An End to the Diet Wars?

I have shared a little of our family's diet struggles with you before, but things have been going downhill fast. I put the whole family on the same eating patterns so Son wouldn't feel left out and we could support each other with our healthy eating habits. Despite several trips to the dietitian, Son was back to his old over-eating tricks. I had even portioned out all of the snacks into sandwich baggies to keep us from eating too many servings at one time. (I'm just too darn cheap to spend all of that extra money on the packaging materials for those ones that come individually prepackaged.) He just wasn't getting the fact that he should only have so much of a certain type of food per day. How do you keep track of all that you've eaten anyway? I guess I probably do that kind of thing too. I mean, it's easy to look at a food pyramid and decide what you SHOULD eat. Do you actually eat that way?

I was tired of acting like a police officer and reminding him to slow down all of the time. I decided that there must be a better way of getting the family to self regulate what we are eating. We have done food journals in the past, and while they are effective they are also time consuming. There had to be something else I could do that didn't require as much work and could be done quickly.

While cleaning up my craft room the other day, my eyes landed on the left over magnet pieces I had used for blocking unused vents to reduce our heating bills. They would be perfect to use with that rusty old baking sheet that Cheesehead had insisted I throw out. Quickly, I grabbed my permanent markers so the words wouldn't smear and got to work. To make it easier to find each food group, I color coded them. I wrote the portion sizes from the food pyramid he had been given by his dietitian under the name of the food group so he'd know how many of the magnets to move after he'd eaten.

I divided the sheet into two columns. One was titled "What can I eat?" and the other "What have I eaten?". Then all he had to do was move a few magnets from one column to the other.

I even had enough scraps left to make one for my daughter too so she wouldn't feel left out. They have been using it for five days now and they haven't gotten bored with it yet OR forgotten to use it after eating. Is this idea going to keep working? I sure hope so, I haven't had to remind them of anything they can or should eat since we started using this thing. YAY!

Thank you for stopping by to chat with me. Please leave me a message, I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Cindy

Dad's Birthday

Today is not only Groundhog's Day, but it also would have been my dad's birthday. It's hard to believe that another year has already passed. Time flies so quickly it is almost impossible to keep track of it. This is the forth birthday that has passed since he passed away.

As I cleaned my craft room today I came across my dad's slides. I really think tonight will be a good night to look at some of them. I'm sure that most of the pictures I'm sharing with you were once among my grandpa's slides. I'm sure glad that some of them were made into pictures or we wouldn't have anything left since my dad's landlord so rudely threw out everything in the trailer that I had given to my uncle after my dad passed away.

This picture is a picture of my grandpa and grandma on the steps of the Tyler hospital on February 10, 1942. I assume that was the day she was discharged. Wow, 8 days in the hospital? That would NEVER happen with the insurance companies of today!


He sure was a cute little baby, wasn't he? Grandma was pretty good looking too I think. I feel sad sometimes that I never got the chance to meet her. I don't even remember my dad ever sharing specific memories of her with me. I suppose it was a bit painful to talk about since she died so young. Dad was in college when she died so my mom never even met her.

Dad was the oldest of the three children. My uncle was middle born and my aunt was the youngest. There were also a couple of foster sisters that show up occassionally in some of the pictures. My dad is the one sitting on the arm of the couch wearing the tie. He sure looked a lot like his dad, didn't he?

This is the last family picture of the four of us that I have. It was taken on my wedding day in 1996. I wonder why we never thought to get a picture of all of us and their grandchildren. We had a little over 10 years between the time this picture was taken and the time he left this world.

Happy birthday Dad, I love you!

Thank you for stopping by to chat with me. Please leave me a message, I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Score!

Winter gives many of us cold climate gardeners a lot of down time. What on earth are we supposed to do with all of that time anyway? Well, let me tell you I have been finding many things to keep myself busy with.

One thing I like to spend my winter doing is reading. Somehow I just seem to have way more time to read when it's cold out rather than when the temps warm up. The last time I went to the library, I only checked out three books. One was about organic gardening, there was the all new square foot gardening book, and a book about a homesteader who shared her experiences with her readers. Since I had gotten all three of those books finished in less than two weeks time, I decided to check out a couple of extras this time. I wonder if these will keep me busy enough? I checked out two books that will help me to decorate my garden inexpensively with home made accessories (I want to make some different signs for my berry patches and some more bird houses), one about healthy skin naturally, one about herbal remedies for better health (Maybe I'll find out about a couple of plants I need to grow in my yard?), and a book about chickens. Hmm, I'm sensing kind of a theme here...

As many of my regular readers may know I also taught myself how to crochet last winter. It seems to take me way longer than it ever took my grandma so I just know I'm doing something wrong, I just am not sure what it is. Since none of my projects have really turned out all that well anyway, I haven't made much with yarn lately. The last few scarves I attempted to make were turned into belts or purses or something, I just didn't have the patience required to finish when my pieces end up looking like something that may have looked nice at some point but shrank in the dryer. I found this great contraption in the craft department while I was visiting Cheesehead in Antigo the other day. It's the round nifty knitter set. I don't know how to knit, but I have PLENTY skeins of yarn. It's idiot proof, meaning even I can make a good looking product! I am almost done making a baby hat and it looks like something I could have bought from a store. There are four different sizes, I could easily see becoming addicted to this. I just MAY have to go get the other set that you can make afghans and sweaters with, I'd adore a hand made sweater. Then there were a couple of books of patterns, I wonder if our local library has any of those...

Winter is also a great time to get organized. To keep all of my projects close at hand, but out of site, I found this great organizer that everything fits into. My family likes to help our home to become unorganized, so I'm always searching out new ways to be able to find stuff. I put this together in just a couple of hours worth of time and I just LOVE it! All it required was a philips head screwdriver to put it together and a few reading and matching skills for the proper sized screws. I also condensed the endless piles of movies and video games in some inexpensive cd wallets which fit perfectly into one of the openings. Most of the time the kids put the wrong game or movie into the wrong case anyway so why not just eliminate the cases altogether? I put them all into some plastic storage totes that will be kept just in case we ever want to set up a nice big movie library or something. You never know...

Yet another great things to do is go window shopping. Usually I just browse through the stores to get ideas of things I can make myself at home, but I found one gem that I just couldn't resist! The best score of all though was this wonderful bread maker that I found at Goodwill. Unfortunately I didn't get one for Christmas (though I DID get the camera I wanted), so I had to buy one on my own. I've been holding off on making the purchase though since they do take up a bit of space, seem pretty complicated if you don't have instructions to go with them, and they are somewhat expensive to buy brand new. This one was "used" (I say that because it looks brand new and had all of the pieces including the instruction manual but had no box) and it was $19.99. So far it seems to be working great, it's an hour into the cycle and it didn't puff out smoke or explode or anything. Thank you God! The bread is now on it's second raising cycle and I am happy to say that it looks like Cheesehead will be coming to a fresh loaf of bread when he gets off of work. Another great way to cut chemicals and preservatives out of our lives without the work of doing all of the kneading and stuff myself.

Busy, busy, busy! I hope everyone is managing to keep themselves warm!

Thank you for stopping by to chat with me. Please leave me a message, I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Cindy

A Gift For Our Support

Scott from hometown seeds contacted me by email earlier today. He wants to thank the online gardening community for all of their support for their new online seed company by offering us 10 % off of our seed purchases at their website. He did give their permission for me to share this with my readers, so I'm not just assuming it's okay to share this information with you. There is also a link to their site on my sidebar. Enjoy!

Just enter coupon code "thanks" (no quotation marks) by February 28, 2010.

Thank you for stopping by to chat with me. Please leave me a message, I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Winter Visitors

I tend not to spend much time outside in the winter time here, I imagine if you lived up here you'd probably spend most of your time inside too. That means I don't really have much opportunity to see which of my animal neighbors have been visiting me. Of course there are signs of life even among the mounds of snow and piles of ice covering just about anything your eyes land on up here.

What signs of life, you ask? Well, while I don't see sprouts from my bulbs popping out of the ground, buds swelling on tree branches, or anything of that sort yet, I do see animal foot prints in the snow. They show me that not everyone headed south for the winter or went into hibernation mode like me. I do not venture into deep snow piles or anything as the snow would probably spill over the tops of my boots and freeze my poor feet. These pictures were taken in the snow that as most recently fell onto our driveway.

The most obvious visitor to the winter garden is the deer.

They have large footprints and sink deeply into the snow. The cloven hooves give them away, not many animals that live around here have prints like these.

Apparently the path Cheesehead had made for me to access the new compost bin he built me this summer for my birthday was quickly discovered by the deer too. It seems they have used the path much more recently than I have. Conveniently, it goes right by my apple trees. I need to remember to get the soap hung in the trees soon or the deer will start nibbling on them soon.

The bin is easily visible from the driveway. I think it looks good, but once the snow levels decrease and before the ground is no longer frozen, Cheesehead seems to think we need to move it. He doesn't like the fact that it can be seen.


Our next biggest guest is our lovely friend, the rabbit. Their foot prints come in groups of four as they hop their way through the snow. They don't sink as far as the deer do, but you can often find which direction they came from as well as where they headed off to. They aren't quite as noticable as far as the footprints go, but they also leave many other signs that they've been here. Our eaten seedpods which are now buried in the snow drifts along with the extra fertilizers they add to my beds. Those two signs make them the most visible visitor to my yard prior to the next new snowfall.


Our last visitor is a little mouse. It has stayed away from the house more this winter than the last time, but if you look closely you can see their barely discernable footprints in the snow near the shed. I had to adjust the exposure and the brightness of this photo to better highlight the prints in this picture. They are so light they seem not to sink at all even in our loosest of snow.

Thank you for stopping by to chat with me. Please leave me a message, I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Cindy