Category: Family

 

Just last week I told you how my family and I had a great year making family meals and active time together COUNT with help from my role as a Together Counts Energy Balance. Well, I am thrilled to announce that my partnership with Together Counts will be continuing this year!

Perhaps you remember from my previous posts, but let me remind you what Together Counts is all about: It’s an initiative of the Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation that encourages families to eat meals together and be active together. But it does more than just exhort and encourage. Together Counts also provides corresponding tools and resources to teachers and school nurses to help teach kiddos how to have a healthy, active lifestyle. PLUS!! They have numerous opportunities for you to win grants for your child’s school as well. Don’t miss out, make sure to check out their blog, subscribe, and follow them on Facebook and Twitter.

In 2013, I really focused on eating together as a family, staying active together, and as an added bonus – serving the community together. In 2014 I want to do all those things and take them up another notch. We have some additional dietary challenges to work around as Jonah has recently had to go dairy-free as well as gluten-free, but I am confident we can conquer that new eating challenge – and still get out and play together no matter what the weather (well okay, we’ll keep active indoors during this crazy wind chill advisory!).

 

This year we did three different service-type projects or fundraisers as a family as well – two of which also required us to stay active and work on our energy balance! So we will do those again and make our efforts even more successful this year.

 We had a great year focusing on our family and our Energy Balance – calories in, calories out – and I can’t wait to do it bigger and better together this year with Together Counts!

What are your family’s togetherness goals for this year?

This post is part of my job duties as an Energy Balance Ambassador for Together Counts, for which I was compensated.

2013 was great for my family for a lot of reasons. Jonah started speech therapy, Sophie kicked butt in kindergarten, and Joshua made some really awesome (mom-approved!!) new friends.

Another reason it was great? I had an extra reason to focus on being healthy with my family through my role as an Energy Balance Ambassador for Together Counts.

Together Counts was started by the Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation and encourages families to eat together, be active together, and be intentional about energy balance – calories in, calories out! Being an Energy Balance Ambassador inspired me to be intentional about making good meals for my family, making sure we had dinner together, and about spending time being active together, whether indoors or out. And, it’s helped us develop healthy habits together that we can keep up for years to come!

Over the course of 2013 I enjoyed writing for the Together Counts blog and sharing some of my family life and culinary tips and experiences. In June, I conquered the topic of Meal Planning with Food Restrictions, since 2013 was the year both Jonah and I developed wheat allergies/gluten intolerance. Planning our menus ahead of time really helped me get used to cooking foods that were allergen-free for Jonah and me but that the whole family could also enjoy.

In July, I shared some of my very favorite Fourth of July Memories, including bonding with Emily over our fear of fireworks, and the Fourth where I realized that Sophie was truly conquering her developmental delays.

In October, I wrote about one of our very favorite family traditions – Trick-or-Treat with cousins! – and also shared 5 tips for a Safe and Memorable Halloween.

In December I covered two topics – my favorite post for Together Counts all year long – Celebrating School Achievements as a Family and my favorite wintertime treat (which we just happened to have last night!) – What’s for Brinner? 3 Easy Breakfast-for-Dinner Ideas.

I had a great year working with Together Counts and being intentional about living an active, healthy lifestyle TOGETHER with my family. If you haven’t checked out their many resources and ideas for great family activities and opportunities to win grants from your school, make sure and check out their website today!

What are your favorite activities to do with your family and your favorite meals to share together? I’d love to hear about them in the comments!

 

So guess what? I…don’t really like sports. I’m not opposed to them, I just don’t really care who wins. I mean, I guess if I had to choose, I’d choose Ohio State over Michigan like the rest of population of this state, but in all honesty…I don’t give a crap. Which is very FREEING. Plus? Football games are long. Noise on my tv for several hours straight? PASS. Recently Joshua an Sophie have decided that they “like” football thanks to the NFL Rush Zone tv show on Nicktoons…which they watch online since we don’t have cable. Yesterday we had a snow day and I bundled them up and they spent an hour and fifteen minutes outside playing FOOTBALL! Which up until a week ago, neither one of them could care less about.

My athletics apathy pretty much extends to all sports unless the Olympics are on. I am an Olympaholic and I LOVE everything on the Olympics! I’ll even watch curling, bring it on if Team USA is involved! I can’t wait til Sochi, and then, I can’t wait til after Sochi so I can stop caring again.

But there is one sport I enjoy in a specific way. I enjoy high school basketball…when my nephew is playing. Actually I have several basketball-playing nephews, but only one in high school. Next year I will have three in high school so my level of caring might actually triple. Eek!  I don’t think basketball is much fun to watch until kids are older, so forgive me if I sit the junior high games out. But I enjoyed watching the few games I went to last year so much that this year Bobby and I bought a season pass to get into all the Varsity home games. Weird, RIGHT?

Well last night was the BIG rivalry between sister schools Dayton Christian (my alma mater and where my kids and my oldest nephew go) and Xenia Christian (where my other nephews play but they are still in 8th grade.) So I was glad to get to go, since it’s the most-anticipated game of the year. And it was a NAIL-BITER!

We started out down, were down by 5 at the half, then came back in the 3rd quarter and were up by 15, then BLEW that and the lead got down to 1 point! Finally, we were up by 6 but the entire last quarter was extreeemeely stressful.

It was a good, exciting game. I yelled myself hoarse!

And I needed a XANAX. My heart was pounding and I couldn’t wait for it to be over because the back-and-forth was killing me.

I am way too old for this. And this is just my nephew playing. If it were my own kids, I am sure I would’ve had to breathe into a paper bag. Let’s hope they remain blissfully unathletic so I don’t have to go on blood pressure medication to make it through a sports season.

Whew! I can’t even tell you how crazy I felt last night! Are you a superfan when your kids play sports? Or can you relax and chat with the other parents?