Eating Clean?

*Before you even begin reading, this is a loooong post. I realize I do have a ton to catch up on, but hopeully this will help those of you who have been harassing me for an update (ahem, Aunt Jennifer) to understand why it hasn't happened. This blog re-enactment was just one hour of my night. Just one hour! However, this is nothing new. It's basically the same track every night, with the CD on repeat.


A little background: My friend Shannon sometimes blogs about her diet. And by diet, I don't mean "what I'm going to try this week to lose weight." She eats clean, which is not a fad diet, it's a lifestyle. I text messaged her to get some more information and motivation, because I was really interested in it, even though I knew changing the way I eat would be very difficult. She asked me what I thought would be tough, and I told her I don't like veggies (totally true) and that since I had Braysen, my grocery shopping has consisted of finding the easiest and quickest things to prepare (totally true also, but not the entire truth). I couldn't put it in just a few words to explain it to her, but what happened tonight is like a recurring theme in our house. Every night.

The truth: dinner is hard for me. It never was before. I started cooking when Tony and I got married. As a matter of fact, that first week we were married was the first time I had ever used a recipe for something other than baking. It was easy. I cooked every night. We never ate out.

Dinner is hard now. I'm by myself at dinner time. Shannon held me accountable for my bad diet behavior last week (whoops) so this week, I had my menu totally planned out and the groceries bought for what I would need all week.

Tonight we were having taco salad. Not completely clean, but pretty darn close. I cooked the meat, made a clean guacamole for it, salsa, everything. But I had to do it all while holding Braysen. He gets very tired by this time every night and wants nothing to do with any toys. He wants to be held. No daddy here, so obviously, I am the one that needs to do it. If I don't pick him up, he cries and throws a temper tantrum, I am tripping over him as he follows me through the kitchen, he stands under me while I'm cooking at the stove (not good), or tries to touch the oven every time I open it (also not good).

So I get everything made and get a majority of his food cut up into tiny pieces and get it into his bowl. Meanwhile, my kitchen is a disaster because I am too busy trying to keep him happy to even bother to pick up as I go. The only thing I'm waiting on is the meat to finish cooling, so I go to put Braysen's bowl in the fridge. Somehow between balancing him and his drink cup, I manage to drop his bowl of food (that I just finished cutting up) onto the floor. Score a point for mom!

So I sat his little booty in high chair and gave him some snacks to entertain him, which is something I don't really like to do. I recut his food and get it in the fridge, successfully this time.

I have everything ready for my salad, so I go to get the lettuce. Hi... Salad... Umm, you need lettuce for that, right? What I didn't realize is that Tony has been taking salads for lunch all week (which is something he never does) and there are only a few scraps left. Not really enough to even be called a salad. I'm pretty disappointed, but at this point I'm so hungry I really don't care. He'll have to make all this deliciousness of a taco salad into a taco or something when he gets home at midnight or whenever.

So I get my sad-looking salad put together, set it on the table, put Braysen's food in front of him, then walk to the fridge to get some water. In the meantime, he's knocked both his milk and my dinner onto the floor. Now I realize that you may be thinking, "Why did she put her food close enough for him to be able to reach it?" I didn't. He grabbed onto one of the barstools and rolled the entire highchair closer to the table. Anyway, score another point for mom. I can't make another salad because the lettuce is gone and I can't make a taco because Braysen is throwing his food around. He hasn't eaten a single bite of his taco salad.. Why you ask? Because he filled up on those before-dinner snacks that I didn't really want to give him in the first place. This is obviously not the first time this has happened. So at this point, his bowl is on the floor with half the contents of it strewn on the highchair tray and the other half on my kitchen floor (that I just cleaned, I might add). And I still haven't figured out what I'm going to eat for dinner. I ended up grabbing an unused bag of chips that were leftover from his birthday party and had chips and guacamole. So I am trying to scarf down a few bites in between picking up his milk cup that he's thrown on the floor for the 6th time. By the 7th time, the lid pops open and the milk is on my floor. We. Are. Done. Time for the tub!

I never even get a chance to clean up the dinner mess until Braysen goes down for the night. I took a picture of what my kitchen looked like, but I am way too embarrassed by it and decided not to post it.