Day FOUR! Better late than never… a good day!

Day Four, no fear! We did not quit blogging but yesterday was an unusually busy day not leaving much time to recap our meals & snacks.

Mom and dad were gone before we woke up to help at a local triathlon. The boys and I ate homemade granola and milk with a small glass of milk for breakfast. They seem to be getting more used to the taste of the granola… no complaints about the texture today. We're still planning to make pop tarts soon!

The main course for lunch was natural peanut butter (beware when you open a new jar… the oil separates and we spilled a good amount on the counter!) and natural strawberry jelly sandwiches on whole wheat bread. We managed to find some potato chips that met our criteria (or close enough!) They are Lays Simply Natural thick-cut sea salted chips. They are made with expeller pressed oils. There are no artificial colors, flavors or preservatives and they are gluten free!  We also quickly grilled some asparagus with a little bit of extra virgin olive oil but no seasoning. We like our asparagus naked. The boys did not like the texture but were alright with eating the asparagus once they tried it. We also had apple slices. Yum! With the extra apples, we put them in a small tupperware with a little lemon juice for a snack later. To make our sandwiches more appealing, I added a tiny sword toothpick to each sandwich… but there ended up being a small sword fight between the boys. Ty ended up in time-out after a little incident so beware if you choose to add sword toothpicks to any meal with a 4 year old!

Between lunch and supper we were all on the go, in different directions of course! I shot a round of golf with a friend and just snacked on grapes and drank plenty of water.  My parents and brothers had a small mixed cup of fruit and a Lara Bar with water.  Our family has also enjoyed trying the new flavors of SOBE life water. It is a good drink, with no sugar.

For supper, we had grilled chicken breast, potato skins with natural freshly shredded colby cheese and bacon with a little light sour cream. 100 days of real food has a great potato skin recipe. Tonight was a little tricky because I had a friend over who we wanted to share our real food challenge with. He was super surprised at how tasty everything was. We also had a fruit kabob again because they were such a hit the night before! Why does fruit taste so much better and get eaten all up when it's on a wooden skewer?! The boys again loved the fruit and asked for more.  I should also share that it was a little hard to eat our grilled chicken without bar-b-que sauce. My mom and I usually make our chicken swim in the sauce before we eat it.  This was hard so we decided to try it with a little ketchup. We have always used Heinz but found that Hunts does not have high fructose syrup, but it does have sugar. We both used just a small amount.

One of our family activities was going to a parade (crazy, I know!) I was in the parade and it is a large and entertaining parade so my mom decided to bring my brothers. We had a talk with them before even leaving the house about how they can collect all the candy they want but that we were not going to eat it. They were amazingly okay with it!  We were delighted to see a little less candy and more healthy and fun options at the parade this year (stickers, play necklaces, rubber wrist bands, whistles, pencils and 3M products.) The boys were thrilled to get their own roll of tape! They go thru a lot of tape (don't ask!)  After the parade, the boys took handfuls of candy and put it in the bag of the little girl sitting next to us. It was awesome to see that! As a reward, we let them each have 1 piece of candy of their choice. They lit up. We explained that they don't have to go through life never eating sugar again, but that if you eat candy regularly, is it really even a treat anymore.  The friend who I was in the parade with was tormenting me by eating candy right in front of me! Surprisingly I didn't even want a piece. I was a little worried it would give me a stomach ache but I also figured this many days into our challenge, a lot of the toxins have been removed from my body so I didn't want to cave in and eat any. Pretty proud of myself!

For a night time snack we made smoothies. We used 3 cups vanilla greek organic yogurt, 2 cups frozen pineapple chunks, 2 tablespoons honey, 4 tablespoons milk and 1 cup spinach leaves.  Other than a bitter aftertaste, we all thought the smoothies were pretty good! We plan to try strawberries next time. The boys also ate a bowl of cereal with freshly sliced strawberries on top.  We were thrilled to find a replacement for honey nut cheerios that they usually eat every day. We bought Full Circle Organic Honey Nut toasted Oats and they didn't even know the difference! We put them in an air tight cereal container so they couldn't see the box. They both asked for a "refill."  SUCCESS!

Before bed we made a loaf of whole wheat banana bread (recipe from 100 days of real food).  The recipe we historically use has regular flour and an entire cup of milk chocolate morsels. My brothers didn't know banana bread is NOT supposed to have chocolate chips in it! We plan to eat it for breakfast this week… more to post on that later!

Supper. The potato skins were amazing! I would normally eat more than this but we are finding all of our portions are getting smaller. The really foods are satisfying us. We're also learning that we need to eat only until we are full, no more. 

Our garden.  We're really not big fans of gardening but we have the space on our farm and we like the end result… it's all the weeds and mosquitos that scare us away.  

The parade! 

WHEW…we made it through day 4!  I think the people at McDonald's miss us! HAHA! Our dishwasher has never seen so many cycles in a week and we are constantly in the kitchen, but we are enjoying the challenge, discovering new foods, and we're really having fun watching to boys learn about good food choices. Instead of climbing the grocery cart like it is a jungle gym or running up and down the aisles like wild animals, they are looking at food labels and asking questions. They really miss chocolate milk (a previous staple in our house).  We let them get one container of Chocolate soy milk and one container of Almond Breeze chocolate Almond Milk. They did a taste test and said they liked both but I just went to the fridge and the almond milk is almost gone! We were surprised to read that one cup of Almond Milk has 473mg of calcium versus 1 cup of regular milk that has only 276mg of calcium!

Thanks for reading!