For Every Mom

I am excited to send you over to a great site today For Every Mom.  They published one of my personal essay articles. Kinda fun!
Check it out

Creamy Cauliflower Alfredo -Dairy Free, Egg Free, Nut Free

My Daughter Saylor has SEVERE Allergies to Milk, Egg, Peanut, Tree Nuts, Peanuts, and Sesame Seed. When we make food for Saylor we deem everything as Saylor Safe or Not Saylor Safe.  This Recipe I am sharing today is SaylorSafe. In the past five years we have done a lot of trying new recipes and figuring out which ones are a win for the whole family. Allergies have been a hard thing for us, but one of the positives has been that we definitely eat more whole foods and overall a better diet then we were before food allergies entered our lives.
      My son that loves Milk, and Cheese and Cream really enjoyed this recipe we made the other night, so that is a win! This may become a staple in our home and with all the cauliflower it is a lot healthier for us then all the milk and cheese. Whether you have allergies in your family or not this is a great recipe to get some veggies in your picky eaters without them even knowing.  Just don't let them watch you make it and they won't even know they are eating lots of cauliflower.

Being Content with where I am at

This weekend I decided to bring myself out of running retirement and run a local 10k.  I have not run this race for at least 6 years.  This race is a hard 10k, even in the peak of my running career this course has gotten the best of me.  It starts with a flat/gradual down hill for the first mile. (That part is nice.) But that is the only nice part about this course. After the first mile you start winding through streets heading towards the mountains. This part has a lot of gradual up and steep up. After you crest the steepest hill you get some rolling hills for a mile or so. After that you get about a quarter mile of pretty steep down and then you turn into the last mile and a half of gradual up again.  And to make it worse you finish the last mile on the same street as the finish line with it looming in the distance for a mile of slow gradual uphill.  Oh yeah, and you have parade goers out cheering for you. Which should be a good thing. But I think it makes it even harder to get through that last mile knowing that I am being watched as I physically cannot finish the course as strong as I would like to.

To the Guy that watched me be a Mom for 30 seconds...

  To the guy that watched me be a mom for 30 seconds and decided that you knew all about my parenting skills. Enough so, that you thought it was your place to yell and scold me in front of my kids, my mother and father in law, and an arena full of wrestlers and fans. Telling me, in a very loud, stern voice, "That is Ridiculous parenting. The most Ridiculous parenting I have ever seen."

    
In those 30 seconds you saw my little boy pushing a stroller down an isle In front of the bleachers, past some stairs, around the corner out of my sight until he ran into another set of stairs that went up. At that point he turned the stroller around and came back to me. You were kind enough to help my little boy find his way back to me. In which I would have thanked you, had you not decided that because I was sitting in the bleachers, I was an unfit mother. Had you not decided in that 30 seconds that I was "The most ridiculous mother you had ever seen", I would have been glad for your help in helping a young mother, who definitely has her hands full right now, out.

Leave it All on the Track

  “Leave it all on the Track.”  

Photo Credit TrackandFieldPhoto.com

This is a term I used as a mantra through my running career that I now carry over to my life as a mom.

In every race I ran I tried to run my hardest, run my fastest, give it everything I had that day. I always wanted to step off the track and be able to say “I left it all on the Track, I left it all out there. I have no regrets about that race. I did everything I could to run a great race.”  I didn’t want to take the race with me and know that there were things I could have done better.  I wanted to know that I did everything I could to run the race the best I could while I was on the track.

This is me in one of the few races that I fell to the ground completely drained, knowing that I left it all on the track.