Perfect Corn

Since my Brown Eyed Girl has been little, she has loved to draw and color. I can not count the number of times she has sat at the kitchen table for over two hours coloring. She has done this since the time she was old enough to hold a crayon or marker. She loves art, it's in her blood.

It's in her genes...

My Brown Eyed Girl's teachers have been commenting all year about what the little artist she is becoming. Every time there is a new craft or project to make she is giddy with joy. All smiles. Arts and crafts are her favorite part of the day - socializing a close second.

She is a perfectionist when it comes to art - in a good way. She pays special attention to the directions and works diligently to complete the project so it looks exactly like the teacher's sample.

When learning the letter 'O', the kids made these cute little owls.

She was the only one to nail the face and put the little feathers on the tummy of the owl.

The most amazing masterpiece she has made so far is her ear of corn. The kids had to cut out a little picture of corn and then glue green tissue paper on the leaves and real corn kernels on the ear of corn.

This was my Brown Eyed Girls corn...

I think it's okay to be a proud momma when looking at her corn compared to the other examples from the class.

The project was meant to be three dimensional. She just REALLY made it three dimensional. 

Her teachers said they were in awe watching her glue and layer the corn kernels so meticulously. Taking her time to position each kernel just right.

They were worried what would happen when they actually picked up the project. Would the kernels all fall off? Would my Brown Eyed Girl freak out?

But they didn't fall off. And her corn hung on the classroom wall for two weeks without desinagrating.

Amazing patience.
Artistic ability.

The teachers also said they have never had a student complete this project in such a way to really make it look like a REAL ear of corn.

I told them she might just have a little more understanding of corn than the other kids do.

Thank you Iowa corn and Grandpop!

Training Your Bird Dog

Being a successful hunter means building a relationship with your bird dog. It takes hours of training, and hard work with your dog on the fundamentals like listening to commands, obedience and retrieving. You want to build a relationship with your dog. 

It's good to purchase a few retrieving dummies to use specifically for when you are practicing your hunting commands and exercising your bird dog.

A good hunting dog will come to recognize this dummy and associate it with working and hunting. The sight of the retrieving dummy should rev him up and get him excited. Motivated.

So much so that he will do anything for the bird. Make sure that you are always alert and keep your dog behaving. Don't allow him to snatch the dummy from you when he sees it.

Training takes patience. Don't get frustrated if he misbehaves. 

And don't give up.

It is good practice to ask your dog to sit and stay while you ready yourself. Teaching them to hold and wait is important in hunting.

You don't want your dog to scare up the birds before you are ready. 

He should be focused on your every move, your every command. Practice having him sit still and wait.

When he is focused and you are ready, release the dummy and give him the command for your dog to, "Fetch it up."

 Your dog should retrieve the dummy and bring it back to you. You want to be able to ask him to, "Give" or "Drop it" by command.  He should relinquish the dummy to you with ease.

Often, this takes the most practice (and patience.) When dogs are excited about retrieving, they want to hold on to their prize and can be reluctant to hand it over.

 
Stay calm and ask again if need be. 

Repetition is the key to successful retrieving. Use the same approach every time and the same commands. Keep asking him to drop it until he does.

Be positive.

A positive attitude equals success and a fantastic foundation.
Hunting and working with your dog is fun!

It's all about good communication.

Good body language and consistent commands. 

Work on good throws and don't forget to let the dog do the work...

Oh Boji....

 

Food, A Four Letter Word

When I find myself standing in the kitchen, chilly, and I realize I have been staring at the open fridge for an unknown period of time, searching - for what I am not sure - and finding nothing, I feel empty inside. I close the fridge, shuffle some clutter on the counter trying to look for a secret message on a piece of paper that doesn't exist. Direction. Before I know it, I am standing in front of the open pantry door, unaware that my feet have traveled and my mind and body are on auto pilot.

I am not even hungry.

But I find myself doing this several times a day. And by several, I mean more than three but less than... well I am not really sure. 

Eventually, my boredom - because that's the only reason I can think of why I do this - overcomes me and I reach. I reach for a piece of cheese, a handful of crackers, a cookie....

and I eat.


I am a time strapped, working mom of two who struggles every day to just step away from the doughnut and put down that extra scoop of spaghetti noodles, because let's face it five is already enough. I have never been "obese," but I live on a perpetual merry-go-round of eating, gaining weight, fat pants, low self-esteem, working out, losing weight, feeling better, indulging in little splurges I now feel I deserve... rinse and repeat. I am getting dizzy and I want off the ride!

I want to eat healthy, live healthy so I can really be healthy. Not just for myself, but for my kids. I want to have the energy to run and play and do fun things. I want to be fun.

I don't want to be "the fat mom."

I actually think that that scares me more than high blood pressure and heart disease.

Right now at 4 and 2, my Brown Eyed Girl and Mr Blue Eyes look at me and all they see is... Mommy. I am love. I am cool. I am smiles and laughter. I am beautiful. Yet everyday as their little minds grow and they are exposed to this unforgiving and real world, they look at things a little different. Nothing prepares you for a silly laugh, and a run-by love spanking as your daughter says, "Hahaha, Mommy I just spanked your BIG butt!"

She is funny. She is carefree. She is honest. BIG is as relative as saying I have LONG hair or BROWN eyes. Descriptive words. Innocent adjectives.

To her, my butt is BIG.

Daddy snickers just a little from the other room and I am embarrassed to even lock eyes with the man who sees my birthday suit every day. I cringe and feel like crying inside even though I know she wasn't being malicious, just playfully honest.

The next morning, I go for a run and eat fruit for breakfast.
By 10:00 am I have visited the fridge and pantry several times and I am now sneaking a bowl of ice cream, eating it quickly and discarding the evidence... and no one is even home.

Sneaking food.

I am an adult. The shopper of groceries. The chef to my kitchen. In my own home, I sneak what I make and what I provide. Just one more little bite after I have already eaten while doing the dishes and transferring the left overs into a smaller container. With a slip of the hand, I enjoy a cookie, or more recently a piece of Halloween candy, on my way out to feed horses. A bounty of empty rappers hidden in the trash, hay bale strings choking away the evidence. I do these things as if I am not entitled to food. Definitely not the candy, cookies, ice cream and other sugary false joys. Therefore, I steal them. I commit petty theft in my very home.

And it is... petty.

It is an indescribable feeling to not feel entitled to something. I despise not being able to sit down and enjoy food, every kind of food imaginable, and not worry about calorie counts, portion sizes, one more helping, one more bite, hiding. I don't want to wake up in the morning and step on the scale and cringe. I hate tight pants. 

Willpower is hard. It's harder alone when you are the only one under your roof that has to battle with it every day. It feels unfair that your husband can eat a whole pizza and lose ten pounds while you only have to glance at it, smell it, while nibbling on celery and wake in the morning to see you have gained five. Then secretly, I think I hate him, just a little. I know it's not his fault. I am jealous.

In my frustrations, I eat. Secretly, I eat. I eat emotionally. Not binging. I just steal tiny little moments of false satisfaction. It's not every day. It just depends where I am on the merry-go-round.

After lunch with a friend this week, we talked about our relationship with dieting and food - let's face it ladies, most of us think about food (what we can/should/should not/can't believe we just ate) probably as much (if not more) as we think about our husbands, even our families, during the day. So it is a relationship. Sometimes it's healthy and beautiful. But most times it's abusive. It slaps us around, leaves us feeling small and insignificant. Unworthy of it's love. We'd never really let someone treat us this way, make us feel this way, not in real life. But we do... for food. We stay on the ride. Round and round fluctuating up and down.

Why would anyone do that?

I have never been addicted to drugs or alcohol, but I think I am smart enough to recognize the same addictive behaviors I have with food. I let the addiction to that five minutes of false joy overcome me, cloud my judgment. I know deep down when I am eating too much, eating the wrong things, but I do it anyways. It is an addiction.

I don't think food was always my vice. Once upon a credit card debt time and 8734010 black trash bags full of clothes off to Good Will, I was a retail therapy addict. Clothes, shoes, and things filled the voids and were used to cope with day-to-day troubles and uncomfortable situations. Failed a Chem test, a new pair of jeans made it all better. Fight with my friend, new shoes. Parents on my back, new tack or piece of equipment for the horse. I would open my closet, bulging and overflowing, and stand there staring, finding nothing. Absolutely nothing to wear. Especially on the hard days when my self-esteem was at rock bottom. If it wasn't in there... I had to go find it and off the the mall I went.

Then it all stopped.

I was so horrified of having Handy Man find out about my small amount of debt and addiction to shopping as our relationship got more serious that I cut up the plastic and slowly paid off the years of acquired debt. Slow and painful. Much like diet and exercise after years of eating.

Handy Man is your classic "Meat and Potatoes" kind of guy except he doesn't really eat potatoes and if he can't cut the meat with a fork then he doesn't like it. Not because the meat is not tasty or cooked well, but because it simply takes too much effort to use two utensils - a fork and an knife. He is a Neanderthal is a simple man and if the meal is made from a noodle and ground beef he loves it. Handy Man can eat more spaghetti than should be humanly possible. It amazes me, even after 13 years together. Pasta. Pizza. Noodles. Ground Beef. All of the stick-to-your-ribs comfort foods that are jammed packed with carbohydrates and calories. Every night. Every meal. He is thin, fit without having to exercise and consumes thousands of calories every day.

We rarely eat vegetables as a family.

As infants, my children graduated from each stage of baby food eagerly experimenting with finger foods of all kinds. They were good little eaters. Their current stage is an exclusive diet of noodles, poptarts, hot dogs and chicken nuggets. Vegetables are four letter words. Ranch dressing is my only hope for experimental eating. My Brown Eyed Girl would live off bread and butter, just plain bread and butter, and chicken nuggets if I would let her. Mr Blue Eyes is still a little more willing, unless Sissy sabotages the meal by calling it gross or disgusting.

We struggle most meals. One more battle in our day. Over food. Especially with my Brown Eyed Girl. I just want to put food in front of her after a long day and have her eat it. When I voiced my concerns with the pediatrician this year, I was given a look of sheer terror and told that, "We don't fight over food." The lasting results are food issues, self-esteem issues and the leading causes of anorexia and bulimia in young girls.

I grabbed a bottle of wine and thought about jumping. I have been so worried my own self-image, thinking that if I was fit and healthy and ate good things every day she would too. If I am not "the fat mom" they will be healthy, have a healthy relationship with food. In the meantime as we struggle and push her to eat the broccoli on her plate and the rest of her macaroni and cheese we are inadvertently still creating a stigma with food. Eat when you aren't hungry, because I told you to and you can't waste your food. Vegetables = turmoil and arguing and a battle of wills.

No more fighting over food. If all I cook is healthy meals, eventually they will eat it. Food for fuel after all. That is my new mantra. Food for Fuel!

I have sat my husband down and said, "I need you do be on my side, do this with me. I am going to cook healthy meals for the family, because I want to eat what my family eats. I want to be healthy as a family." The first recipe I cooked was a success. Everyone was eating. I smiled, proud of myself, and told Handy Man how many calories were in each serving and he looked at me with desperation in his eyes. He asked me if these types of meals were going to be on the menu every night. If he meant healthy meals, then yes, they were.

As I smiled happily, he asked me if I was trying to kill him.

I just have one question as we enter the next seven months of sugary, cookie, candy nightmare that accompanies the holidays... How do I get off the merry-go-round but not feel like I am trapped on a hamster wheel for the next 30 years of my life?

How do I get my family to eat healthier? To BE healthier?

Iowa '13

A few weeks ago the kids and I made the 14 hour drive back to Iowa for my cousins wedding and to see Grand-pop and Grandma Joan. To most, the idea of spending 14 hours in a vehicle with a 2 and 4 year old might seem like a nightmare. Crazy talk.

For the most part, the drive really isn't that bad. Sure it lacks scenic variety. Though, this time of year we did see a lot of beautiful fall color that painted the highway. And sure, I get "Are we there yet?" 16546841698463541676416354687 times before we even hit the Nebraska state line. However, the pro's definitely out-weigh the cons.

The Top 20 Highlights of Our Iowa Trip 2013.

(in no particular order, other than chronological, in the order of events, because it makes my life easier.)

20. The Suburban celebrated 200,000 miles on the old odometer.

. 

19. I fell in love with low altitude running in the land of corn and soybeans. Because it was easy and I could run farther and breath easier than the Mile High. 

The first day out on a run with my dad's dog JC, we accidentally found our way here...

and I enjoyed a spontaneous little visit with my Grandpa Roy while the birds welcomed in the morning.

18. I found somehting for Handy Man to build me when we get home near our pond.

17. Speaking of ponds... the old fishing pond is much more enjoyable in the spring/summer.

In October, fishing is a little chilly in Iowa. Your hands turn numb before you can even catch a bite.

Grand-pop, you hook him and I'll be ready to real him in. 

It's windy and cold fishen.
But, Rah-Rah and Grandma Joan make cute Eskimos.

16. Frogs are cool and Gran-pop is a mighty frog catcher.

15. Uncle Mat is the coolest uncle because Uncle Mat is a Firefighter. 

There is nothing quite like a VIP tour of the fire station.

They come with fire truck bucket ladder rides!

Real life fire poles and even a little demo by the fireman himself!

Uncle Mat wears a lot of gear as a fireman.

Mommy will never be a firefighter. Frumpy does not suit me. I will save the uniform for the hunky guys. 

Well, can I just get the souvenir jacket?

14. Aunt Rah Rah has amazing patience and fancy hair styling equipment.

13. Hotels are amazing and fun. Spending the night in one is so cool when you are a kid. Especially one with a swimming pool.

I really must stick to being the narrator and use a little more anonymity with the picture selection process. Yikes!

Unfortunately, the next hotel I book will wither have two rooms or three beds.
Please select your sleeping partner....

Miss I-am-hot-like-my-father-and-there-shall-be-no-covers-tonight-while-I-sleep-in-the-middle-of-the-bed-so-my-teddy-can-have-his-own-side-and-you-may-have-what-is-left-over

or....

Mr I-prefer-side-ways-sleeping-and-relocate-myself-at-minimum-2154643-times-thoughout-the-night-and-I-kick-and-I-snore-just-a-little-bit-too.

Two Rooms or Three Beds...

12. You can never have enough pennies for a wishing well.

11. These two love to party!

 

10. It's always great seeing Uncle Kurt and Aunt Marilee!

9. Nothing can keep the kids from playing at Grand-pop's park, not even a four letter word like C-O-L-D.

8. Mini-pop

7. Farmers feed America and farming is amazing. Especially when Grandma Joan and Grand-pop arrange for the kids and I to get a ride in a combine during harvesting. 

What a valuable lesson for kids. Riding in a HUGE machine like that. Watching corn being cut. These two were mesmerized!

I have seen several combines in fields before. But to be right next to one is incredible. They are HUGE.

 

 

They even got a little souvenir.

6. Grand-pop has candy machines at his office and they are funny looking.

5. Grand-pop has a fun bucket truck too!

4. You are never too old to have your Daddy take care of you, like washing your car.

3. After a week of big trucks and bucket rides these kids are fearless!

Not even a big, old, swinging bridge over a river scares them. Not even when Grand-pop is being a turkey and jumping and swinging the bridge scaring the crap out of Mommy.

Fearless!

2. The ride home was not Armageddon. Probably because Handy Man wasn't with us and we could just swing by and pick up lunch... 

and then find a little park and enjoy our selves for a while and stretch before hitting the road again.

1. We spent an amazing weekend with the Eveleth Family.

I take it back. 

I think there are actually 21 Top Highlights of our trip. And the 1 is really my best. It's the 1 that means the most to my heart. It's the 1 that has the most probability to never happening again...

Uncle Mat and Grand-pop can always take us up in their fancy trucks again. I am sure Grandma Joan can arrange another tractor ride and the old fishing pond will see us again next year. Sure, Alex only gets married once, but there will be more weddings and dancing and hotel stays in our future. Sure, the memories will be a little different each time as the kids get older and that pure innocent 'WOW' factor fades away over the years. But they are all repeatable. Obtainable. Possible. 

I know that in ten years it will be the fire house, bucket rides and combine ride that the kids remember the most. And I love that! I love that they will have those memories of Iowa. 

But for me, this was my 1. My Top Highlight.

I am blessed that although my visits are few with my Grandma Alice since she has developed Alzheimers, they are always special!

I receive updates on her progressive decline and loss of cognitive ability though Grand-pop. I prepared myself for the reality that she would not know my name, probably would not recognize my face, and definitely would not know my children. But none the less, I looked forward to our visit. I looked forward to the importance of memories. For me. For my Brown Eyed Girl and Mr Blue Eyes. 

While the kids and I waited for the nurse to bring my Grandma to the family sitting area for our visit, this kids and I checked out the cool little activity stations in the Memory Care Unit.

While the kids were trying on old hats and playing with antique phones, something very special happened, my Grandma recognized my dad and called him by name. I missed the moment, but I know it moved Grand-pop. It had been a very long time since she had recognized her son and called him by name.

A tiny miracle.

Special.

We sat in the family area and visited with my Grandpa. She was excited, happy and smiling. Watching my kids interact with her was amazing. All smiles as they demonstrated their newest learned tricks for her. Summer-salts, cartwheels, dancing. They smiled and laughed. My kids hugged her and kissed her and my Grandma's eyes twinkled with love and affection.

The show would not be complete without a little singing from our little entertainer, my Brown Eyed Girl. As my Brown Eyed Girl started singing I'm A Little Tea Pot, my Grandma Alice joined right in and sang the words, in tune, with my Brown Eyed Girl.
Every word.
And they smiled and laughed when they were done.

Beautiful.

My sister had her 'new' Polaroid camera with her and she was taking little snapshots of our visit. A little something to leave with our Grandma to remind her of our visit.

On the bottom of each one, Rah Rah wrote the date and who was in the picture as a reference. My Grandma was holding the pictures in her hands for a while when she glanced down and must have read the words to herself. Quietly, and with a tone of realization, she said, "Christi!" out loud. And she smiled. She smiled at Christi.

God is good.

As the kids played on the floor, we all watched. No one needing to really say anything. Just be there. Sharing the moment.

The kids started playing with my Grandma's walker and Grand-pop started teasing my Brown Eyed Girl by moving the walker at the last minute from where she had positioned it. This went on a few times, back and forth, my Brown Eyed Girl scolding Grandpop to stop. As my little girl started to get frustrated with Grand-pop's teasing she said, "Grand-pop! Stop it!" one last time. She possitioned the walked just right. And.... he moved it again!

Without skipping a beat, my Grandma looked right at my dad and said, "You don't listen very well do you?" She did so with a look and tone, perfected after seven kids. His expression was priceless. You bet he had heard that from her many times before.

The mind is amazing.

And I am so thankful for the memories.