One week down the hatch

Well, it's been a little over a week since I posted about my weight loss plan and goals. The first week has been interesting. Atkins is hard, yo. Every day there was a different craving of what I couldn't have. One day it was pizza, another, mac and cheese.

The trampolining has been good though. I wear headphones to keep from getting bored, and each day I jump a little differently. One day I did a jogging motion, another, I kept my toes down and just used my heels to bounce. (which was really good for the butt area by the way)

I was chugging along ok, although I was kind of frustrated. Everywhere you read says Atkins sees big weight loss in the first week or two, and my scale wasn't budging.

Something happened though, that made me fall off the wagon, AND lose weight at the same time. I got the stomach flu! It was a killer too, with me even sleeping on the bathroom floor at one point, on the brink of being delusional. As I'm sure all of you know, recovering from something like that involves a certain diet. A.k.a. CARBS. I've been living off of crackers, applesauce, ginger ale, and chicken noodle soup for two days now.

The one perk though? I'm down 10 lbs. I kid you not. I weighed myself Monday and I hadn't lost anything. Today? 10 lbs. lighter.

I know there is a high rebound chance here, since I'm having to be pretty sedentary, and consuming the all evil carbs. It will be tricky to find the right time to transition back to the exercise and diet. Wait too long, and the pounds will pack on. Go too soon, and I could make myself sick again.

So, that's where we're at. Wish me luck as I figure out how to transition back into the routine.

Starting weight:165
Today: 155

Five years (and change)

I hadn't really thought about it until today, but it's now been five years since my mother passed away. It was bittersweet at the time. I had watched her fight and suffer for so long, I was relieved for her to be done with the battle at last. However, she was only 44, and I was only 24.

I am learning that even though you depend on your parents the most when you are a child, you still very much need them when you are an adult. The rest of my family has tried to fill the gap the best they can. My dad is still around, and I have a step-mother who is readily there for me when I need. There isn't any replacement for your own mother though. Especially when you are a mother yourself.

I've had friends lose a parent in the past few years, and they turn to me for wisdom. I do what I can for them, but really, there is no wisdom here. I will say this. It *does* get better. Eventually. The pain isn't so constant, and you learn to not think about them every waking hour any more. You move on. Not completely though. It's funny now, how five years later, something can happen, and the pain comes rushing back in so fast it takes my breath away. Times when the kids do something funny, or have a doctor's appointment. My mom always wanted to hear about that. I called her every day, and if I didn't, she would call me. She loved her grandkids, and wanted to hear everything. So, at times like when Hannah cut her bangs off, just like my sister did when she was little, it hurts to know that I can't pick up the phone to tell my mom about it.

There is also a noticeable absence when I think about the kids. I get sad for them, that their grandmother isn't here to watch them grow up. When she died, Logan was only six months old. Hannah wasn't even a blip on the radar yet. Lindsay was pretty small, so she doesn't remember her, but Ryan was old enough, he does have a few memories. Some days I get to thinking about the what-could-have-beens. Wondering if she would think Hannah looks as much like me as I think she does. Wondering what it would be like to have her as yet another cheerleader for Logan as he attends all his therapies. What she would have thought of the bossy, yet sweet, piano playing princess Lindsay is turning out to be. How she would be so proud of Ryan, who started off in the NICU with a very uncertain future. She was there every step of the way with us, and I think about how happy she would be about the young man he is turning into.

I am a person of faith. My mother was as well. I believe I will see her again, and that my children will too. That some day is floating out there on the horizon, and I do take comfort in it.

I still wish she was here now though.

Two movies to not watch back to back before falling asleep

Hidalgo and Day After Tomorrow.

Because then you end up dreaming that you are in a horse race through a ship, to win supplies before the cold hits.

Just FYI.

Trying. . .AGAIN

This week there was a milestone of sorts. Wednesday marked exactly six months until my 30th birthday. I know, I know, I have enough friends older than me to know not to be upset about that or anything. It did give me pause though. I've chronicled my fitness attempts on here before, and failed. I tried valiantly for two months early last year, but after two months of no results, I quit. There, I owned up to it. I am a quitter.

It was easy to get frustrated though. Two months of hard work, and the scale didn't budge an inch. So I said "screw it" and threw in the towel.

It's time to try again though. I'm trying a different approach this time. I know I need to see some upfront results fast in order to stick with something. I also don't want to do something drastically unhealthy. After a lot of thinking, and reading online, here is my game plan: Atkins and a trampoline. Yes, a trampoline. I'll get to that in a minute.

I'm only on day 2 of the Atkin's and I am hurting. I am a carb fiend. Mexican food containing many tortillas and Italian food with all of its pastas are my favorite foods. Turning away from it (at least for the time being) is a real challenge. Upping the ante is the fact that I made a chicken spaghetti casserole the other night, and it's been in the fridge, taunting me. I literally thought about it ALL day yesterday. So, while this is starting off hard, I have read that it *does* get results quickly, especially the first few weeks. Which is what I need.

I did pretty well at lunch today. I'm sitting here satisfied. It was a big lunch, but I guess that is what it's going to take, to keep me from sitting here daydreaming about chicken spaghetti. I took two big leaves of green lettuce, and laid a red cabbage leaf in each one. Then I whipped up some chicken salad. (canned chicken breast, just enough mayo to hold it together, and then pepper, garlic, and my secret ingredient: celery salt) I split the chicken between the two sets of lettuce/cabbage leaves and then rolled each up, burrito style. I had a piece of cheese and a stalk of celery on the side. I used the whole can of chicken, which is technically two servings, but this is Atkins, where that kind of thing is allll good, holmes.

Ok, enough rambling about that, on to the trampoline thing. I needed an exercise that I could do at home, wouldn't kill my fragile knees, and would be, well, not boring. I don't know how I stumbled on the trampoline thing, but I did. Turns out, it's a real form of exercise, and I can easily do it while the kids run around the backyard. You don't even need to actually jump when you are first starting out. Just standing on it and bouncing gently gets stuff done. I did 30 minutes of it yesterday, and my legs were jello afterward.

So, that's the game plan. I'll try to keep public about how I'm doing, so I'll either spectacularly fail (again) in front of everyone (again), or I'll start a new trampoline craze amongst my friends with my awesome results.

Starting weight: 165
Goal weight: 135 would be amazing, but I'll be ecstatic with 140

I'll either be starting my 30's with a body I'm happy with, or I'll be starting my 30's with the body I have right now. Either way, the clock has started. Six months and counting. . .

A homeschooling blip

Since we have a pretty free-styling method of homeschooling, it allows me to explore different methods. (like the new way I came up with to do long division that is actually easier than what we were taught in school.) It also allows me to let the kids take the lead a lot, and sometimes, that turns out to be awesome.

My kids don't like math worksheets. Well, who does, really? Lindsay is always the most reluctant to complete them for me. We actually don't do them very often, because I don't believe that's the best way to learn math. I think actually understanding the how's and why's are more important. Every once in a while though, I like to do one with a bunch of different concepts on it to see what the kids can do. On those days, Lindsay's eye rolling capacity is set from stun to kill, and much audible sighing happens.

But then, then the day after happened. The day where Lindsay decided to make a worksheet for her dad to fill out. The brilliance of it? He gave it back to her to check it. It was totally her idea, and she saw it as a way of playing, but in reality, she was doing the problems too, since she had to check them.

I'm filing this one away for future use.

Harassing the dog

Because I have other posts brewing in my head, but they are not ready to surface yet.

I've blogged a bit here and there about the dog before. I never really was a dog person until we got one. I really got her for the kids, but it turns out she's one of those dogs that picks one person to bond the most with. For some reason, she chose me. I could wax poetic that it's because she knows I need her the most, but it could also just be because I am the quietest person living in this house.

She loves the hubby too, and the kids to some extent, don't get me wrong. However, I am the only person privileged enough that she literally accompanies me everywhere I go in the house. She even stands sentry outside the bathroom when nature calls for me. You know, in case I fall in or something.

It's been a new experience for me, that's for sure. My entire life, I've been a cat person. We have two cats now, and I love them both dearly. Cats are what I know. Having a dog though, well, having a dog is a whole new ballpark. I never knew you could have a pet that could seem so human. There are times when I look in her eyes, and I can tell what she is thinking, and it seems like she can tell the same about me.

I may be biased, but I also think that we have a slightly more-than-average expressive dog.











Here I think she was pretending to sleep so I would leave her alone. She still has a lot to learn.



Look at these paws, aren't they great?



They remind me of a teddy bear.



This nose kills me too.



Yes Chip, I'm still here. With the camera.



After this I actually did leave her alone though. Don't want to abuse her too much in one day you know.

{W}rite of Passage: The Job

My first official job was when I was 18. For years before that, I had been babysitting off and on, and working at our church occasionally. I got paid sometimes, but it wasn't really a job for me. I liked kids, and they liked me. I was one of those responsible kids that adults felt comfortable leaving their children with. I was always "working" for people who were either family or good friends of the family though, so it never really was like a real job.

The summer before I started college, my mother told me that if I got a job, she would get me a car. (She never did, but that's a whole other story.) I landed a job at a nearby grocery store as a checker. I should have known things weren't going to go well when a friend who was a manager told me, "You don't want to work here." I applied, was hastily accepted, and thus began my training.

My "training" didn't quite go as planned. I showed up when I was supposed to, in one of the awful teal shirts that were the uniform, and found the manager who was supposed to train me. Apparently she was pretty disenchanted with the whole idea. She looked me over, sizing me up, and then told me to go an open register she pointed at. To do what, you might ask? Well, to check people out of course! The "lovely" manager thought I didn't need training. Never mind that I had never checked anyone out or used a cash register before!

I had to learn on the fly how to ring up produce, what to do when someone paid by check, and how to handle food stamps and WIC checks. It was one of those things where I had seen it done for years, but had never really thought about it and all it entailed. I had some very visibly annoyed customers that night. Thankfully, none of them took it out on me. I was also extremely grateful for an older checker working next to me, who took pity on me and would coach me through transactions when I needed help. Unlike the "manager". (Who was a different person from the one I knew, by the way.)

I want to say that I found my rhythm, and after some time things went smoothly, and we all lived happily ever after. Yeah, right. What I hadn't known at the time, was the the whole chain of stores was a sinking ship. We cycled through managers on a monthly basis, each one more apathetic than the last. Eventually, with everything I had going on with school, I was only working one night a week, and after a grand total of six months as an employee, I quit all together.

There was no love lost, and less than a year after I quit, the entire chain of stores closed. I did learn some valuable things in those six months. Things like, I am always nice and patient with the person ringing me up at the grocery store. I've been on the other side of the fence, and I know the crap that they have to put up with from customers on a daily basis. (When I was a checker I lost count the number of times *I* got reamed for the price of something by a customer. You know, because I had control over that, right?)

I also help bag up my things if there isn't a bagger there, because I know the stress and fear that comes when you don't have one. The groceries are piling up, the people in line are impatient, and you have a million things to do at once. So, I help.

I also am very careful to not pick up things without a UPC code on them. Having to get something price checked is an inconvenience to everyone involved. I am sure to mark the PLU number of any produce I get that is out of the ordinary, like the time we bought star fruit. Any good checker will have a lot of the produce codes memorized, (bananas-4011, green grapes-4033, red grapes 4032, etc.) but there are things that I don't expect them to know offhand. I don't want to have to wait while they flip through that little book looking for it either. So, I write it down, or I make sure to get one with a sticker on it.

The six months on that job taught me a lot. It taught me to be nice to those people at the register. It taught me what it felt like to get a real paycheck. It also taught me that some people out there really don't care about others. I think everyone should work at least once in their lives at a job where they have to deal with the general public. If anything, to learn that the general public can really suck. Maybe by learning that, more people wouldn't treat others as crappy, and the overall suckitude of the general public would decrease. It's a nice thought anyways.