My happy plan of getting through the month with a mountain of runs, walks and visits to the gym was stopped by the doctor sternly telling me not to do anything more than a light walk until I’ve had some tests. These will be next week. Fingers crossed I’ll be back on running and I’ll pick up where I left off – I suppose that means trying to run and gym through February (from the 3rd) instead.
Fingers crossed.
In the meantime I’m restricted to my routine of walking. I had started the day looking to see where I might slot in a pleasant 30 minute walk – and there was no chance it was happening. I’ve got things to do, children to keep alive. Instead, I was looking at the possibility of walking on the treadmill at 9:30pm.
Happily, this didn’t come to pass. Most of the things I had to do were sorted in good time before I went to pick the kids up at 3pm. I had some errands to sort out before getting the children, so I was out in the car – boo. No walk to the school. However, I did find what I was after and I’m very happy about that.
Today’s experiment with the children’s packed lunches seemed to go down well.
I had bought some new lunchboxes at Asda earlier in the month which are awesome and are working great, but I wanted to see if I could add some other healthy stuff over and above the usual. At the moment, I’m cooking a ham on Sunday evening and then making wraps with the ham and some cucumber, peppers, or other salad / veggie stuff I can find. That, along with staples such as kit kats, a bit of fruit, yoghurt, etc. That seems reasonable, but I was wondering if I could get a tub of spicy rice, or tub of something sweet in there as well.
The problem with the lunchboxes is that they are very shallow and every container that we have wouldn’t fit in the space. I did some shopping around and all the tubs I could find were way too tall.
Then I came across this place, Ampulla. This is a goldmine of tubs, bottles, cans and containers of every description. It feels slightly industrial, but that’s ok – they had what I’d been looking for… The 160ml clear food tub and and lid. It’s a thing of beauty. They say that it’s “the perfect container for an accompanied dish”, and it IS!
So I ordered 25 of them! God knows what Jude’s going to say, but I think Ampulla probably think I’m running a curry house or something.
Anyway, today was their first outing. I’m kicking myself for not having got a photo when they were full, but here is a picture of the two empty tubs (post jelly). It turns out that these are so shallow that I can stack one on top of the other in their lunchboxes and still have space for a sandwich next to them and for the lid to close with space for biscuits and other loveliness in the top. This makes me very happy.
When I first bought them, Joel was quite concerned that he might look a bit weird or unusual eating from them, but after today it’s no longer a problem. I made some jelly in the tubs and they were fine – they could have done with a bit more refrigeration, but that’s just some tweaking, I think. The second tub had blueberries in. Apparently I can do no wrong if their lunch includes blueberries. I just need to get a second job to pay for their blueberry habit.
Tomorrow it’s blueberries and grapes in one, and strawberry yoghurt in the other. Along with the sandwiches and everything else. I think that it just about counts as a balanced lunch!
On the exercise front… In the end I didn’t have to go on the treadmill for my walk. Instead, I strode out after dinner – taking an extreme zig-zagged route into town and back again. This was because of the weather. The wind was lashing down County Road and I wanted to avoid being battered by the rain and sleet, so I tucked down Green Lane. I then had to make up time by taking detours which also had to try and shelter me from the full force of the weather. I think that this route worked pretty well.
I did 3.68km in 34min 28sec. I would have been home slightly sooner, but I got it in my head that I wanted a bit of symmetry to the route, and so I took a detour to make a triangle at both ends.
Only three more days to go, and then I have to think about whether I continue this into Feb. At the moment, I’m thinking that I should try and keep up the blogging and any thoughts would always be welcome. And the exercising? That’s out of my hands at the moment.