Week 7 Recap

I lost 2 pounds this week! So that puts me at 15 pounds thus far.

I will admit that I'm not following WW much anymore. It was becoming too time consuming to input everything, but I'm still using their weight tracker for now, until my membership expires. My "method" for now has been to eat something light for breakfast like a bowl of cereal or a piece of toast. I try to stay busy throughout the morning so I don't think about snacking and I usually walk during Cooper's morning nap, so that helps to pass the time until lunch. For lunch I've either been having a turkey sandwich on whole wheat bread with fat free Miracle Whip and a handful of pretzels, or a WW meal that is fairly low in points. Now the stretch from lunch to dinner is the hardest one for me. But I try to make myself wait until 3:30 or 4:00 pm and then I'll eat a snack which usually consists of the Chex party mix 100 calorie packages. I love that stuff! Supper is probably the hardest because I'm terrible about meal planning, so I just try to keep my portions small and do my best. Occasionally before I go to bed I'll have another 100 calorie snack, but that just depends on how late I ate supper. We eat pretty late at our house so a lot of evenings I do ok without snacking before bed.

I did not walk every day last week, but I've stuck with 5 days for now. I haven't done the Shred in awhile now, but I want to pick back up with it soon.

A make-it-or-break-it day for a mom

Let's face it. There are many, many make-it-or-break-it days for moms. The days when the spit-up and poopy diapers seem endless. The days when you've had a combined 2 hours of sleep in the past 24 hours. And the list goes on and on. This was just one of those days. Maybe not even as bad as one that I've listed, but a couple of situations I have yet to face in motherhood. Until now of course.

Garrett's bestest friend, Avery, came over for a few hours this morning, so that was actually pretty awesome. Once I (finally) got Cooper down for his morning nap, I was able to really clean my kitchen like it hasn't been cleaned in a while. It's amazing how much you can get done when your chatty 4 year old has someone else's ear to talk off. Before Avery came over, Cooper was being very fussy, which made my last minute clean-up before Avery's mom stopped by, a little more harried. I'm sure a lot of it has to do with the fact that he's cutting the hardest tooth to cut ever in the universe. (Or at least it feels that way. He's been teething for 6 months now. It's about time to start seeing the fruits of the fussy, drool-filled labor.)

After my kitchen cleaning was done, I went to check on the 2 buddies playing in Garrett's room. The first thing I see is Garrett pulling his pants up, then Avery telling me that Garrett peed on his Spiderman punching bag. Seriously?! He hasn't peed on the floor since potty training days. To say I was mad was really an understatement. And by the look on his face, he knew he had jumped way past the line of following the rules (an unspoken one would be, never pee in front of a friend. But apparently it needs to be a spoken rule. Especially when the peeing is NOT taking place in a bathroom.) So I "dealt" with the situation swiftly and immediately. On top of the "dealing" he was also banned from Wii for the day.

After Avery left, I was straightening things up around the house. I made a quick run through of Garrett's bathroom and got to looking at the shower curtain. It's normally never closed, but since the bathtub is in need of a good scrubbing, I pulled it closed this morning. And in my run through discovered that "someone" had used it as toilet paper. Seriously?! I basically hit the roof by this point.

I know that once Cooper is walking and really getting into things, days like today (few and far between as they hopefully are) will be multiplied by 2. I have really tried to encourage Garrett to do a lot of things independently, like going to the bathroom or playing with a friend in his bedroom. And while I don't plan on changing this course of independence, we apparently need to have a good talk about ground rules. And I should make no assumptions as to what I think he knows.

When you start thinking that maybe your child is figuring out this crazy, mixed up world, and doing a good job with it, days like today happen to remind you that they are, in fact, just 4 years old and still have LOTS to learn.

And a funny story about Garrett to balance out this post: A few days ago, he patted my stomach and said "Your belly is big! You're gonna have another baby." Just what a dieting mom always wants to hear. The next day he told me that he really wanted to have another baby and that we need to go to the doctor and get one. Yesterday morning rolls around. Garrett is sitting on the living room floor eating dry cereal out of a cup for breakfast (it's how we roll in our house). He sat the cup down for a second and Cooper took off. He crawled as fast as his little legs would move, grabbed the cup of cereal, dumped it on the floor and started chowing down. Garrett looked at me and said very emphatically "We don't need any more babies!!!!"

My Motivation

I know I mentioned in my last post that my motivation for my personal weight loss challenge is holding myself accountable via this blog. However, my other bit of motivation is thanks to my iPod and my personal faves in my workout play list. I thought I would share some of the songs in there, if for no other reason than to give you ideas if you're looking for music that motivates you.

Now I must preface this with the following: whether you agree with this or not, rock music motivates me more than most other genres when I'm working out. So if you abhor rock or extremely dislike some of these bands, then I apologize, but I really like most of these songs, if for no other reason than they are easy to workout to, so take that as you will.

My workout playlist actually has about 50 songs on it which I just shuffle through each time so rarely do I listen to the same song 2 days in a row, unless it's just stuck in my head and I'm needing to hear it again. My entire iPod actually has tons more than 50 songs on it, but I tried to pick out either a) songs that I LOVE and thoroughly enjoy listening to no matter what, or b) songs that have a great beat to keep me going. The #1 requirement for a song to make it to the workout playlist is for me to know the majority of the words. While I obviously can't sing along with most of these because I'm typically a bit out of breath, I do enjoy mouthing the words. And yes, I'm sure that makes me look atleast a tad ridiculous on the treadmill. But the only person who might see me doing this is Garrett, and my workout time is his Wii time so I think I can say he uses every second of that time to play Wii and couldn't care less about my workout habits. Though if he does ever scrounge up the camera and take a video of me doing this he just might be in trouble. :)

Here are a few highlights: (OK. So it turned out to be a bit more than "a few." Brevity is not my strong suit...)
Aerosmith "Crazy" and "Angel"
Black Eyed Peas "I Gotta Feeling"
Buckcherry "Sorry"
Chris Brown "Forever" (I haven't liked Chris Brown even before he beat up his girlfriend, but this song is catchy and is actually the only song of his that I know.)
Darius Rucker's "History in the Making" and "Alright"
Many songs by David Cook. A couple are "Barbasol", "A Daily Anthem", and he did a cover of Radiohead's "Creep" that I like. I've already said I'm a big fan of his and he has many songs that are great to workout to.
Green River Ordinance "Goodbye LA"
Jason Derulo "Whatcha Say"
Jay Sean "Down"
Kelly Clarkson "Already Gone"
Mark Schultz "I Am"
Metro Station "Shake It"
Orianthi "According to You"
Nelly, P Diddy "Shake Ya Tailfeather"
Plain White T's "Hey There Delilah"
The Script "Before the Worst", "Man Who Can't Be Moved" and "Breakeven"
To Have Heroes "The Story of Your Life"
Uncle Kracker "Smile"
Zac Brown Band "Whatever It Is"

Tell me some of your favorites to work out to. I'm always looking for new music to listen to.

Another thing that motivates me is when my clothes start getting too big. Some of my jeans are loose, but on Sunday I put a top on for church and discovered it was way too big. It's always been a bit baggy, but it just looked ridiculous. And I did a little happy dance while throwing it into a pile on my closet floor that I will eventually be giving away. It's the first item in the pile so far, but it won't be the last.

Just call me the maid

Due to the fact that I attribute blogging about my weight loss attempts to staying motivated, I'm going to try this with another area that I'm currently trying to change in my life. My household cleaning schedule. My goal has always been to have a different chore for each day of the week so I don't get overwhelmed with cleaning the whole house in one day. Obviously if I wasn't a stay at home mom, this would be different, and it was when I was a working mom. I did the majority of my house cleaning and laundry on the weekends. But since I am home the majority of my days during the week, I may as well use them to my benefit.

Here's where you come in. I'm going to post my tentative daily cleaning schedule, which I will start this week, and then I'll report in next Monday as to whether or not I was able to stick with this schedule and if I had to change the days around any. I may not post on this one every week like I've been doing with my weightloss recap because, well frankly, there's only so much one can say about house cleaning, but I'm atleast going to post this and a follow up or two. We'll go from there.

So here's the schedule I've put together. We'll see how it goes.

Monday: grocery shopping and *organizing

Tuesday: laundry

Wednesday: vacuum most of the rooms in the house

Thursday: mop and dust

Friday: bathrooms

*By organizing, I mostly mean decluttering. Picking up stray items that get misplaced, doing a quick runthrough of the boys rooms and my bedroom and just general clean-up. This gets done many days of the week, but maybe giving myself one day to definitely do it will mean that my room won't get overlooked. That's the room that typically goes without a lot of the cleaning because it's the room that can be closed off if people stop by.

We tend to do laundry over the weekends too, so we'll see if I actually do much laundry on Tuesdays, but I feel as if I need to give the laundry a day. If nothing else, that will be my day to wash all of our bedding.

If any of you have a cleaning schedule of any kind, even if you do all of your household cleaning in one day, let me know how yours works and what seems to go best for you. I know you would think I would already have something like this down, if for no other reason than I've been a stay at home mom for almost 4 years now, but I just haven't found anything that has worked consistently. I'm just hoping by posting this out in the open, it will be just the motivation I need to stick with it.

Week 6 Recap

Yet again, I lost nothing, gained nothing this week. While I like seeing a 3 pound loss in one week, I don't like having the weeks before and after showing nothing. I'd rather see a consistent 1 pound loss per week. I even exercised every day this week. I have a few tricks up my sleeve to try and jump start my weight loss again. So we'll see if there's any improvement next week. Part of my problem is that I tend to be much more relaxed with my eating on the weekends and I know I should not be doing that. It probably wouldn't hurt to work out on the weekends too. I know 5 days a week is good, but maybe 6 or 7 would be better. At least in the beginning, until I've lost a good 30 pounds or so. But I don't always have the time to get on the treadmill on the weekends, so we'll see what works. I can definitely tell a difference in my jeans though. So that's a nice feeling. A couple of pairs used to be rather snug and they fit well now, and the ones that used to fit well are pretty loose.
So I'm still at a 13 pound weight loss. And I'm happy with that, but I'm really ready to start seeing more.

8 months old!

Dear Cooper,

Today you are 8 months old! You are getting to the age where you make us laugh on a regular basis. Almost every day you're attempting to do something new, which usually looks so funny.

Here's what you're up to lately:

Instead of dropping you down to 3 bottles a day, I've dropped you to 6 ounces, 4 times a day. You were seldom taking all 8 ounces at any of the bottles and I was having a hard time figuring out what times to give you the 3 bottles, so we're sticking with out same times, just smaller amounts.

You eat 3 meals a day (usually). For breakfast you typically have baby yogurt or fruit with cheerios. I've learned that you must have something you can feed yourself while I'm attempting to feed you your food. Eventually you'll feed yourself the entire meal, but for now I don't think you get enough if I rely solely on you to feed yourself. For lunch you typically have a fruit or a veggie with fruit puffs or saltine crackers. For dinner you have a baby food dinner, like spaghetti or turkey and veggies sometimes with cottage cheese, and I'll give you small pieces of whatever we're eating so that you have something to feed to yourself.

You're starting to outgrow some of your 6-9 month size clothes, but for the most part, you can still fit in them. I'm hoping that will continue until the weather gets permanently warmer because we have no cold weather 12 month size clothing. As soon as we use up all of the size 3 diapers, you will be moving up to size 4's. You've had too many leaks in the 3's, so I'm tired of that.

You still have not cut a tooth!! I'm so tired of all the drool and crankiness. I still can feel where one is slowly making its ascent but I am more than ready for it to pop through. And I know you are too.

You aren't much for baby babble. You prefer squealing/shrieking/screaming. But sometimes when you're fussy you say "mama". With Garrett, I stressed about his babbling and then later on his speech. He didn't really start talking until he was 2 1/2 and now I can't get him to stop talking. So I have no stress in the babbling area. Eventually you'll start and then I'll wish for a moment's peace. For now I'm enjoying the relative silence. Most of the time you have your paci in your mouth, which is probably why you don't babble as much. But I'm ok with that. :)

Physically, you are learning something new every day. You have completely mastered sitting yourself up from a laying down position. As well as moving from a sitting position to being on all 4's. You like to lunge forward when you're doing this in order to try and get yourself moving forward. You have finally started crawling forwards, after crawling backwards for a few months now. You're still slow and mostly do an army crawl rather than being on all 4's, but between army crawling, backwards crawling, spinning around on your stomach and being able to sit yourself up, you get around really well. Thankfully you haven't attempted to get out of the living room yet, but I know it's coming. The baby gates are ready and waiting in your closet. Your newest determination is trying to pull up. A negative to this is that we really don't have anything that you can attempt this on. So I've brought out a table of Garrett's and you try to pull up on it all the time. So far you've managed to get on your knees.

Your favorite toys are balls, anything with tags, and anything you can open and close. You love opening and closing books. You also love toys with music, as soon as the music starts, you start rocking back and forth.

You've also started shaking your head no and yes. Though it usually means nothing when you do it, it's still funny to watch. You did it for Nana and Pawpaw on Skype the other day and they thought it was hilarious.

You still love to jump in your jumperoo. But you've stopped jumping when people are holding you. I can tell you're trying to figure out your balance now so that you can stand upright.

You sleep 11-12 hours at night, which is awesome. I've discovered that you've decided you like throwing your paci's out of the crib. Unfortunately you only do it on the side of the crib that's by the wall. What's up with that? Throw them into the middle of the room so that I can actually get to them. You take 2 good naps a day. The first one is usually from 9:30-10:30 and the second one is 1:00-3:00. Those are approximate and obviously differ on the days Garrett has school since we have to pick him up at 2:00.

It's just amazing to me how much you have learned in a short period of time. I'm really enjoying seeing your personality shine and grow. And you're still my cuddler and enjoy lots of time being held whenever you can get it.

Week 5 Recap

When I got on the scales this morning, I was very excited to see 3 more pounds gone! So that brings my total weight loss to 13 pounds in 5 weeks. I tried to stay focused on eating well because it's been a bit of a hectic week. I didn't get to Shred any and only walked on the treadmill 3 times.

I helped throw a surprise baby shower for Garrett's teacher on Tuesday. So Monday and Tuesday were both hectic. Early Thursday morning, snow started falling heavily in our area, so I kept Garrett at home in order to avoid having to get in and out in it. In a 24 hour period, we got 12 inches of snow, which is a new record for the DFW area. It's been so fun! Keith stayed home today, so we got to get out and build a snowman and take some pictures of all the snow. If we're friends on Facebook, then I've shared several over there. But here's one.

Everyone has commented on how big of a snowman it is. We didn't intend to make it so big, Keith and Garrett just got carried away rolling the snowball around the yard. So we just made a smaller ball for the head and called it done.

Back to my weight loss, I have to say that I'm feeling very encouraged right now. Which is so nice, because I know exactly how it feels to struggle with weight, I've done so my entire life. For whatever reason, it's all working for me right now, and for that I'm grateful. I've tried basically every diet out there and have even done WW before. The first time I did it, I lost 25 pounds, but then our house got hit by a tornado and that pretty much threw me off completely. It took us a good 3 months to get everything back to normal and that consumed all my free time that I could have spent exercising and attempting to eat right. So here's hoping that I'll be able to stay focused on this weight loss attempt and actually have the ultimate success. Which would be to get down to my goal weight and stay there.

Monday Morning Recap

I know I mentioned in my last weight loss blog that I'm changing my weigh-in date to Fridays, which I did, so I'll post a weight loss recap on Friday. But I will say that I jumped on the scale this morning and saw a 1.5 pound loss, so I was happy to see something. But it's not my official weight loss for the week, just thought I would share it.

This weekend we rented a couple of good movies that I thought I would briefly share about. I've been on a terrible roll of renting bad and dumb movies. I'm not sure if Blockbuster online doesn't do a good job of describing the movies or if I'm just bad at choosing them. But this weekend I went to the actual Blockbuster store to rent a few. The nice thing about doing Blockbuster online, as opposed to some of the other online rentals, is that you can return your online rental to a brick and mortar store and rent another movie for free. We watched "Beyond a Reasonable Doubt" with Michael Douglas, on Saturday night. It was a good legal-type thriller movie with a twist. I personally didn't like the twist at the end, but Keith did, so it depends on your movie preferences, but on a whole it was 100x's better than the last 2 movies we had seen.

Sunday afternoon, before the Super Bowl started and while Cooper took a nap, we watched "Love Happens" with Jennifer Aniston and Aaron Eckhart. Great movie! A romantic comedy, light on the comedy, but not your typical romance. I really liked it. It definitely had its sad moments which can be affirmed by the fact that Keith said at one point during the movie "He just makes me want to cry." Not talking about the main character, Aaron, but another man in the movie, a dad. I'll just leave it there.

We ended up staying home for the Super Bowl this year. The past few years, I've been teaching Sunday School in our church's pre-teen department so I've gone to the pre-teen party. But this year, with Cooper being little and going to bed about 7:30, we decided to forgo our adult SS class party and stay home to party by ourselves. I really enjoyed it, but I tend to be a home-body, so I know it's not for everyone. My absolute favorite commercial was the Stevie Wonder/Volkswagon one. I really hope we'll see that one again. I was rooting for the Colts, largely in part to the fact that I lived in Indiana for 10 years of my life and my parents currently live there, but I guess I'm ok with the fact that the Saints won since it's their first win ever. And I've heard good stories about their QB.

We've been spending the past several days (weeks) really trying to encourage Cooper to crawl forwards. He is a very fast backwards crawler and has been doing it for months, he just doesn't quite know how to go forwards, unless he's holding onto something, like the edge of the area rug. He will go from sitting to his hands and knees which obviously puts him in a forward motion, but once he's on his hands and knees, he ends up going backwards. The good thing though is that he spins on his stomach and turns around in order to get to where he needs to go, so he's getting better about running into things (or under them), but it would still be nice for him to figure out the forward part. I've put all sorts of things to try and entice him to move forwards, he just doesn't quite know how yet.

He's also started getting on his tiptoes and his hands, so he looks kind of like he's doing a man's push-up. Or crawling like a monkey, except he usually isn't moving when he does this, he just stays stationary. He can also pull himself up to where he's standing on his knees, and he has started rocking back and forth when he's sitting up. He usually does this when he hears music, but sometimes he'll just start rocking and there isn't any music playing. And yesterday he started nodding his head yes, which looked so funny. He'll be 8 months old in 9 days, which is just crazy!

Garrett celebrates his half birthday in a few weeks, so I promise I will write a big post just about him in honor of that birthday. He's a total goofball sometimes and absolutely loves playing Wii. We've had to limit him with it because he would play it all day long.

Well, it's almost naptime for someone in this house (I wish that someone was me.) then I will hop on the treadmill. I'm actually to the point now where I love walking on it. I've downloaded some great music and put together a fun workout playlist, so I look forward to having some alone time with my iPod while I'm also getting myself into shape. I do NOT look forward to the days I do the "Shred". Yikes! I haven't done it enough for it to be getting easier or something to look forward to. But I definitely feel the workout when all is said and done, so I know it's worth the time. But I countdown the minutes while I'm doing it.

Week 4 Recap

Well, this week was kind of a bust. I lost nothing, gained nothing. I guess that's good, but a half pound loss would have been nice. I may end up changing my weigh-in day to Fridays because it's really hard to weigh-in coming off the weekend. I don't just let myself go on the weekends, but let's face it, I definitely don't have the best willpower those 2 days either.

Last week, I worked out 3 times, 2 times on the treadmill and once doing "The Shred". I still want to add one more day to that, here's hoping this week will work out better. I'm even going to walk on grocery day too, so that's extra exercise, in my opinion.

My eating was definitely lax so I'm tightening up the reigns this week and will try to do better about documenting everything I eat, which I did not do this past week. But I'm still on track to lose 30 pounds by this summer, I'm 1/3 of the way there, so that's exciting!