My darling son has started kinder this year and he loves it!  We live in a wonderful school district and his teacher is absolutely great.  I couldn’t ask for him to be at a better place right now.  We haven’t had any behaviorial issues and he seems to be learning so very much.

Work is work – its all good!  We have busy times and then not so busy times.  We are feeling a bit of the squeeze from the downturn in the economy but not so bad that we don’t have any breathing room.

My wonderful husband is working lots as it is but we are finding time as we can to spend with each other.  We are contemplating a trip to Las Vegas next year for our anniversary.  He isn’t the gambling type and I’m not so big on it – but I think it would be great for us to take a trip out there for a weekend, spend it together without the kiddo and perhaps walk about – take in the different things and let him take lots and lots of pictures.

Well in a week we head down to San Antonio for Thanksgiving and that will be wonderful.  I don’t want to move from Dallas but part of me still feels that San Antonio is my home and boy do I miss it at times.

On the weight loss side of the news I have continued to drop some poundage but not as fast as that first week – I am down 15 lbs since the date of surgery – 25 since the pre-op week and a total of 40 since I started the required 3 month diet and stuff before the surgery.  My clothes are getting baggy – I have more energy and I just feel better – This was one of the best decisions I could have made for myself and for my family.

I met with my surgeon about a week before to do all that pre op stuff and start my clear liquid diet.  That by itself was extremely hard and I didn’t completely stick to it – but I did ok – lost 10 lbs in that one week and come last Thursday – the 17th – I was at the surgery center at the butt crack of dawn ready to get my skinny on.

I showed up, got through the paperwork, did the preggo test just to make sure – standard for all girlies about to have the surgery – got hooked up to an iv and away we went.  One of my nurses looked like a younger version of Morgan Freeman – was kinda cool.  The last thing I remember was being wheeled into the operating room and looking about at all the cool stuff before I was off to never neverland.

I woke up hurting pretty good.  But after some wonderful pain killers, I was back to floating.  The nurses spoke with my husband about all the discharge info and we were home by noon (can’t remember exactly when – was a bit hazy).  I don’t remember a whole lot else of that day – can’t remember picking up pain meds or anything else.  I spent the weekend at home except for a few trips around the apartment complex to walk and a few short trips to the store.

The worse part of this whole thing has been the gas pains.  The incision pain sucks – and its not comfortable, but when you get into the right position, it kinda fades away.  The gas pains – not so much.  Its not like the “I gotta toot” type gas pains, but the gas from the surgery where they blow your stomach up to see and it gets trapped in your body.  It seems from the vast www that its a pretty common happening and tends to happen on the left side.  I wonder why?  I thought perhaps cause we lay/sleep/rest on our right sides to avoid the tenderness of the incision on the left side and the gas floats on up to the left cause its the highest.  Who knows – I’m probably far from the truth.

I headed back to work this morning.  So far so good, until the jerkface two cars behind me rearended the guy directly behind me and he knocked into me.  We weren’t going fast – braking cause there was traffic up ahead, but so not the way to start off the work week or the first day back to work after surgery.  An hour later after all the insurance exchanging and waiting on the police officer to do his thang – off to work I went.

Work went well – I made it until about 2:30 and then I started hurting.  I knew that if I didn’t leave soon – I would be hurting too much to get my butt home safely.  Picked up my little monkey man from school – spoke briefly with one of his teachers – and then stopped by wally world – I have wanted a digital scale for a while – found one that wasn’t too costly and now I am home.

According to the sparkling new scale – I have lost 7 lbs since surgery day.  Its kinda scary to see how little I can eat or drink right now.  Anything I eat is basically the consistency of baby food/mush.

I am off – gonna rest, read and pant over Dr. Gregory House as the season starts back up tonight.

The other thing that we found, and I personally still find fun to use is the blender bottle.  Its a heavy duty plastic cup with a flip top lid and a small springy type metal ball that goes in the cup to help mix stuff up.  It works really well, it takes a bit of time to get the protein mix to not have the lumps in it, but a heck of a lot less time then it would to use a spoon.  I have also used it with Crystal Light and those other drink mixes that you mix with a bottle of water and its perfect.  Nothing seems to stain it, its dishwasher safe, we just put the cup and lid in the top rack, the little ball in the silverware basket (just don’t add two balls to one spot in the basket – they somehow magically comingle and join evil forces and are a witch to get apart).  We first ordered them online from here and then I found them at a local market (more on that place later).

We have started to venture to the local farmer’s market recently and I have to say – I love it!  The experience itself is entertaining, lots of people selling veggies and fruits, herbs and plants and various other things.  We have found that most of the prices are very comparable to the grocery stores around here and the freshness and tastes are so much better with the food that we buy from the farmer’s market.   The best part of it – you can normally try just about anything before you buy it and its all good for you.  Our kiddo had never tried mangos before and with a little coaxing, he did, and its now his favorite fruit, he can devour a mango very quickly and then searches for more.  We have bought mushrooms and onions, brocolli and cauliflower, red potatoes, pineapples, plums, all sorts of berries, apples, oranges, romaine lettuce and spinach, and probably several more things that I can not remember and they all tasted better then what we have bought in the stores and were just prettier.  We are going to try and go at least once a month, not everything will last that long, but its great to support the local community and find new fruits/veggies for us to try.

There is so much to share – we found a farmer’s market that I absolutely love – the kiddo has learned how to swim underwater! – I just had my last appointment with the nutritionist and mid level physician for the lap band – going home to SA this weekend – and bunch of other stuff – there will be several posts coming in the next few days – a little about everything – so be patient and sorry it has been so long.

We have made our adult frozen beverages in them without a problem and this evening we tried fruit smoothies. After a ritual Weds. visit to Newflower Market to buy the fruits and veggies for the next week or so and a little extra to make smoothies with, we were on our way. Tonight we tried a berry smooth, strawberries, blackberries, raspberries and blueberries, a handful of each tossed in the blender with ice and a generous splash of orange juice and we were good to go.

The smoothie came out a deep dark purple and it took a bit of coaxing to get our kiddo to try it. His first response was “yuck”, immediately followed by “mmm that’s good”. I do think they taste good, and would probably be a great drink to have in the morning on the way to work. Fruit, juice, and ice, no sugars except for the natural sugars, nothing bad in it that I can see. The only thing that I don’t like about the smoothing would be the seeds from the berries, but there is no way that I can think of to solve that, a small price to pay for a healthy drink.

The blender works beautifully, there are no huge ice chunks like I kept getting with my blender and the little spout is pretty handy until you get to the very bottom. It does leave smaller ice pieces in the glass, so we have found that our thinner straws get clogged pretty quickly, but if we use a normal straw, there isn’t an issue. I haven’t risked putting it in the dishwasher, and honestly, its not that hard to hand wash if you do it right after you make your drinks. It has a cool wave action thing going that sucks everything from the top down into the bottom over and over so it mixes everything up pretty well.

I think tomorrow night we should try some of the other fruits, mix and match various fruits to see what new flavors we come up with.

The past few years we have tended to just roam around, check out the various shops and catch whatever shows were right there. This year, we tried something a wee bit different and tried to plan out what shows we would like to see and then just wandered about. We saw, in no particular order,The Nature of Mercy, a pretty cute little performance that let the kids get involved about sword fighting, Fool Hearty, a cute little comedic act with a husband/wife clown, Sholo the Nubian, a huge guy that stands guard throughout the faire but during his show, he recites entertaining poetry and warriors and something about how women were the evilest of all creatures or some such nonsense, we also wanted to watch the human chess match which we saw a bit of last year, but instead they just mock battled, which was still cool. We also caught a few other pieces of various acts as we walked around.

A tradition was passed on this day and it made my heart a wee bit sad. There is a great love of funnel cake in my family. Carnivals and fairs, circuses and rodeos, we would seek out and find the funnel cakes and gorge. Today, our dear sweet son fell in love with funnel cake as I mourned over the fact that it will probably be the last one I will ever have with the lap band surgery in the near future.

It was a good day had by all. Kiddo got to play on the play ground they have there for a while, ran around and enjoyed looking at various things, battled against Daddy with a nerf sword and got to go on a ride that spins you around and around. It seems our little daredevil takes after his mother as well with his love of fast rides and rides that go high.

We are home now – duh – no data plan on my phone, and gawds I would hate trying to type this stuff on a phone. We are all a little pink, me so more then my two men, feet are aching and my poor hubby crashed out on the bed with an ice pack for his knee as soon as he walked in the door, but we had fun and I am glad that we went this year.

Jonathan (my wonderful hubby with the british accent) suggested we try out a place we had never been before called Cafe Express that wasn’t too far down the road.  After a quick peek at the menu and where it was located, we got our son, Christopher, loaded into the car and away we went.

The cafe was located in a nice area of N. Dallas in a relatively fancy shopping area and the outside looked really nice.  The inside was relatively clean and while not packed, it wasn’t dead either.  There was a small olive/condiment bar and then the counter where you place your order.

We grabbed one of the menus and sat down for a bit to look over what we wanted so we didn’t hold up the line and after a few minutes, we decided that the pasta and cheese with fruit was for the kiddo, I was going to have the swiss cheese and baby bella mushroom burger and my hubby wanted the blue cheese and bacon burger, both burgers with fries and a side of ranch to dip said fries in (we tend to dip a lot of things in ranch btw).

After placing the order and receiving a little light up coaster for when our order was ready, we proceeded to the condiment bar, gathering pickles and olives, mayo and croutans to munch on before dinner arrived and got our drinks from the soda/tea selections.  The coaster lit up and we were ready for our burgers!

The entire order was a disappointment!  They got my burger wrong, giving me the mushroom and spinach burger, and while I do like spinach, I don’t like it on my burgers.  I got my two men settled with their food before taking mine up to the counter to get it fixed.

Sitting back down, I tried coaxing Christopher into eating his pasta and cheese before I tasted it myself.  I don’t blame him for not wanting it, it had absolutely no flavor to it.  With the exception of a bit of parmesan cheese grated on top, there was no cheese flavor to it at all.

Jonathan’s burger looked good except for a few spots of burnt bun, but hey, its a sacrifice if its a good burger.  It wasn’t.  The only flavor that came through was the blue cheese.  The hamburger meat itself had no flavor, no seasonings, nothing.  The bacon was almost inedible because it was so dang hard.

The lady from the counter brought my burger over, with fries that had gone cold, and it looked pretty good too, but no such luck.  The only flavor that really was there was the swiss cheese, and that was after I gave up trying to eat it as a burger and picked it apart.  The meat was flavorless, the mushrooms were bland, the tomato was just nasty looking so I wouldn’t taste it.

This brings me to our ranch.  We love ranch!  We dip our fries in it, we dip our burgers and sandwiches in it,  carrots, cucumbers, bbq chips, cheese (that would be my husband), on and on, we heart ranch.  Not all ranch is created equal and we know that.  Our fav tends to be the homemade ranch, mix sour cream with a package of hidden valley ranch dip mix and we are in heaven.  Each place had its own version of ranch dressing and most are tolerable.  Not this place!  There was such a vinegar taste to it that after one taste we had given up trying to find something to enjoy at this place.

We aren’t picky, we normally adapt relatively easily at new places and find something we like, and we just couldn’t.  I ended up coming home and sending a note through the website about the food and how it was just not appetizing.  More then likely, nothing will come of it and that’s ok, but we know that we will never be back there again!

A while back we had purchased a set of bath towels from there, they are really pretty colors, and we got the blue and red bath towels (bath sheets), but they were all out of the gray. They had the gray in today and I got the final missing towel! I really like these towels, on one side they are super soft and cuddly, but don’t dry so well, on the other, they are still nice and soft, but a bit coarser and tend to do a heck of a better job drying.

We picked up some new bath mats as well since ours seems to be on their last leg, the backing on one of them is almost completely gone and they are just plain old. We got a dark red bath mat and a medium shade of green. They match really well with our shower curtain that is a hodge podge of colors.

One of the main reasons that I had wanted to venture to Ikea was to pick up some more dish sets that we had bought a while back. When our kiddo was a wee one and just beginning to eat, we had purchased a set of plastic cups, bowls and silverware, they were so little and so cute and I just knew he would love them, and he did! Well fast forward a few years later, and he has outgrown them except for holding a bit of snack food when he wants a snack, and for holding spices and such when we are cooking and arranging all our ingredients. We are missing most of them through mishaps in the dishwasher or just plain losing them.

I will hopefully, in the next few months, be having lap band surgery done, and while fooling around in the kitchen the other day, realized that the cups and bowls would be perfect for my meals after the surgery. Once back into the routine of eating, I have read numerous times over how people adjust better to having smaller plates, bowls, cups etc and don’t feel like they are deprived. So we purchased 2 sets of the bowls, cups and plates. I am hoping that these will help, as a boost from the pretty colors, portion control from knowing how much each of the little cup/bowl holds and the plates that are no bigger then a salad plate.

I am proud to say that I did resist the urge to buy more candles. I have issues, major issues, when it comes to candles and bath stuff. Nevermind I already have what seems like 100 million candles we haven’t used yet, or am overflowing with smelly stuff from Victoria’s Secret & Bath & Body Works, it takes major will power not to add more to my collection. But today, I fought against the dark side and won! (It helped that my husband the whole time was right behind me going “No, No, no more candles, we have enough candles, keep moving Steph.)