Yesterday's Menu

Okay, so this is what I ate yesterday...

Breakfast: 1 large green apple and one piece of whole wheat bread, 2 large cups of coffee with 2 sweeteners each, plus some milk and about half a teaspoon of vanilla flavoring.

Snack: peanut butter and strawberry jelly on whole wheat.

Lunch: 2 double cheeseburgers from McDonald's Dollar Menu and ice water.
(no fries)

snack: 1 large green apple and a diet soda with ice.

Dinner: 1 beef kabob with bell pepper and onion. (about 4 oz of beef) and diet soda.

On the other part of the health and beauty routine, I did brush, floss, and rinse my teeth as well as wash my face and remember to use moisturizer. Spiritually, I did half an hour of bible study on Nehemiah. This evening I will continue that since I did not have time for it this morning.
Last week we went to the park every morning, Monday through Thursday. The boys played and did some of the exercise machines with me. At this park near our house they have these great outdoor exercise machines that work against your own body weight. It doesn't seem like they should work, but the fact that I was sore all last week tells me they do! We wrapped up each day with a lap or two of walking around the park. We haven't done it this week yet, because of the state testing Taylor had to do. Ryan doesn't have to do it until next year. Tomorrow we will get out there though because the testing wrapped up today.
I don't put too much stock in the testing. It is a measure of what one child did on one day. They are not a measure of a child. However, I do have my kids take them because it does help the school with their funding, which in turn helps us out by increasing the resources we have available to us. That said, Taylor's math scores last year were pretty bad. His language arts scores were through the roof. He's nine and he just started reading the Lord of the Rings trilogy because he wanted to. I made him read me a couple of paragraphs out loud and he can do it. His sister didn't read them until seventh grade which is still pretty good as there are plenty of adults who haven't attempted them due to the thicknesses of their spines. Anyway, as I had suspected last year, because Taylor finished first, before any of the other kids in math, that he had just zipped through and guessed at everything. Taylor confirmed that, so as incentive this year, because I'd like to get an accurate estimation of what he's capable of in math, I told him that if his math scores came up I would buy him a new video game or take him to Boomers. He is very excited and a little daunted as we won't get the results until the middle of the summer.
On a slightly sadder note, we said goodbye to another fishie this morning. We originally got four from the fair. One died about five days after bringing him home.
Taylor was devastated. It was his fish, Odysseus, who had floated. Ryan had come home with two fish, Fred and Bob, so he told Taylor that he would give Fred to him now. This meant that each kid had a fish. It was working out well. We had purchased the ten gallon tank and even the fish even had their own Parthenon, sunken treasure and castle. We had gone through some murky water issues, but all seemed well until last night. I noticed a dripping sound that was different than the water filter. The tank had started to leak. So we moved the fish into a big plastic tub until we could reseal the glass in the aquarium. Jody I were even able to rig it so the filter would work in the plastic tub. I didn't cover the tub though. I had read somewhere once that you should cover your aquarium so the fish don't jump out. I wish I had remembered that last night. When Jenna got up to go to school this morning(she's up at 5:30am so she can catch the bus at 6:45) she found dead Fred on the kitchen floor. Apparently Fred had been suffering from fishie depression and all his desperate fish cries for a little fishie prozac in the fish food had gone unheard. He could take it no longer and proceeded to commit fishicide by jumping out of the plastic tub. OF course these reports may be inaccurate. It could have been that Fred was really Frederika and she had developed a passionate relationship with the skull in the sunken treasure chest. Being separated from him may have been more than she could bear. She began to get jealous and in a jealous rage she jumped from the tank in an attempt to find him and be reunited. The love story however ended tragically as so many often do. Take your pick. Fred is dead and once again Taylor was devastated. Devastated so much in fact, that as his sobs began to subside, he said " You know Mom, to comfort me, you could look up that lego star wars game boy game on amazon and get it for me to make me feel better." Ahhh, the manipulation starts early. That's what I get for teaching him how to read the big books!