Today

My day:

Get up at 5:30am (actually slightly before). Wake up kids. Drive Ken to the airport. We used some more of our tax refund to get him a plane ticket to Hawaii, because his dad sent us an email about his poor health, and we want to make sure Ken (at least) gets to see him again.

After dropping Ken off at the airport, we came back and had breakfast at McDonald's. Because (1) we had very little groceries in the house and (2) I figured letting the kids play in the Playland area would be a good way to kill time until morning Mass. The McDonald's is very close to our parish.

So then we went to the 9am Mass for Ash Wednesday. There's nothing to make me appreciate having Ken come to Mass with us so much as having to take all five kids without him. They were, however, rather better than usual today. Maybe I should let them run around Playland for an hour and a half every Sunday morning before Mass? Gabe was decidedly noisy, though. He kept wanting to talk loudly about everything.

Then we went grocery shopping. (See point 1 above). Savi hurt her finger somehow (while kneeling on the floor with her hand on the cart - but I don't see how she could have gotten it run over or pinched, so I don't know how it happened) and ended up crying (loudly, obnoxiously) for a fair amount of the time. Fortunately, there weren't too many people in the store on a Wed. morning.

Oh, and this guy who worked at the grocery store was very surprised that Elijah and Savi are not twins. Yes, sadly, my almost-7 year old is the size of his just-turned-5 sister. I was delighted when I found some yogurt with 6 grams of fat per container.  Each time I go shopping lately, I try to find high-fat yogurt for Elijah, because he's been into eating yogurt lately, and I want to fatten his skinny self up any way I can. But usually, 90% of Safeway's selection is fat-free, and the highest fat is still billed as "low-fat", maybe 2 or 2.5 g/serving. I bought some Yo-Baby (whole milk) banana yogurt last time because it had 4g/serving, but he didn't like it. (I tasted some - it was the creamiest, best tasting yogurt I have ever had). So I was happy to find the new 6g/serving yogurt, and we picked out several for Elijah to try.

Anyhow, then we went home and crashed. The kids have spent the rest of the day watching Netflix on the iPad and playing Kinectimals and such. I've spent most of the rest of the day reading various articles on the blog sour salty bitter sweet and trying to wrap my head around the question of what I want to do about food; what food claims am I going to believe, and how am I going to let it affect my life?  I'm rereading the book Real Food by Nina Planck, in an attempt to wrestle with this question better. I think I might post another post putting my thoughts so far down, so I can remember them.