Here’s the update on the dieting efforts . . .

I’ve added one pound to the loss column making the total loss now 17 pounds. This is not nearly as good as what I was hoping for, but it is a move in the right direction, so I’ll take it.

I have exercised 4 times in the past week, and I’ll likely get in one more time before I go to sleep tonight. Hopefully, this will increase my losses so my next report is better.

I bought two new (from a thrift shop) pairs of jeans at the end of the school year. One pair was snug, but wearable. The other pair was only wearable using the old lay-on-the-bed-to-zip them trick. I’ve been able to zip them without that trick for about a month, but yesterday when I put them on, they were noticeably looser. This is a good thing. I am hoping that by sometime in September they will be too big to wear.

Nevin, at supper, “So where is Charis going to go to school?”

Parents, silence.

Evangeline, “She’ll go to preschool.”

Dad, “What’s the official age for real pre-school.”

Mom, “Three. Remember, Nevin went when Calvin was in K.”

Evangeline, “Yeah, and I went the year after and had the same teacher.”

Nevin, “Well, I meant when she gets to K.”

Calvin, “What’s the age of that grade before K?”

Mom, “You mean pre-K.”

Calvin, “Yes. I didn’t go to pre-K because I was too tall.”

Mom, “No. You didn’t go to pre-K because we moved in the middle of the school year and had never heard of pre-K before we moved to Oklahoma.”

Calvin, “Well, you told me it was because I was too tall.”

Mom, “No. You just extrapolated that from something else I said.”

Evangeline, “How old was I when we moved there?”

Mom, “Eighteen months old.”

Nevin, “That was 5 years ago.”

Mom, “No, it was 6 years ago.”

Dad, “Wow, Calvin is 10 years old.”

Mom, “It seems like yesterday.”

Mom breaks into song, “Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away. Now it seems as though there here to stay.”

Dad, “Ha, ha…”

Mom, “That’s really a depressing song.” (to the tune of said song)

Yes. I know that was a long and drawn out recreation of our supper conversation. But it is indicative of a couple of things to me, so bear with me.

First, on the positive side, after nearly 15 years of marriage and with our oldest being 10, we are creating a family history. We’re really in the thick of life, and I am so glad to have the family that I have. It is fun to have a real conversation with our kids now while remembering a time when we sat around the table hearing a 5-, a 4-, and a 3-year-old telling meaningless knock-knock jokes. And, we’ve also added one to our number since those days. God has blessed us with so much on so many levels.

Second, on the less positive side, we are facing some stresses in life, and we need your prayers. It’s not the earthshattering kinds of things like terminal illness or divorce, but just the typical stresses of life. However, when your the one having the stresses, it can feel very heavy and like they are here to stay.

I just finished doing “2 miles” of Leslie Sansone’s Walk Away the Pounds Express 4 mile Superchallenge. I bought this tape shortly after Charis was born, and I did the 4 miles at least 3 times a week for about 6 weeks back then. It really didn’t help me lose much weight, but I did feel pretty good doing it. I used to call it “aerobics for dummies” because you obviously get a good workout, but the steps are simple variations of walking. I always struggled with other aerobics videos because the moves were too complicated for my poorly coordinated body (and even in my 18 months of thinness, I was still not coordinated).

I was reading a book by Leslie Sansone at Barnes and Noble today, and it inspired me to give the program another try. I am going to try to do this 3 times a week along with my twice a week walking with a friend. Here’s hoping it helps.

Update on the dieting efforts. I have had a bit of a lull with my program. Each week, I take a break on Sundays because of company for lunch or going to lunch at someone else’s home. Mostly, I try to make the best choices I can in the situation and not to overeat. So far, this hasn’t been harmful. However, it seems like I have come to a plateua in losses. I haven’t weighed myself since my last post, and I don’t plan to weigh again until the end of this week.

I really think the biggest problem is that I am getting bored with the menu on the diet. It can be varied, but many of the choices are a bit pricey, and I am already having to cook essentially two meals since kids generally don’t eat a lot of salad and meat. I always make the same meat for the kids as what Mark and I will eat, then I make them a starchy side dish, and also make a fresh salad for Mark and me. Meal prep is a bit overwhelming some days.

That being said, I am not giving up. I am just feeling like I need to add a little variety. I think I will be spending some time looking into the diet’s menus and recipes to see if I can find some affordable options to add a little zip and keep me interested. I also hope to add more exercise to my life this week, too.

The positive side is that my energy level is pretty good, and I am looking forward to reporting more losses here. Tune in later to hear reports of success!

So we have the boys do a few chores around the house. When I say a few, I mean, well, really, too few. One of their chores is collecting all the trash in the house on the night before trash pick-up and taking all the trash to the curb. This past week, on two separate occasions, I asked each boy to come take the trash in both kitchen cans out to the big cans in the garage. Their responses were identical: “But Mom, we take the trash out on Wednesdays. We don’t have to do it now.” I took this opportunity to shatter all their fantasies that the trash fairies come on all the other nights of the week to take all the trash out to the big cans. I told them that Mommy and Daddy took out trash at least once a day. The shock and horror on their faces was priceless. Just so they don’t start to believe in the trash fairies again, we plan to give them more opportunities to take out the trash on days in addition to Wednesday.

This is a quote from an entry on my blog in early January:

“I really don’t want this to be a flash-in-the-pan sort of effort. That’s part of why I decided to write about it here. But I have written about weight loss efforts before, and as we all know, they weren’t successful. I don’t want to make excuses for past failures. I just want to focus on the task at hand.”

Well, as you might have guessed the early efforts were not successful. However, it is not all due to a lack of trying. It was due to a lack of success and therefore a lack of motivation to stick with a program.

In April, I went to a homeopathic MD who ran some tests and put me on thyroid medication. She also recommended the Fat Flush diet. This is a low-carb plan than includes lots of herbal supplements, not all the animal fat of Atkins, and the addition of Omega-3 fats like flaxseed oil. I sort of half started the plan the third week of May. Two weeks later when I went to my follow-up doctor’s appointment, I had lost 9 pounds. I started the plan more seriously and added several herbal supplement. In a week I lost another 3 pounds. I had a bit of a plateau for 2 weeks, and I added a couple of other supplements, and now I’ve lost another 4 pounds. So in 5 weeks, I have lost 16 pounds. I have hesitated to blog about this because I have been afraid to “jinx” myself. (I know, this isn’t a very Christian concept.) But my initial losses are encouraging after major attempts with diet and exercise (consistent and long-term, BTW) that led to little weight loss and ultimately a downward spiral emotionally that actually led to more weight gain.

The bottom line is: I need to stay on this plan and get healthier. I see the doctor again at the end of August. That’s about 9 weeks. I am hoping to lose 2 pounds a week at least, which makes my goal by the doctor’s appointment to be a total of 34 pounds.

Hopefully, my next post about my losses will come sooner than this one did since I started out in January.

I haven’t done much reading this year. Time has been tight, and most of the time I don’t fall asleep watching a movie, but I do reading a book. So my reading has fallen a bit behind.

However, since it is summer, and that is one of the best times to kick back and read, I am hoping to finish a couple of books. I have recently started, True Believer. This is a novel by the author of The Notebook–a book that was made into a movie last year. I am about a third of the way through, and I have two general impressions. First, the writing is average. The author likes to “info-dump,” a practice I disdain. I have been trying to figure out how this guy got published in the first place and then went on to be on the bestseller list. Average writing aside, I did stick with the book so I could give it a fair shake, and now, I do want to know what happens. So the author is doing something right. I haven’t read anything else by Nicholas Sparks, so I don’t have any personal expectations. But I am hoping that there will be something about the book that makes me feel it was more than just mind candy–like reading celebrity magazines in the hair salon or the doctor’s office.

Having a sister who is 4 years older than you provides many learning opportunities. The birthday party mentioned in my last post that was full of all things girlie left us with several bottles of nail polish. Charis has already learned how to apply it. Here she is demonstrating her new skill. What you can’t tell by the picture is that she is also good at getting it on her (new) dress. But don’t be dismayed, nail polish remover and shout together did a great job getting out the stain.

You might be interested to know that last week was pretty busy around here. It was week 2 of the kids’ summer break from school. We watched less tv than week 1, the laundry reached a somewhat manageable state, and I ran many errands planning the big 7-year-old girly birthday party for Evangeline which we hosted in our house on Saturday afternoon.

We had 5 girls, (7 with my 2) and the theme was “Groovy Girls.” We decorated little white canvas purses with iron-on decals. Before the party I hot-glued bead trim onto the top of each one. The girls loved the purses, and they each got a tiny bottle of nail polish, a small compact of lip gloss, and a little bottle of lotion to take home in their purses. To top it all off, we had a purse pinata. Estrogen levels ran high here on Saturday!

After partying with the 7-year-olds in the afternoon, Mark and I went out. First, we went to the PTO dinner for our kids’ school. I know, it sounds like a hokie beginning to a night out. But it was being held at a good Italian restaurant that I wanted to try out. The food was pretty good, and we enjoyed talking with the people across from us. The next stop of our night out was for a surprise 50th birthday party for a friend. This was a fun party, that shocked the socks off the birthday girl! Really, it was just nice for us to get out. It had been a while since we had been out sans kids.

On Sunday, we had some friends over to eat lunch with us after church. It was a pretty relaxing Sunday even with 2 extra toddlers and a newborn among the guests. I hope it was just a little relaxing for their parents! The other guest, a single guy we know from OK, was here visiting Covenant Theological Seminary, preparing to move here very soon. He was a great person to have around because he actually enjoys kids, and he was willing to take out the trash!

I set out today to go to several yard sales. One of the nearby neighborhoods was having their yearly neighborhood sale, so it was a great day to venture out. I picked up several things I’ve been looking for, and a couple of things I wasn’t looking for. It was overall, a good day.

The best buy of the day was a portable dishwasher that I picked up for $25 at an estate sale. It is harvest yellow and old, but the family said it works. I am running it for the first time as I write this. I am hopeful that it will get my dishes clean and tie us over until we can afford to redo the kitchen. I don’t really mind hand washing, it just takes up a lot of my counter space. I bought what I thought was a great refrigerator right after we bought this house, and I paid a lot more than $25 for it. The refrigerator works, but there’s a problem with the through-the-door ice server, so we can’t use it. This may be should have been expected since the refrigerator was used, but I wish the seller would have told me about it. So I am hoping that the dishwasher turns out to be a better buy.