In The Streets and On The Couch

Friday felt significant, because it meant it had been over a week since I started GAPS-ing.  I promise this won't be another post full of complaints about my self-imposed diet choices (especially since I get to eat squash walnut pancakes now...all is right with the world again).  I did pretty much the same thing this Friday as last Friday, that being pick up the CSA box (which was huge this week)...

A little blurry, but not bad for $20!

 ...and stop by Hedgeapple for some more meat.  This diet has encouraged me to try new cuts of meat, for example I now know what beef shin tastes like (tough).  When you're just boiling everything there's no point in getting tenderloin!  That definitely helps with the cost of buying local grass-fed organic beef.

Saturday we did In The Streets!  I used to go to this celebration back when I was a kid, but lately we've either been unable to go or we've ended up getting there too late when everything was closing.  This time we got there right as it opened!

Emily in front of the old FNP's bridal veil clematis

Love the new lily pads in Carroll Creek!

Yay!  At least SOMEONE was handing out healthy food!

Slime!

Me being very un-Montessori and telling the girls what to do at the Montessori activity table

 We spotted Greg and Lauren as we strolled by the acupuncture tent, and strolled around with them for awhile afterward.

Lauren with her two star Bodypump students :-)

Face-painting was a must

I love Charlotte's serious "I'm having my face painted" face

Checking out a snake

What season is it???

Charlotte FINALLY got to realize her dream of having a hands-on bunny rabbit encounter.

Time for food and some sitting

 We made it back to our car right as the first raindrops started to fall, and back to our house right as the skies really opened up in a torrential downpour.  By the time it was time to go back out to my sister's for a family dinner, the rain had stopped.  Perfect timing!

Krista, the middle sister

Ground turkey enchiladas, refried beans, guac and chips, and turmeric oat groats

My dinner...a lacto-fermented pickle, stuffed green pepper, butternut squash

This is why Gemmy takes Bodypump

On Sunday I was super-excited because I got to make pancakes for breakfast!  They were just pureed squash and eggs, but it was the first remotely normal breakfast I've had in awhile!

Yesterday and today I even got to add ground walnuts to my pancakes!  They are even more delicious that way!  I feel like I'm finally getting out of the worst part of the diet now that I can have whole cooked eggs, walnuts and avocado!  The next things I'm really looking forward to are carrot juice, then applesauce, then fresh vegetables!

After our usual Sunday morning routine of dog park/playground/workout, we were all so tired we scrapped our plans of going to the Greek Festival and just laid around the house.  We were lazy for awhile, but we did get somethings accomplished, like 2 hours of weeding that finally made my front garden look presentable.  The weeds were seriously about 3ft high.  I am not the most devoted gardener.  I do, however, love to decorate for the upcoming holidays so I wanted a respectable-looking canvas to start with this year.

I feel like the festival-filled fall weekends have officially started, and the weather is cooperating.  After this blazing hot summer I can't wait for fall!

And I would be remiss if I posted today without mentioning another beautiful fall-ish day 11 years ago when I woke up and walked out of my room to see my roommate crying and watching images of the pentagon smoking and the twin towers collapsing.  I remember feeling shocked and nauseous thinking about how many REAL people Will and I were watching die live on TV as the towers fell.  Being at UMCP we were quite close to DC, and we didn't know when the attacks would stop.  There was talk of biological attacks on the Metro, and I lived less than half a mile from a metro stop.  But school was not cancelled that day, so I headed to class marveling at how EMPTY the sky was.  I could usually look up and spot at least 4 airplanes at any given time but that day there wasn't a single one up there (luckily).  Less than 2 weeks later our campus was hit by an F3 tornado and we were all left wondering what ELSE we never thought we'd have to worry about could happen.

I still get choked up thinking about all the people who died that day, and I try to keep them in mind if I ever start to get irritated while standing in an airport security line.  I know that in the next couple years Emily will probably be learning about 9/11 in school and asking me where I was when it happened just like we asked our parents where they were when they found out Kennedy had been shot.  Not having gone through it herself, I know Emily can never really understand what it was like, the uncertainty about what would happen next, the friends who disappeared from school for a week to go to their parents' funerals and the sinking realization that we weren't nearly as safe as we had thought we were.  But as much as I want Emily to keep that feeling of safety for as long as possible, I also think it's important to honor the people who died by remembering and passing on our stories about 9/11, especially to those who weren't alive yet to experience it.

Fast track to starvation

Hello again everybody!  It's so easy to get out of the habit of blogging, and so difficult to get back into it!  It's the same way with most things I struggle with, I guess (eating well, keeping the house clean, etc.).  I apologize that I have put everyone through over a week without knowing what I'm eating!  Hopefully everyone survived.

And the thing is, I don't know if there's even enough memory space available on my blog to post pictures of everything I've been eating even if I had faithfully documented it.  Right after my last post I went on another eating bender, and with an occasional half day of control here and there I have basically just been eating excessively and gaining back weight since then.  Like, a really large amount of weight.  Like, Will's jaw literally dropped when I told him how much weight I had gained in 1 week.

I am bummed of course, but not overly concerned.  I was shocked with how low my weight was when I weighed in the day after Krista's wedding, and whenever I just drop weight quickly and unexpectedly like that it comes back on pretty easily.  If only it worked the other way too.

SO, I am pulling out my secret weapon.  Weight Watchers Fast Track.  It's boring.  It's miserable.  It's 1000 calories a day.  But it's easy, and it's effective.  If I can find the willpower to get up off the floor and quit whimpering that I'm dying of starvation, it's actually kind of nice because the food choices are so simple, and it with a little preparation ahead of time it means I can eat my simple dinner whenever I want regardless of when Will gets home or when the girls get hungry.

I found a link to it online, and it's the OLD version of it that I like better too!

Here it is.  I'm doing the Higher Protein "Red Light" version because I like to shuffle everything around so I end up with more snacks.

I may post pictures of what I eat tomorrow, but as long as I'm doing fast track I probably won't bother to do it every day because I'll be eating almost exactly the same thing every day even moreso than usual.

I'm not sure how long I can keep this up, especially since I'll be making multiple batches of cupcakes and cakes and hanging around pizza and snacks all weekend.  We have Emily's birthday party on Saturday, which is being held at a place that pretty much forces us to serve junk food, plus we have various other activities and get-togethers, almost all of which involve copious quantities of food.  But maybe if I plan ahead of time to have a slice of cake, I can do just that and move on with my life without ruining everything OR feeling deprived?  And in the meantime any days I spend doing Fast Track will just put me in a better position to be allowed to have a splurge?

Who knows what will work and what won't.  I certainly don't.  This is a new approach though at least (the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results as my good buddy Einstein once said) so we'll see how it goes.

So here's what I've been doing since I last posted.

My great-grandma's 97th birthday.

Yes, THESE cakes again

I had fruit :-(

The hat was supposed to be a door decoration, but when you're 97 you've damned well earned the right to wear whatever you want on your head

 Not pictured: A week of eating too much.

Then!

The Children's Festival at Baker Park.

The bubbles were a HUGE hit

We got to hang out with Abigail for a bit too.

On Monday, Emily's field trip to the Frederick airport.

That pretty much catches us up to today.  Soon it will be time for me to head to Bodypump, which I hope will help take up some evening hours and help distract me from my hunger.  I also noticed the new gym has 1.25lb Bodypump weights now, which makes me quite happy.  I've already made the jump up in weight on most exercises though to compensate for their absence, so I guess I'll just have to wait until the next time I'm ready to go up in weight to fully appreciate them.

So I'll try to post all my food tomorrow, and after that we'll see.  If I am not posting my food then I'm not sure what I'll talk about every day, but those who know me also know that I can always find SOMETHING to yak about.  I'll try to channel that into writing so that I don't leave everyone bereft again :-)

Rehearsal

And I'm back!  Things have slowed down enough to allow me a couple uninterrupted minutes (or at least minutes that are as uninterrupted as they ever are when I'm at home) to mess with pictures and work on a post!  So without further ado, lets travel back in time to Thursday and pick up where I left off.

Thursday dawned, and I had a breakfast almost identical to the one I had the day before.

I spent the morning cleaning up and running errands.  The maids' arrival was perfectly timed (yay!) and at some point I had cheese or an egg or something.  I can't remember. 

Lunch was a salad on the go.

At 1 I put Charlotte down for her nap and left my Mother-in-Law in charge while Emily and I headed out to get our nails done.  This was Emily's first experience in a nail salon, and she did a great job!  It was probably the most patient I've ever seen her.

I got the shellac which I LOVE.  Within minutes it's hard as a rock and my nails still look perfect now, after all kinds of abuse over the last 3 days.

Mom got her 4th manicure ever.  She had one before her own wedding, one before my wedding, one before Kathleen's wedding and now one before Krista's wedding.  She's not a fan :-)

With our nails done and everything finally packed up, it was time to head to the rehearsal.  I grabbed some almonds on the way out the door.

The first thing the girls did, of course, was try out the dance floor.

Listening intently to instructions

Pretending to sprinkle flowers on the way down the aisle

The bride-to-be!

Then we headed back down to Frederick for the rehearsal dinner.  Despite having lived in Frederick since birth, I have never been to the Red Horse Inn before so I was psyched to be able to check out a place that is such a Frederick icon.  We weren't able to procure a babysitter for the occasion, so Will just met me for a girl pass-off and then had to miss the dinner to go take them home and put them to bed :-(  

Loved all the little horse-themed touches

One of the (many) drawbacks of having a broken camera is that it is almost completely impossible for me to hand it to someone and have them take a picture since it requires a lot of fiddling to focus it even when it's on auto-focus.  Heck, I use it constantly and I can't even get a shot that's in focus half the time.  I found a mirror with which to take a self-portrait though.

Dylan did a great job getting a family shot later though.  He's technologically inclined, so he just has a knack for those types of things.

Original Drays

I partook of a glass of Riesling.

And a pretty plain salad, but the roasted onions on top were really yummy and added a bit of interest.  For lack of an acceptable dressing, I ate my salad dry, which my Dad told me was "hardcore".

I went for the crab cakes, which were pretty yummy, but I could've done with a bit less extra stuff and a bit more crab.  It wasn't bad by any means, but that tends to be how I feel about almost all crab cakes.

A glass of Chardonnay was consumed with dinner.

After dinner the waitress paraded around with a Baked Alaska.

It looked lovely.

I had this mug of decaf coffee for dessert instead (minus all the cream and sugar).

The bride and groom presented the presents after dinner...Ghostbusters ties for the groomsmen,

and jewelry made by Krista for the bridesmaids!  She did an awesome job, although I didn't get any pictures specifically of the jewelry.

By then it was getting very late, so we left the Red Horse...

Bye

...and headed back to my parents' house where all the bridesmaids spent the night.

I had a snack before bed.

And then finally got to bed at 12:30AM!