Oops

What do you get when your one year old gets off the couch face first?

Baby Hitler (with a bruise and slight rug rash).

Wordless Wednesday: Real food lunch

Adopted?

If its true that the way to a mans heart is through his stomach, then Ellie was meant to be Jons daughter.  Jon and Ellie have a bond that no one else in the family can touch.  They have bonded over food.  Food that most 2 year olds don't enjoy, but Ellie does.  While the boys and I wont touch Tabasco, cream cheese, barbecue sauce, sausage and some random concoctions that Jon comes up with, Ellie is right next to him asking for bites.  

Next stop: Skyline.

Egg hunt

Saturday was Cross Points annual Easter egg hunt. Unfortunately, Sam had a major meltdown over a boo boo so he and Zach stayed home with dad while I took Ben and Ellie.  Ben went right to work.  I didn't see him until it was over.  Ellie wasn't sure about why she was bundled up and throwing eggs in a basket, but she got a few goodies.

It only took 2 tries to get them both smiling!

Ben was shocked to see that the Ester bunny has helpers just like Santa.

Real food...ish

I came across a website not too long ago about real food. Its full of explanations, recipes and health benefits.  It made sense and sounded like something I'd like to try. While, we don't have the worst diet ever, we eat out more than we should and could probably eat more vegetables with dinner.  Then reality set in.  The thing about real food is its a complete overhaul of your thinking, kitchen, wallet and time management.

The basic rule seems to be not eating anything that has more than 5 ingredients.  I should rephrase.  You can still make something like pancakes, but each ingredient in the pancakes should have less than 5 ingredients.  This means lite bread, granola bars, yogurt and other things that I associated with being half way healthy are out.  You need to buy the special 1 ingredient flour, the greek yogurt and all the other things that I avoided because they were in the expensive sections that I skipped.

Another drawback is the kids.  While looking at the sample menus on the web site, I could count on one hand the number of things the kids would eat.  A lot of it didn't seem that appealing to me either to be honest.

Then we come to the time and convenience.  Eating out on a real food diet is a challenge.  And thats being nice. Whipping up a quick meal is also long gone.  These meals take planning and time to cook everything.  We all know I'm not the cook in this family and with Jon working long hours until fall, that spells disaster for me.

I put the real food idea on the back shelf for a bit.  Then I went to a party Saturday where that was one of the topics of conversation.  Then I heard people trading recipes on Sunday for something healthy.  Then we had lunch with Prasti on Monday who is a much healthier eater and she answered some questions.  So I took the hint and decided to start small.

The kids love pop tarts, bagels and cereal for breakfast.  I pulled up a few recipes, got some approved ingredients and made banana pancakes.  We've had them before and the kids liked them so I figured it would go well.  Sam was annoyed we weren't making waffles and Zach wasn't interested so it didn't go as smooth as I hoped, but we survived.  Lunch was pretty easy: cheese, triscuits and fruit was pretty close to a regular lunch.  I made hard boiled eggs and pulled out some vegetables for a snack. This was Wednesday, also our 9 year wedding anniversary, so we skipped the healthy and enjoyed Outback for dinner. Even with cheese fries and salad dressing, I lost just over a pound in one day.  Now we're on day 3.  Sam was completely annoyed he couldn't have a pop tart for breakfast and refused to eat.  I wont make them give up the junk all at once or maybe even completely, but on days where we have time to cook a good breakfast, we're going to do that.

We still have a lot of shopping to do to replace the bad ingredients, I haven't given up my diet pepsi yet and we need to research a ton of questions I have about some foods and recipes, but we're getting there...slowly.  You wont get anywhere if you don't take a step in the right direction.

Wordless Wednesday: Another tooth gone

Happy St Patricks Day

Wordless Wednesday: Smiles

Breathe

Help Me Grow was out again yesterday.  This time the occupational therapist came with the speech therapist. She was going to evaluate Ellies lack of enthusiasm when she's in certain settings.  It was a very weird visit.  After a lot of random questions and watching Ellie interact with the speech therapist, the OT suggested some movements to try with Ellie.  She said, in not so many words, that the ear is the key to the speech and facial expressions.  When we engage the inner ear, we will see improvement in several areas, not just speech. 

She also suggested some tactile trials.  She wants us to have something small for Ellie to hold/play with in situations where it looks like she is shutting down.  She thinks if Ellie has something to focus on and will stimulate some senses, that might distract her from her surroundings and help her stay engaged.

She also mentioned breathing exercises.  This is something the speech therapist touched on before, but not in this kind of detail.  Ellie can go from zero to crazy in about 5 seconds.  As soon as she feels threatened (like someone is going to take a toy or food) or if she doesn't get help with something immediately or when things don't go her way, she will often have irrational responses which lead to temper tantrums and breath holding.  She said the normal kid is about a 5 (out of 10).  When they get mad, they have some room for their emotions to grow and don't immediately turn into Mr Hyde.  Ellie seems to run on a 7 or 8.  When she gets mad, she doesn't have anywhere to go except crazy!  The therapist said when this happens, kids are often very tense and literally hold it inside.  Kids will often tense up their stomach area which contributes to the crazy.

We need to start playing with more straws.  Very long, bendy straws for water and long, straight straws for smoothies.  She also wants her to play with whistles and bath flutes.  All of these things will help her work on her breathing and will let her relax her core.  If it works as planned, we should see a more relaxed Ellie who wont fly off the handle every time her brothers look at her the wrong way.  Then somehow this will translate to more facial expressions and not shutting down when she is overstimulated.  I started to lose her when we got to that part.

We'll try it and hope it works, but I'm just not sure how she came up with all that after an hour with Ellie.  How does she know its a tense breathing issue and not just a kid being 2 and not wanting to share or 101 other possibilities??  I guess we'll see.

Silly face

Ben and Sam were practicing their silly faces.

Ellie wanted to get in on it.

Zach refuses to be left out of anything!

Pasta

She hasn't met a bowl of pasta that she hasn't loved!

Walking

While he prefers to crawl, we know he can do it when he's in the mood: