I had the most amazingly fun day today. First of all, my sister left early this morning with my aunt to go for a long drive down to the central valley. My sis needs a few more driving hours before she can get her license, so they decided to go meet our cousin for lunch.

After they left, my mom and I went to the mall to go after-Christmas shopping! We didn’t just go to any mall either. We went to the nice mall with tons of stores with huge inventory (way more than our local mall has). I had some serious big bucks to spend after all the gift cards I got for Christmas. We shopped till we dropped and had a blast!

Here is all my loot (minus my big pillow – lol):

Hm. Can you guess what my favorite colors are? I got 5 shirts, 2 sweaters, 3 pairs of jeans, 1 pair of khaki cords, 3 pairs of earrings, and the best thing of all… one of those super expensive purses from Macy’s with a matching wallet!!!

You know in Macy’s how they have all the “nice” purses locked away behind glass counters? Yeah, I got to go shopping for one of those and it didn’t cost me a thing. Gotta love gift cards. That’s something that I never in a million years would have gone shopping for with my own money. It was so much fun.

So on with the eats…

I knew I would need a big breakfast to fuel me for shopping, so I had a bowl of oatmeal made with banana (cooked in with the oats on the stove) and topped with homemade coconut-almond granola and sunbutter (my new love).

In between stores, my mom and I went out for lunch to the Cheesecake Factory!! I haven’t been there in soooo long – over a year, probably two. They have so many things on their menu that it was hard to decide, but I finally chose the Crabcake Sandwich. Yes I did. I didn’t know all the ingredients, but I ate the whole sandwich and enjoyed every bite. It was delicious. Yes Ed was freaking out over this, but for once I told him to shove it and ate what I wanted.

Here’s a cell phone pic because I forgot my camera. I didn’t eat the fries because they bother me, but I was perfectly full after the sandwich.

By dinnertime I still wasn’t hungry (we had lunch kind of late in the day), but I knew I needed to eat so I had some Amy’s black bean soup with Kashi crackers on the side.

When we had lunch at the Cheesecake Factory, my mom and I also picked out three different slices of cheesecake to take home. We got peppermint bark cheesecake, chocolate coconut cheesecake, and fresh banana cream cheesecake. I picked out the banana cream one. My dad was thoroughly excited about the coconut flavor (no one in my family besides him and me like coconut).

Chocolate coconut (Dad’s):

Peppermint bark (my mom and sister split):

Banana cream (my dessert for this evening):

It’s true I’ve had problems with dairy and wheat in the past, but lately I’ve been slowly easing them back into my diet. I think as long as I have them in moderation I am fine, which is very good news.

I know I didn’t post yesterday or the day before, but I felt like I got too far behind to catch up, so today I’m starting fresh.

I can’t believe tomorrow is the last day of 2008!