In my last entry, I talked about my need for more exercise and diet. Well, I’ve not come close to meeting my exercise goal for the week, but I did manage 2 walks with my friend, 1 treadmill session, and 1 walk with my little girl. Hopefully the next week will be better.

On the diet front, I stayed pretty close to the program. I sort of eased into things about 2 weeks ago, but got officially on board with a diet a week ago yesterday. I lost 5 pounds so far. Not bad for 10 days to 2 weeks. I hope it will be a bit better next week as I tweak some of the choices I make.

My goal is to lose 100 pounds. That sounds pretty ominous. So I’ll start with the goal to lose 50 by my birthday in July. It’s a total of 26 weeks from the time I started until then, so that’s a loss of less than 2 pounds per week. That doesn’t sound quite so overwhelming. Although the endurance through to the goal is the hard part. Hopefully, once the first 50 is gone, that will motivate me to keep going until the second 50 is gone.

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.

Hopefully, you’ll check in now and again to see how I’m progressing. I’ll still blog about other things, but this will be a regular feature.

On a completely different goal, I wanted to note that I have challenged one of the high school girls at church to read Les Miserables with me in 6 weeks. I’ve had this book for 16 years, and I have never been able to get past the first 30 pages. In conversation, it came up that she has been trying to read it for the past 2 years, so I told her we could work on it together. We are also trying to get others on board. I’ll try to keep you posted on how this endeavor goes as well. Perhaps success on another long-time failure will motivate me in the weight loss area too.

I just got back from walking to the park near our subdivision. I took Charis in the stroller after lunch, so we could enjoy the nice weather today (upper 40s and sunny). It takes 8-10 minutes to walk to this park. It’s a nice walk now because the county just recently extended the trail to the road that leads to our subdivision. Up until about 3 months ago, we really had to drive over there because there was no easy (or safe) access on foot.

The walk involves going up a couple of large inclines–to call them hills would be an insult to real hills. I have to confess that I really struggled to get to the top of these inclines. I had the incentive that if I didn’t make it to the park, Charis would be highly disappointed. Then on the way home, well, we had to get home.

Many who read my blog know that I have struggled with being overweight for most of my life. However, despite that, I have been able to handle most physical activity with little problem. As an adult, I lost a lot of weight (the year I snagged Mark and married him). Since then, I have for a variety of reasons gained that back plus some. The last year we were in Oklahoma, I was exercising at a gym very regularly–4-6 times a week. While I didn’t lose lots of weight, I felt pretty good and it took quite a lot of activity for me to get winded.

This past year in St Louis, I have allowed myself to get more undisciplined than I have ever been with regard to exercise. I have done very little. I have gained even more weight, which is quite disturbing. But it is even more disturbing that I am now struggling to walk up a slightly inclined street. In the last couple of months, I have noticed feeling winded after climbing stairs, too. This has bothered me, and now I am even more bothered by today’s occurrence.

So I have purposed in my heart and mind to exercise more. I have been walking with a friend two mornings a week for the last few months, but I have to up the anty if I am going to be around to see my children grow up. For now, my goal is to keep up with the 2 mornings a week of walking, to go on a walk with Charis to the park twice a week, and to walk on the tread mill for 30 minutes twice a week. After a month, I will evaluate my progress. and determine how to proceed.

You should know that I have also started a diet. I won’t mention now which one it is, but I am working that angle as well.

If you read my blog, and you think of it, please keep me in prayer that I can be disciplined in this effort. Yes, I would love to be thinner and look better–who doesn’t want that? But ultimately, I want to preserve the basically good health I have had all my life and improve upon it for my future and for my family’s future.

Today Charis went to Parents’ Day Out at a nearby church that has quite an impressive early childhood center. She has been carrying around her back pack in the house since her older siblings started school in the fall, so she was quite thrilled to go to “school” of her own today.

I expected her to cry and give me her regular “drama” like she does when I take her to Sunday school. But when I was getting ready to leave, I said to her, “Bye Sweetie. I’m going to leave now. Have fun.” Then she said, “Will you come back for me?” I told her, “Of course I’ll come back to get you.” She started down the slide in the middle of the room, waved, and said, “Bye Mommy.”

I guess the next 15 years of my life will be one empty-nester experience after another.

We didn’t send out Christmas letters or cards this year, so I thought I would post a photo of our family from Thanksgiving. This was taken at Mark’s parents’ home in the Dallas area.

I noticed on Jon Barlow’s blog that they were concerned about the transmission in their mini-van. Well, yesterday after Mark and the boys had been at the home of church friends receiving help on their pinewood derby cars for scouting, they got in the van to head home. Low and behold, Reverse didn’t work. So, this morning, we took it to our local mechanic, and it is sitting in his back lot over the holiday weekend. He couldn’t start work on it today because he is waiting for us to determine if the transmission is under warranty. We had it replaced about 14 months ago when we were still living in OK. The replacement transmission was rebuilt, but it had a 2-year, 24K-mile warranty on it. So the mechanic here had to find a number on the transmission that we could relate to our mechanic in OK who would then pass it on to the company that manufactured the rebuilt transmission. We feel sure we haven’t passed the 24K mark, but we are a little leary about whether we will actually be able to get the manufacturer to follow through on the warranty. We have had a bad experience with this sort of thing in the past, so we’re a little gun shy. We’ll see.

The good news is that the same friends who were helping with the pinewood derby cars are loaning us their minivan for a couple of days so we can at least make it to church this weekend. Our car doesn’t accommodate the whole family, plus I need to be at church a bit earlier than the rest for choir. So this is a great help for which we are really thankful.

The day before Christmas Eve–I can’t believe the year is nearly over! The final 4 months of 2005 have been frenetic for me. Adjusting to new work schedules, school schedules, and life in general has been a challenge. Sometimes I have been up to it, and other times I haven’t been. Laundry, housework, homework, doctor visits, Brownies, Webelos, Wolf Scouts, Bibls studies, choir, freelance work . . . all of it has contributed to a busy household. Much of the time I’ve felt frazzled. Getting ready for Christmas has only made things a little more crazy!

However, I am pleased to say that I wrapped most of the children’s presents last night, and I am trying to simplify things on the cooking end of things. My goal is for the weekend to be a little more relaxed than the 48 hours surrounding Christmas have been traditionally in our family. We will see.

I hope to have a new photo added to my blog in the next couple of days. Perhaps some of the Christmas Day shots will make it up too. I don’t want to pressure myself though 😉

Despite my somewhat stressful life, I have much to be thankful for and it is all because Jesus humbled Himself and became a man to suffer and die on the cross for my sins. Keeping that in perspective helps me remember that my stress is not so much to handle. Until my next post, I wish all who stop by here a Merry Christmas.

After a bit of a dry spell, I at last have something to blog about. Our 4th grade boy, Calvin, had his acting debut yesterday at his school’s 3rd-4th grade musical. The name of the show was “The S Files.” “S” is for solutions, as the plot centers around a group of kids who find solutions to mysteries that are sent to them via e-mail.

The show had a very simple set with a desk and computer on the stage and a large screen down the center where the computer screen was projected so the audience could read their e-mails and also where background video could be played. The main actors (the kids who “solved mysteries”) were on the stage. Then, to the right of the stage, there was a large choir who sang upbeat fun songs in between each scene on the stage.

The mystery that the group had to solve came from Thomas2000 who wrote to ask about the real meaning of Christmas. They proceeded to investigate by searching the Scriptures and comparing the real meaning of Christmas to some of the more popular cultural practices of celebrating the holidays like shopping. It was pretty typical for a church-type children’s musical, but the children really worked hard and did a great job pulling it together.

Calvin played one of the solution seekers who acted on the stage. As a completely unbiased mother, I must say, he did a great job. All of the children did really well at remembering their lines and following cues. I was amazed at how well they did. It really went so well because the teachers and parent volunteers were organized and thorough and very patient with the children.

I liked the experience for Calvin for lots of reasons, but one thing that stood out to me was that none of the children were singled out. The recognition at the end did not place higher significance on the actors than on the choir, and the children didn’t seem to either. It was a real team effort, and I think the teachers and volunteers worked at making that the attitude among the kids.

On Monday, the kids take the show on the road to a local nursing home. I am also pleased with this as it gives Calvin an opportunity to reach out to the community.

Irony abounds in the MO State Auditor’s race.

Nokia phones rock!

No, Nokia has not sent me payment for advertising on my blog, but I do have to take a moment to speak of my Nokia phone’s remarkable ability to revive after being submerged in water for at least 2 minutes. On Monday morning, we were getting ready to check out of a motel at the end of a long and very arduous trip home from our Thanksgiving vacation.

Picture it. Mom, Dad, 4 young children all sharing one motel room. Chaos available in abundance. There wasn’t too much of a chance that we would really be paying attention to what 2-year-old Charis was doing. Then, I saw it. In the midst of the dull roar of activity, I reached for something from the bathroom vanity, and looking down, I noticed that Nokia phones do not float. They sink right to the bottom of motel ice buckets filled with water from the previous night’s ice. I fished it out, took it apart, and I dried it first with a towel. Then I gave it a full two minutes of direct attention from the in-room hair dryer. We went to breakfast, and I came back and gave the phone some more attention from the blow dryer.

After we arrived home, I took the phone apart and laid it out to dry all day yesterday. This morning, I plugged it in to recharge, and so far it seems as good as new.