Quick Takes, Back to School Edition

Let's do some chatting, quick takes style!

--1--

Today I have been prepping a ton of food for school lunches, which we will be packing beginning on Tuesday!  We will now have four girls that have to have a lunch packed (well, J only on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but she still needs lunch foods at home too!) and two snacks each day.  I got a lot of inspiration from a couple of posts I read around the interwebs and so today I made some homemade bagels, meatballs...

...baked three loaves of bread, and made homemade sunbutter for C.  I'm trying to think outside the sandwich because last year many a sandwich came home totally untouched so I think the hidden message being sent to me there is that sandwiches are so five years ago.  I doubt that this level of food preparation can happen every weekend but, if these items are well-received, store-bought bagels and meatballs would do in a pinch.  More preservatives and bad ingredients, yes, and harder to find gluten- and dairy-free, but... acceptable.

If any Mamas out there have any other non-sandwich lunchbox ideas, I'd happily accept them!  Last year if I was feeling creative we did a lot of hot foods in Thermoses, like soup or chicken nuggets or spaghetti, and those tended to be a big hit.

Speaking of Thermoses, I purchased a couple of new ones on Amazon so now we have one for each girl.  I also stocked up on reusable snack bags and got some cheapo versions of the yumboxes we got last year, so we'll have a second set to use while the first set is being washed (meaning we can put them in the dishwasher and Mama doesn't have to hand wash them every day like last year).  So I think we are pretty well set to have an efficient lunch-packing experience, as well as keeping our plastic bag usage to a minimum!

--2--

Speaking of baking, I have taken to baking all of our bread again this summer, as I have done on and off throughout married life to save money.  Resurrecting my old breadmaker has made this task much easier.  We were going through about 3-4 loaves of gluten free bread a week (yes, my girls love bread) and at nearly $6 per loaf it was a significant chunk of our grocery bill.  Using my much-beloved gluten-free bread machine recipe has saved us almost $20 a week on the grocery bill.  Yay!  Homemade bread is so much better for us, too... when you look at the ingredient list on a loaf of store-bought bread and it's miles long, then you go home and look at a homemade bread recipe and realize it's basically just water, flour, yeast, sugar, and salt... well, it's motivating.  So, there's my soap box for the day.  Make more bread :)

Of course I don't have delusions that I'll be able to keep this up all year, either... I'm sure that by May I'll be feeling like a plastic bag full of Captain Crunch is enough for lunch.  LOL.  But I'm gonna try!

--3--

The girls helped me with some of the cooking today (N and L made the meatballs themselves as well as shaping all the bagels after the dough had risen).  The rest of the day has been lots of biking and a sort of Nintendo Wii binge since we all know we're not going to have time for it much once school starts.  I absolutely LOVE that our neighborhood is a dead-end street, and there are practically no cars since the only people that need to drive down our street are the people that live here, so it's really safe for biking.  N and L especially have spent hours and hours this summer just doing laps.

Sometimes they take the little girls with them, and sometimes the little girls just stay home and climb trees.  I feel like this summer has been a very '80's childhood for my children... biking for hours, climbing trees, and Nintendo.  What could be better?

--4--

My summer reading has been wonderful... I tried a bunch of different books before I settled on something that really hooked me in.  The thing that really hooked me in, I'm a little ashamed to say, was young adult fiction.

I'm not gonna say this is the most sophisticated writing, and the characters are a little bit two-dimensional, but it certainly did hook me in.  It was actually a freebie from Amazon Prime reading that I read through my kindle app on my phone, and then I borrowed the second book in the series from the library.  I think part of the reason that it was a page-turner for me was that I didn't know the ending.  I have realized that a lot of the books I'm trying to read are stories to which I already know the ending, because I've seen a movie or TV version, or because it's an old favorite book that I'm re-reading.  So they don't exactly keep me up late so I can get to the end, ya know?  And everyone needs some light/semi-trashy reading over the summer, right?  A beach read?  Anyway, if you're looking for a knight-in-shining armor kind of romance set in a futuristic society, and you don't want to think too hard about it, this may be the series for you!

--5--

In terms of other entertainment this summer, I really enjoyed watching Les Miserables on PBS Masterpiece (had to catch up on that one with my Passport account since I didn't have time to watch it in the spring).  Sooo good!  I highly recommend it, but be prepared for a good cry.  More recently I have finished the first two episodes of season four of Grantchester and I'm loving that as well!

While you all know I'm a huge fan of James Norton, I think that Tom Brittney has been an excellent addition to the cast and I'm looking forward to seeing his character develop over the next few episodes.  A good mystery definitely makes you stay up late... so I have to sort of plan to start these episodes early or just know that I'm going to stay up late to finish them!  Or watch them on the treadmill!

--6--

Speaking of the treadmill, I have really caught the running bug again recently.  I have done a couple of runs on the treadmill, but I have really been enjoying running outside on crisp fall mornings.  There is a bike path really close to our new house so that has made it very easy for me to just hop on and do a few miles.  In our old neighborhood, it was SO hilly that you really couldn't run outside on any route surrounding our house without having to tackle several steep hills.  It kept me in great shape, but I didn't always feel motivated to do a really difficult run.  So, the runs here are more easy, but at least I'm doing them more often!  Fitness Blender was great for keeping me in shape in the interim, and I may have to go back to that some as M goes back to teaching this fall and I'm on my own with J more often.  For now, I'm loving the runner's high!

--7--

One thing we're excited about in addition to going back to school... crisp fall temperatures, and all things pumpkin spice.  Pumpkin Spice Cheerios have been all the rage in our household lately!

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know.  Pumpkin Spice.  The most controversial topic ever.  But I love it.  Gonna go get me a pumpkin spice latte now, as L was kind enough to point out that Starbucks now has them as we were shopping at Target the other day.  She knows I love them.  You know you want one.

That's it for now!  Hope you are all having a great Labor Day weekend!

Oh... one bonus pic of N with her locker all set to go...

MIDDLE SCHOOL??? What?!?!  But seriously, she's really excited, and I think she's going to have a great time.

Okay, that's really it! :)