During the spring campout a church a few of us ladies were chatting (while making lunches for the kids) about how we were all in need of a little help with our waistlines. Most of us had gained 40 or more pounds since our weddings (although one had gained a lot less, she was a lot closer to her wedding than the rest of us as well) and we had all tried lots of diets or exercise plans and not had them work.
Well, one of the ladies had a new plan: God, by way of the Sam’s Club book counter:
We all agreed that God had been the one thing really lacking in our past plans, so we got hold of the book and we set a start date and now that day is here.
The book is pretty simple and slim on details: you find your own diet and exercise plan, something doctor approved, and then this book provides the Scripture and encouragement and opportunity to journal daily. A little paragraph about health, a lot of quotes from the Bible and elsewhere, and then a journaling prompt.
Here’s how today went:
I did really good in the morning: got up, read the chapter, made myself a little plaque with the main quote from the book to put up in my kitchen, worked out, ate a reasonable breakfast & skipped snacking.
Afternoon wasn’t bad either: a decent lunch, then skipped the afternoon snack because I was having a high calorie dinner, walked a fair distance to the car & back.
Evening though, well, some of you know that I went back home after the play. Nick didn’t go back to work (surprise!), but had been preparing a special dinner.. So I did not do well in the evening after all that work the rest of the day. *sigh*
But that’s okay! The book didn’t really have any goal for today other than make a list of healthy choices you’d like to follow and unhealthy ones you’d like to drop and an admonition to look at portion sizes, which I totally did.
I’ve made a big post about this at my other blog, but in case you don’t read over there, or don’t want the whole long story of it all, here’s the short version: I had a majorly weird episode last weekend and the doctor is thinking either a) I had a mini-stroke or b) I’ve developed multiple sclerosis. Most likely B, as I’m already taking medications that would cause A to be unlikely and B is a side effect/co-morbidity of the immune condition/medications that I already have. So I’m going back to the hospital for more testing in a week or so (we’re waiting for insurance to say yes to it all).
There will be a fun kid related update tomorrow. 🙂
Monday we had a horrible storm first thing in the morning. There was some golfball sized hail and lots of thunder and lightning. Greg and I spent lots of time cuddled up on the couch. We also started working on Iheartorganizing’s Project Purge. 🙂
Tuesday all the kids were at school. I visited my rheumatologist (more about that here) and then met my friends E & H for Thai food. They brought me an early birthday present: scrapbooking pens, a layout book, and a nifty cottage mug. 🙂 (How did I manage not to take a photo?!) After school the kids spent time exploring the creek since it was still fairly full of water. Even Greg went over the fence (he usually stays behind with me) and took a look around. David had his first lesson out of his new piano books & Ben counted out how many songs left in his current book so he can “catch up” (they’re not using the same books, so he’s not really catching up, but that’s how he thinks about it).
Wednesday Greg and I went to the library for story time. There was a lady there from our local professional ballet troupe and she read the kids Pocahontas, as that’s the show they’re currently putting on. Since the version she read was the Disney version (and therefore mostly romance), the boys all got fairly bored fairly quickly. By the end of the story Greg was the only boy left in the room. We exchanged our books from last week for some new ones and went on home for lunch. After school Ben planned & prepared our snack as part of his scouting electives. We didn’t have raisins for ants on a log, but we did have craisins & dried cherries, so we tried those instead and it worked out well.
Thursday was another all-kids-in-school day, but I was feeling under the weather, so instead of being productive, I stayed on the couch and watched TV and dozed all day (fortunately for me my coffee date friend cancelled that day -serendipity!). It was a beautiful day, though, and the day that my rosebush erupted into blooms.
Friday Greg and I spent all morning playing with his kitchen & grocery store sets, something we haven’t done in ages. Greg made me six kinds of soup (because soup is good for you when you’re sick) and set up a “table” with a table cloth for our meal. It was very fun and something I could do while sitting down, which was great since I was so dizzy. That afternoon my parents arrived back from Germany and so we went over to visit and look at all their photos. Nick and David left for a while to go fishing with Uncle Mark in his boat (which we’d planned before we knew my parents would be up – my dad had been selected to serve on a jury that week, so we thought they’d not be up til Saturday). When they came back we had dinner together at their house.
Saturday we got up and I felt pretty good at the beginning of the day. I was perky and could finally smell stuff again. We went over to my parents house for breakfast and hung out for a while. By the time we left to go back home, though, I was starting to feel weird. Dizzy again, and tingly in my extremities. I went home and took a shower, hoping that would make me feel better, but it didn’t. I tried blow drying my hair, but couldn’t feel if the drying was blowing hot air or not, so I asked Nick and he said it was. I decided that I shouldn’t continue, for fear of hurting myself. The rest of the family got dressed and went on to church. I was supposed to follow along in the second van, but I was getting so confused, I couldn’t figure out how to drive. I called my mother in law to let her know what was going on, so she could tell Nick why I hadn’t made it to church (our phones don’t work out there very well) and laid down to rest. My parents eventually got back to me (they were out buying a new van, which took hours longer than expected, even once they’d picked it out), picked me up, fed me a bit of lunch, and took me back home to rest some more when I couldn’t manage more than a couple bites of toast. Once my in-laws brought the kids back from church (Nick was staying late for Men’s Club), I walked the kids over to my parents house for dinner (frozen pizza, the kids favorite), as I wasn’t sure I should be in charge of an oven. My parents tried to show off the new van to the kids, but something went wrong and the new van wouldn’t start. They spent the evening calling back and forth everywhere trying to get a technician out, but ended up leaving town the next day with the problem unresolved. The pizza, being left to me in the meantime, did in fact end up crispy critters. 😦 The kids ate around the burnt bits and were very sweet about the whole situation.
Sunday Nick made us a nice breakfast at home before running off to work. I was still feeling really weird, so the kids and I stayed home and had a quiet day. The kids were really well behaved all day and mostly kept to themselves, David with his Legos, Greg with his games, and Ben with his book (he’s reading Barthe de Clements “Nothings Fair in Fifth Grade” – which I read as a child).
Yesterday morning I woke up feeling nearly normal. I was finally able to drive the car & managed to get the kids to school, the mail stamped & mailed at the post office, and the milk & bread purchased at the grocery. Of course, I spent all that time also fielding phone calls from the various doctors offices that were finally calling me back (I’d left messages over the course of the weekend asking for advice). The rheumatologist didn’t think it was a drug-reaction or an RA related event, even though he’d specifically mentioned numbness & tingling being a possibility at our appointment earlier in the week. My primary physician wanted to see me “right away” but didn’t have a hole in his schedule until today, which the nurse thought was all right to wait since I was feeling okay by that point. Greg and I spent the rest of the day doing our quiet little Monday things: tidying, dishwashing, laundry, watching movies, the usual. The big kids came home and had a snack before David ran off with his friend on bikes, riding through the neighborhood. Once he and Nick arrived home (within moments of each other, so I was surprised into not taking a picture of David arriving home), we had a bbq picnic outside (another one of Ben’s elective’s for scouts).
I realized the other day after the fact that when I posted about President’s Day that I still had a week or so of posting to do and now it’s been a couple weeks since that and I have A LOT of posting to do. I’ve been doing that thing again where you start a post, realize that you need to have your calendar close by or your photos already uploaded and since you realize that you’re woefully unprepared, you close out of the post unsaved and promise that you’re going to post TOMORROW. Well, I have a lot of “tomorrows” to post for and who knows how long I’ll manage to stay awake at this point, so this may be more summary than actual posty goodness.
We’ll start will February 18th, as that is the first day on the calendar post-15th that I have a) something written on and b) photos for. In the morning, G, my mom, and I hit Lowe’s for the second time in a week, this time in order to buy those fabulous kid-size-but-very-sturdy gardening tools that we’d seen earlier in the week. We also scored some Gerber daisies (two varieties, it turned out), which we later planted in a small grouping in the front yard.
That afternoon we picked the kids up from school, drove out to my in-laws house, and prepped & decorated for a family dinner.
The next day we got up, got ready for the day, and then G and I headed up the hill for his best friends birthday party at the local community center. Fun was had by all, including me (I got to talk at length with an interesting woman who’d held a similar ministry position to mine back in the day)! 🙂
After that we headed out to church, then back to town to visit with my parents. Sunday was, again, basketball and more basketball, followed by Nick working overtime and the kids and I cleaning up the house and catching up on laundry and such. Monday was President’s Day, which I already blogged at length about in my last post. Tuesday was my appointment with the rheumatogist, which I blogged about here. In case you don’t follow that link, the long and short of it is: new meds and I have to see another doctor about my pre-hypertension. Yay. I spent the rest of the day cleaning and taking kids to piano lessons and Greg got to spend the night with his Nana and Pa.
Wednesday I hung out with my parents a bit, which was weird all by myself. I went home and cleaned house until it was time to pick up kids. Around 4:45 we met up with some other scout parents and took a group over to the Lady Apache Basketball game (well, I took the kids, but Nick and his dad and G eventually showed up there).
Thursday I had my appointment with my PCP, wherein I found out that due to family history, I needed to start on a beta blocker and watch my health more closely. Yay. Friday was a normal day with kids going to school, homework being done, chores, etc. We drove down to CS Friday afternoon/evening. Saturday the kids played ping pong and watched movies. My friend Sarah and her new baby came over to visit, which was lots of fun. G loved playing Peek-a-boo with little Serenity. 🙂
Sunday the kids went fishing at the park, then we drove back home in the afternoon. Monday was a regular day for us, with the kids at school and later B had scouts. Tuesday marked Nick and I’s 14th anniversary of our first date, so we had the babysitter come over after piano lessons, so we could go out to Sonoma Grill and the bookstore afterwards.
Wednesday, March 2nd, the car wouldn’t start, as we’d miscalculated the gas mileage (our gas gauge does not work). I walked the kids in to school, a 45 minute round trip. This, of course, put us in the marginal zone for being late for our 2nd glass appointment (the replaced glass from last week having cracked once we tried opening the window). They said that the guy was running a bit late anyway, no worries, he’d be there by 11am. Well, by 11am we had a friend lined up to help us fill our gas tank. The glass guy was, of course, terribly late, so while we waited we had a playdate at our house.
That family left after lunch. The glass guy, despite being only “45 minutes” away at 10:30am, showed up at 2:35pm. Needless to say, we won’t be doing business with the Glass Doctor again.
Thursday the 3rd all the kids went to their various schools & I had lunch with my friend Em and her daughter H. We discussed the Wii game Animal Crossing in great detail, as my whole family is obsessed with it, and H. is an expert player. That evening I went out once again with B’s Tiger Cub den (and one other), this time to tour the local TV station during the evening broadcast, which we were supposed to appear on, but due to scheduling and technical difficulties, we did not appear on. Ah well, the tour was interesting and the kids had a pretty good time.
Friday, March 4th. we went over to my friend JP’s house for a playdate. G loves her daughter K, so all was well there. Afterward we spent the afternoon cleaning up before hosting a family from church for dinner. We had a fabulous time with our friends and the kids loved making a movie “show” and videotaping it for our later viewing pleasure. 🙂
Saturday was a church day, then afterwards Nick headed out to Men’s Club while the kids and I headed out to Pizza Hut with Nick’s parents and sister and her girls. Sunday was yet more basketball, Nick working more overtime, and us cleaning more of the house. Monday was the first official day of Spring Break. D has spent several nights at his Nana and Pa’s house. The younger kids and I made a picnic lunch and toured Mrs. Lee’s Daffodiil Garden before heading our to our friend’s house in Gladewater for the afternoon. We played at their house, then played over at R’s school playground before coming home for the evening. Today we spent the day playing video games and hosting a playdate with one of Ben’s friends and missing our D. Tomorrow he comes home, though, and B will get his turn at Nana and Pa’s house. 🙂
That’s it. Hope that was coherent enough for you. More photos can be found at flickr.com, of course.
It has been a sincerely and completely crazy week. I’m not even going to try to tell all of it, that’s how insane it’s been.
Monday we wrote in our workbooks, ran Zhu-zhu & Kung Zhu hamsters all over the house, made food in the Easy Bake oven, looked up recipes to make reasonably priced food in the Easy Bake Oven, and generally stayed in our pajamas until it was long past time to be out of them.
Tuesday we did more of the same, but this time ventured out to a Post Holiday Jollies party at Double Daves with my former MOPS friends.
The kids ran around like crazy, the adults ate far too much in an attempt to recomp some of the money we spent on food the kids weren’t eating, and we generally laughed a lot and agreed that Christmas is totally ridiculous. A good time was had by all. 🙂
Wednesday we got up and after a couple false starts drove to Ft. Worth for D’s orthopedic visit. We got completely turned around at some point (bad directions, yay) and ended up getting to our appointment with only 4 minutes to spare, which was agonizing, as we’d left more than an hour of leeway in our schedule. My friend Kay watched the younger two at the park (along with her two) while I took D in to the doctor alone. He had his xrays done, his legs measured four ways (on a block, on the xray, with a measuring tape by hand, and another way I’ve forgotten now), and we got the whole hemihypertrophy schpiel again, as the med student in with us had never heard of it. The doctor reassured us that despite D’s “deformity” (his word, not mine), he was actually in really good shape and did I read any hemihypertrophy blogs or belong to any forums? I tried not to laugh at that. (For a really long time I was one of the top three hits on Google for hemihypertrophy) I explained that I had at one time, but really it got to be too much. The doctor said that D’s leg length difference is getting worse, not better, and that we need to keep coming back at 6 month intervals to keep an eye on it to make sure it’s not damaging his pelvis or his spine or anything. When he’s around 15 (sooner, if it keeps growing too fast), they’ll have to break his growth plate on the one leg so the other can catch up. I’m hoping that the health industry comes up with a better answer by then, as that sounds incredibly painful and time consuming and what 15 year old boy wants to take a time out from life for something like that?! Aie. Anyway, after the appointment, we went back to Kay’s parents (now Kays home as well, but they have two houses at the moment and it gets confusing) house and took the kids on an adventure and let the play games and fed them multi-colored pancakes for dinner. I think Kay has better photos than I do, but I will post those when I see her next.
Thursday I spent in pain because of all the driving I’ve been doing lately. Yay, pain. D and B each had friends over to play video games. G’s friends couldn’t make it, due to illness (argh), but B & his friend let him play Mario Kart & Wii Music with them, so he was pretty happy anyway.
New Year’s Eve day we spent running errands with Nick. We got fireworks for a future display (once the burn ban is over, I’ve been chanting this for months) and other stuff that required a trip out towards Nick’s parents house. Hung out there for a while with his dad. We had a big surprise over something that I’m not sure I’m ready to talk about yet, nothing family related, exactly, but something big we’re still talking over and making decisions about. For the evening festivities, Nick made a whole lot of German food (sauerbrauten, red cabbage and apples, caramelized onions, etc) and I made a lot of decorations that said 2011 and poppers for the kids. My parents came over to eat and celebrate. The kids got to do both my kind of poppers (with candy inside) and the more explosive kind (confetti explosion) and smoke bombs and sparklers. We had a bit of dancing in the living room and then an early countdown to the new year for the kids. Actually, for everyone.
My parents left right after that and Nick and I decided we’d had enough for the day and went to bed, too. 🙂
New Years Day was a Saturday and therefore a church day, but therein lies the madness, so we ended up going to services at two different churches. Like I said, not something I’m up for discussing at the moment, but it did take up all the day and into the evening. We had dinner at my parents house here in town, with the two D’s making us the Crazy Cantina Chili from the original Star Wars Cookbook. It turned out all right, kind of like Taco Soup, but without the meat (my dad threw some in at the end to fill it out a bit).
Yesterday we took the kids out for basketball practice, but there weren’t many kids there. They had fun, though.
We spent the afternoon at home doing necessary cleaning type stuff. I set up a Kids Command Center in their hallway with all their important info like calendars, lunch menus, emergency numbers, chore lists with dry erase markers, etc. I’ll do a post about that and the art we made today as well sometime tomorrow.
Anyway, hope everyone is having a very pleasant new year so far. 🙂
I keep trying to post this, but then I wander off, the computer reboots, the post gets erased, and nothing gets posted. *sigh* I suppose that is the universe’s way of telling me to leave certain things unsaid. (Or something.)
So here are the important parts: The kids are alive, well, and hysterically funny. Nick is, too, but maybe not as funny as the kids. He’s taken up bike riding, long distance. We are all happy and well. I’ve quit my mom’s group after 7.5 years of membership and discovered who my friends really are, which in some ways is interesting & amazing and other ways predictable (but lovely nonetheless). Both Nick’s dad and my dad have been in the ER in the last month, nothing really awful, but signs are pointing both of them in the direction of “slow down,” which neither of them intend to do. I’m on yet another medicine for my RA/fibromyalgia, big kids are in school & thriving & the smallest kid starts school next week, and I’m going back to writing in my now-more-copious amounts of spare time. That, really, is all.
So hey, it’s February, and so therefore we have the Plague. David has this on again off again stomach virus at least one day every week since the end of January. Ben & Nick have been coughing, but seem okay for the most part. Greg has been snotty & feverish and coughing for a solid week now. I got a sinus infection three weeks ago, spent two weeks literally writhing in pain before that started dying off, and am now living in the land of Am I Sick or Not? (Which means one day of feeling good & productive followed by one day of deathly-sinus-headache followed by one day of chills/fever/but otherwise fine followed by one day of sore throat/sinus pain). Greg and I have missed all our MOPS stuff & coffee dates & play dates. It’s making me cranky.
I’ve pretty much watched every movie in the house that is safe to watch in front of Greg and am now starting to watch things like Pretty Woman and wonder why,oh,why anyone thought a movie about a prostitute was acceptable for young people to watch. As a kid watching it, it was AWESOME, but as a mom watching it, I’m thinking about things like Vivienne getting tetanus from getting scratched on the fence and what kind of horrible germs are in that toilet that she just plunged her hand into and whoa, all the dirt! Yeah. I watched Legend & Total Recall last week (after kid hours) and was amazed at all the gore. My brain, it is exploding. I shouldn’t be allowed movies in this state. No, no, no.
In other news, we’ve been on a science kick around the house. David had to do a research paper & model & report on a natural disaster and he, naturally, chose a meteor shower. So we did that. We also made a tsunami, because a meteor strike in water can cause that. Then we made a tornado in a jar. One of the other class mom’s is a biologist of some sort & she brought a bunch of chemicals up to school & did a demonstration, so David wanted to know what kind of chemicals he had access to at home, so we tried to figure that out & then figure out what kind of experiments we could do from here without buying anything special.
Ben’s started doing math at school. He got a 100 on his first paper (BEST IN CLASS, MAMA!!!) and has ever since been making his own math problems to work after school. He’s also been learning about coins and passed that mania on to Greg, who has been playing pirate or shopkeeper, whichever one takes his fancy as long as he gets to count the money. Ben’s been trying to teach him that each coin “costs” a different amount, but Greg just counts number of coins. It’s very funny to watch them argue about it.
I finally got my writing notebook back in the mail, so worked on that a bit yesterday. Progress notes to be posted at dreamwidth.
Nick is obsessed with the Olympics, which has been fun, I guess. He’s the kind of person that will watch any event, so if the Olympics is on at any point, he turns the TV on. I, on the other hand, am mainly just interested in the figure skating (so I went to bed way early last night).
I guess February doesn’t completely suck. I just wish we all would get better finally.
Lisa Holcomb 