Weigh In Wednesday: Weeks 4 & 5

Well I totally forgot to blog last week about my weight loss for week 4.  Probably because I didn't lose anything but gained 1 lb! YIKES  I knew this would more than likely happen because I really was not good about drinking my water or watching what I was eating.   So Week 4 my total weight loss was 5 lbs.

Week 5 I did do better with eating less but still not so great with drinking my water.  But I did LOSS 1 lb! So I made up for the 1 lb I gained back.  My total weight loss for 5 weeks is 6 lbs.  Not the greatest for 5 weeks but better than nothing I say!  I really really need to get better at eating better breakfasts.  I think that is one of my major issues as well.  I do pretty decent for lunch and dinner, but I eat snacks or not so good for you muffins and stuff like that for breakfast.  My goal is to start finding healthier breakfast options and making and eating them! And apparently I need to do this for my daughter too! I just love that my dad works at her school and is friends with her preschool teachers because some of the stories they tell him and in turn he tells me just make my day!  Today (after eating 1 1/2 gogurts and some pop tart minis) she tells her teacher that "my mommy never gives me enough to eat in the morning and I'm always starving!" She really is too comical! And that is what she asks for for breakfast! So maybe I need to start serving her 3 course meals for breakfast as well.  I do honestly think that my daughter will eat us out of house and home.  She could seriously constantly eat all day long and still be hungry!  And she has not one ounce of fat on her! She is all muscle!  I'm not sure what I would do without my baby girl! I just love her so much and she makes our lives so much better!

So here is to  hoping that Week 6 has another loss as well!
Happy Healthy Eating!

Meal Plan Monday: My Meal Plan for the Week of 2/27

This weeks meal plan I just now finished!  I have been a little behind on my meal planning and blogging in general lately.  Hopefully I'll get it together and start being a little more organized!

This week will be a pretty easy week for me cooking wise.  I'm off the hook for 3 nights dinners!

Monday 27th- Gino's East Pizza- They are closing this week and I still have a groupon deal to use there, so cheap, yummy pizza!

Tuesday 28th- Chicken Quesadillas- the chicken is in the crock pot today so I will just have to put it all together and heat it up tomorrow after the gym.

Wednesday 29th- Fish Fry with my parents, brother, sis in law and Uncle!  My Uncle gets us tickets each year to his Church's fish fry! It's pretty funny because they actually have their fish fry at my Church's school!  So Emma will be excited to eat in her gym.

Thursday 1st- Hamburgers on the grill and french fries.  Hopefully the weather is ok.  If not probably BBQ Chicken Sandwiches

Friday 2nd- Dinner with Friends!! I just need to bring a dessert or 2.  Any suggestions??

Saturday 3rd- Enchiladas and possibly having French Toast Bake for Breakfast! Depends on how creative I feel Friday night!

Sunday 4th- Pancakes for Breakfast (made on my new griddle pan!) and my Parents for dinner.

Whats for dinner at your house this week?

Week 6 of 52 Week Organization Challenge

I am a few weeks behind!  Here is the link for week 6. This week was creating a home recycling center and dealing with trash.  An easy but important challenge for me.  We already have a really good system down for our recycling and trash issues.  Our recycling items do not have to be sorted and are just dumped into our big recycling bin, taken to the curb every 2 weeks and is emptied by the recycling man!  We are very aware of things that can be recycled and try to put everything that we can in there.  Even our 5 year old is really good about asking or knowing if something can be recycled and putting it in there as well.  Our recycling bin in the house is something that isn't the cutest but works for what we need it to do!  We use an old, emptied and cleaned plastic kitty litter container! 

Once it gets full, about every other day, we just take it out our back door and empty it into the city provided big recycling bin. This bin sits right around the corner of the kitchen so it makes it super easy for us to recycle!

We have a good system already in place as well for our everyday trash, just an ordinary trash can that Brian empties when it gets full.  With this challenge though I did give the trash can and surrounding area a nice clean!

The next weekly challenge is Coupons!

Meal Plan Monday: My Meal Plan for the Week of 2/20

Today starts another Monday and my poor baby Caden isn't feeling the best.  He is coughing and is very flemmy.  Thankfully his cough is really loose so I'm hoping that means he is almost done with it.  I love that this winter has been nice but I hate what the constant temperature changes does to the kids, and Brian and I. 
Last week we stuck to the meal plan pretty well but we did eat out alot more on the weekend than we typically do.  I'm afraid of what the scale will say on Wednesday.  This past week I have been in a blah mood and my diet has definitely reflected that (as has my motivation to do much of anything creative this last week or so).
Here's this weeks Plan.

Monday 20th: French Toast Bake (Pinterest- Not even counting the points!) This thing looks so yummy and I wanted to make it this weekend but we ended up going to Cracker Barrel for breakfast yesterday (so not complaining about that!)

Tuesday 21st: Tacos

Wednesday 22nd: Ash Wednesday so no Meat- Pasta Bake

Thursday 23rd: Chicken, Potato, Veggie Bake (Kraft Foods) I have had this on the Menu for the last few weeks and I am bound and determined to make this!

Friday 24th: No Meat Friday- Cheese Pizza (unless I get more creative during the week!)

Saturday 25th: Hamburgers (haven't had these all winter and they sound so good!)

What's for dinner at your house this week?

Weigh In Wednesday: Week 3

This past week I lost .5 lbs.  Not the greatest but at least I lost something! So I am down 6 lbs in 3 weeks.  I did have a few challenging days and know I did not drink water like I should be. 

Last Wednesday I just wanted to eat everything in site!  I was just hungry all day long.  Thankfully I was in Chesterton and too lazy to leave the trailer to go out and get junk!  I had only packed my sandwich for lunch, goldfish and some oranges so I couldn't eat too bad.  I did though on the way home have to stop and get gas and got a coffee cake from the gas station, but that really pretty much held me over till supper.  I am sure that I will have many more days like this throughout my weight loss and than my maintaining my weight, but I'm ok with that.  This new healthier eating is a lifestyle that I will have to (and want to) continue with so if there are some days I just want to eat bad stuff, I'll eat some bad stuff!  I'll just have to workout a little harder than to compensate.

So my goals for this week are to drink more water, really watch the extra junk that I am eating because it adds up faster than I realize and continue to work out 3 days a week.

Here's to hoping for more weight loss this week!

Meal Plan Monday: My Meal Plan for the Week of 2/13

I have been really good about meal planning for about a month now and I can already tell that I am saving money!  Plus we are eating better meals and not eating fast food at all, and being organized with food!  Makes me really happy.  Last week I went grocery shopping and only spent $42.xx!  That is like a miracle for me because we usually spend at least $100.00 a week if not more.  Last week though I was really good and only bought what was on my list.  I do realize that every few weeks it will be alot more because I will have to stock up on snacks and stuff like that that has run out.  I'll wait until I can get a good sale on the stuff like that though.

Last week I stayed on track really pretty good.  Thursday we ended up using a gift card we got for Christmas and had Subway after Gym and Dance, but February is $5 foot long month so we all ate for 11.xx (that includes the bag of chips Emma got!)  And Friday I just had a total fail and forgot to put the frozen chicken in the crock pot for my meal until 1 so that definitely was not ready by the time we were hungry.  We ended up having scrambled eggs, toast and grapes.  Everyone ate all gone and it was really good and nice to have something different.  So we had the Chicken on Sat and it was super yummy! Will definitely make that again. 

So here is this weeks plan...

Monday: Deep Dish Pizza (WW 5 pts- this is what got bumped from last week)

Tuesday: Italian Beef Sandwiches (Amanda- 7pts)

Wednesday: Chicken, Potato, Veggie Bake (Pinterest- Kraft Foods)

Thursday: Chili

Friday: Tacos

Saturday: Beef Fajitas

What's for dinner at your house this week?

Weigh In Wednesday: Week 2

Week 2 of WW and working out went pretty good!  I lost another 2 lbs for a total of 5.5 lbs so far!  Saturday Brian, the kids and I went to the gym for the 1st time in probably 4 months for me.  It works out really nice because the kids like to go to "Gym School" (named by Emma's friend Ms. Morgan!) and Brian and I get to work out and shower afterwards while the kids have fun, play and color.  Even with eating a not so healthy meal of Creamy Raviloi and Chicken from Applebees Saturday I still managed to lose!  This week I have worked out on Monday and plan to work out Friday and Saturday as well.  We go to Memorial Health and Lifestyle and its such a nice, clean and great gym.  They have really nice, top of the line equipment, a cool workout monitoring system and awesome classes.  Going somewhere you like makes it alot easier to go too!  The people that work out there are really pretty good too.  There is a good mix of super in shape people and people that are working to get there!  I never go and feel that people are looking at me funny or judging me by how I look or what I can or can't do while I am working out.

This week the meal plan has been going really well and I'm still trying to drink as much water as I can and eat as much fruits and veggies as I can as well.  The one area I need to work on those are sides for our meals.  I am doing good cooking the main meal but really really bad making sides.  We love steamed brocolli and green beans, I just forget to pop them in the microwave for the 8-10 mins!  My goal is to cook better sides!

My motivational marbles just got 8 more moved to the LOST side!  What a great feeling that is to keep moving them over! 

Also if you look to the right side of this post you can see I now have a Weight Loss Ticker!  Each Wednesday I will be updating that as well with what I have lost! 



Week 5 of 52 Week Organization Challenge

Week 5 of the Weekly Chalenge was recipes and cookbooks.  You can find the link to it here.
This was a pretty easy week for me because I have a halfway decent organiztion of this already.  My favorite cookbooks are in a cabinet and I also have a recipe binder that I keep all my favorite recipes that I get other places in. The one area for me that needed to be organized was the printed off recipes.  I don't like to take the time to write a recipe on a card to go into my binder until we have tried it and know we like it.  So I needed a better organizatin for that for sure.  I liked the suggetion on the Challenge site to put them in labeled file folders. I had a nice magazine holder that I decided to use for this.  Right now I'm just putting the recipes that I have in there but i really want to get folders to put the recipes in categories. I will label them as Chicken, Meat, Main Meals, Desserts, Breakfast and Sides (this is the way that my binder is organized as well).  This way when i get a recipe that I may want to try, I can just stick it in the file and be done with it until I'm ready to look for something new to cook!

Right now the recipes I have printed are all together in the magazine holder.

My recipe binder is awesome! I got it a long time ago as a wedding gift.  It's from Hallmark, has labled tabs to put on the tab inserts, plastic sleeves to put in 5x7 recipe cards and some blank sheets to write recipes on.  Before this challenge it wasn't really organized so this weekend I decided to put the recipes in an order.  I decided on making a Chicken, Meat, Main Meal (things that dont really have a meat or chicken in them), Desserts, Breakfast and Sides.  This will make it really easy to find a meal I want to make.

My great now organized binder

Each section has a tabbed divider

It has sleeves to put in recipes that you either write out or print out.



Sneak peak to week 6...Recycling and Trash!

Meal Plan Monday: My Meal Plan for the Week Of 2/6

This weeks Menu

A recap of last weeks meal plan...  I didn't feel like making the stir fry Monday so we had the Calzones.  The Buffalo Chicken Sandwiches Tuesday were really really yummy!  I made a double batch and freezed 1/2 of it into sandwich sized bags so I can take one out for lunches whenever that sounds good!  Wednesday night we went to the hospital to see my new baby niece! Addyson Janell is so sweet and looks like her big sister Abby did! Congrats to Ashley and Doug on another precious little girl!

Baby Addy!

So Wednesday was leftovers night.  Thursday we had the Chicken Stir Fry (which Brian actually made!)Friday we did eat the Oven Hot Dogs and they were pretty good.  I'm not sure if it is something that Brian or I really want again though.  We just like our regular hot dogs!  I think it was the mustard on them that I didn't care for.  Saturday we didn't have the Hamburger Balls because we used a gift card and went to Applebees!  It was very yummy!  So this week's menu is this...


Monday 6th: Spaghetti and Meatballs (8 pts)

Tuesday 7th: French Dip Sandwiches (Amanda and Pinterest 4 pts)

Wednesday 8th: Hamburger Balls (Amanda 10 pts)

Thursday 9th: Crockpot Italian Chicken (Pinterest and looks super good 6 pts)- Very Excited about this one!

Friday 10th: Deep Dish Pizza (5 pts WW)

Saturday 11th: Abby's 4th Birthday Party!!

Sunday 12th: Parents


Whats for dinner at your house this week?

Emma's Bow Holder

A month or so I made a really cute headband holder for Emma out of an oatmeal container so now all her headbands are nice and organized but I had to think of something to organize all her hair clips and cute pony tail holders.  I finally decided to make her a Bow Holder out of an E! 

So I went to my favorite store, Joann Fabric, and got this cute E, the ribbon and the cute buttons!  I was 1st going to paint the E pink but wanted to do something more creative and cuter.  I have seen alot of cute button initials on pinterest so I decided to do that with her E.  The buttons were a cute mixture and would work really well in her room.

I didn't do good taking pictures through out the process because I just wanted to get it done and it was a little time consuming gluing each button on.  But what I did was glued buttons on the outer edge of the E 1st, than took a second layer and angled that on top of the 1st layer and than did a 3rd layer over the 2nd.  Doing it that way covered the whole E and gave it some dimension.  I than took the thicker 1" ribbon and glued it in the middle of the bottom of the E and took the smaller 5/8th" ribbon and put them on both sides of the thicker ribbon.

Up close Picture of the E with the buttons on it

Her Bow holder with some on there.

I am so happy with the way it turned out and it is really nice to get the bows and holders out of our small and cramped bathroom! Plus it adds a cute decoration in Emma's room!



Week 4 of 52 Week Organization Challenge

Week 4 of the Organization Challenge is Organizing the Frig and Freezer.  You can find the link here.
I'm a day late posting this because Emma was sick yesterday and I stayed home with her :(

My refrigerator stays pretty organized most of the time because I have spots for specific items.  This is what each shelf is supposed to hold...The top right hand shelf  holds the Brita Filter Container plus Brian's yogurts.  The left hand side middle shelf  holds the eggs.  The right hand side middle shelf always holds the Crystal Light pitcher and the Milk Jug.  The bottom right hand side shelf always holds the pop.  The bottom right hand drawer always holds the cheese and tortilla shells.  So I feel that my frig is pretty organized, but it definitely needed a good cleaning.  I was a little lazy this week and didn't get around to cleaning the frig.  I was going to do it Monday but I wasn't thinking and went grocery shopping for the week so my frig is chuck full again!  I will clean it this weekend though. The freezer was a mess! Most of the stuff up there really could go down to the big freezer in the basement.

Before

This is my freezer After.  The plastic bin holds the stuff I need for the weeks meals!  More organized and I moved some stuff down to the deep freezer.

Here is the before picture of my basement storage area.  This are holds extra food we have and also the extra cookware we don't use very often and takes too much room in my cabinets upstairs.  I really need to keep this area clean and organized because I had to thrown some food out because it was expired.  I also need to get better that even though its an awesome sale, if we are not going to eat it, do not buy it! 

This is my storage area after!  Looks so much better and I can actually get to the shelf and I organized it with some dollar store totes.  And yes, we have a TON of gold fish crackers! The kids live on those things and they were just 10/10 get the 11th free at Meijer so I did stock up on these!

The pictures below are the before pictures of our deep freezer by the storage area in the basement.  Things were just kind of thrown everywhere and were only sort of organized.

Below is the after pictures of the organization. All the roasts are now on the top shelf, steaks are on the second shelf, the 3rd shelf holds the random items and the bottom shelf has the hamburger and hamburger patties.  The door now holds all the veggies.

Hopefully being more organized with our food storage we will waste less and I will be able to find what I need easier.

A sneak peak for Week 5's Challenge... Recipes and Cookbooks!

Weigh In Wednesday: Week 1

Well my 1st week down on my new diet down and I lost 3.5 lbs! WOO HOO.  Other than peeing all the time because of all the water I have been drinking, it did not go to bad.  Having the meal plan was my saving grace a few nights!  Wednesday I stayed a bit later at my friends picking up Caden and on the way home I so did not want to go home and cook dinner.  Most of the way home I thought of just stopping at McDonald's and getting us all food!  But I thought about my diet, all the hard work I had been putting in the last few days and all the stuff at home to make calzones, I decided to just drive home!  So glad I did because the Calzones were amazing and only took 30 mins total (that includes prep and cooking!)  Brian helped out and had the oven preheated and all the ingredients out!  Having all the ingredients all in one spot on my pantry helped!  We even ate out at Flat Top Stir Fry Saturday and that was ok on my diet!

I also made my Motivational Marbles jar!  Each little marble represents 1/4 lb, so I have 200 in there to represent the 50 lbs that I want to lose.  It was really satisfied dropping those 3.5 lbs worth of marbles in there!  I got the jars at the dollar store.  I like them but they are bigger than I really needed.  I was surprised that the marbles really don't take up much room!  One of the reasons why I decided to do each 1/4 lb.  The stickers and marbles came from JoAnn Fabric (my most favorite store!).  It was fun to make and even funnier moving those marbles over.

14 Marbles moved over! One Jar says "Pounds to Go" and the other jar says "Pounds Lost"

This week our gym membership starts back up so I'm super excited to start back up again.  I think I'll go Friday during the day with Caden, Saturday for either Zumba or Pilates and a little time on the treadmill!  Brian and I also need to figure out a schedule for during the week.  They have child care on Tuesday and Thursday nights so we will definitely go together on Tuesdays but on Thursdays Brian will probably just go with Caden by himself because I'm at Gym and Dance with Emma most of the evening.  Saturday mornings we will definitely both go together too!  Looking forward to going back, I have missed it and am ready to get back into shape!
Here's to next weeks Marble Move!!