More miscellaneous nonsense

Let's see. Life has just sort of been moving along recently, so nothing spectacular to report. Hence, the lack of blog entries.

Kids are good. Sophie is getting teeth, and Gage is just getting bigger. He's such a tall boy. Both kids are ridiculously smart, ornery, and know just how to melt our hearts or push our buttons, haha. The thing that gets me the most though is how much they love each other. Whenever Sophie looks at Gage, she smiles, and just has this look in her eyes like her big bro hung the moon. Pretty cute. Gage, being a little older and more articulate, hugs Sophie every chance he gets and often tells her, "I love you! You're my best friend." It's pretty awesome to see, especially because when I was pregnant with Sophie, I was nearly constantly worried that he would be really jealous of her and not very happy to have a sibling. I was sure glad to be wrong there!

Everyone is kind of back on track as far as sleeping since daylight savings time. It took a really long while, but it seems we have all adapted. It's nice to get sort of uninterrupted sleep. Sophie is a restless sleeper though, so we end up waking a bit with her.

Friday night we had a huge rainstorm with some hail too. Gage loved it! He was running around our balcony throwing hail over the railing and yelling about hailstones. It was really cute. After the rain was over, we let him go down and jump in mud puddles and big rainwater catches in the water. Sophie waded some too, and loved it. She is such a water baby! They made friends with our downstairs neighbor, who is about 5 1/2, I believe. The little girl and Gage really hit it off, he is such a friendly and kind kid. Gage wanted to go jump in mud puddles all weekend, it was hard for him to understand that they dry up!

I've hit a total plateau with my weight loss. I'm trying to tweak my diet a bit more to see if that helps, but so far I'm at a complete standstill. It really is a bummer, to be honest. I was on a really good roll there for a while, I lost 1-2 pounds every week pretty consecutively. I knew at some point a plateau was inevitable, and I tried to prepare myself for it mentally, but that doesn't mean it isn't bumming me out to be in the midst of it. It's very discouraging to be doing everything right but not losing. At least when I was off program, I could think I knew why I wasn't losing, and what it would take to start losing again. Plateau is just... Like beating your head against the wall. Frustrating and painful. But, I've just got to stick with it. At some point, I'll overcome it.

I guess that's about all I have. Good summer so far.

Life, as it goes

Let's see. Nothing terribly interesting to report. Well, lots interesting, but much of it isn't really blog worthy, haha. But some is! So I'll tell you about the fun stuff!

Gage and Sophie are the best of friends. It is so cool to watch them interact. They just play together, hug each other, emulate each other, etc. Gage tells Sophie he loves her all the time, she sits on his lap, and they just laugh and laugh with each other. It isn't the way I expected it to be, at all. Not to say they don't get into it sometimes (Gage periodically shoves her down, or she will bite him) but over all, their sibling relationship is a really good one. I sincerely hope they always have close bond.

They each have email addresses and I try to remember to email them regularly to tell them stuff about what they're doing, what their development is like at their ages, etc. I figure it will be fun when they're bigger, and I can give them the passwords, and they can read all the things I wrote them. I also thought it would be cool for them to each have email addresses now; who knows what email addresses will still be available in 13-15 years?! It's fun to write to them, anyway.

I had a really nice Mother's day. Brian gave me a card, we spent the day as a family, and took a long walk to a frozen yogurt spot. It was fun and tasty, and not TOO bad, points-wise. Next time we go, I will be a little more portion conscious, but it was ok anyway. For me, I am not the kind of person to want to send the kids away or get away from them for Mother's day. I really enjoy spending time with them and feel so blessed to have them. Not saying anything negative about those who do enjoy a day without kids, because we all celebrate differently. But a perfect Mother's day for me is one with kids! And also a long walk, and also delicious frozen yogurt, haha. We sure put miles on our double jogger. It's great for walking with both kids.

I have been working really hard at cooking every night. I've been doing pretty well, too. We really don't eat out very much any more, and I'm really proud of that. I've lost weight the last four weeks, and that's a pretty huge accomplishment for me!

The SD card in my phone fried last weekend. It was a big bummer because I had loads of music and photos on there, and I hadn't backed up pictures in a long time. Fortunately, Google+ works diligently at backing up my pictures, so they are all "in the cloud". Now I just have to figure out how to get them OUT of the cloud. And how to warranty my SD card, too. It was a birthday gift, so it's barely 6 months old.

I guess that's about all I have for now. That was  a pretty boring post, so I hope you enjoyed the minutiae of my life. Ha!

Warning: More Weight Loss stuff ahead

If you're sick of reading about my weight loss journey, you can skip this one.

Yesterday, I lost another 1.6 lbs. I'm a little under four pounds away from losing both another 5 lbs and also hitting my 10% goal! I'm so excited, primarily because it feels really good to be losing, and also because I'm proud of myself for getting back on track.

I got off for so long that I honestly didn't know how I was going to get back to it. I prayed, I cried, I talked about it ad nauseum with people trying to figure how I would get my motivation back. Nothing worked. (well, prayer always works but it isn't on our time, haha). Until I gained a substantial amount of weight for one week and recommitted! It's been amazing to see that scale moving EVERY week. For a while I was doing one week down, one week up. It made for slow weight loss and a lot of discouragement. Then I quit tracking, quit watching what I ate, and my ups were equal or greater than my downs.

I thought to myself, ok, this is it. Keep going, and get back on track, because going to some meetings isn't going to peel the weight off, and it's becoming a waste of money, or get back on program and REALLY do it. Obviously, I chose to get back on program and REALLY do it.

And I am absolutely thrilled with the results. I am feeling so good and so proud of myself!

Wooooo!

Well, I'm down 15 pounds as of this morning. I'm so proud of myself! I have 50 lbs to go which is no small feat, but I have proven to myself that I can DO this! I'm excited to have broken through my wall. I have lost weight three weeks in a row, which has maybe never happened to me before. It's amazing how sticking to it works!

March for Babies

I did the March of Dimes March for Babies today. It was really fun and felt good. All told, I walked about 5 miles. It was lengthy. It was technically a 5k, but by the time we walked in from the parking lot, wandered around, got the starting line, finished the race, ate lunch, and walked back to the car, it was more than 5k. My legs are really tired tonight, but I was very proud of doing it and also proud of Gage and Sophie, because they did GREAT. Gage got a little whiny when he got hungry about halfway through (I had taken snacks for him but forgot them in the car, ugh) and he was a bit fussy while waiting for food in the lunch line because he wanted a hot dog immediately. But all in all, everything went really, really well.

It was fun, it was packed, and it was inspirational to read all of the stories about the preemies while walking. I would definitely do it again. My friend who lead the team made everyone shirts, and I made everyone hair flowers. Everyone liked the hair flowers which was good. Last night I dreamed everyone though they were lame and then I was sad. I'm such a weirdo.

I am exhausted. I got about 4 hours of sleep last night, walked close to 5 miles today, and was out in the hot sun for much of the day (forgot to sunscreen my face. Burnt.) and I'm beat. Off to bed, soon!

More weight loss chatter & other miscellany

Today I weighed in and discovered that last week I lost another two pounds. Tracking and staying within my points. Ridiculously awesome. I felt so great stepping off that scale. Anyways, I am just going to keep going. My mom got me a new pedometer today too, it tracks steps and activity and shows you how man points they equate to. I do not like eating from activity points, but I do like seeing if I gain any. And I'm curious as to how many steps I take in a day.

Tomorrow I'm helping to sort a craft coop order. I'm kind of looking forward to it because I love the craft supplies but am kind of not looking forward to it because Gage might make it really difficult. Hard to say.

It's going to be a crazy weekend. I'm walking in the March for Babies on Saturday and then Sunday we will be doing a ton of stuff around the house. Will be a little crazy but a lot good.

I think that's all I have for now. I have many anecdotes I could share about my kids, but one day, they will learn to read and use the Internet and I would rather they not discover that I told the world about their private moments. I think it's all too easy in the blogging world to forget that we are sharing with the world, not just a close friend or two. One of these days I will do a "50 Awesome things about Sophie" post though, because I love the one I did for Gage and Sophie deserves one too. She's pretty awesome. And clingy. But that's ok.

Why does the Blogger for Android app always fail my post publish on the first try? It always is successful the second try, but fails the first. Why?

Odds and ends

It's Saturday and we are trying to get the little folks to sleep! We have had kind of a busy day so far, with trying to get a few things done around the house and going to my parents house this afternoon. Both kids played really hard and got really tired, which sometimes makes it even harder to get them to go to sleep! But they had lots of fun.

I was very proud of my eating today. I only went over my daily points into my weekly points by a couple which was really good. It was especially good because I made the best cookies ever at my parents house.

Their next door neighbor's son has been battling cancer for a little while now, and the chemo is kicking his butt, so my mom asked if I would bake some cookies for them. I said sure, and then decided Gage was old enough to help. He jumped at the chance to help me bake cookies! It was really fun to do with him. He mixed the dry ingredients, helped me pour them into the mixer, helped pour the chocolate chips in, and helped put the dough balls on the cookie sheets. He loved every minute of helping and I really enjoyed having him help. He did a good job! I used this amazing recipe that I have for essentially chocolate chip sugar cookies (sooooo good) and was wrapping up, telling my mom that the dough seemed a little drier than usual. We were talking about whether the recipe was missing anything (it wasn't) and Brian was joking that it needed more chocolate chips. Then he said it needed peanut butter chips. My mom and I laughed, because obviously, she doesn't just have peanut butter chips laying around. Then she says, "Why not throw a little glob of peanut butter in there?" I said, "Why not throw a BIG glob in there?!" So we did, and the cookies tasted amazing. Seriously, like, everything good about sugar cookies, everything good about chocolate chip cookies, and everything good about PB cookies. They came out pretty, too, which doesn't matter if you're just going to sit down and eat them yourself, but for gifting purposes, gorgeous cookies are important.

I had a sinking feeling in my stomach because they were so good I was afraid I would eat like, 4 of them or something. I told myself I was going to eat one and a half cookies. Well, of course, I was sitting there looking at them, and my (bloated fatbody) subconscious was sitting there telling me, "Just have two cookies. Cmon. A whole 'nother cookie isn't that much more than half anyway. Just eat it. It'll be sooooo good. You'll enjoy it sooooo much. Just think of how it'll taste. It'll be amazing. And just think, you made them! Think of how proud you'll be, eating those delicious cookies you made. Hey, speaking of how you made them, you totally deserve to eat AT LEAST two of them, because come on, you did all that work. It would be weird if you only ate one and half." Ok, that may seem over the top, but it's TOTALLY NOT. That's like, 2 seconds worth of my subconscious mind's reaction to a food I really like. And that just goes on and on and then I don't really wonder why I'm fat! Anyway. I shut it down, told it no, and ate my planned for 1.5 cookies. And then I didn't have anymore, despite my own brain whispering to me to just eat another one.

I wonder if that will ever go away? Will I ever just approach food like a normal person, not like someone who can't resist throwing all the food down their gullet? Guess only time will tell. I hope at least doing WW for a while may quiet that annoying voice!