Life is hard....dinner shouldn't be! (Review)

I am constantly struggling with time.  Time to get my work done.  Time to spend with Bean.  Time to do things that I like to do.  Heck, some weeks, I struggle to find time to take a shower!  Because of that, and a little bit of being intimidated by cooking, I am a huge fan of convenience foods.  I often teach classes in the evening or even late into the night and having something quick to fix when I get home is a great benefit.  So, I was excited when I was asked by SocialMoms to test out a new Smart Ones product from Weight Watchers and blog a review! 

I've eaten Smart Ones boxed meals off and on for a while, so I was surprised when I saw the packaging.  The new Smart Ones Satisfying Selections come in a steam-in bag.  Its a pretty large size (see the 30% larger serving note on the packaging) and although the varieties are currently a little limited (there are five varieties available), all of them sounded delicious to me.  I received coupons for two free bags and I chose the Ziti with Meatballs & Cheese and the Chicken Teriyaki Stir Fry.  I was excited to try the Ziti as the picture looked cheesy and had numerous meatballs.  The ease with which I was able to heat it up in the microwave was GREAT!  There was no stopping in the middle, lifting the plastic cover, stirring the product and placing it back in the microwave, only to find that I didn't stir enough so the middle was cold and the outsides were burnt on to the edges.  Instead, you just place the bag in the microwave with the steam side up and start it, not having to stop until its finished.  No stirring.  No dealing with unevenly cooked food.  Just place the bag in the oven and let it steam!  It was, by far, the easiest cooking of a frozen meal I've done.  And I've cooked my share of frozen meals!

Now, I don't know about you, but often the pictures on the packaging for frozen foods are about as close to reality as the shows I watch with Bean on the Sprout network!  They look so appealing when you pull it out of the freezer, but once the box is removed, all appeal is lost.  That was not the case with the Smart Ones Satisfying Selections.  The ziti came out looking like fresh pasta, there were tons of meatballs and the cheese was plentiful as well!  And the taste was very good as well.  I have to admit that I was starving when I made it, which I suppose could influence my opinion of the meal.  But, the meatballs were tastily seasoned, the noodles were soft and fresh and the cheese was plentiful.  It wasn't the best ziti I've ever had, but it is definitely the best tasting frozen food pasta entree I've had.  And again, I've had my share of frozen meals!

I had the Chicken Teriyaki Stir Fry the next day for lunch.  It was also tasty, although not quite as good as the ziti.  The flavor was not quite as good, but the chicken was plentiful (increased protein portion is one of the perks of these selections), the noodles seemed fresh and evenly cooked and there were quite a few veggies in the mix.  I just found the sauce to be a little lacking in taste.  

I have lost about 14 pounds since the beginning of Summer (thanks Hungry Girl) and I was also excited to have new options in the frozen dinner area.  It seems lately that the boxed varieties have shrinking entrees and just are often not that satisfying.  But, these meals are definitely larger (30% larger) and more filling than the boxed varieties I've had lately.  I had a slice of bread with the ziti for a late dinner and it was enough for me to not feel hungry.  The teriyaki at lunch was a pretty perfect lunch portion as well.  For those of you on Weight Watchers, the teriyaki chicken is a 9 point meal and the ziti is a 10 point meal.  Not bad for pasta dishes!  Especially the ziti, which I thought was quite cheesy.  

I would definitely suggest that anyone looking for a good frozen meal that won't kill you in calories to check out the Smart Ones Satisfying Selections! 

This post is part of a SocialMoms product evaluation, for which I’ve been

selected. I’ve been compensated for my time with 6,000 My SocialMoms Rewards

Points. The opinions expressed in this post are mine and don’t necessarily reflect the

opinions of SocialMoms or Heinz.

It Takes A Village

Well, as Oscar Wilde said, "It is always with the best of intentions that the worst work is done."  Or, in my case, no work is done.  Last week was really one that I would prefer to forget in many ways.  It was scheduled to the hilt and I had a lot on my list of things to do and ended up getting few to none of them done.  I didn't post daily as I was hoping to because I ended up with spotty internet at best for most of the week and just too many other things that I could not possibly put off doing.  So, this took a backseat.

I had a panic attack last night realizing that I have not slept well for the past week, have a to-do list the size of a small continent, and not much in the way of energy or time management to get that small continent taken care of.  But, I guess I'll just have to approach it with the "How do you eat an elephant?" strategy...answer...one bite at a time!

The picture up in the corner is Bean in her car seat at the Berkeley High School Speech and Debate tournament that I worked this weekend.  She is not usually this happy in her car seat, but the photographer caught her in a good mood!  It was a looooooong weekend.  I was at the tournament for between 13-15 hours each day on Saturday and Sunday and I'm still here plugging along today.  For those of you unfamiliar with Speech and Debate tournaments, they are like working a 40 hour work week in three days time - and it can definitely be painful.  Luckily Bean had a good sleeping weekend, with only one 4:30 a.m. wake-up this morning.  But, I'm still relatively exhausted and we have a three and a half hour drive back to Chico today at some point.  Ugh....

But, let me get to the title of today's post.  Although it also takes a village to run a Speech and Debate tournament...and in all honesty, I feel like it will take a village to get my life on schedule, I was referring to an article posted on the Congenital Heart Defect Support email list from the Star Tribune in Minnesota.  The article, A Kid-Sized Niche, is a great example of what can happen when people discover their passion.  I have discussed the "profitability gap" for pediatric medical devices on my previous blog, in "'Profitability Gap' Means Adult Treatment for Children", but I did not see the solution that Bradley Slaker saw in creating DesignWise Medical.  Slaker has created a "nonprofit pediatric medical device company" that collaborates with Universities, retired engineers, law students, and others to create solutions for pediatric medical problems.  The article says that Minnesota offers a unique environment with its identification as a "medical tech hotbed".  But, I think its great that Slaker has found a way to produce these devices without them having to be profitable, offering parents like me some hope for solutions that will work.  I also think its great that students at Universities are being involved in the creation, production and legal work involved in these devices.  Perhaps some of them will be inspired to continue in this area.

I am looking forward to starting a new week that will hopefully be better then last week.  I am not at all looking at an easier week this week, but at least I'm expecting the chaos that is sure to ensue and hoping to be able to deal with it a bit better then last week.

2010 Will Not Be the Panacea...Back to the Hospital

Well, I had kept saying that I could not wait for 2010 to begin to hopefully get out of the disaster that was 2009.  Here it is 2010, and nothing much has changed for us.  Bean had her first biopsy of the year yesterday and it has come back a 3, which is really high.  So, we are being readmitted tonight (bed won't be available until 4 p.m.) to get a three-day course of IV anti-rejection medication.  This will also mean more trips to Stanford (a four hour jaunt from home - on a good traffic day) because we will not be able to space out the biopsies as much as we otherwise would.  Bean is looking good, seems to be feeling great and her echocardiogram came back unchanged, so all function is good....but, on the inside, she is not taking to the new heart as well as we and the docs would like.  It definitely is not the news I wanted to hear and I definitely would have liked 2010 to start out better, but at least there is a treatment and she is not symptomatic and I am  on Winter break from teaching right now.  So, all in all, it could be much worse for us.  But it is still a disappointment.

.................later that same day...........................

Well, we've checked into the Ronald McDonald house again (thankfully they had a room available for us, so we won't have to drive a distance to sleep and we can take shifts at the hospital), we're back in our old room on the third floor (we started out in a different room, but they are redoing floors and we got moved back over to the same room Bean was in for weeks after the transplant), we have a wonderful nurse on duty tonight, Bean has received her first mega-dose of the steroid, had a slight roid rage when her baba was late arriving, and is now sleeping soundly.  We have a room with a comfy recliner chair (thank goodness - the alternatives are pretty bad after a couple of hours) and I went to Andronico's to get snackage, so I'm set for the night shift and Jason will be here in the morning to give me a break.

For those of you unfamiliar with the transplant/rejection thing, I thought I would give you some information.  If you are a pro, please feel free to skip this part!  When a transplant is done, the new organ is seen as a foreign object, so it is attacked.  Most of the information I'm including here was gathered from CHFpatients.com, which also has some really interesting information on research being done to handle rejection.  I really do believe that by the time Bean is an adult, things will be much easier for her and other transplant recipients.  The chart on this page does a great job of showing the different levels of rejection.  The levels are taken by doing a heart cath, where in addition to looking at all the levels, etc. they also clip off a tiny, tiny piece of the heart tissue and bring it out for a biopsy.  The results are reported as levels, varying between a zero (very good) and a four (very bad).  Sometimes rejection is detected through other means - echocardiograms and signs of failing heart function (sweatiness, difficulty eating, etc.), but oftentimes, there are no outward signs of the rejection.  This is why the biopsies are done are regular intervals, to catch the rejection early before it starts to cause problems in the body.  Bean's very first biopsy, one month after the transplant, came back a level 3A.  She was placed back in the hospital (she had just barely been released to go to the RMH) and given high doses of steroids over the course of three days.  Her next biopsy, and every biopsy since then, has been a level 1A, which is pretty darn good.  Yesterday, she had what I think is her sixth biopsy, and it came back a 3A.  Sigh...we thought we were out of the woods.  We were moving toward more spread out clinic visits and biopsies.  She seemed to be really doing well as of late.  But, here we are back in the hospital again.  She is receiving the IV prednisone, along with a medicine that will keep her stomach from eating itself (ulcers) because of the big dosage of prednisone...every day for the next three days.  She has received one dose already.

This has really brought me back to reality as far as realizing what having a chronically ill child is all about.  So often, Bean just seems your run-of-the-mill baby - maybe a little on the small side and definitely in need of a lot of medicines, but still run-of-the-mill.  But, we will be dealing with hospitals and doctors and blood tests and heart caths and biopsies and echocardiograms and side-effects for the rest of our lives.  And all that is okay with me - its definitely much better than the alternative.

But, it does mean that you have to start to view life a little differently.  I imagine it is what it is like for those who have jobs where they are always on-call.  You have to be ready to go at the drop of a hat, and you may have to stay a little longer than planned when you go certain places.  You have to have a network of support people who can step in for you to make sure what needs to get done at home gets done.  I am thankful that we don't have other children, whose lives would be in upheaval during these times.  We do have animals - a dog, who goes to my parent's house or my sister's house, and definitely has some separation anxiety thanks to our four month stay away from home - and a cat, who does miss us, but not in the same way as the dog.  She also went to my parent's for the four months, but she doesn't really suffer any anxiety over it.  She loves it when we are home, but as long as she has food and water and a catbox, she is pretty self-sufficient. I also have to have enough of a dependable support staff at work that things will continue to function even if I am absent.  This is a tough one, but seems to be working out acceptably this year.

I have said this before, and I will say it again...this does mean that I need to be a more organized, more pre-emptively acting, less procrastinating person.  I have not followed through on a lot of what I set out to do in those areas of time management and organization....let's face it...I have procrastinated about getting rid of my procrastination.  Sad, but true.  So, I am going to take these three days to really start to examine my life to find ways of streamlining certain things, opening up time for other things and really getting on top of my productivity and time management.  I need to do more, be more and accomplish more.  And I know I am capable of doing it, but not without a very specific plan of action that I FORCE myself to stick to.  I am hoping that some of you out there can act as checks on me...be my external conscious so-to-speak.  I need to get on top of my life, my goals, and my desires!  If anyone has suggestions for helping me to do this, please send them my way in the comments!  I would love to hear them!

Routines are so not routine...

I must say that I will be very glad to have 2009 over and done with!  It seems like one thing after another goes wrong in my life.  Little things, big things, medium things.  My husband's boss supplies us with a portable wi-fi account that has limited bandwith - one of those Sprint accounts.  We used up the bandwith about a week before the end of the month and I've been without regular internet service at home for the last week.  During this week I should have (1) finished my grading for my classes and submitted them, (2) figured out my routine/scheduling, and (3) got my syllabi revised for next semester.  Because of my total loss of routines and maybe a little because of the loss of internet, I have done none of those things.  Today was my first day back on the schedule I set up for me and Bean, and I can say that i definitely feel much more productive when I stick with the routine, even if I am not totally productive even with the routine.

I'm not sure if the two are related, but Bean has been completely off any kind of sleep schedule for the past two weeks or so.  Its been horrible.  She doesn't really nap (although, she is taking her first nap of the day right now in her swing.  Hopefully it lasts longer than her morning nap, which was all of 20 minutes.  Last night, she did sleep for four and a half hours, which is about the longest at one time she has done in the past two weeks.  Its really killing me.  I don't really nap well during the day and I am a light sleeper, so even when my hubby gets up with her, I am still awake and often unable to go back to sleep immediately.  I am hoping that things will change if I get her on a regular schedule/routine, but I'm not holding out any promise of that.

I am ready to get myself on a regular routine/schedule for 2010.  My husband made our usual argument against routines last week - he said, "do you really think with OUR lives we can ever have a routine?" and I quickly responded with the conclusion I had come to only a few weeks back - its all about prioritization.  We have established a routine for giving Bean her medicines because we prioritize it.  Nothing is more important than her getting those medicines, no matter what else might be going on in our lives or how much we would rather be sleeping or watching TV or continuing our drive to somewhere.  We need to start prioritizing other things in our lives in an equal way.  That is what the schedule I've come up with is all about.  Without some guidance, our laptops and the TV gets priority.

So, 2010 will be Year of the Routine for me!  It will not be easy to establish those routines and really stick with them, but nothing worth doing is easy...right?  So, in honor of the Year of the Routine, I will be establishing a routine for this blog.  I will post at least five days a week in the new year (need to give myself a reality break of two days a week) - and may even post more should the motivation be there.  I have not established a type of post for each of those days, but I think it may help to have that as well.  I will be thinking about that over the next week so that I can get rolling right away on the first.

So, although routines may not be routine with me now, my hopes it that by the end of 2010 routines will be routine for me and my family!