Workout recap, meal plan & sunflowers

Greetings!

(N planted this sunflower as a seed, and gave it to me for Mother's Day this year... look how it has grown!!)

We just spent a lovely abbreviated weekend visiting with my parents and grandparents, who are up from Florida for the summer.

A few snapshots from last week... we did a couple of trial days of homeschool so I could test out our schedule, get used to curriculum and see how things went with three girls to keep occupied.

Boy are they eager to learn!

N begs to do work from all of her workbooks and loves every subject.

L is obsessed with the planets right now and chose to write about them in her journal.

C, heading down the stairs with her little violin strapped to her back, ready to start a day of "school" (mostly free play for her, actually).

There are tweaks to make in the schedule, mostly regarding how to split my time among the three girls and maximize one-on-one attention, and I have a bit of "homework" to do myself getting activities ready and photocopies made, etc.  I'm also going to change our curriculum focus from my original plan a little bit in a few areas.  However, I have learned in our trial days that the girls' zeal for learning and willingness to complete whatever I throw at them will not be a problem.  My energy level keeping up with their enthusiasm may turn out to be an issue, but their excitement about school will not be.  Hooray for that!

Here's our meal plan for the week:

Sunday breakfast: in CT

Sunday lunch: in CT

Sunday supper: on the road or leftovers

Monday breakfast: stove top oatmeal, your choice of toppings

Monday Lunch: cheese quesadillas, wholly guacamole

Monday Supper: ricotta pasta with spinach

Tuesday breakfast: leftover oatmeal

Tuesday lunch: yogurt with dried fruit, apples with peanut butter

Tuesday supper: leftover pasta

Wednesday breakfast: smoothies, peanut butter on soaked bread

Wednesday lunch: sandwiches on soaked bread, fresh fruit

Wednesday Supper: teriyaki chicken with soba noodles & broccoli

Thursday breakfast: crockpot steel cut oats

Thursday lunch: scrambled eggs and fresh fruit

Thursday Supper: tomato soup and sweet potato fries

Friday breakfast: leftover steel cut oats

Friday lunch: out at the Science Museum... sandwiches or bought lunch

Friday supper: leftovers

Saturday meals: on the Cape with friends!

...aaaaand a quick workout recap (sorry to bore you guys with all this... but I like keeping myself accountable to my training plan here!)

Monday: 6.01 miles at 10:14 pace
Tuesday: Crazy 8 workout and 15 minutes on the treadmill at 9:07 pace
Wednesday: 4.6 miles at 10:35 pace
Thursday: 50-minute pilates workout
Friday: off
Saturday: 10.7 miles at 10:38 pace

My 10.7 on Saturday felt much less hard than 9 miles did last Saturday.  I was conscious about taking it really slow to start, since the first leg of my usual long loop is straight uphill (just shy of a 300-foot elevation gain in two miles!).  Last week I really burned myself out for the rest of the run by going too fast up those hills.  Much improved this week, and I think my overall stamina is improving thanks to those strength workouts during the week.

Since I did almost 11 miles for the long run this week I may bump up to 12 this week and put myself a week ahead of schedule.  It's going to be a busy week, though, so we will see how things go.  I'll check in with y'all again next week on the training... t-minus 7 weeks to the race!