Breakfast.

I, like most other people my age, grew up with the constant "breakfast is the most important meal of the day"... and like most people, I more or less ignored that advice. 

Can you blame me for valuing what precious little sleep I get over spending time cooking in the mornings? Most days as a teenager I'd be content to just grab a piece of fruit on my way out the door... or absurd amounts of coffee once I got to HUB at the U of A, occasionally with a scone for a bit of substance (so THAT's how I dropped fifteen pounds when I was at the U. I miss that body.) And to be totally honest, I'm still not 100% sold on breakfast, and will in all likelihood probably be living off of caffeine when I'm back in school at the end of August. 

But over the past few weeks, I've been making more of a conscious effort to force myself to eat in the mornings, whether I want to or not. Some days it's a losing battle, but some days (like today) I completely rock it. 

Any of my Card cousins who read this will laugh and nod knowingly, but... Well, Grandma and Aunt Marge and the aunties all had it right with the "make sure you have some protein!!"... I've found that the mornings where I have eggs for breakfast tend to be the days where I'm less in need of snacking during the day. Let's take today's breakfast for example! 

My grandma is actually the one who
introduced me to Peabutter, but I was
pleasantly surprised to find that Rory
eats it as well!

I've come to start with a basic framework (eggs and toast) and occasionally spice it up a little bit. 

Today, I put some NoNuts Golden Peabutter on my toast.Yep, I'm one of those poor unfortunate souls with a nut allergy. It hasn't really ever affected me much (aside from last December, when I had an allergic reaction and landed myself in the hospital in anaphylactic shock and the mother of all asthma attacks... That was minorly terrifying...), although it definitely has limited some of my food choices, especially since all the nuts that are really good for you are the ones that would kill me in a matter of minutes.

A lot of the nut-free peanut butter substitutes out there are heavily soy based, which is something that I do my best to avoid because I consider soy to be something best avoided.

Sunday Night Photo Dump

(aka further proof of my attachment to my cell phone, and my Instagram fixation...) 

This was fairly straightforward to make, I copied my Instagram photos (using Statigram), shrunk them down to 33% their actual size in MS Paint -- I'm at the office and don't have any fancy photo editing software here, haha -- and then pasted them into a grid. If you want to follow my Instagram feed, my username is @andraealynne. How imaginative, right?

The idea for this photo dump was inspired by Kelle Hampton at Enjoying the Small Things, who does her own photo dump every Friday night. Admittedly, her feed is a lot more interesting than mine, because her life is full of a lot more fun than mine seems to be these days. 

So yes. Some of my Instagram feed from this past week! For the most part, this is in chronological order as well. I had to shrink the image down so it wouldn't stretch the page weirdly, so click on it if you want to see it in larger form.

a wee bit of nostalgia

My little sister (Elizabeth) had her high school grad and commencement this past week. I am ridiculously proud of her and at the same time feeling a wee bit... old. And nostalgic. Of course, I still remember her as the annoying little tag-along sister that she was when I was in junior high. 

Elizabeth is three and a half years younger than me-- she just turned 18 in January-- and in the past few years we've become quite a bit closer than we have been in the past, which has been a very awesome thing for me. It's nice to be able to call her my friend as well as my sister =) 

On Thursday, we made our way to the Jubilee Auditorium for a few family photos prior to her commencement ceremony-- there weren't enough tickets available for us all to watch the ceremony (which quite frankly was a bit of a relief, my own commencement in 2008 was more than four hours long and I did not want to sit through that again), but I had suggested that we all (myself+Rory, my parents, sister and grandparents) take a few photos beforehand. My grandmother and mother liked the idea, so it would seem that my own intuitive ideas are a good thing from time to time. Heh.

So we took a few photos. I think they turned out decently well! Click on the individual pictures to open up a larger copy.