Windy Start to the Weekend

Was it ever incredibly windy last night! Poor DS was so scared! He finally fell asleep in a pile of Webkinz! I figured I’d have a bad sleep because of it but it didn’t keep me up at all! PHEW!
I had a nice fruity breakfast this morning…

-1/2 cup Hazelnut milk
-1/2 cup water
-1/2 cup Quaker oats
-3 big strawberries and 1/2 banana (which were frozen, thawed, then mashed up)
-cinnamon
-Pampered Chef Cinnamon sprinkles

Good Lord, this turned into a BIG bowl of oats! I bet the fruit equaled a good cup by the time it was all mashed up. What a great way to get some servings of fruit in right at the beginning of the day!! Here's a shot of the Hazelnut milk that I've been using. I bought it at Wegman's on my last trip to the US. Unfortunately, I finished it off today!

I was feeling like a snack by 9pm last night so I served myself up a small bowl of dry Nature’s Path Cinnamon Blueberry Optimum cereal…..

Hit the spot!!! This cereal is such a nice, crunchy treat!!

I spent the morning with our lovely (insert sarcasm) folding machine as we’re getting all the T4’s ready for the mail on Monday. What an exercise in patience that thing is! We finally had to call in the repair guy to fix/run it for us. I was getting a little hungry when I got back to my desk at 11:15 so I munched on one of my cranberry oatmeal muffins.

This guy got flattened in the fridge! Oh, well…it was still full of flavor!

I hit up the gym for a nice 50 minute sweat session! My hubby was off work today so he joined in on the fun! I hammered out 30 minutes on the treadmill (274 calories), 10 minutes on the stair master (98 calories) and 10 on the stationary bike (106 calories). I made a pact with myself to try to use as much equipment in the gym as possible instead of just the treadmill. I don’t want my body to figure out what’s happening next because I can get pretty cozy on the treadmill!

Time: 50 minutes
Avg Hr: 161
Max Hr: 174
Calories Burned: 478
Distance: 3.12 miles (5.2K) on treadmill

My lunch today was a lovely mug full of vegan chili. I topped it with some cheesy goodness! Before I heat it up, I put a squirt of hot water from the coffee machine in to loosen it up a bit. Works like a charm!

I think I still have about 4 servings left in the freezer. This batch has really come in handy for days when I’m either in a rush or not sure what to bring to eat. I just set it on a plate on my desk to spend the morning thawing out.

So here’s a question for y’all! I can not for the life of me figure out how to view how many hits my blog has received. Where do I find this elusive (to me) feature?? In Blogger, do you find it under “profile views”? I know not! Any help would be much appreciated!! :)

I decided it would be best for me to get the grocery shopping done right after work. It's a cold, windy day and I just knew that if I went home and got all warm and cozy, there's be no going back out! With this in mind, I ate some cantaloupe right before leaving work. Shopping on an empty stomach is a very dangerous thing for my wallet!!

I found a cool new product while at the store....Dempsters Fresh Squares. They looked very intriguing to me so I bought a box of each flavour....Apple Cinnamon....

And cranberry...

Here's the stats;

I'm thinking I'm going to test one out for a snack a little later on. I'll do a full review of the bars in tomorrow's post. Friday night dinner's are always a simple affair. By the end of the week I'm usually too wiped out to cook anything that requires thought. The fam had chicken fingers, fries and cucumber slices. I ate a bowl of Amy's Lentil Soup...

...and a WW Arnold Thin with Sabra jalapeno hummus, smoked cheddar cheese, lettuce and a piece of tofu. I put a big ass can of diced tomatoes on top of it while it was in the pan to flatten it and give it a "panini" look!

T'was delisio! No sweet end for me tonight....actually, that's a lie! Now that I think about it, I did eat a rainbow chip cookie while clearing the table off. Talk about mindless eating! Wonder how I enjoyed that when I almost forgot eating it? Blah!

Well, It's just after 7pm in my parts and I think we have a couple movies to watch. Sounds like the perfect thing to do on a blustery, cold night! Anyone have any spectacular weekend plans??

Bye for now!!

Post V-Day

WOW! Last night's dinner/dance was loads of fun! I hope everybody had as good a Valentine's as I did! I'll begin this post with an update of the festivities. First off, I had DD take a picture of me in my new little black dress...

My hubby thinks it totally vain of me to post this, but whatever, he's a guy and doesn't get it!! :) We enjoyed a 4 course meal before the dance part. It started off with a plate of antipasto (capicollo, salami, provolone, prosciutto, pickled veggies and olives) I ate all but the veg.....I do not like pickled veggies!

Next up was penne with meat sauce. I had a very small serving....about a 1/2 cup. Also, I passed on the bread basket the whole meal.

The main course was chicken Parmesan, roasted potatoes, veggies and salad. I ate all the vegetables, 1/2 the chicken and all the salad. I'm not a potato gal so I didn't even touch them.

And dessert was a beautiful piece of triple chocolate mousse. Hell, ya!!!

There was red and white wine at the table, too, but I am not fond of wine (I know, bad Italian) so I stuck with water all night. Later on in the post, you'll see that this was probably a very wise choice! Here are some more fun pictures. The first is Mom and me and the next is my handsome hubby and me.


We left at around midnight and by the time I drove the sitter home and washed up, it was well past 1am. I wasn't asleep even an hour before an upset tummy woke me up. I'll give no details except to say that I spent the remainder of the night camped out in the washroom. I finally fell asleep on the couch around 6:30am. I'm not sure what got me, but I'm thinking either the chicken or dessert. Ugh! I still can't think about it without feeling sick again! Bletch! I woke up around 10ish when DD came down to check on me. Mom or Dad on the couch is a very odd thing to the kids! I felt fine by then, but in no mood for any breakfast. The crew went on out to the farm without me so I laid around with Pepper (who is also under the weather from his shots yesterday) and read my book. Around 11 I decided to make myself a bowl of oats as I was starting to feel hungry.

-1/2 cup hazelnut milk
-1/2 cup water
-1/4 mashed banana
-cinnamon
-raisins
-maple flakes

When I was a kid we used to eat a lot of flavoured instant oats and cinnamon raisin was on of my favourites. This bowl tasted just like that. Thankfully, it settled nicely in the ole belly. I spent some time reading blogs while I waited for the fam to get home.

The rest of the afternoon was spent lounging around and catching a quick nap. I made an early dinner because DS had a hockey game at 6pm. I had bought some brown rice sushi yesterday that was suppose to have been my lunch today, but turned into my dinner. I ate 7 of the 9 pieces.

My sweet end was a sliver of apple pie that my hubby picked up at Knapp's on his way home from the farm.

Well, it's a good thing I had dinner to post today because my eats certainly weren't very exciting! I do feel much better, though and expect to have a great sleep tonight! I apologize if I haven't commented as much on blogs today, but I've been pretty wiped out. I'm going to tuck in tonight with a yogurt (get some good bacteria in my gut) and watch the premiere of the Amazing Race. It's my second favourite to the Biggest Loser! Hope everybody has had a fantastic day!

Bye for now!!

A Quick Recap of the Day

Hi everybody! I hope everyone's weekend is going GREAT! This will be a post with lots of pictures and not much text. I have 1/2 an hour to get this done as I was in Buffalo all day (Wahoo!) and my parents are due here shortly. I will be back to norm tomorrow, but I hope you enjoy the post regardless of it's lack of narrative!!

Breakfast;


Snack on the ride down. We made it from my front door to the mall in Buffalo in 1hr 45mins!

After some successful Christmas shopping...and some "me" shopping, we hit Panera for lunch. I had the Orchard salad and tomato mozzarella panini....delish!!


I saved my apple and ate it on the way home. While at the mall, the kid's enjoyed this "bear band"!!!


We hit up Barnes & Noble, Target and Wegman's...I skipped Kohl's this time as DS was becoming increasingly hard to deal with after his 5am wake up call! DD spent some time with good ole Jack Daniels at the duty free store.....:)

We were at home with a quick supper on the table by 5:45pm! On the menu was baked cod fillets, veggies and mac n' cheese (for the family);

And here's my loot!!! Here we have 100 calorie English muffins and WW & multi grain Arnold sandwich thins!! I've seen these ALL over blogland recently so I was stoked to come across them!


Next up---dairy! Fage (and LOTS of it!), whipped cottage cheese (can't find that here), Oikos yogurt (another recent star in blogland), a Weight Watchers yogurt, cinnamon plum tea jam (found this at Panera's), Kozy Shack Ready Grains oats (to try out)

Lastly, oat milk (finally found it!), Wessex 5 Grain cereal, Quaker bars, hazelnut milk, cinnamon bun Coffee Mate (a treat!), sweet potato puree, box of chocolate chip Z Bars, Progresso soup, seasonal clif bars, eggnog coffee and flatout wraps!

Of the non-edible variety, I bought a cute snowman bowl and a penguin cup at Target. I saw a Santa cup, but I didn't want to become Eating Benders cyber stalker!

So, there you have my stash!! I promise to be back to normal tomorrow. I'm hoping to have some time later on to do some blog reading, so please know that I'm not ignoring anybody!!

Bye for now!!