Happy Children and New Food Finds

I thought I'd start this post with some positive images of the children - this morning was a completely different morning to yesterday! I felt a bit bad about posting a photo of Toby crying, but I think it would be unrealistic to only post happy pictures - that's just not real life, especially with young children! I figure as long as the happy times outweigh the sad times or at least I can forget about the sad times more quickly then we're doing ok!

I am lucky that Izzy and Toby do, usually, play really well together and this morning was a perfect example of that - every time I looked round they were doing something cute...I kept putting the camera away and then having to run to grab it again!!

First up, playing with their Little People farm. Toby adores Little People toys - they are always his first choice to play with at toddler group, creche etc and he goes to bed each night with one of the little characters clutched in his hand!

After breakfast (Ready Brek today - not as tasty, but much 'safer' than yesterday's smoothie!) Izzy randomly started doing "toddler group" songs with Toby...they were in the middle of singing "Wind the bobbin up" here I think!

And finally playing with blocks...this red box and most of the blocks are actually from when I was a child...good old wooden toys last so much better & longer than all the plasticky ones!

Toby's favourite part is knocking the blocks over, but Izzy is pretty good and is fine with him doing that so long as he lets her 'finish' each tower first - a compromise that seems to work!

Right, sickly sweet positive part of the post over, let's talk about food! I was so glad to see that it had stopped raining yesterday (and today we even have sunshine, yey!!) that Toby and I took the opportunity to walk into town and wander around the shops. I couldn't resist picking up a few new-to-me foods to try!

Chocolate sweetened with stevia...

I Instagrammed a photo of these that a took a while ago through the chocolate shop window, but hadn't actually gone in to buy any before yesterday! My local shop sells bigger (85g) bars of the dark chocolate with berries and also a white chocolate with mango and raspberries, but not the chocolate orange one. I decided to buy a couple of little (21g) bars instead, to see whether I liked the chocolate first. I tried the berry one first and really liked it. It wasn't as sweet as I thought it might have been, if anything it was slightly sour when you bit into a blueberry part, but overall it was good. The orange one, however, was disgusting. I (tried) to eat it just now and couldn't finish it - totally artificial tasting, yuck. Strange how two different flavours from the same brand could be so different. It was the orange cream filling, rather than the actual chocolate, that tasted so horrible, so I will be avoiding any others with cream centres! I've been looking on Amazon and they do loads of different flavours! My local shop isn't as expensive though, which surprises me, I always think of it as "the expensive chocolate shop" but maybe it's not so bad!!

The other new-to-me purchase was some fun-looking tortilla chips...

I've got a couple of avocadoes that aren't quite ripe enough yet, but as soon as they are I'll be mashing them to eat with these. Yum!

Finally, I had sweet potato fries and falafel burgers again for lunch yesterday. The fries were 10x better than on Sunday as I was only cooking them for me, so was able to spread them out on the baking sheet in one layer. Even over two baking trays, the fries were overlapping each other on Sunday because we eat so many!

This was amazing. Crispy sweet potato fries, tasty falafel burgers, mayonnaise, and veg box purple sprouting broccoli. So much easier to cook quantities just for me - things tend to get overcooked and/or left to go cold by the time we've cooked, served up, helped the children etc when everyone is eating at once!

Have you tried any new products recently? Or had blue tortilla chips/stevia chocolate before? I'm sure I've seen blue tortilla chips on quite a few blogs before. These were on 'special' for £1 each in Holland & Barrett, so not exactly cheap, but I do enjoy trying new products from time to time. The more I thought about the stevia chocolate, the more I decided that, clearly, I really don't need to eat chocolate sweetened with stevia rather than sugar, but again...I sometimes can't stop myself from buying new products purely because I haven't tried them before and they look interesting!