Day 1

 I did it!  I made it through a day eating reasonably.  It was very tough...I wanted to pig out quite a few times (especially while making mac and cheese for dinner, one of my WORST trigger foods) but I made it 1 day.  1 day at a time.

I have decided that when I get into the next lowest "decade" of weight I want to get some new gym clothes.  My old ones are fitting kinda funny and most of them have small stains on them since I have worn them around my kids for longer than 5 minutes.  I think some cute new gym clothes would help me maintain my motivation.  That is, if I can even maintain it past today.

Breakfast:

 I went to Bodypump today and wasn't really feeling it.  Squats were especially tough because my legs were sore from spin yesterday, and I took a bit of weight off for the back track since I've had this pain in the back of my right shoulder since Saturday (I think I did something to it while carrying boxes around).  I got a good workout and went up in weight on chest and triceps, but I just wasn't enjoying it like I usually do.

I ate a babybel on the way home, and I am amazed that this is all I had for lunch considering I was so hungry:

Now my salad was remarkable so I WILL tell you what was in that.  Greens, peppered goat cheese, roasted red peppers, toasted pine nuts (SO much better in a salad than on cereal!), roasted grapes, and honey + apple cider vinegar dressing.  Plus the lemons, but I didn't eat those, I just kind of stirred them around to get some lemon-y flavor into the salad.  I have been wanting to try roasted grapes for ages, ever since I saw on someone's food blog that roasting grapes is actually a thing people do.  They were really yummy!  Kind of like when you put raisins in your overnight oats and they plump up.  Which makes sense, they're kind of an in-between stage when going from grapes to raisins.  They added a nice sweetness to the salad that made me wish I hadn't put honey in there too.  

Shortly after lunch I had 1/2 cup of cottage cheese to get in a little more protein.

Then I made myself a green smoothie in honor of St. Patrick's Day later this week.  

I kept this in the fridge and sipped on it throughout the afternoon.  I REALLY liked drinking it this way because it stops me from heading to the fridge and grabbing cheese or some leftover dinner or whatever else when I get peckish, I just take a gulp of smoothie instead.  I will definitely be using this smoothie-drinking method in the future.

Our fun for the day was making slime.  Pictures from teachpreschool.org caught my eye on Pinterest and I decided I really wanted to do this project.  The woman who wrote that must be some kind of magical wizard or something because our experience (with only 1 preschooler!) was not nearly as neat and orderly and gorgeous-looking, although that was partially because I bought white glue instead of clear glue. But it did the trick, and we had some messy fun on the newly-reclaimed back porch.

It must be my phone's camera...looking cross-eyed like her mommy

Stirring slime with one hand, eating leftover breakfast oatmeal with the other

 We made orange and purple, and when Charlotte woke up from her nap the offer of slime helped her to bypass the customary half hour of whining that follows most naps.  She enjoyed poking it and discussing it more than actually digging in and playing with it.

We also ate our dinner outside today!  It was incredibly nice to be able to do so without POLLEN everywhere.  And I just finally ordered the table and chairs for the back porch so hopefully we'll be enjoying many more meals on the back porch this season.

I made macaroni and cheese per Emily's request, but I decided it should be green for St. Paddy's day (which is a GREAT excuse to sneak spinach into everything your kids eat!).  Then I decided that on top of the spinach I put in the sauce I would add puréed cauliflower and some pumpkin I froze last fall.  So in the end it wasn't so very green, but it was creamy and chock-full of veggies.  I served even more on the side, ensuring that I got about 500x my quota of spinach and kale today between my salad, my smoothie and dinner.

Sickly yellow but super-delicious

I ate 2 bites of macaroni while I was making it, but then stopped.  I can't tell you how rare it is for me to be near macaroni and cheese and not eat until my stomach hurts.

I decided I still wanted dessert, but I limited myself to 2 carefully measured Tbsp of grain-sweetened chocolate chips.

When I got hungry later on I had a grapefruit.

Repeat footage AGAIN, but for some reason this picture likes to hang out on my camera so it was more convenient to just recycle it.

Oh!  And I forgot...I drank half of an Ithaca Brewing Company Partly Sunny beer.  The rest went into the mac and cheese sauce because I'm not a HUGE fan but it was refreshing and satisfied my beer craving.  Since Will went to his beer club meeting tonight I was wanting some too!

So that's it.  Will has to wake up early tomorrow so I am going to head to bed right now vs. staying up any longer to think of a clever way to close my post.  See you all tomorrow.

Crazy Days-ees

Oh goodness, what a crazy couple of days!  First things first, I guess I should fess up.  I fought off the urge to eat too much until halfway through Friday, then lost control.  At my weigh-in Saturday morning I was up 3.8 pounds from last week.  That was painful.  I guess those 4 pounds that kinda fell off right before I went to San Antonio have decided that on second thought I need to really earn their absence.  Either that or, you know, I've just been eating too much this week.

Friday was an emotionally charged day for me.  First I had to take Charlotte to her well-child doctor's appointment in the afternoon.  Everything went perfectly well, she's smack in the 50th percentile for pretty much everything except that she's way ahead for speaking and motor skills (go Charlotte!).  The drama was because she needed to get a shot which is always super-sad :-(  I CAN'T STAND how they make the mommies hold the kids down!  I guess they feel like your presence helps calm your child, and I guess it IS better to have Mommy laying on you vs. some nurse you've never met before but I feel like such a traitor in that moment when their little bodies go completely rigid and they start to scream.  She was very brave though and was really interested in the heart band-aid they put on her leg so she didn't cry for long.  That's a nice change from Emily, who HATES band-aids so her anxiety about getting a shot is always compounded by her anxiety that the nurses will make her wear a band-aid afterward!  Now Charlotte won't need any more shots until she's 4 (all of which Emily has already gotten) then both girls are good until they are 11!  Hopefully they won't need to be held down at that point.  That is unless they decide in the near future to start requiring kids to be vaccinated for something else too, which would not surprise me.  They already force you when they're incredibly young to repeatedly vaccinate them with 7 diseases at once, many of which it would be practically impossible for them to be exposed to unless you travel with them internationally or make them spend time somewhere that's super-filthy.  I love vaccines, don't get me wrong!  I even signed up for vaccine trials in college (sounds scary, but who has two thumbs, $700 and is immune to all 4 strains of Dengue Fever?  THIS girl!)  But I really don't think we have to hit tiny babies with so many vaccines at once, especially when the chances are so low that they'll be exposed to some of these diseases.  And I also wish I wasn't treated like a really inconvenient idiot when I ask to spread out my children's vaccines :-(

So after the shot tension, I went that evening to visit my almost 97-year-old great-grandmother who has been in and out of the hospital for the past few weeks.  Luckily she has lots of family around, but I hadn't been to visit her yet.  I was warned by some of my family members that she was very weak and fading.  My sister decided to come along with me, and as we drove over to the hospital we were thinking we were on our way to say goodbye to her.

Well when my sister and I got there, she was actually doing really well!  She was completely lucid, not having any pain anymore, and we chatted with her for about 45 minutes.  She could even keep all the family members we discussed straight (which would be quite a feat  for anyone considering she has great GREAT grandchildren at this point!) and the plan was to release her from the hospital back to her nursing home the next day.  It was really good to see her, and hopefully I'll be able to get out there with the girls sometime soon so they can give her some hugs too.

Saturday was nuts.  I spent the morning chopping fruit and veggies in preparation for my sister's bridal shower that I was helping to host later in the day (although my mom and sister did almost all of the work).  Will left at one point to go on a trail run with our friends Brad and Kim, but they ended up getting lost when the trail they thought was a loop turned out to be a straight trail!  Will came flying into the driveway at 11:20 and since I was supposed to be across town by 11:25 I waved at him and then immediately raced away.  I ended up getting there at 11:37, which wasn't TOO late.  That was good because we had A LOT to set up!  My sister Kathleen had quite a vision and we had a large blank room to decorate, so even with about 10 people helping we just barely got everything ready in time.

It was a fantastic shower though!  The food was outstanding and the decorations really ended up looking nice.

Starting to set up

The dessert table, only partially filled

The bride, confused as to why scarves secretly snatched from her apartment are hanging over the door

Kathleen's truffles (she made 5 kinds!!!)

Kathleen's baklava, which she also MADE HERSELF

Nanny's dolmades

Nanny's hummus

My sangria and water plus some juice and tea/coffee fixin's

Mom's goat cheese-stuffed dates

Kathleen and I had similar shoes

Roses's rice krispy treat "cakes"

Aunt Diane's cupcakes

My plate

Shower games...identifying herbs by smell alone

The Bridal Party

Everything went really well, up until we were cleaning everything up and a group of people walked in at 10 till 5 and told us they had rented the space starting at 5!  We had to RUN boxes of all the decorations and food out to the sidewalk just to get it out of their way, then we were able to sort it all into different people's cars.  They were nice about it but it would've been nice to know ahead of time that we had a time limit!

After that we went over to my parents' house to have dinner and hang out with some out-of-town family who had come down for the shower and were spending the night.  Emily was NUTS but Charlotte behaved herself quite well.  I sent her to make the rounds and hug everyone goodbye as we prepared to leave for the night around 8, and she went to Dibby (my Dad) first.  She held up her arms to him, and he put out his thumbs for her to grab.  She did, then lifted her feet off the ground and hung there.  But as I walked by I heard her say "Ow, my arm hurtin'!"  She seemed to really be concerned about it, but we were able to get her to wiggle her fingers and lift her arm up over her head, so I figured her sad whining was just the fact that she was up past her bedtime after a long day and that maybe she just had pulled it funny while hanging from my Dad's thumbs.  

As we drove home she continued to pitifully say "My arm hurtin'!" every couple minutes, but she would also remark calmly on things she saw out the window.  I called Will to make sure he'd be home from the Leprechaun Luau he had been working at all evening just in case I needed to drop Emily off and take Charlotte to the doctor.  It seemed to hurt the poor thing quite a bit to get her out of her carseat and out of her shirt and she was holding her arm tight against her body and clutching it with the opposite hand.  I decided it was time to page the Dr. (it was after hours so you have to call the practice's answering service and they page the doctor to call you back). In the meantime we were working on getting Emily to bed and keeping Charlotte as motionless as possible.  When the doctor called me back he said it sounded like Nursemaid's Elbow, and that we should take her to the ER unless I wanted to try and pop it back into place myself.  He explained to me how to do it (hold the point of the elbow between the thumb and pointer finger, then with the other hand turn her palm until it's facing up while quickly bending the elbow as much as possible), then said to call back if I had any further trouble.  The idea freaked me out, but I decided to give it a shot.  My poor little girl was so tired and had been holding still long enough that her arm wasn't currently painful so it broke my heart to have to grab her arm and cause her pain, and my first attempt didn't work :-(  For some reason I decided to try one more time, and as her elbow bent I felt a POP!  I was hopeful but when I asked her if her arm was still hurting she moaned "Yeah!".  

I had Will sit with her and I headed downstairs to collect up my purse, phone and shoes so that I could drive her to Urgent Care.  When I came back upstairs I said "Alright Charlotte, it's time to go see the doctor", and she said "OK!" and sat up while she flung the blanket back with her bad arm!  I said "Oh look!  You're using your hurt arm!" and she looked at it, moved it around a bit and said "It's not hurtin' anymore!"  Those were the best words I'd heard in a long time!  Within a couple minutes she was asleep and now she's doing just fine :-)

I'm so glad we were able to take care of it at home...since she was at the doctor's office getting a shot the day before I didn't want to have to take her to the doctor to have something painful done again the very next day!  I might never've gotten her back into a doctor's office without tears again.

After all that excitement, today has been nice and chill.  I woke up early (EXTRA early because of the time change) and went to Lauren's spin class, which was seriously tough!  In the spin class I usually take on Tuesdays I get to the point where I'm gasping with my heart beating like I'm sprinting about 2-3 times over the course of the class.  Well in Lauren's class I felt like that practically the whole time!  She definitely made good on her promise to give me the best workout of my life!  I made it through (barely) and have been pretty worn out ever since.  Working my legs so hard a day after running around the shower for hours wearing pretty high heels has taken a toll on my body.

Luckily, I didn't really have to do anything else today except keep up with the girls, so I convinced them we needed to snuggle in bed a bit, then I rested during Charlotte's nap and was able to be moderately useful for the rest of the day.  I even power washed the back porch!  That thing has been nasty and I am determined that this is the year that we get patio furniture and make the back porch somewhere that we can hang out!  I planned to get patio furniture when we first moved in but at that point (Fall 2008) the stock market was so sucky it seemed wiser to wait on additional large purchases after buying a house.  Acquiring patio furniture has fallen to the back burner although at least once a year I entertain the idea again, and in the meantime our back porch has filled with muddy dog prints, stinkbugs and mildew from the girls constantly dumping water from their play sink all over the porch floor in the summer.  But now it's clean!  All I need to do is get some nice furniture and a couple solar lanterns (and get RID of the junky table and chairs that are back there now) and it should be a pretty neat place to eat meals and hang out when it gets warm.  And my only injury is a tiny hole I blasted through the skin on my left hand when it accidentally got in the way of the power washer.  Ever since I visited my great-grandma in the hospital on Friday we have been narrowly avoiding ending up back there again!

You will notice that there aren't really any pictures of my food in this post...I have snapped some here and there but I always seem to lose motivation about halfway through the day.  You would think my crappy weigh-in on Saturday would've been enough to motivate me to jump right back on track but sadly it wasn't.  I have been eating way too much the past few days :-(  

I plan to try and focus on eating healthy for my body over the next couple days, not on "dieting".  I think I have been thinking too much about the dieting part recently which has been getting me depressed about my progress.  And I have definitely not felt healthy and energetic the last couple days...when I eat too much I feel so gross!  And yet I still do it.  

I am also toying with the idea of snapping and posting pictures of everything I eat but maybe not necessarily explaining every single ingredient in the caption, especially since I eat pretty much the same thing every day.  That takes a lot of time and gets pretty boring!  I will try just posting the picture from here on out (unless I feel like saying what's in it to make a point or something like that) and see how that works.

So here we go again, it's time to lose some pounds over again that I already lost.  And I know from experience that it's very important to get back on track right away and get rid of them quick so they don't stay over and invite their friends!

Eat all the things!

Yuck.  Breakfast was a fail today.  Because I was saving the last of the cow's milk for Charlotte and Emily (who will not accept any kind of non-dairy milk substitute) I was forced opened a box of whole grain rice milk from the pantry that I had bought back when Emily was sick and off dairy.  I shook it up in a drink shaker with ice (I can't stand warm milk of any sort...dairy or non) and poured if over my bowl of cereal.

A couple days ago when I was trying unsuccessfully to prove to Will that pecans aren't THAT bad nutritionally I noticed that pine nuts are actually quite high in protein but low/moderate in carbs fat and calories comparatively.  So why not try them on my cereal instead?

2 biscuits Barbara's Bakery shredded wheat with whole grain rice milk, blueberries, pine nuts and erythritol, scrambled egg with salsa and pineapple

Because they were awful, that's why not.  The "milk" tasted like sweetened water and somehow accentuated the metallic-ness of the pine nuts, or maybe it was the blueberries.  I couldn't tell because it was just a big old bowl of nasty.  It was so gross I didn't finish all of it.  I will be keeping my pine nuts safely tucked away in the cabinet at breakfast from here on out.

Today was round two of FNP's Coffee Madness, so after preschool drop-off I headed out to Dublin Roasters.  I knew they roasted coffee and sold it through local natural food stores but I didn't realize they had a whole coffee shop thing going on too.  I really liked it there!  It was spacious with a very earthy/fair-tradey feel PLUS the lady working there gave Charlotte a free honey straw (much better than the dum-dum lollipop a bank teller gave her yesterday as an apology for bonking her in the head with a door)!  I tried the VOLT blend, which I assume is what they serve at VOLT, and it was quite tasty.

Then I went to finish signing Emily up for Kindergarten.  I didn't bring the correct proof of residency last time so I had to go give them the rest of the papers they needed.  Can I just say something here?  Of course I can, it's my blog.  SO, it seems things have gotten pretty ridiculous when it comes to how much of your business you are forced to share with the school your child attends.  I had to circle what kind of "dwelling" we live in, I have to have a form filled out by Emily's dentist stating that it appears her teeth are well cared-for, she has to have proof that she's had a physical, and she has to get a blood test to prove she doesn't have high lead levels.  Now I understand making sure they've had all their immunizations (although I still have a big problem with how it is all handled...another post for another time) because yeah, if your kid comes to school with a contagious disease then they could affect the other kids negatively.  But how do my child's teeth or what kind of house they live in affect anyone?  If it's to make sure that your child isn't being abused or living in poverty, wouldn't that be better noticed by your child's teacher since if you live in a cardboard box you probably won't go around admitting that on school forms anyway?  I am all for identifying and reaching out to kids in bad situations, but as usual I think the way they're going about it will help very few while making all the other kids' parents have to jump through hoops and feel like we are being subtly accused of being incompetent parents who have to have the school system checking over our shoulder to make sure we're doing everything right.

Once I got over my indignation, I headed to Bodypump, then after picking up Emily we set out to spend a fun afternoon downtown in the gorgeous weather.  Every time we drive through Everedy Square Emily points at the ice cream sign on Frederick Ice Cream and Fudge Co. and asks if we can get ice cream there sometime.  I had my coupon for coffee at Frederick Coffee Co. which is right across the street (lots of shops in that vicinity that start with Frederick and end with Company!) and there is a playground down the street so we just hung out in the area for awhile.

For lunch at the coffee shop Emily had quiche lorraine, Charlotte had a PB&J with banana on wheat bread (although they forgot the bananas) and I had an "Asian Twist" salad.

Greens, sprouts, edamame, processed-tasting chicken, Asian salad dressing

The girls behaved wonderfully and the people who work there are super-nice, but I was not all that impressed with the coffee or the salad at this place.  Dublin Roasters wins this round!

When we went across the street to "Make Emily's dreams come true" (her words, not mine) the girls, of course, picked out the nastiest kind of ice cream possible.  Cotton Candy (shudder).  See?  I'm not ALWAYS a super-stickler for healthy eating with my kids.  Today was just the kind of day that lent itself to letting loose a bit, what with the beautiful sun and 70 degree temperatures outside!

Mmmm, dye and sugar

We took a very drippy walk 2 blocks down the street to the playground, where they still had a see-saw and a merry go round!  You don't see that kind of awesomely dangerous equipment on new playgrounds these days.

On the way back to the car we stopped by Stone Hearth Bakery to get a loaf of whole wheat bread, but when I asked the owner which ones were 100% whole grain he told me none of them were!  He only uses 50% whole grain because using 100% whole grain "makes the bread too hard".  This makes me angry for several reasons.  #1, I have been told by several different people before that some of the breads there are 100% whole grain (although now that I think back on it it seemed to be different kinds each time) and #2, I have had plenty of 100% whole grain breads that are delicious.  It just takes a little more effort and fiddling with the recipe.  So I have been lied to many times there.  I will not be going back :-(

But overall we had a lovely time today, then we went home and Charlotte took a 3-hour nap.  Hooray!  And I remembered to make my smoothie before she went to sleep, double hooray!

1 orange, whole grain rice milk, plain nonfat greek yogurt, flax seeds, 10 almonds, vanilla extract and nutmeg

That was not the end of the day though, because there's always dinner to make and grocery shopping to do. We hit MOM once Charlotte woke up because the girls snack on the dozens of samples around the store which keeps them happier and I can shop longer without meltdowns so everybody wins.  I can't wait until my $20 for $10 coupon I just bought on Eversave kicks in!

I was pretty desperate to eat everything this afternoon, but I tried to focus on fruits and veggies so that I would still be overdoing it but not quite as badly.

This is a pear

Carrot with hummus (not all of the hummus pictured was consumed)

1 Tbsp peanut butter

1 spear pineapple

I wanted to do something for dinner to get rid of all the extra beans I made up for chili last week, so I made a HUGE pot of taco soup for dinner, and we'll freeze most of it for later.

Taco soup, Cabot 50% light cheddar, 1/4 avocado, 4 mini whole wheat flax cornbread muffins

I will admit, this is a picture of Will's dinner.  I had the exact same thing, but mine was consumed bit by bit as I was standing in the kitchen cooking.  I took a taste of the soup to test the seasonings and then just kept eating.  Luckily after I had consumed just about 1 bowl's worth I grabbed a KeVita and drank until my stomach was uncomfortably full to stop myself from eating more.  This particular loss of control was very tough to fight.  When I want to eat that badly, my head is completely out of sync with my stomach and being so full only diminished my urge to eat marginally.  I stopped myself from eating any more than I had originally intended to eat, but it was SO hard and I certainly did not consume my dinner in a dignified fashion.  I think it's important to sit down and actually ENJOY your food, not just snork it down while you are doing other things in the kitchen.  I wish I knew how to fix whatever is wrong with me eating-wise so that I didn't have these mental breaks!

After the initial fullness went away I STILL felt like I was in danger of doing some naughty eating so I started snacking on more 0-point plant-based things.

Pickles

Beautiful grapes that unfortunately turned out to have seeds :-(  I gave most of these to Charlotte

I do not like grapes with seeds and/or slipskins!  For some reason I am just fine with "table" grapes but when I eat grapes with seeds my lips really itch in an allergic reaction-y kind of way.  These just looked so yummy and it has been so hard recently to find grapes that are organic or failing that at least grown in the US that when I saw them I snatched them up.  Will'll love these though.

And yes, there was even more fruit consumed after that.

A "Pango" Will gave me

To be fair I forgot the banana that is usually in my smoothie so this wasn't technically "extra"

Then I had dessert, to kind of psychologically put an end to my eating for the day.

the end of my Theos mint dark chocolate bar

 Over the course of the evening I drank 2 Zevias to keep my stomach full and my mind off eating.

So I ate a TON of food and beverages today and I still didn't eat SUPER well, but everything I ate that was "extra" was at least a healthy (or 0 points anyway) snack vs. the more calorie-dense things I would rather have been eating.

I feel good about the fact that I was able to more or less direct my eating, even if I wasn't able to stop it, and how I feel psychologically about my eating has more to do with my long-term success than anything else so that's good I guess.  I'll keep focusing on taking baby steps and at least doing things "less wrong" even if I still can't seem to make myself do them all the way right.