Mixing It Up

Davan and I had a yummy, nutritious, cheap meal this morning for breakfast. It's a bit different than we usually do, but something similar to a breakfast I used to make for Max in the morning.

I made cinnamon apples, like I make to stuff into pita pockets, but then I mixed them with oatmeal instead. There were definitely more apples than oats in the dish, which is how we like it. As with the pita pockets, I added walnuts to mine. Davan doesn't like nuts in her apples, but I wanted to boost the fat in hers (out of the whole family, skinny, growing, super active Davan can use fat the most), so I mixed peanut butter into hers. It was yummy. We each had two bowls.

To make it even cheaper, I used apples off our tree in the front yard. I was lazy this year and let the apples go too long. We lost a lot of them to birds and worms and neighborhood kids. However, I salvaged what was left for our very large, filling breakfast this morning.

I hadn't done this for Davan and I in the mornings for a couple of reasons. One is that, although Davan loved oatmeal when she was younger, she has professed a dislike for it for the last several years. I like oatmeal sometimes, but not all the time. Also, I don't always like to do a starch with breakfast, preferring to concentrate on fruit. However, done this way, with the apple to oat ratio there was, we both liked it and got a lot of fruit in. Besides, we'd been doing the apples in pita pockets often lately and the pita pockets are both more expensive and a more refined grain (being made with flour, all be it whole grain flour) than oatmeal.

I give it a thumbs up and we'll do it again, especially as we're trying to lower our food costs.

In other news, I'm reading a book that is very interesting, if a little technical, called "Spark - The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain." It's all about, as you can glean from the title, I'm sure, how exercise effects the brain. So far, as a summary, exercise makes learning easier and keeps stress in check. There are lots of sound scientific reasons for this, which you'll learn if you read the book. :) I'm only about a 1/3 of the way through, so there is more information to come.

Poor Davan has been having trouble sleeping lately. She tends to go through cycles with sleep troubles. You'd think with all the exercise she does, she'd sleep soundly. However, every few months or so, she goes through a stretch of 2-7 days (although shorter stretches lately, I've noticed) of having a hard time falling asleep. My theory is that it happens one night and then she obsesses about if she'll be able to sleep the next night, causing it to happen again. Sigh. She's still sniffing from the cold she started last week, so I'm sure that's not helping. Last night was night two. I have high hopes that she'll sleep well tonight. Of course, that's tempered with a good dash of pessimism on my part, as that's just how I am.