Jason said my blogs are so depressing so I will try to be more upbeat today. Actually, today was better than the last couple days. Kids napped, and there were no toddler fits or nasty notes.

Today has been the hottest day yet, though our house seems to be staying a wee bit cooler thanks to a new system I'm trying out. During the morning and early afternoon I leave the back bedrooms open and their fans going full blast (along with my kitchen and living room fans). This gets a lot of cool air into the house early... In fact, we're usually FREEZING in the mornings. When the sun moves to the other side of the house, I close up Ethans room and the office, but keep our bedroom open (since it faces North). This seems to block out a lot of the warmer air, while still drawing in cooler air from the North side. Its still hot, but not unbearably so.

I spent a lot of time reading and doing a little housework today. I'm reading a book called, 'How to Cook a Wolf' by MFK Fisher. It was written just before WW2 and goes into a lot of information about food rationing, etc. Wolf, in her book, refers to starvation and hunger. Its really interesting to hear her tell stories of how 'a man I knew lived on 7 cents a day for a year by eating nothing but whole wheat gruel and stealing fruit every morning from the chinamans cart parked outside his apartment'.

Speaking of food, we had another good dinner. I had some of that delightful spicy peanut dipping sauce from last night leftover. So, I took 3 chicken breasts, sliced them about 1/2 in thick, and marinated them in some soy sauce, rice vinegar, chile-garlic paste, garlic, peanut oil and brown sugar for about 30 min. I threaded them on skewers, then grilled. They were done in flash, and in fact I overcooked them because I wasn't paying attention, but they were still excellent. We had grilled zucchini, yellow bell pepper and onions on the side. Another very filling, but extremely healthy meal. This has to be the most nights in a row I've ever grilled. It keeps the kitchen cool and fairly clean! However, I do end up feeling a little cooked myself between the heat of the grill and the scorching sun setting right in front of me. Yowch!

I've taken a few cute pics of Gwen over the past two days. Thought I'd share:


I'm going to engage in gratuitous Mommy bragging and say gosh-darnit, my kids are the cutest kids I've ever seen!

Well, with me watching my meals and making an effort to get more walking, I'm happy to say I've lost 5 lbs... but that's it. No movement on scale since those were lost. I just know I need to be more active, but when? Must I be forced to spend the little free time I get to exercise? If only I had a free room to put my treadmill in, so I could watch TV and use it. I won't bring that monstrosity back into the house if it has to be in my living room tho.

So I was checking the stats on my blog the other day and wow, I have a lot of visitors :) I did find one thing peculiar... A number of you dear readers are apparently coming to my blog from a 'CamGirls' site... Now, I went to this site and, uh, how shall we say... Its not a site catering to blogs about being a Mommy and what that Mommy had for dinner. I have no idea why my blog is linked from that page. Bizzare huh?