shauna'h, who has also made these, she said they are supposed to turn out more like crab cakes than burger patties, which made me feel a lot better. I think I did everything right, actually. Aside from the sticking issue. Does anybody else use something besides one of those vegetable oil sprays for non-stick purposes? If so, please leave a comment. :)

So then we sit down to dinner. Both children immediately look traumatized.

"This looks disgusting."

"But it *tastes* really good. So try it." And it did. Those patties tasted awesome. Mike loved his.

Both of them ate some of their rice. When I was making that, each ate a bunch of the pineapple as I chopped it. This is an extremely nice perk of cooking with real food. Healthy snacking. But the patties were going over like a lead balloon with the kids. Pretty soon, Henry was crying because we were being so mean as to insist that he at least taste his, and Anne started crying because Henry was crying. The kitchen was an absolute cacophony of misery, and I sat there flaring my nostrils. I spent an hour making dinner after working all day, and this is what I get?

It was just a really bad night. After a night of sleep, I feel a bit better. With any endeavor, every day isn't going to be a good day. You have to take the good with the bad and keep trucking on.

To look at the positives, I'm already seeing some pretty fantastic personal results from this project, which I will detail after my 10 days is up next week. I'm trying new things and am actually excited about what I'm cooking and serving again.

I also love my new tea routine that resulted from all of this. I've always been a tea drinker. Nothing too fancy, black tea with cream and artificial sweetener. I have now switched to one cup of black tea a day, with real cream and honey, and one cup of herbal tea per day. And the herbal tea that I now have is AMAZING.

*angels sing*

I mentioned my trip to Teavana earlier this week. The chocolate based teas they have there are *delicious*. As in, they taste like dessert. In fact, you literally could eat their tea. :0 (ask me how I know this...) I brew one of those in the afternoon, add a little honey, and voila! Happy camper, with no artificial ingredients, and no late afternoon cravings and snacking. I have this precious little teapot to brew the loose leaves:

My teapot and I: in love.

 It's the Teavana Perfect Teamaker. Isn't it the height of preciousness? You just dump the leaves in, fill it with water and let it steep. When you're ready to drink, you place your mug at the bottom and it has this little sensor that dispenses the tea right into your cup while the leaves stay strained in the pot. I adore it.

One final note: My sister Shauna'h recently sent me a gift book for my Kindle:

I'm really enjoying it. It's giving me hope that my children actually CAN come to like vegetables and other foods they currently find repulsive. If her kids can come to like pickled pig snouts, mine can eat asparagus. :0 I'll keep you posted.

I usually rarely miss a 7 Quick Takes Friday, but I'm taking tomorrow off to watch basketball with Mike. He and I are taking Henry out to lunch, since he has a half day from school, and I know I won't get to do any blogging. I will check in with you all on Monday and I promise lots of food and Lenten updates. :) Have a great weekend everyone!

Life of the Catholic Librarian, a Monday evening...

Hello all! Reporting in again with antics from my life, for those who care to read such things. Yesterday afternoon my mind was all awhirl with recipes, plans for my upcoming 10 day real food pledge (slated to begin tomorrow), and stuff I had to do around the house. I left work a bit early to do a few errands on my way home. Given that my mind was awhirl (see supra), it wasn't exactly a huge surprise to get out to my car and realize that:

(a) I had forgotten my knitting bag to work on my project at home, despite it being placed atop my desk as a reminder, and

(b) I had forgotten to change from my work shoes back to my boots. I do this twice a day, every day, and yet...I forgot.

My life could be written up in a dissertation entitled: The Aging Brain: A Study in Futility.

First, I stopped at the mall. I had a lovely gift card to Teavana from my birthday, and I wanted to explore some new herbal teas in my quest to eliminate artificial sweeteners. One intense and expensive (thank God for that gift card :0) interaction later, I emerged with a big bag. I am now the proud owner of an infuser teapot for loose tea, and 3 small canisters of herbals to try out, and if you know me at all, dear reader, you would know that these flavors had "Catholic Librarian!" written all over them:

Caramel Almond Amaretti
Chocolate Bananas Foster
CocoCaramel Sea Salt

I mean, did you ever? I'm so thrilled. I can drink these without any sweetening whatsoever. They are already happily ensconced in my office.

I wasn't at the mall nearly as long as I thought, so I had time to pop by JoAnn's on my way home. I needed buttons for Mike's cardigan, because THAT BABY IS OFF THE NEEDLES!!! It is DONE! Well, almost. The pieces are knit and blocked, but they have to be seamed together.

*long suffering sigh*

I hate seaming. But there is light at the end of the tunnel! So, buttons. I needed 5. I had previously asked Mike what color he would like the buttons to be:

"Navy blue."

"Ok Honey, but the sweater IS navy blue. Wouldn't you like a coordinating contrast? Gray? Tan? Maybe go wild and crazy and get, oh I don't know, light brown?"

"Brown?" *look of horror* "Navy blue, please."

And so I stopped at JoAnn's and got the plainest, most boring navy blue buttons you can possibly imagine. They were so bland they cost $1 per 3 button package, the least expensive buttons in the display. For a woman who usually buys handpainted buttons shaped like acorns or alpacas this was difficult to do. I brought them home to show Mike.

"These are PERFECT!"

I knew it.

Mike made dinner, dear soul that he is, mustard chicken with rice, and the children gamely ate some of it amidst cries of "What is *that red thing*? A pepper! GROSS!" Kitchen clean up followed, and then Mike left for an audition to a community play he was interested in. I got the kids ready for bed, and wrangled Anne into her crib, no easy feat these days.

"Mommy read me a story!" "Mommy I need my *pink* blanket!" "Mommy can I sleep with Teddy?" "Mommy, I don't want Ernie in my crib!!"

And finally, the piece de resistance:

"Ok Honey, I'm blowing you a kiss, good night!"

"Mommy, I have to go potty."

*collapses*

Finally, she is taken care of and settled. I grab a shower while Henry watches Regular Show. I get dried off and jammied up, and plead guilty to watching an episode of Regular Show with Henry and enjoying it. It is now Henry's bedtime.

"Ok Honey, go brush your teeth."

"Mommy, my toothbrush is all gross and ready to be replaced. Could you go up and get me the new red lightsaber one I got for Christmas?"

"Why can't you go upstairs and get it?"

"I have to go pee." *halo*

I trudge upstairs, wondering why we don't impose a 6 pm bedtime on days when Mommy is especially tired. :0 As I walk down the darkened hallway to the upstairs bathroom, which lies immediately beside Anne's bedroom, my foot painfully hits something. A swear word passes my lips as I realize I am powerless to stop the subsequent loud BANG! against the adjacent radiator.

Mr. Potato's Books.

 
Has she lost her mind, what is she talking about?! I am referring to this little ritual that Anne has devised. Every day, she insists that she has to leave this pile of hardcover books right in the entryway to the upstairs bathroom "for Mr. Potato." Mr. Potato is a character in the fabulous British cartoon Peppa Pig. She loves him. And she leaves books for him. In the bathroom. I'm not sure if Mr. Potato is supposed to *read* them, or manifest on them, or what. But everyday she makes this pile. And now I have knocked them over, injured my foot, and they have banged loudly against the radiator almost immediately outside Anne's door. I swear again, just for good measure.

I grab Henry's new toothbrush and hurry downstairs. As I'm readying his asthma medicine for the night, I hear it: the sound of a monologue coming from Anne's room. My little escapade in the bathroom woke her up.

WHY HAS GOD ABANDONED ME?!

I hustle Henry upstairs, forcing him to tiptoe up the stairs all crazy the way I do, to avoid the squeaky spots in the floor. I get him in his room and read him the story of St. Patrick as he gets into bed, our nightly saint ritual. He reads an excerpt out of one of his St. Joseph picture books aloud, as is also our custom. He's currently reading about Padre Pio.

As I tiptoe out of Hank's room, I press my ear to Anne's door. All is quiet. God loves me again.

I go downstairs to await Mike's return. As he pulls into the driveway, I am waiting with a big glass of wine. :)

ANDDDDDDD, that was my evening! How was yours?

Sipping tea, and Mass musings...

I'm a tea drinker. I do also drink coffee, but I'm not addicted to it. At work, I exclusively drink tea, and I brew it daily. My absolute favorite black tea is Celestial Seasonings Nutcracker Sweet, which yes, is a holiday tea. That seems to be a theme lately. They put it in the stores in the fall, and I stock up. It's a nutty vanilla tea with a hint of cinnamon. I adore it.

Well, this year I didn't stock up enough. Sometimes I remember to stalk the grocery store *after* Christmas, and then all the holiday teas are on clearance (score!). But I didn't this past year. Hence, I ran out of Nutcracker Sweet about a month ago, much to my dismay.

Thus, I pulled out the regular Salada bags that I'd had since before my pregnancy with Anne. I try to drink more decaf when I'm pregnant, so these had been sitting around awhile. It was fine, but I was missing my Nutcracker fix. This was a BIG box of regular tea bags, and I dutifully brewed a cup every morning until I couldn't take it anymore. I went in search of Nutcracker Sweet.

Happily, I found that via their web site, Celestial Seasonings sells Nutcracker Sweet year round. And if you buy a bulk box of 6 packages, you get a small discount on the price. I snapped one up.

It arrived on Saturday, and so I'm contentedly sipping Nutcracker Sweet at my desk. *bliss*

On a totally different note, Mike and I went to Mass by ourselves Saturday evening. As you can imagine, this is a pretty rare occurrence. We had dinner plans with some friends, and the restaurant is right near our parish, so my in-laws came over to watch the kids, and we went to Mass and then dinner.

I rarely go to the vigil, preferring to attend Mass Sunday morning. But Mike likes the vigil better when he goes to Mass, so I'm happy to oblige. Right away I noticed something relating to a post from last week: the dress of the attendees. The vigil clearly attracts an older crowd, and all were dressed nicely.

Mike and I were talking about it as we walked to the restaurant, and I noted that this was a big contrast to what I see at the Mass I usually attend at 10 am Sunday mornings. That's the "Family Mass" and draws a younger crowd. At that Mass, I often see shorts, flip flops and tank tops. When I mentioned that, Mike stopped short and made what I thought was a comment that summed things up nicely:

"If it's a chore to dress nicely for church, you're going for the wrong reasons."

I think he's totally right. I do think there's a "at least I'm here!" attitude that plays into this a bit (and my friend Karen mentioned this in the comment section of the post from last week) and that's just a shame. Going to Mass is about a lot more than simply meeting our weekly obligation, but I know that I've been guilty of this mentality in the past, so I'm not casting any stones. I don't know what the solution is, but I will just mind my own business and focus on what *I'm* wearing. That's all I'm accountable for.

I will say at when I attend Mass in the Tridentine rite, it's a breath of fresh air in this regard. Not only is everyone dressed nicely, people downright go all out, wearing beautiful dresses and head coverings, men in *suits*! It contributes toward a feeling of reverence, that we're participating in something special, and I truly appreciate that.