Good One!

I was over at my dad's house last week. He was looking for pictures of L and O's baptism on his computer so that I could see them. He couldn't find them but he did find pictures and a couple of videos of our family from the spring that we moved into our house.

We moved to Burleson in March of 2005. The boys were almost 3 years and 5 mos old when we moved here. Those of you that have older children might understand me when I say that L has always been 9 and O has always been 6. When they pass a certain age, you sort of forget what it is like to have wee little ones under foot. And pictures remind you of that time but not quite like a video does. On my dad's computer are 3 videos from this time. I vaguely remember having his camera for about a week but not why.

One video is of L either right before or after turning 3. 3 is SO little. I had forgotten the way that L moved and sounded when he was 3. He still had that 'Mom and Dad are mostly the only ones that understand me' speech. Guhpa=Grandpa, Camuh=Camera. Ray was asking him if he loved Grandpa(it was his camera after all, we had to get film of the kid saying that he loved him), and he said that he did. He also said that he loved the camera, this one was unprompted.

One video is of R holding 5 1/2 mo old, hulking, chubby wubby Tiny O. He is holding him so that you see really just R's hand and O is 'standing' on the table. You hear happy chattering sounds coming from somewhere off camera and O staring in that vague baby way with a slight smile in the direction of the chattering. All of a sudden, the baby(R, really), produces this GIANT BURP. O startles a little, I call out to see if he will look at the camera-this whole time he is staring in the direction of the chatter. R prompts L to say 'Good One!' in reaction to the burp. Does L ever say it? We never find out because that's when I turn the camera off.

What do I get from these videos, other than a faint nostalgia? My children are much the same. You can see and hear aspects of their personalties even at such young ages.

L-so happy, and chatty, and just sweet.

O-In awe of his brother.

I don't want to 'go back' in time to that age. I love my children now just the way that they are. I don't deal with the tantrums of a 3 year old, or have to pump extra milk for a week so that I can leave the house with out my baby and not worry about his milk supply for a few hours. But, oh, those videos brought back the happy chatter that almost always accompanied L, and the vast chubby cheeks that was my O.

The video also reminded me of the time that I had to retrain my children to say 'Excuse Me' after burping rather than 'Good One!'.

Maybe I should take videos of the boyos a couple of times a year so that when they are 30 I can remember that O loves his stuffed dragon and that L likes to build elaborate things with legos.

Reset!!!

I have had a tough week diet-wise.  There has been no activity or tracking of food this week.  I could use the excuse that I am sick to cover the activity but there is no excuse for the food ignorance that I have been practicing.  It's time to get back in the truck, drive away from the cliff, and set the cruise control.

We, each of us in my family of 4, have been escaping into internet and/or movie land too much lately.  I tend to putz around on FaceBook and watch Netflix for many hours of the day.  R will come home and almost immediately get on the computer to check sports statistics and play his latest game-'Storm the Castle'.  It's 'Angry Birds'-like-so it's very mindless.  Very little of actual e-mail checking/writing or other productive internet time is actually accomplished by either of us.  The boys have been watching at least a movie most days and sometimes they get KERA as well.  They also tend to pester me until I hand them my IPOD touch to play one of the few silly games that I have on there at least a few days a week.

I have to ask myself if this is what I really want my children to see as examples of adulthood.  Mom and Dad, staring at a computer screen for various non-productive reasons, while the living room is a wild mess, the kitchen desperately needs mopping, and the yard needs a mow.  I know that it is not what I want them to grow up to be like, but there are times when I feel powerless to stop the momentum of lazy/poor choices in my own life.

This week, I propose a challenge to my family.  I say we go off the grid starting tonight.  No internet for a week.  No movies.  No TV.  I think that I'll actually get lesson plans done for the coming school year and maybe end up with a pretty clean house by the end of it.  R may actually work on some writing that he hasn't seemed to work on for a couple of months.  Maybe we both need to stop disengaging our brains and engage them in things that need more than just the half-assed attention that we seem to be giving things.  I'll maybe have time to mop! And read actual books to my children!  And finish a languishing knitting project!

I find my children's childhood slipping away.  I need to show them how an adult is to act.  How an adult is to interact with the world around them.  How an adult is to act in relationships with husbands, wives, friends, the world in general.  And it is NOT with a screen to buffer the rest of the world.

Breaking Down

For the last 3 pay checks that Ray has received, we have justenough to pay the necessary bills, the 'we have been dumb in the past but are paying it off' bills, and to fix what ever it is that's broken.  We have had our home AC break, both of our vehicles, and now the home AC has broken in a different way, with the toilet handle breaking in my hand yesterday.  Ray can fix the toilet, and the AC guy is on his way.  He said on the phone, that a lot of people are having trouble with their AC's in this heat.

It is HOT every summer in Texas.  It gets so hot that it is hard to move and breathe out in the stuff.  We have been hit high and hard this year with less rain than I remember having in a long time.  Burleson has had almost no rain at all and every day has been 100 or more since the first week of June.  I find it hard to even want to do anything that requires stepping outside.

My plants are surviving despite the heat.  I have a second round of tomatoes that will come in the next few weeks, the trees that I planted last year and this year are so far surviving, and we still have 4 chickens.  I go out 3 times a week to tend the garden and water trees, and the chickens are tended at least  twice a day.

The boyos are getting more TV this summer than they usually get.  With a movie or 2 hours of TV being watched a day.
***

The AC guy just came and went.  The capacitor had gone out.  Luckily this was a quick, non-expensive fix.  BUT, there goes any extra money in our account.  It seems like what ever breaks, takes just the right amount of money to fix it.

204.6

Most of you that have know me for more than 5 years might know that I am a weight fluctuator.  Even from an early age I would go up and down with my weight.  As a child, when ever I would go and visit my dad for a few weeks I would always come home 10 pounds heavier.  The difference between my moms house and dads?   At my dads house there was unlimited access to nutty bars, oatmeal cream pies, and cable.  My dad, being a man, and probably having some guilt that he only saw me once or twice a year, almost never said 'no'.

My first diet was when I was 11.  My sister, her husband, and I all went on the T-Factor diet when I was 11-the summer before I went into 6th grade.  I look back on that with love for my sister, because she was able to stand back and objectively say that her chunky little sister should not be so chunky-but also with a little bit of horror.  The T-Factor diet, for those that may not know, was a diet based on drastically reducing your fat grams.  Yikes!  As an adult, I have studied all sorts of diets, and would never put a child with a developing brain on a low fat diet-I believe in fat!  Our bodies need fat.  This is probably why we no longer hear of the T-Factor Diet-reducing fat to those levels can make you crazy!  I lost probably 15-20 pounds on that diet-I really don't recall anymore exactly how much-this was 20+ years ago.  I do remember stepping off of the Greyhound bus and my mom telling me how good I looked.

My weight slowly crept up over the next 4 years until I was in 9th grade.  That was the year that I went on Jenny Craig with my mom- I was successful on that as well.  Then my weight slowly crept up and in 11th and 12th grades I experimented with bulimia and anorexia.  There were days that I would have almost nothing for breakfast, a Mountain Dew for lunch, and almost nothing for dinner.  When we would go to our favorite mexican restaurant, I would come home and vomit.  Yuck!  Looking back on that, I am glad that this phase didn't last too long at a time.

Towards the end of my freshman year in college, I ended up pregnant and placed the baby for adoption. Over the year after I had her, My weight went slowly down, and then stalled at about 180.  I was 209 when she was born.  That summer, I limited myself to 800 calories a day, walked at the park every chance I got, and was able to drop about 30 pounds between my sophmore and junior year in college.  The cute theatre boys I went to school with told me I looked good!  Success!  And then-do you see where this is going?  I kept it off, even lost a little more in a healthy way, and then my weight crept back up.  I met my husband, got married, and got pregnant hovering around 200 pounds.

Between L and O, I lost 50+ pounds on Weight Watchers.  I weighed 147 and was in the best shape of my life when I got pregnant with O.   I felt pretty gross most of the beginning of this pregnancy, and also used it as an excuse to eat eat eat all the cake I could.  I gained 70 pounds with that pregnancy!  Before he was a year old, I went on WW again and lost about 40 pounds.  Then, I hit a rough patch and over the course of the next year and a half, gained 50.  Then, I would gain and lose the same 15 pounds for the next couple of years.  In January of 2010, I made some changes to my lifestyle, and have managed to lose and keep off 20 pounds.  But then.  I got stuck.  I have lost and gained the same 5 pounds over the last year.  Sooo.  Here I am.  Back on Weight Watchers.  I am feeling rather optimistic that this time it'll stick.

Why?

Because, they have tweaked the WW plan in such a way that it doesn't seem as strict anymore.  On the old system, you would get as low as 18 points a day and then an extra 35 a week to spread out however you wanted.  Now-the lowest points anyone is on is 29-and you get an extra 49 points to spread out however you like.  I am also treating this round of WW as more of a lifestyle remodel than a 'DIET'.

I started at 208.2.  I am now 204.6.

Do chickens love tomatoes? Really?

Really!  I have 4 chickens-2 white and 2 red-they love those tomatoes.  They go after them like kids after candy anytime they are offered one.

This is my first blog post.  Who knows.  It may be my only.

Today, I had Chick-fil-A twice.  It is 'Cow Appreciation Day'-so, if you dress like a cow, you get free food at Chick-fil-A.  With some creative pinning of black felt to white t-shirts and a little halloween make up, I only had to cook breakfast this morning.  You know what that means!  No kitchen clean up-Yay!