Boys & Movies

Here it is, pizza and movie night again. The kids take turn choosing the movie; they have their own queue on our Netflix account. Last week I wasn’t altogether thrilled to be watching “Cars” again. It’s a cute movie, but we’ve seen it several times lately. Now that’s sounding pretty good compared to this week’s selection, “Buzz Lightyear of Star Command.” I’m not a big “Toy Story” fan, but either of those movies are better than this one! It’s basically an hour long Saturday morning cartoon featuring my 4 year old’s favorite super hero, Buzz.

I’ve been trying to put my finger on why I have such a hard time sitting still for the kids movies. I don’t mind the G rating at all; in fact I almost always choose PG movies for myself and usually regret trying to watch anything that is rated R. But instead of the many classic, family friendly movies that are out there, the kids tend to choose cheesy cartoons like Buzz Lightyear or Strawberry Shortcake. The 10 year old asks for Batman and Bionicle cartoons, but I’m spared for now as the family night movie must be G-rated so that everyone can watch.

In some ways I miss the days when the Friday night movie came from our own collection (unless we happened to go to the library that day). They still got to take turns choosing what to watch, but Larry & I were the ones who had chosen what movies to buy in the first place! However, we don’t have a very large collection so that had its frustrations too, for the kids as well as the parents.

At least my pizza was good tonight! I made a whole wheat crust with ham. I use less cheese than most pizza places; it’s still plenty cheesy but without the grease from too much cheese.

Goals & Healthy Eating

I think I gave up on New Year’s resolutions somewhere around junior high. Resolving to do something only seems to hasten my failure at that very thing. However, for the past couple of years I have tried to set myself a new goal on the first of each  month, usually in the form of a daily habit I’d like to establish. Some habits have lasted longer than others; last month my goal was a daily walk. I think I walked once. Or was it twice? But the nice thing about a monthly goal is that every 30 days or so I can try again with the same goal, or a new one.

Today is June 1, and I decided to base this month’s goal on a recent healthy eating discussion on Martin Loopers. There were many great suggestions of ‘baby steps’ for improving the family diet. Some are steps I’ve already taken, such as shopping the perimeter of the grocery and baking our own bread (and other goodies). Many more involved areas where we still need improvement around here, but for this month I decided to focus on adding vegetables to our daily diet. Yes, you read that right. I confess that I do not serve my babies veggies every day! We do okay with fruit, averaging 3-4 servings a day. Eventually I would like to add 2 servings of vegetables to that, but for this month my goal is just to serve vegetables once a day. I even met my goal today! I had forgotten to bake bread for sandwiches, so we ended up with a mini salad bar for lunch. Most of the kids’ salads were heavy on the egg, cheese, and ham. . .but they all ate at least some of the carrots and spinach too.