Weekending X

Happy Monday!

I don’t think I am ever happy for Monday, can’t we have an extra day of the weekend… please?!?! I guess I can’t really complain about this weekend though it was just what we needed.

Friday night I hit up the new Trader Joes in our area on my way home from work to grab dinner. It’s been the buzz around my clinic that the new TJ’s was going in and for good reason, it’s a really nice Trader Joes stocked with all the TJ specialties! I grabbed some salmon burgers and some fixings to make a nice Friday fish dinner.

Salmon Burger with a side of green beans!

Our romantic Friday date night included deep cleaning our apartment, vacuuming, scrubbing the floors and all the rest, for our friends who were coming over on Saturday… Nothing says romance like the overwhelming scent of Pinesol 😉

Saturday we woke up and headed to the gym. Ever have one of those days at the gym when all you want to do is lift but something (usually life) gets in your head and stresses you out to the point where you cannot lift any more? Well that happened to me on Saturday. It.Was.Bad. I couldn’t focus enough to safely lift and I knew what I had to do. So I dropped my bag with Brent & headed out the door with my metronome beeping for a run.

I didn’t know how far I was going to run but I knew I had to run until my head was clear, my tears were dry & my lungs-n-legs told me they were done. After about a mile I stopped, caught my breath and did some of my Pose falling drills to reset my legs & get my groove back. I ended up running a 5K and I was feeling on top of the world (you know when a good run does that too you?) then I got into our house & realized that I LOST MY KEY! I had grabbed my house key from my keychain when I left Brent at the gym so I could get into the house when I got home, and when I got home it was gone!!! Brent went out and found it while I got ready as we were on a schedule.

We headed to Coopers Hawk, one of our favorite places, to meet our friends Chris & Kristina for lunch. Chris & Brent went to high school together and him & Kristina live in Rockford, so when we all were living there we became good friends. Actually they let me stay at their house a couple nights a week when I was driving back and forth for work. Well in January Chris & Kristina had a baby girl but since I have been so crazy busy with family stuff I hadn’t had chance to meet her, so they decided to come out to us for the day. It was so much fun, lunch was great, we chatted and just caught up on life.

Appetizers at Coopers Hawk

Chris & Kristinas Appetizer at Coopers Hawk

Shrimp Mediterranean Salad… Delicious!!

After lunch we headed back to our place for what promised to be a riveting match of UNO! When Brent & Chris were planning out the day Chris mentioned he would bring UNO, I honestly thought it was a joke but it ended up being the highlight of the day… well besides the baby snuggles. And I did get a lot of sweet baby snuggles! Baby B was being a little bit needy since she refused to sleep, so while we played UNO we had a few baby breaks to make her happy. After a few rounds of UNO we delt a hand that ended up lasting FOUR HOURS before we finally were just sick of playing. There were 3 times when someone had an UNO but then got slammed with a 15 card draw to get a red so then we were back at square one. It was intense, we moved from sitting to standing, to a few baby naps, and a few baby feeds. I don’t think Ive ever played a longer game of uno in my life AND stayed smiling the whole time. It was awesome!

ALL the sweet baby snuggles!!!

We then said our goodbyes and headed out for “dinner”… Brent & I had a huge craving for something sweet, we have been trying to be really good about what we eat so a dessert treat was definitely in order. So our Saturday night dinner was a delicious bowl of FroYo!!! I can’t remember the last time we went and got FroYo and it definitely didn’t disappoint.

Promise there is Yogurt under ALL THE TOPPINGS!!!

Sunday was a relaxing “typical” Sunday filled with groceries, church and food prepping. On our way to get groceries I was in dire need of some caffeine so we stopped at Starbucks. Brent coined a new drink name the “Dirty Oprah” when he ordered the Oprah chai tea latte with an extra shot of espresso (dirty) the baristas and us thought it was pretty funny!

The Dirty Oprah

I was pleasantly surprised when my veggie heavy turkey chili leftovers was enough for most of our lunches this week and I didn’t have to prep anything.

Heres our super exciting meal plan for the week:
Breakfast: Egg Scrambles (Brent will eat em fried, I’ll eat em scrambled with spinach)
Lunch: Salad with deli turkey & turkey veggie chili
Dinner: Grilled Chicken & Roasted Zucchini Carrots & Mushrooms

Sunday evening we headed to the gym for a shoulders workout with our friend Rich. I usually do my own thing when Brent helps Rich workout but I wanted to do shoulders so while I sort of did my own thing at times it was nice to superset two machines and have a rest period too. After we did shoulders Rich wanted to do some legs so I decided to do a core workout. What I realized is my core is SUPER WEAK. Since moving from Rockford and having stopped GPP, mostly due to trying CrossFit & the gym that we workout at right now is not conducive to GPP (which make my heart cry!) my core workouts have significantly decreased and I have definitely felt the results.

New goal – work on your core Allison!!! On a positive note…. My shoulders are on point, even Brent mentioned that they were looking good 😉

I hope you all had a great weekend and have a fabulous start to spring this week!

 

 

 

 

Linking up with Katie on this Marvelous Monday! 

Weekending III

Happy Monday!!!

I have to say that I am not super excited about having to work a FULL week this week. It was really nice to have a day off in the middle of last week & three days off the week before. Oh Holidays why do you have to go by so quickly!?

Friday night we watched Biggest Loser and I worked on a little DIY craft which I will be sharing with you guys later this week. My fit female friends will LOVE it!

A little DIY to end the week!

Saturday started like most do with open gym at EPC. There is something about open gym and getting to work on different moves that is a lot of fun. The chill vibe of the gym and just being able to hangout, chat and throw down some heavy weight is something that I really love about our CrossFit gym & community. Our Olympic lift workout for the day was snatches and power clean & jerks. I worked on both for a while getting a 95# snatch & 105# C&J then I decided to work on my biggest weaknesses. Pull Ups & Handstands.

Action shots are my favorite!

I did rounds of pull up negatives with a band (started with green then moved to blue) holding chin above bar for 10-20seconds then in super slow motion lowered to the bottom. During my “rest” I did a handstand & held the position for a while (I couldn’t see the clock) until my arms got jello-y. I focused on getting my core tight and body in more of a straight line. I continued this cycle of pull up, handstand for 6-8 rounds making sure I took some good rest after the handstand.

Overcoming a fear & channeling my inner athlete to perfect the skill!

Concurring my fear of falling on my head during a handstand and being able to start focusing on the skill of the movement was more exciting than I thought it would be. I  still need to get the confidence of finding the wall each time but I no longer fear falling or killing myself, which is AWESOME!

Last week I mentioned to Brent that I wanted to start making a conscious effort to have a date night each week (or at least every other week). We spend a lot of time together but some times I don’t think it is the most quality time, so by focusing on having a date night where we can connect, talk and do something fun we will be hitting all those key relationship factors!

Sometimes I take the extra time to actually put on makeup and wear cute clothing… and I kinda like when I do 🙂

So Saturday night we got our date night cloths on and headed to Coopers Hawk for dinner & wine. We are Wine of the Month members but didnt want a white wine with dinner so we swapped our wine for a Malbec (Brents favorite wine ever). The Malbec was delicious and so was dinner! I ordered the Soy Ginger Salmon & Brent got the Jambalaya both dishes were amazing and so filling.

Coopers Hawk my Salmon dinner!

Coopers Hawk

After dinner we headed to the tasting room to taste the January wines. We got to sample 8 different wines and surprisingly enjoyed most of them, even the whites! We are definitely a red house hold! We were chatting with the bar tender and asked if they saved the corks, this landed us with a big bag full of corks, WIN!!!

Date Night Selfies!

Date Night Selfies are MARVELOUS!

Sunday was a chill day, sorta. We are starting our second (my third) AdvoCare 24 Day Challenge & so Sunday included a trip to Costco & the grocery store followed by a few hours of meal prep.

I decided to add a little extra challenge by including the principles of the Whole30 (Paleo based diet) to our 24DC. Brent & I eat pretty clean during the week, with the exceptions of work demons and weekends, so I wanted to give our bodys a bit of a change and challenge. I think it is really important to change up your diet every once and a while, it helps your see bigger changes in your body and gives you more variety in life.

ARE YOU ALL IN!?

I intend on sticking to the Whole30 principles pretty closely, with the exception of one sauce I made this week with peanut butter (sorry $12 on sunflower seed butter just wasn’t going to happen when i have some PB in the cupboard!) For this week to give myself a boost I am following the week 1 meal plan by Melissa. She has a killer website with SO MUCH Whole30 knowledge, and while I could use my brain and pinterest, I decided to stick to someone who was successful and let it go from there. I did make some modifications to the meals & mashed up my own stuff, because following a recipe to a T is way too easy!

Heres our meal plan for the week:
Breakfast – veggie quiche (larger version of these mini quiches)
Lunch & Dinners –
Carnitas Power Bowls (sautéed veggies, spaghetti squash & Melissa’s Carnitas)
Chicken Pad Thai
Chocolate Chili

Hope you have a wonderful week, and good luck to all my friends starting the 24DC this week!

Have any good date night ideas?