The Saturday 7

1. Diet update. I've lost just over 2 lbs. It's encouraging to see the numbers going down, and despite my last blog entry, dieting itself hasn't been horrible. I miss snacking and drinking lots of Dr Pepper, but 1800 calories is pretty do-able. I'm a little worried about my milk supply, but I think that's more due to dehydration than lack of calories. If I can't drink Dr Pepper, I don't drink anything. Gotta work on that. 

2. While I'm on a health kick, I decided it's time to work on my kids' eating habits, too. Lucy is getting even pickier as she gets older. She's down to about 4 meals she'll eat: macaroni, hot dogs, pizza, and frozen waffles. And Lena is so influenced by Lucy that she says she doesn't want anything else either. So I told them we were going to have "try new things week" this week. I scoured Pinterest for kid-friendly meals they might possibly eat, and tried some out. Result? Big fat fail. Sigh. These are the things my kids refused to eat:

Turkey and cheese roll-ups and Annie's organic yogurt. (Lena ate a couple bites of her roll up and all her yogurt. Lucy refused both.)

Turkey wrapped string cheese, club crackers, yogurt/fruit squeeze pouches. (Lucy ate the crackers. Lena ate the string cheese. Neither of them liked the squeeze pouch!?!)

Pizza pinwheels with ranch, and grapes. (Lucy picked out the pepperoni. Lena ate her and Lucy's grapes.)

I wouldn't let them have anything else if they didn't like what I made, so they went hungry most of the week. I was feeling a little bad about that, though, so I decided to make them some smoothies. There's a lot of sugar in them, but right now, it's my only chance of getting any veggies into them. We had a smoothie most afternoons, and it was trial and error to find something the girls would drink. I tried different variations of  frozen go-gurts, handfuls of spinach, honey, peanut butter (Lucy didn't like it), sprinkles, red food coloring (to disguise the green flecks of spinach) vanilla Greek yogurt, lots of different kinds of fruit, vanilla extract, and those baby food pouch purees. (I used one that had broccoli in it, and it totally ruined the whole smoothie. Haha. Lesson learned.) The girls did pretty well. They guzzled a couple of my attempts, and refused a couple others.

3. On Wednesday, our local library was doing "Parent/Child" yoga in place of regular storytime. I used to go to a weekly yoga class, and the girls love doing Cosmic Kids Yoga from YouTube, so Lucy was all excited to go to a real yoga "class." She insisted that we all had to wear yoga pants. You better believe I wore the longest shirt I could find. Haha. It was just a half hour session - mostly warming up and stretching, with just a few different yoga poses. Lucy loved it. Lena tolerated it. Haha.

Lucy even let me put her hair in a bun.

4. This was one of my favorite weeks of the summer: fair week! I took the kids down to Sparta yesterday for Kids' Day and they had a blast with all the activities. I was shocked, both of the girls even went on the pony rides!

Lucy was brave and went on the kiddy roller coaster:

She's laughing in this picture. 

Carouselfie!

Major thanks to Niki for meeting me down there to help hold Levi and take pictures!

5. Today was the parade. Every year, we have a love/hate relationship with the parade. The girls want to go get candy, but they're terrified of the loud trucks.

This was Levi's first parade, and it appears that he's no exception:

He was terrified of the loud noises as well. 

 6. One night this week, I got the opportunity to go work in the back room of Once Upon a Child with my mom. I was gone for just over 4 hours, so Justin had to give Levi a bottle . . . and once again it was an epic fail. He tried fresh milk, frozen milk, size 1 nipples, size 2 nipples, varying degrees of warmth, even formula, but Levi would.not.take it. And consequently, he would.not.sleep. Justin was pacing with him in front of the TV when I got home at 12:30 in the morning. But we have big plans for date night tonight, so hopefully my mom will have better luck with the bottle! Stinkin' kids.

7. A few more pictures from our week:

Big sister taking care of the little sister at the carnival.

Levi's not great at sitting up in the Bumbo.

Before the parade got loud and scary.