Living The Healthy Life… Or Trying To

So far I have absolutely been horrible at the new year resolution of blogging more, still hoping to get better at this! 🙂 Let me catch everyone up to speed with what has been going on in the month of January and February. Loren got a smoker from his parents for Christmas, so that has been like the best thing ever. For super bowl, Loren smoked a pulled pork and it was amazing of course! These past two months have basically been us getting back into the swing of things with school, and hanging out with family. A couple of really exciting things have happened though, one, my cousin got confirmed last Monday and she asked me to be her sponsor. That was a really special time for me in my life and I was so honored that she asked me to be there on her journey. The other really exciting thing is that my wonderful co- worker (the one that I helped throw the gender party for) had her beautiful baby boy, Bradley Royce Hansen, he was born on February 20th. My whole team went to go see them the next day. It was the greatest thing being able to hold this sweet little boy; I cannot wait to see him as he grows.

How precious is he????

SO proud of her!

As you know, another resolution that I have is to loose some weight and try and have a better/ healthier lifestyle. I have started running again which has always been a love hate relationship with me. I love it because it is such a great way to loose weight, but hate it because, well it is running. I have also been trying to eat a lot healthier, which is hard because I love food. Loren is really great about eating healthy so that is a plus for me. I still eat what I want for the most part, but a big thing in portion control in our life. Everything is okay for you to eat if you control your portions. so that is a big part of my healthy eating. Another tip is getting sauces on the side. If you go out to eat and your dish comes with a sauce ask for it on the side. You would not believe how much of the sauce you actually eat (hint: it is not as much as they drench your food in). For the most part, during the week we eat at home. I got very lucky because Loren loves to cook, so he does most of the cooking. We are usually pretty good about having all meats in the house, we love to mix it up. We typically eat chicken and really the only replacement we do is ground turkey for ground beef, to me it tastes the same.

Lately we have been into cauliflower. I know we have all seen the pinterest posts about mashed cauliflower and cauliflower pizza, etc, so we wanted to see what all the rage is about. So the couple of things we have tried in rice cauliflower and mashed cauliflower. Now, the rice cauliflower is great. You basically chop the cauliflower up in the food processor and the put it in a skillet on the stove to flavor to your liking. The great thing about this is you can choose to season as you like. The past couple of meals where we have used it when we made Asian food. For the first meal we had it with stir fry which was amazing, instead of the rice we did the cauliflower, couldn’t tell the difference. The second time we did fried rice cauliflower, which basically consisted of some soy sauce, chicken, and egg with some few other spices and seasonings. It was great! As far as the mashed cauliflower goes, not the biggest of fans. I think more of its natural taste comes through. When I eat it as rice, we are mixing other things with it so you kinda forget you are eating cauliflower. With the mashed cauliflower, not so much. I just went about making the mashed cauliflower as I would regular mashed potatoes. We boiled the cauliflower, mashed it (I put it in the food processor to chop it up more), and added milk, butter, and salt. One thing I noticed when making the mashed cauliflower, it pretty much soaks up the milk; I ended up adding more milk than I would if I was making mashed potatoes. It wasn’t the worst thing ever, but I don’t know if I could replace mashed potatoes with cauliflower. It was my first go at it so I might just need to look up some recipes to see if I can improve. If you are looking for an alternative or trying to find replacement food for those heavy starches,  I would definitely give cauliflower a try since it is way lower in carbs and calories than rice and potatoes. I am excited that we gave cauliflower a try and can’t wait to try out more recipes. If you have had any success with cauliflower please leave a comment, I would love to try it out!

Until next time…

Love always,

Amie

Bobcats, Band, Babies, and Boo

So I have blinked and magically it is Oct… scratch that, DECEMBER!! I cannot even believe that is coming out of my mouth, where has the time gone?? Things in the Gray household are trucking along, we are two weeks out from Christmas, and it cannot come soon enough. I am not going to lie Thanksgiving was great, but the bad thing about Thanksgiving break is that you get a little taste of what is to come with winter break, and it is so hard to get back into the swing things. The other exciting thing that has happened is that Loren and I have celebrated our ONE YEAR ANNIVERSARY!!!! It was definitely a very exciting time for us! We are took a quick little trip to start our break, and the traveled down to McAllen to spend Thanksgiving with his family. All of which I will post about in a later post. Now to get you caught up for the month of October (and eventually November). I promise not to keep you all waiting this long ever again!!

We started out the beginning of the month with a trip to San Marcos for the Homecoming football game. As you may or may not know, both Loren and I went to Texas State, and we often love to visit the area to see football games and catch up with old friends. It was an absolutely beautiful weekend with our first taste of fall weather. Being from Texas, we really don’t experience the seasons of fall or spring, we just kinda go in between summer and winter. We had an awesome weekend and were able to see our friends and former teachers.

Loren and I at the game.

After we got back from our wonderful weekend, it was back to work. Loren is a band director at an intermediate school, and every other year the intermediates get together at the district stadium, and watch the high schools march their competition show. At the end the intermediates and high schools perform a couple of songs together, it is super cute and I enjoy seeing all the kids. It is also a great way for the kids to see what is in store if they continue band into high school. Here are a few pictures from the night.

All the students in band in CCISD

Now we move onto the babies, are you keeping up? 🙂 My wonderful co- worker bestie is expecting a beautiful baby in March. We both started teaching the same year, and it was wonderful having her as we made it through our first year. Mid October is when she found out the gender of her baby. During one of our morning phone conversations (yes, we have conversations in the morning on the way to work), I asked her if she was going to do anything special for her gender reveal, and she was like “well I was just going to invite my family over for dinner and tell them then.” The party planner in my died a little, I am a person that will through a party for a premier of a T.V. show, so I told her that I would take care of helping her get a few things together. My philosophy is that a few special touches can go a long way for the important things in your life. Plus, it is her first baby and she needs to go all out! So I wanted to share a few pictures from that night.

Cookies in the shape of onesies that my aunt made, she gave them out as favors.

How precious is the table? Here is the cake that she cut into to reveal the gender, and the cuts we used to take a group picture to see what team everyone was on.

This is the entry table. As you came in, we had the guests tally their vote of whether it was a boy or girl, and then they grabbed a clothespin (which we painted the tips of using a paint pen) and pinned it on their shirt so we could see what their vote was.

The beautiful star of the show with her Old Wives Tales chalkboard sign (you cannot even tell she is preggers).

To top all of it off, she is also pregnant with her sister, which I think is the most exciting thing. They are both having boys, so after the reveal they were able to take some really cute pictures.

How cute? Such a special thing to be able to share with a sister!

Haha the hubbies had to show off their bellies too!

It was such an absolute honor to be a part of their wonderful night. I was so happy to be able to help plan to make the night special. I cannot wait to meet this precious baby boy come March.

Now we close the month of October with Halloween, which is a personal favorite because it is the start of fall; a season I have grown to love very much. At school, we had to dress up as a team based off of book characters. We choose the book “The Day the Crayons Quit.” If you have not read this book you definitely should. It is super cute!

How cute do we look?

Later that night we went with some friends to the Museum of Natural Science for Spirits and Skeletons. It was definitely a lot of fun, but for what we paid it would not be an event we attend every year. I would definitely recommend it if you haven’t been.

Loren and I, we went for the 1920s theme this year.

A picture of the group, we had such a wonderful time!

All in all, it has been a great fall semester for Loren and I. We are definitely looking forward to Winter break and spending time with family. Hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving!

Love Always,

Amie