Hello!  I hope your weekend was great.  Mine was so refreshing.  Matt and I had our first big night out (longer than 1.5 hrs) since Jack was born just the two of us (Thanks to our wonderful friends Rachel & Dave) last night.  It’s amazing how much more we were able to really talk…even if half of our topics involved Jack.

So after a great night, I woke up ready to have a productive day.  I did more extensive menu planning on Thursday night so that I could get groceries on Friday afternoon.  So with the kitchen stocked I started some food prep.  On the menu for the week:

• White bean kale burgers (recipe to come later this week) over romaine

• Beef braised in wine with onions (based on this recipe) With sweet potatoes and steamed asparagus

• Chicken stir-fry with bell peppers, onions, snow peas, and broccoli

Lots of veggies in these meals so I cleaned and chopped all of the veggies this afternoon so that our evenings will be a bit easier and so that we can have dinner on the table quicker.  Jack is really interested in dinner time lately.  He likes to imitate us chewing so we are trying to have dinner before his 8pm bedtime so he gets plenty of big people practice.

A couple of time-saving tips:

1.  I almost always make a 4-pot serving of steel cut oats on Sunday and individually portion them out so that I can have an easy breakfast.  Today I added cinnamon to the pot as they were cooking.  These oats smell heavenly!
2. I “cooked” the asparagus quick method.  I chopped the stalks in half, put them in a microwave bowl, added about ¼ cup of water to the bowl, covered in saran wrap and mircowaved for 3 minutes.  Perfect texture.

While the burgers were baking I put my workouts on my calendar to make sure I planned a variety of workouts and would make them a priority.

Monday:  Strength training/Dirty 30
Tuesday:  Run group
Wednesday:  Spinning
Thursday:  Run group
Friday:  Strength training
Saturday:  Teach Spinning (at City Gym)

Now that I’ve typed it out I feel even more committed.  All of these are morning workouts which works best for me.  You see, I have this funny little guy at home and I have an impossibly hard time leaving his side after the work day.  Here’s a video of his new vocalization:

Any big plans for the week?