Recent Eats aka Feeding Kids is Hard

Hello my friends! 

Sharing some random life snapshots in today’s post. First up in some very important news: we got new placemats for Christmas.

What do you think?

I love the color – our old ones were plain navy and these brighten up the room a bit, as well as being much easier to clean/wipe off than the old ones were (our old ones had lots of holes as part of the woven pattern which was very annoying for spills).

Pictured on our plates was a variation on my Maple Glazed Salmon recipe – yum, yum.

Obviously the kids refused to eat any of it and both ended up eating random other stuff – sigh. I’ve been extra frustrated lately by how picky they are, especially Riese. 

Please note in the picture above her plate has: 1) a reese’s (I just spelled it Riese’s and had to correct!) peanut butter cup, a large dinner roll with butter, and some string beans. I give up/whatever.

At least she genuinely likes a lot of vegetables like string beans, raw carrots (NOT cooked), and raw bell peppers. 

(And yes, we serve dessert with dinner rather than waiting until after or doing any sort of “you have to eat xx to get xx” situation which just leads to massive power struggles and teaches kids to not listen to their own hunger/fullness cues. Wes doesn’t realize dessert exists yet so he doesn’t get any. 🙂 ) 

Another night Matt and I had some enchiladas (I forgot an after picture, but it’s that recipe I linked to minus sweet potato and plus ground meat):

The kids had a deconstructed version of the mostly raw ingredients.

Wes had some guacamole (which he LOVES), cheese (which he has never liked randomly and did not eat), black beans (also does not like these and didn’t eat them), some of the cooked ground meat filling (HUGE fan of this, we gave him more), and raw bell peppers (much better received than cooked ones).

And yes, he’s still drinking from a bottle at 20 months.

We’re working on it – we’ve been switching his milk to open or straw cups at meals the past week and just do the bottle before nap and bedtime now, but not sure how we’ll move on from those two bottle occasions.

He’s way more attached to it than Riese ever was! For her, we switched from a bottle to a straw cup right at 12 months for milk and she was basically like “whatever.”

Wes has been fine drinking water from a straw cup since he turned 1, but he just doesn’t drink much milk unless it’s from a bottle, and not drinking much milk = waking up in the middle of the night or crazy early. Soooo yeah. Tips?

Anyway! For Riese on enchilada night, she had some cashews, crackers, cheese, black beans, and bell peppers. All things I knew she would eat, except for the black beans which I figured I’d try but as expected she did not eat.

I think I ended up giving her some rice after this, too, because she was still hungry. How much food she wants for dinner is always variable and simple meals tend to go over best.

One thing I have discovered though is that Riese LOVES tuna salad sandwiches. I always make it using this recipe: No Mayo Tuna Salad.

I love tuna salad so always happy to eat it! Sometimes if I’m making it for her in addition to me I’ll add a little mayo or plain Greek yogurt to dial down the zesty-ness of the dijon mustard for her. 

I’ve also been into chicken salad sandwiches lately – I whipped up a batch of my Cranberry Chicken Salad with Walnuts last week to eat on for lunches because we had a ton of leftover rotisserie chicken on hand. Yum! 

In other news, I’m slowly starting to build my running base in anticipation of the DC Rock ‘n’ Roll Half Marathon coming up in mid-March! 

I had a great 5 miler earlier this week with my friend Katie – we went on a loop from our neighborhood that included some of the Mt. Vernon trail, which I always love. 

Katie and I have been doing 3 mile runs every Monday morning right after school drop off for months now, but as of this week we’re going to take it up to 5+ miles.

She’s doing the race as well, so thankfully was down for some extra mileage! 

My friend Kathleen and I are going to do our long runs together, but she has been out of town for the past month. She’ll be back next week and we need to get ourselves in gear ASAP! 

I’ve run a lot of half marathons (18 to be exact!), but the last one I did was in 2016, so it has been a LONG time since I did one and I’m feeling a little nervous about it! 

(Just took a trip down the blog memory lane to see when and where my last half was, and apparently in 2016 I went on a running tear: I ran the Charleston Half Marathon in January with Matt, busted out a very fast Rock ‘n’ Roll DC half marathon in March, and unexpectedly ran the Middlebury Maple Run half marathon in May as part of a blog trip! Wow. Very different time of life for me!)

Kathleen and I were supposed to do the March 2020 Rock ‘n’ Roll DC half and got mostly trained for it (we made it to 10 miles) but then it was cancelled.

Soooo, yeah. This will be my first half marathon in 7 years, since having kids (Riese in November 2017, and Wes in June 2021)! Crazy! 

I’ll keep y’all posted on my training! My plan is to run 3 days per week – two of those will be with mom friends from Riese’s school right after school drop off, and then Kathleen and I will do one long run per week starting next week. 

The other days I’ll be doing yoga to try to stay limber amidst the extra running 🙂

And that’s all I have for you today! Have a great weekend and see y’all back here on Tuesday!