I wonder who she’s been watching? Yep…I suppose that would be me

Almost every morning, Brooke sees me work up a sweat as I jump, lunge and squat with my favorite exercise videos. I definitely would not say it’s at the top of her entertainment list, but, obviously, it’s had a positive impact on her.

As I watched her attempt to repeat some of the workout moves she’s seen me do, I realized I have the perfect opportunity to encourage her to develop a healthy active lifestyle, simply by being an example to her.

She even asked me to get her a workout video for kids. Of course, I got her one, and she has actually done it a few times.

We all know our kids pick up a lot of our habits - good and bad. I hope that this is one of the good habits she will pick up from me and keep.

What good (or bad) habits are your kids picking up from you?

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Once again we had a lot going on last week. My husband took our daughter on a field trip, with her preschool class, to a local apple orchard on Wednesday. I had my Lasik post-op checkup that day so I wasn’t able to go, but it made for a fun daddy-daughter day!

They brought back a bag of the biggest apples I have ever seen! I’m not kidding. Oh, and they are so delicious. They make me never want an apple from the grocery store again. I’m not generally one to just sit down and eat an apple, but I almost craved those.

Oh and in case you’re curious, my eye appointment went very well. I am now seeing 20/15 in each eye. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen that well.

As far as the menu plan goes, I didn’t stick to it very well last week, but I’m hoping to do a better job this week.

Here’s what’s cooking this week:

~Breakfasts~

• Sunday - Cereal/Waffles/Muffins
• Monday - Bacon & Eggs
• Tuesday - Whole Wheat Buttermilk Pancakes
• Wednesday - Egg Sandwiches
• Thursday - Oatmeal Blueberry Applesauce Muffins
• Friday - Sausage & Buttermilk Biscuits (I’m cheating and using white flour. I have some in the pantry that I bought before I started using all whole wheat. It needs to be used.)
• Saturday - Chocolate Chip Granola Bars, Fruit

~Lunches~

• Lunches usually consist of leftovers from the night before, or grilled cheese quesadillas on whole wheat tortillas, fruit, and other quick fix foods.

~Dinners~

• Sunday - Chili Dogs, Kettle Chips
• Monday -Meatballs w/Mashed Potatoes & Gravy, Black eyed Peas
• Tuesday - Lasagna Casserole, Garlic Bread, Salad
• Wednesday - Steaks, Baked Potatoes, Corn
• Thursday - Baked Spaghetti, Cheesy Bread Sticks, Salad
• Friday -Campfire Chicken, Cornbread Muffins
• Saturday - Sloppy Joes on Whole Wheat Buns

What’s on your menu this week?

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One of the most frustrating parts of eating homemade foods is trying to figure out how many calories are in those casseroles, desserts, breads, etc….

Now you may think I’m crazy, but I keep a daily journal of everything I eat and drink and how many calories each item contains. Hey, it’s working for me.

Well, I recently ran across an awesome website that allows you to input all the ingredients of your recipe, along with the number of servings, and then it calculates the calories per serving. Isn’t that cool?

The name of the website is MyFitnessPal, and it’s totally free! As a matter of fact, you don’t even have to register in order to calculate recipe calories.

However, if you want to save your recipes, you do have to register, and that’s really easy to do also. I already have about four pages worth of saved recipes on the site.

I know most of you probably don’t keep up with all your calories like I do. Nevertheless, I thought you might like to know that if you are ever curious about the calories in that piece of chocolate cake or that super cheesy casserole, you can easily find out.

The above link is to the website homepage, but you can click here to get a direct link to the recipe calculator.

Of course, the website offers many other tools as well, including an online food journal and exercise diary. I personally only use the site for the recipe calculator and looking up various food items.

I find that keeping my information in a notebook with pencil and paper works best for me. It’s also a lot more portable than my laptop.

This is the form I created for myself to track my daily foods, exercise and even my water intake.

As you can see, I also added a to do list at the top and my menu plan for the day. I keep it all in a binder in my kitchen drawer, so it’s very easy to grab when I need it.

Here is the link to a printable copy of the form, if you would like to try it out for yourself.

Again, this may not be something useful for you, but if you know someone who is trying to monitor their calories, I’m sure they would find MyFitnessPal to be a very useful tool.