Awesome Weather

We had a full day today. First Trinity went to school. While she was at school Nicholas and I went to the elementary school where Trinity will be going next year. We had to get all the registration papers and application for the dual language program the school offers. We picked Trinity up from school, ate lunch and Nicholas took a nap. Later we took a trip Dairy Queen for ice cream and then to Grandma's house to say Happy Birthday.

We decided to go to the park by our house because we are over seeding our front lawn and have moss killer in back yard right now (we live in a very damp area and the moss is horrible). So the kids can't play on the grass for a few days. I wanted the kids to run out some energy. The park has a lot of shady areas so when it's hot out it is great park.

Nicholas shaking out his shoes for the hundredth time.

panoramic picture of part of the park

somersaults in the grass

We have to take in as much sun as we can before the rain comes back.

Trinity loves to build

Trinity is always building something out of anything she can find. We had a party and bought a huge pack of cups from Costco. We didn't use all of the cups at the party but we like to keep them around for birthday's and get togethers.

Trinity got into the cups one day and used every single cup to build with. Well, I didn't want to throw them away and have some much waste. I also didn't want to use them to drink out of because who knows if feet or something were inside of them. So these cups are now her building "blocks" She pulls them out all the time to build castles and pyramids.

These pictures are of her playing with them a few days ago...

a childs point of view

The sun was out today and as we were driving down the road on the way home from preschool Trinity started talking about wanting her sunglasses. Then she went off on a rant about needing new sunglasses because the sun was still too bright to look at. I told her sunglasses were not for looking at the sun they were to protect her eyes and make it not look so bright out.

Then Trinity said she likes when it's warm outside but it makes her eyes shrivel up. I asked her what she was talking about. She said my eyes do this ... she showed me her squinting eyes. I said ok when the sun is out it's bright outside and it makes your eyes squint.

HAPPY EASTER!

I am not going to post very much today but I wanted to post the new picture I made of the kids and their Easter eggs.

The kids are very excited about Easter tomorrow!

Stuck!

We went out the play in the mud today. We were trying to get up a pretty big hill and right at the top we slid and got the back driver side wheel stuck. There was a big root in front of the wheel and a stump in the back. Exactly the reason you never go off roading by yourself. Our friend we had with us pulled us out without much of a problem. Half the fun is getting stuck and figuring out how to get unstuck.

We all got so dirty. It was rainy, snowy and very muddy. Also part of the fun.

On a side note I always thought I hated omelets because of the egg white. Turns out that after I made myself an egg white veggie omelet tonight for dinner I really like the whites. It's the cooked egg yolk that I don't like. However, I like the yolk but not the whites on a hard boiled egg. My omelet was delicious. I put zucchini, onion, red bell pepper and a little cheese in the mix. I added a little hot sauce (0 carb) on top.

Dominick is down 9-1/2 pounds in 2 weeks. He is way ahead of me in our competition.

Turns out that this last week I didn't eat very well (I had a french fries once and Dr Pepper twice). I did work out a few times though. I only lost .02 of a pound so that doesn't even really count as losing weight. This week I am really going to get into the whole healthy eating. I am going to eat less carbs (I love carbs so I am not going to cut them out completely) and less fat. We will see if that makes a difference.

An afternoon at the park

It was really nice out today. The kids didn't even need coats. After Nicholas and I picked Trinity up from school we headed to the park (first we tried the Zoo but it was a mad house today). The park is walking distance from our house and it very big and nice. The kids loved it.

The park has 2 playground areas, tons of picnic tables and lots of big areas of grass. We have driven past it almost daily since we moved here but it looked like a little podunk skateboard park. However after looking into parks in the area I found that this park was very nice and much bigger than it looks from the road.

I took over 200 pictures of the kids so I would have a few really good ones.

The last picture here is Nicholas being a car driving down the slide. Also notice his shoes are on the wrong feet. He spent the whole time at the park like that.

1 week later

I lost 2 lbs in the last week. Dominick is down 4.5 lbs in 1 week. We stopped drinking soda, juice and energy drinks. We also started keeping more fruits and veggies around cut up and ready to grab. We don't have any chips or unhealthy snacks in our house. We also started substituting fatty foods with a better choice like ground turkey instead of ground beef and plain yogurt in place of butter and oil. Let me tell you tuna salad sandwiches are very yummy if you take out the mayo and use plain yogurt. I also added chopped red, green and orange bell peppers in place of pickles and onion.

Today Trinity came up to me and said she wanted to make cupcakes. She had a box a milk chocolate cake mix in her hand. I told her I would make them but I would not put frosting on them. She said ok, lets get started.

I googled 'how to make a healthier cake mix cake'. I found that if I used 4 egg whites instead of 3 whole eggs and use plain yogurt instead of oil I could cut out a bunch of extra fat. So we made semi healthy mini cupcakes and they were delicious. The texture was a little different but in a good way.


I also have to add that I hate filling the little cups. It's messy and time consuming most of the time. I decided to find a new way to fill them today. I got out my easy accent decorator from pampered chef filled it with the batter and pumped it into the the little cups. It was very fast and very easy. I do have to clean an extra 2 pieces but that is as easy a rinsing it and putting it into the dishwasher, no big deal.