Very quick weekend summary:

• -1.0 lbs. Yay! There’s more to this story, but I shall sum it up this way: Always pee before weighing in.
• The southern living party went well – a couple of friends read my blog on Friday and then did a supriseroo and attended! Awwww shucks. Thanks guys. I’ll never invite you to one of these things again. EVER! I shall also not have a pity party for myself cause now I feel like I guilted them into it. Well, at least I’ll wait on the pity party until it’s over.
• I have pink eye. No doubt, caught from my son. Little impromptu poll on the situation.
  • Should I use my son’s prescription drops for me as well and don’t bother going to the doctor?
  • Should I use my son’s drops until I can get to the doctor and get my own prescription?
  • Should I not use my son’s drops and wait til I get my own prescription from the doctor?

  I won’t say what I’m doing. But I’m just interested in seeing what people think. I wish I knew how to do an actual poll, but you all will just have to write comments. Poor you. Suffering from my lack of technology. Well, I don’t lack the technology, I just lack the motivation. I am lazy.

That’s all for now, except to say that it’s supposed to snow tonight. I love snow. Also, if the government declares that it is closed, I also don’t have to go to work! And I get to charge the day to client leave (as opposed to having to use vacation). GO SNOW!

OOh – also, remind me to tell you the 2 cute kid stories that happened over the weekend. The one with Ethan in the car, and the one with Jocelyn and the milk. Oooh, also Ethan and the napping Jocelyn.

About a week or so ago, I expressed my disgust with my inability to really buckle down in this whole weight watcher’s thing. I debated the different routes I could go to keep myself on track, including telling you all what I had for breakfast, something I’m sure you all would really not care to hear.

Basically, there are 2 plans that one can do on weight watchers. You can do the Flex plan, or you can do the Core plan. The Flex plan is what I was doing last year – in fact, it was the only one availabe at that time. A serving of a food is assigned a point value based on the amount of calories, grams of fat, and grams of fiber. Who knows what formula it uses, but roughly, it’s 50 calories = 1 point with some leeway for bad things (more fat, less fiber=more points) and good things (less fat, more fiber=less points). On the flex plan, you have a certain amount of points you can eat per day depending on your current weight, and then you have 35 Flex points that you can use over the span of the entire week. After your weigh-in day, the week begins again, and your 35 weekly Flex points resets for the new week. It’s a good system with a lot of flexibility built into it (you can eat whatever you want, even use those 35 Flex points all in one day, but then you have to stick to your daily points and nothing over that the rest of the week), but heavy on journaling, which I am not good at.

I should also mention that both plans have daily requirements that one is supposed to have. A vitamin, 5? 6? (I don’t even know *cough* don’t ever make it) servings of dairy, 6 glasses of water, 6 servings of fruits and/or vegetables. One is supposed to include these in their daily intake for a healthy diet. The water is super important – if you don’t drink the water but have a perfect week otherwise, you might not see anything on the scale. Who knows why, it just is. It’s hard to do the water for me, but it’s the easiest thing on the daily requirements. I never get the milk in. I just take a calcium supplement at night instead. Fruits and veggies… Yeah, that also is rare. I have some fruit usually every day but I could go a few days without any veggies sometimes. Sad but true. Back to the plans.

The Core plan is what I was attempting. There is a core list of food which you can eat whatever you like, using your own hunger as a gauge (if you are full, don’t eat! how fancy! how innovative!) You get 35 Flex points per week which you can use on whatever foods you like that aren’t on the core food list. The Core list is made up of healthy, non-processed foods. It is really getting back to a more natural and wholesome way of eating. Bread is not on the core list, you would have to use some weekly flex points for that, but you can have potatoes or rice once a day – they limit it because those foods could be a trigger food for someone looking to snack. Lean meats, non-fat dairy, and of course all the fruits and veggies you could shake a stick at are on the list. Soups, as long as they are broth based and not cream based get the OK as well.

The problem with the core plan is unless you cook all the time, you start cheating. (I should stop saying “you” all the time. It’s me the one doing this, not you.) I do pretty well with the cooking a lot, but it takes preparation, and if I don’t prepare, then I’m going out to lunch during the week and I’m making guesses like, “Well, the turkey breast should be core and all the veggies are ok so I probably just have to count points for the honey oat bread on that sub and they only use lighte mayo so ……” It just goes on and on. I never actually count the extra points, I just figured it was low enough to be within my weekly flex points. The yo-yo weigh-ins told the truth about THAT little myth.

Well this was a long story, but a few people have asked me how weight watchers works, so I thought I’d fill in some of the blanks. The point is, I’ve switched to the Flex point plan this week, and to help me in my efforts, I enrolled in the WW Online E-tools which basically has all the foods you could ever find in a database already assigned their point values and I just have to search for it, and enter it into my online journal. No paper and pencil and looking it up in little books or using the little slide-rule calculator to find the point values. Online does it all, I just have to remember to DO it.

So anyway. That is what I’ve done to get back on track and I am feeling pretty proud of how I’ve done this week. Since I missed last week, this week will be a biggie – I’m sure I gained over Thanksgiving, so I’m hoping I’ve lost what I gained and then some for an official loss this week. I’m looking at that 20 lb goal by New Years, and this is my first big step. Honestly, even if it’s a disappointing weigh-in, I feel like I’m doing well, I’m ontrack and on top of the situation instead of being all, “Oh it’ll work out!” which is never true.

I’m sure I’ll let you all know how it went tomorrow – as well as how my pitiful Southern Living party went as well. I bought some stuff for the party, the makings of some mimosas and bellinis, along with a couple of shrimp plates (very weight watcher’s friendly, btw!) Tomorrow I need to tidy up and vacuum but I’m not going to kill myself over this one. Yes! I have children which means messy house and my walls are bare! BITE ME!

That’s a good motto. I smell bumper stickers.

amy loves toasty socks straight out of the microwave.

Hi! I have limited laptop battery life, so I’m just going to get right to it.

After my Weight Watchers meeting on Saturday morning, I stopped by Toys R Us to do some christmas shopping for Ethan and Jocelyn.

I thought I was doing pretty well.

Until I looked into my cart and realized that EVERYTHING was for Ethan. A little garage thingee with matchbox cars (the cars will go zooming down the ramps from the top level all the way down to the bottom. Wheeeee!), a Bob the Builder lego set (it got vetoed later), a Geotrax set. To my credit, Jocelyn is going to get a big ticket item in the form of a play kitchen, and I had the ticket for that one in the cart. But still! I just naturally gravitated toward all the boy car train truck toys and had NOTHING in there for Jocelyn. So I made another round of the store, this time keeping my eye out specifically for Jocelyn. After picking up a cute JoJo doll, I seriously was still coming up empty. The baby toys were really too young for her, and the little girl toys were too old. The amount of pink in the little girl section is just frightening. It nearly makes one need a pepto bismol, except that THOSE ARE ALSO PINK. You just can’t escape it. I really dislike pink. I’m good with purple, but pink should go crawl under a rock and die. Especially that Barbie doll package pink. Shudder.

Now, I know that Jocelyn also loves trains and trucks etc. Just an hour ago, she threw a FIT when Ethan wouldn’t let her play with HIS dump truck. She was very sad. Ethan does this thing where he gets a flashlight and goes “choo-choo”ing around the main level, sometimes with Jocelyn, Mommy or Daddy tailing along behind him as freight cars. Jocelyn LOVES this game, loves pretending to be a train. So I know that if I were to buy her the more boy-type toys, she would be totally in heaven with that. But that isn’t even the point. I used to be a girl! I totally had girlie toys! I was a Barbie queen, I loved my cabbage patch dolls, and anything that had “unicorn” or “pegasus” in the title I was totally enamored with. So WHEN DID I LOSE THE ABILITY TO SHOP FOR GIRL TOYS FOR MY DAUGHTER?

The answer is sad. I’ve never HAD the ability!! This is the first year that she’s a little girl, rather than a baby girl. Baby girls and baby boys can totally get the same sort of toys. Rattles, toy phones, activity tables, you name it, it’s unisex. So now I am facing my own ineptitude for the first time. I called James and ran down the current present tally, and lamented my lack of toy girliness. He reminded me that she had shown some interest in a My Little Pony once, and I rushed to the display and picked some of those out. Shew. Saved… At least until NEXT TIME! I guess it will be easier once she can really tell us what she wants, as well. Ethan makes no bones about what he wants. In fact, I made the mistake of leaving him in the same car WITH THE TOYS R US TOY EXTRAVAGANZA BROCHURE in it. He latched onto it Saturday and lost himself in it’s pages. We forgot to throw it away after getting home from the movies last night, so today we had to watch consumerism latch onto our boy and suck out his life essence.

I know I’m making a bigger deal out of this than I should, because (well, it’s kind of fun to make a big deal, but also,) I DO remember in MY childhood spending many a happy hour gazing over the Sears Christmas Catalog, folding back the corner of the pages that had the toys I HAD TO HAVE OR DIE AND THEREFORE PESTERED MY PARENTS TO NO END. Ahhh… childhood. *happy sigh*

So I think we’re pretty set for Christmas now, which is good because there’s no way I am going to venture into a mall or a store, let along a toy store after Thanksgiving. Anything else we need, well, that’s what the internet is for.

Saturday morning weigh-in:

So. Up like, 2/10s of a pound on my Saturday morning weigh-in.

scream.

Serves me right for dying and going to heaven at Perfect Pita.

I am really heading into a bad time of year. Thanksgiving is this week, for which we’re just staying at home and doing our own thing. Christmas holidays are coming as well, and good food always goes hand in hand during the holidays. This is when, last year, I really just tossed in the towel and lost all the success I had gained during the summer, and I really don’t want to do that again. Honestly, it’s clear to me that I have not really “committed” to this process yet. I want to kind of sail through it, fudge a lot, and still lose weight. when I called James (during the TRU phone call) and told him about my weigh-in, I said something like, “It’s really just time to buckle down, and” blah blah blah. To which he said, “You say that every week.” I SO wanted to bite his head off, but IT IS TRUE. I say that EVERY WEEK. I have NOT buckled down, and it is showing up on the scale.

In fact, I have to say, if it weren’t for this blog, I think I probalby would have been doing even worse than I am. Something about writing down all these things in my head, that normally would stay in my head, makes it so much clearer to me. Now, I really don’t want this space to just be all about this aspect of my life, but at the same time, I think I need to divulge more details in order to keep myself honest. I personally, don’t find that sort of a blog all that interesting, so I think I’ll just mull it over for a while before I start informing the Internet what I had for breakfast. I mean, how boring is that. I guess we’ll see.

I have 6 weeks until New Years, so I need to lose a little over 3 lbs a week in order to make my new years goal. Just a little perspective for me.

Enough of this. Blech.

So last night we went to dinner and Harry Potter with some friends. It was kind of amusing how at dinner, we kind of fell into boy conversation and girl conversation. I can’t remember what the girl conversation was, but the boys were going on about work. I’m not complaining or anything, I think they got bored with what we were discussing, but I just thought it was funny (amusing funny, not weird funny).

Harry Potter was good, but I must say and James emphatically agrees, that the new (yes I realize he’s not that new now, but to me, he’ll always be the new) Dumbledore just isn’t right. Oh how my heart longs for the REAL DUMBLEDORE. There were several scenes that just didn’t seem right, didn’t seem to be the way that Dumbledore really would act / react. I don’t blame the actor, if anything, that would be a director’s choice, and it just wasn’t right.

Overall, I enjoyed the movie, but it seemed to be lacking. I was trying to explain this to James on the way home, and this was the best analogy I could come up with.

I haven’t had one of these dreams in a long time, but have you ever had a dream about flying? I have, and they always started the same way. I would always trip, and in a very Douglas Adams sort of way, miss the ground, and start flying. The most vivid one I remember, I had in grade school, and had it several times. I am in a huge stadium, and am walking down the very steep stairs. No hand railings and it is very crowded. Well, someone bumps me from behind, and in order to not trip and fall down this huge flight of stadium stairs, I start running down the stairs. I go faster, and faster and I can’t stop, even when I get to the bottom, and suddenly I’m falling over the edge to the field below, when instead of hitting the ground, I just zoom by it and am flying. I usually am aware of the fact I’m dreaming now, and unlike some people, I usually never “stay” in a dream or affect how it goes (only very rarely, and they’re usually sex dreams. Ahem.) So it’s usually only a few minutes of ecstatic flying around, effortlessly and powered by my own mind, before I wake up. And I always just want to cry, because the experience of flying is so amazing, so thrilling, so ________, because new words need to be invented just to express how incredible it is, and it’s over. I’m back in real life, and there’s no flying. No flying! NO FLYING IN BASEBALL!

Well, that is how the world of Harry Potter feels to me. When I’m reading the books, there IS magic. There ARE wizards and witches, flying and quidditch, house elves and cleaning up spells (yeah like HOW COOL WOULD THAT BE), and then when I stop, I want to cry, because the magical fiction is just that: Fiction. Well, in my Harry Potter movie-going, that is how my grading criteria works. If it makes me thrill to my toes, and want to BE in this magical place, then it get’s my big thumbs up. It’s getting harder and harder to acheive this, because let’s face it, there’s a lot of stuff to cram into these movies.

So yes, I enjoyed it. And they had me for parts of the movie. But not for all of it. As always, the books are better (a universal truth? probably).

So you are all getting lucky in the fact that my laptop battery is about to run out. And so I must end this post! Adieu! And I hope there aren’t too many typos!

I just looked up what day of the week I was born on, so that I could see what I am according to the nursery rhyme:

Monday’s child is fair of face,
Tuesday’s child is full of grace,
Wednesday’s child is full of woe,
Thursday’s child has far to go,
Friday’s child is loving and giving,
Saturday’s child must work for a living,
But the child that’s born on the Sabbath day,
Is fair and wise and good and gay.

I was born on Friday, and thus, I am loving and giving. Am I loving and giving? It’d be nice if I actually am. I’m glad I’m not cursed with being full of woe, just because of the day of the week I was born on. Ethan was *holds fingers close together* this close to being born on Wednesday. I held out for the doctor that I wanted though.

It’s been a busy week this week, and so I apologize for not updating on the events of the weekend. I really should do that sort of thing pronto, because as the week wears on, the events lose their prominence and the more recent items are more interesting to talk about.

Weight Watchers weigh-in was good: down 3.4 lbs (CURSE YOU TENTH OF A POUND!) I look at the week I’m having and wonder if I’ll have another up week on Saturday. So far, I’ve been like a yo-yo each week, up one, down the next, a step back, a step and a half forward. I could get so much further if I’d just COMMIT already and quit fudging stuff during the week. What have I fudged this week? Well, at my little retro “come sit in my living room and buy stuff” party I had some of the yummy apple nut ring as well as some yummy chips and dip. The dip that I made, with full fat mayo and sour cream. You’d think I’d know better. But I think that all was OK, I allow myself these little snafus on the weekend, especially since I have ALL week to be good. But yesterday, I went into DC for some training and stopped in at The Perfect Pita. OOOoooohhh so yummy. I highly recommend it. I had the hummus chicken pita. It’s probably very healthy, but come on, we all know you make hummus with like a cup of olive oil. At least the garbanzo beans are packed with tons of fibre and protein. After my training was over, I stopped by and got another hummus chicken pita for dinner, and a container of their hummus and 4 pitas. Ethan had a pita on the way home, and he loved it. (BTW, Whole Foods sells Perfect Pita’s pitabread. Just FYI. It’s sold under the Whole Foods label.)

So anyway. Not the best week so far, but I’m working on it. I need to drink more milk (or at least take calcium supplements) eat more veggies, and drink more water. I have Bunko on Friday night, and I’m planning on eating a nice dinner beforehand, and sticking to water for the night. I DON’T WANT TO CONTINUE THE TREND AND HAVE A GAIN ON SATURDAY!

Ahem.

So, how did the Pampered Chef party go you wonder? Well, it went pretty well, I think! Everyone seemed to enjoy themselves and not feel obligated to buy something which is what I worry about the most, along with the whole “i have no decorating genes and my house sucks” complex. Our friend Chris read my blog and he did take a careful look around and noticed a few little display-y spots/areas and asked, “You did this just for this, didn’t you?” The answer was yes, for one, but no, the other one had been done earlier. You just couldn’t see it for all the crap that we’d piled in front of it. I think mostly, if we could just keep our surfaces clean, we’d be doing all right. James is very good at that – me, not so much.

We let Ethan skip naptime and stay downstairs for the demonstration and he did remarkably well, considering he hasn’t had 3.5 years of us trying to make him sit still in church to fall back on. I think if we suddenly did become church goers (it’s a hypothetic people, work with me here) he’d probably do all right. Jocelyn I’m sure would escape from our clutches in church and wander around the chapel and charm the pants off of everyone so no one would mind her anyway. JUST LIKE HER MOMMY DID.

So work seems intent on throwing me weird slants lately. I have been here about a month now, and it was just the other day that I was thinking that it was refreshingly free of weird office politics and communication strangeness when BAM!!! I got hit upside the head with a rather startling one-liner email. It wasn’t major, but it did make me blink at it for a few seconds. Oh well. I do like my job quite a bit, and I could see myself staying here a long while. That’d be a nice change! I guess you can never really escape office weirdness. You just have to deal with it. I could probably adjust my attitude a bit as well, which I will be trying to do.

Sorry this post had no snappy final paragraph that would sum everything up in a way that is super funny and would make you laugh, or introspective/cute that would make you sigh with melancholia.

Puppies. They’re cute.

Now you can sigh.

2 cups fat free vanilla yogurt
1 container fat free cool whip
20 oz can crushed pineapple (with juice)
medium can mandarin oranges (drained)
2 boxes fat free sugar free white chocolate pudding mix

mix everything together except pudding, then add and mix again.
Refrigerate a couple of hours before serving.
1 pt per cup
CORE
note: substitute different flavor pudding as wanted.

Up 2.6 lbs.

Well shucks. Eh.

A part of me is taking this way too laissez-faire. I play Bunko every month with friends in my neighborhood, and there’s always booze and yummy snacks. This month’s Bunko night was Friday night, and I didn’t bother restricting myself. I ate what I wanted, and had a few drinks, and I was up until 1:30 (too wired to go to sleep when I got home at midnight). My meeting is at 8:30am Saturday morning. So a part of me says, “Well, I bet I’m down overall and just because I weighed in right after my Bunko night, no sleep, lots of (bad) (yummy) food, not enough water and it’s showing up on the scale. I bet I have a big loss next week.” I guess it’s good that I don’t beat myself up over it, but really I SHOULD be beating myself up. At least a leetle bit. Nah!!!

So the plan for the week – back to the CORE plan, which means good, whole, unprocessed foods and I have to actually COOK. Can’t do core eating out, well, at least *I* can’t. It also means that I don’t have to do as much measuring and counting points, etc. because if you stay within the CORE foods, then you’re OK. The key is to eat until you feel full, but not overly full. You’re also supposed to start eating when you BEGIN to feel hungry. I have problems stopping when I’m full, even when it is brown rice and chicken. (BTW, have you HAD brown rice? IT IS SO GOOD! Go get some.)

So I’m sure one of the problems is at work I’m sitting around on my ass all day. I was at a temporary job before this full time gig, and at least I was moving somewhat. The job was downtown, and so I rode the train into the city, and then took the metro closer to my building, and THEN walked about 5-6 blocks to my office. It was fun and I liked the people, but at 1.5 hours, the commute sucked, and it was temporary. Full time with benefits has gotta win out every time.

So here I am at my new job, sitting on my butt, and now not even leaving my office for lunch because I bring it with me. I joined a women’s gym at the beginning of the summer and was doing pretty well, but rejoining the work force kind of sent that down the toilet. So, my goal for this week is to get my butt moving again. Yesterday (Monday) I left work early enough to go work out at the gym that just opened on my way home. I get past all the nasty traffic, go work out, and then sail over to Ethan’s school to pick him up. My plan is to do this Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. I have to admit, when I got home yesterday, I felt a zillion times better. I didn’t have that, “omg i’m so tired i want to just sit on the couch and veg out” feeling I get when I get home from work.

SO! To sum up: up 2.6 lbs (why must they do partial lbs? the good thing about WW online was that my scale only registered half lb increments, and so that’s what I got. I liked that better, methinks)

BUT… still down 1.6 lbs overall.

GOALS for the week: work-out 3x, and drink plenty of water

Long term goal: 20 lbs by New Years Day
If I lose 2 lbs a week, this is more than doable.

I feel kind of weird writing about this. I don’t want this blog to turn into a losing weight blog, but at this point in my life, it’s something I have to face and probably continue to face forever. I obviously haven’t dealt with it well in the past or I wouldn’t be here, and so, just putting it out there for my whole two person audience to read is, while a little uncomfortable, it’s still a part of what I’m going through right now. So I’m trying to work/write through the weirdness, and at least post weekly on my progress.

Last year when I was pregnant with Jocelyn, I was determined not to have another caesarean section, like what was done with Ethan. He was a breech baby and big, so we simply scheduled a c-section, and voila, at noon the next day, I was holding him. My doctors kept warning me that second babies were usually bigger than the first, and Ethan was over 9 pounds, so that was frightening. Basically, if I had any chance of a VBAC (vaginal birth after caesarean), I had to not gain very much weight.

So, while it is never prudent to “diet” while pregnant, I did pretty well on the “don’t gain any weight” during Jocelyn’s pregnancy. I beleive it was only 14 lbs total. With Ethan, I gained more like 40 lbs. Many folks say 40 lbs isn’t that much, but when you weigh what I did then, it was!

So I was pretty motivated during the pregnancy (it didn’t work out, however, Jocelyn was born via emergency c-section, more on that later) in order to try to have a relatively normal birth, to not gain any weight. It paid off when I went to my 6 or 8 week post-partum doctor’s checkup, when I was down 25 lbs from my PRE-pregnancy weight. That was a great feeling.

I don’t know if it was because I was nursing and needing more calories, or high on the nursing hormones, but that summer was fantastic for losing weight. I joined Weight Watchers online, counted points, and stayed on track amazingly well. It WAS hard at times, and frustrating. Jocelyn was (and still is) intolerant to dairy, and so I had to cut that completely out of my diet. At times in the grocery store, I would be so intent on searching out the whey, lactose, lactase, casein, and all the other thousands of milk-type substances on the ingredients list, that I would clean forget to look at the ww aspect of the food. But overall, I was motivated, I was MOVING, I was LOSING, and I was really feeling great. Right before labor day, I had lost almost 40 lbs from my dr’s checkup. And no, I’m not ready to post any numbers. Maybe after I’ve left them all far behind I can do it, but not until then!

What threw me off track? Well, unlike a lot of folks that kind of meander off the path, I pretty much made a right angle and started sprinting off of it — but I like to think it wasn’t all my fault. One night, I woke up with an incredible pain in my side. I called the nurse who was useless, got myself an urgent care appt. and took myself in — unfortunately the pain subsided before I even got there. However, a few nights later, it happened again. This time we called a neighbor friend who came over to stay with the kids while I made James drive me in. Again, same deal. It’s kind of funny, because the only time I’d ever felt that kind of pain was when I was in labor (yes THAT IS HOW MUCH IT HURT!) and so my mind automatically went to that same place. I made an appt with my womanly dr., who told me there was nothing wrong with my uterus. Well, that night, it happened again, plus I started vomiting. James called for urgent care, and then on the way there, I hollered at him that I couldn’t make it, and we stopped at the hospital instead.

That’s how I found out I had a faulty gallbladder! Apparently I had gall stones that had gotten themselves messed up with my pancreas, and I wound up with a nasty case of pancreatitis. I spent a week in the hospital not allowed to eat or drink anything while my pancreas got better. When I left, I had instructions to get my gallbladder out. I did, a few months later.

While I was in the hospital, I pumped my breasts, but with no food and water to fuel milk production, and let’s face it, a BABY is the best breast pump mother nature made and anything else is really second best — well, our nursing relationship was doomed. Nursing stopped, and with that, I could eat things with milk in them! I think this, more than anything else, sent me off the WW wagon. It was like a flood gate was open, and I had a hard time resisting all the things I couldn’t have for all those months. I HADN’T HAD CHEESE FOR MONTHS PEOPLE! Then as that subsided, it was the holidays, and, well, I didn’t want to restrict myself, so I didn’t.

So this past year, I’ve made half hearted efforts to get back with it. I’ve rejoined WW online, but couldn’t keep myself on the program very well. Unmotivated, depressed, I was really having mental issues on many levels. When I started my new job, a cloud seemed to kind of lift for me, and I decided it was really time to take action and make ME a priority. So finally, 2 weeks ago, I joined the actual Weight Watchers meetings. Last week on Saturday was my first weigh-in, and I had lost 4 lbs, a great start! This Saturday will be my second weigh-in. I haven’t been journaling my food like I’m supposed to, but I think I’m doing OK. I guess we’ll see.