Meet Me in St. Louis

Chicago will always be my favorite city but over the years St. Louis has come a close second. Minus the fact that St. Louis is home to the Cards it's a pretty cool town ;) For Kris' birthday we spent some time in St. Louis and visited some of our favorite places and one place that was new to us called Pi...

1. Forest Park: Home to the The Muny (which I still haven't experienced yet but it's on the list), the zoo, the boat house where you can eat or paddle boat, art museum, botanical gardens, and my favorite The Jewel Box, to name a few.  I really wanted to have our reception there but unfortunately it wasn't big enough. With so much to see biking or a run through the park is a great way to enjoy a Saturday morning. On our way out we stopped by The Jewel Box so I could take some photos. 

2. Soulard Farmer's Market: Great place to get some spinach basil homemade pasta, buffalo meat or of course produce. 

My first visit to the market as a kid was of course a sweet treat..

3. The Loop: Home to Blueberry Hill (Chuck Berry's restaurant), Vintage Vinyl, The Pageant, Tivoli Theatre and my new favorite pizza place, Pi. They serve delicious specialty and deep dish pizzas as well as some tasty sangria! 

4. Last stop was to watch fireworks on the river. We done this several times before in a few different spots. My favorite was watching them from the Arch. 

Change your thoughts, change your life

I've always been a huge believer in the power of positive thought and what it can do and what you are trying to accomplish in your life. Although it seems recently that I've somehow managed to forget that.

Without going into too many details, certain aspects of my life have recently become stressful. I've always felt like I'm a relatively positive person, and I feel like I've gone to the "dark side" as some might call it. Today was my hitting "rock bottom" of sorts or maybe it wasn't actually today but it felt like it. In any case, I'm determined to try and turn this situation around. It has always frustrated me to hear the same people complain day in and day out about this and that, and whine about things that they don't care to do anything about. I don't consider myself to be one of these people. If I have a problem I try if figure out a way to resolve it or if something is out of my control I have two options 1. find a way to deal with the status quo or 2. change the status quo. For instance, if your boss is a jerk (which is not my situation at all this is just an example) you can either learn how to deal with him or her or quit.

Back to the whole point of this blog and that is - change your thoughts change your life! Easier said than done. It's always much easier to complain and become stressed out about things and why is that? Most of us have complete control over our feelings, thoughts, and how we choose to react to situations. Yet some of us deal with stress so much better than others. I could go off on a tangent about biology, conditioning, etc. but I won't. The point is that I believe that we can train ourselves to change our thoughts thereby changing our lives. I'm sure I'm not the first person who you've heard this from and there is tons of research, books, dvd's, etc on this topic which brings me to my motivation for writing this blog...TEDTalks. I LOVE TEDTALKS (TT)! I mean I've watched/listened to TT on and off over the years but since TT came to Netflix (which I discovered this past week) I've become a energized again...ok well maybe just today. This past weekend I started watching TEDTalks: Life Hack. A M A Z I N G. What's so amazing about TT is that they can fit so much valuable and inspiring information into less than 20 minutes.

Here is the deal, I decided this evening that I refuse to go down this slipper slope of negativity. I am trying out this experiment which was referred to in TEDTalks: Life Hack, Episode 3: The Happy Secret to Better Work. To give a quick synopsis of the episode...Shawn Achor discusses reversing the principle that "success will bring you happiness" to "happiness will bring you success."  You are actually much more productive and successful when you are happy, and by making small changes for a 2 minutes a  day for 21 days you can create lasting positive change.

What is the next step? Rewiring my brain in 21 days by doing the following each day:

• 3 Gratitudes - Write down 3 new things each day that you are grateful for. This rewires brain to start scanning the world for the positive first instead of the negative.
• Journaling - 1 positive experience over the past 24 hours allows your brain to relive it.
• Exercise - Teaches your brain that your behavior matters
• Meditation - Allows our brains to get over the cultural ADHD that we've create by multitasking
• Random Acts of Kindness - 1 positive email to someone in your social network

Hopefully I can report back some positive results. Don't be expecting any qualitative data in these results just my overall mental state!

Adventures with Alex

Alex has come to Columbia several times to visit us and when he does we always have a great time exploring. Here are some photos from one of his weekends here...

Devil's Icebox: This has become of our favorite places to go exercise, hike and spelunk.It's about 15 mins. from our place and almost every time Alex comes into town we visit. The last time we decided to go out and get some head lamps and flashlights so we could really explore the caves better.

After our day of hiking, spelunking and working off some calories we decided to make a post workout snack - homemade protein dots. We actually saw these at the gym cafe. Most of the ones I've seen in the local stores or the cafe have coconut on them which I'm not a big fan of so we made our own.

Chocolate PB Protein Dot Recipe

Ingredients:

• 5 servings (scoops) of whey chocolate protein powder
• 2.5 servings instant oats (1/2 cup per serving)
• 1 bottle of PB2 - which by the way I've recently become a huge fan of
• Few tbsp's of unsweetened vanilla almond milk 

We mixed all the ingredients together and then put them in the freezer for a few hours. This recipe makes 15 dots. If I was to make them again I would use a minimal amount of almond milk because the PB2 already makes it pretty moist. It was a bit messy trying to shape into the "dot" but we managed and had some fun in the process. The freezing helped to make them easier to handle when you want to eat them. I'd like to make them again and try experimenting with pumpkin and other ingredients. They were pretty tasty and a nice change from protein bars/shakes. Nutritional breakdown below.

Thanks Alex for an always active and health inspired weekend! xo