Sidetracked is the word

I had full intentions of doing a photo food diary today, but I kept forgetting to take pictures of anything we had eaten ! Just a weird sort of day where I kept getting sidetracked with life, and our internet kept going out. I was feeling kind of crampy most of the day , so we just took an easy walk this afternoon. It's not high intensity , but it is moving and moving is a good thing.

Tomorrow is my birthday - I turn 51. We have plans of going out to lunch and then do a little leisurely shopping ( I am looking for sheets of magnet for my computer printer), catch some movies and just kick back. And I will try to remember to snap some pictures !

And now for some fun

Inspired by a post made by my friend TJ and because I feel like being silly

Saturday Survey

Don't you just hate that morning mouth taste? Nope. Tastes like chicken !

Do you have a sore throat? No

What can you hear right now? Listening to my MP3 player while hubby surfs and son watches a Pokemon DVD...New Radicals, Rich Mullens, The Who and more

Name three things you did yesterday: exercised, shopped, tormented my husband. It's better than sex

What was the last thing you spent money on? Food.

What is something your going to do a lot of this week? Ponder the questions of the universe, attempt to make a great home latte and exercise

Do you like the singer Bon Jovi? He was after my time.

What is the next concert you're going too? I have not been to a concert in years, out of choice. I used to go , and I was not impressed with the experience

What is your favorite channel to watch on the television? TLC and Showtime

Look behind you, what do you see? salt lamp, exercise mats and stability ball

What were you doing at 8am this morning? House stuff of various and sundry purposes

Can you crack your toes? No, but I can pick things up with them

What was the last movie you watched? Walk the Line last night on TV

Was it good? Yep- it was one of the greatest romantic and encouraging movies I have seen in a long time

Have you thrown popcorn at someone in a movie theater? Nope

Do you like redvines? Ick !

How about black liquorish? Adore it !

How does your hair look right now? Meatloaf looking for a topping with twinges of grey

How long till your next birthday? 2 days- i will be 51. EEEK !

What fast food restaurant has the best fries, in your opinion? Never eat the stuff anymore

Do you sing along to the songs you know while in the car? Nope. I save it for kareoke games so I can embarass my son and neighborhood cats.

Name five things you do on a regular basis: Breathe , blink, burp, pee, walk while chewing gum

Do you read often? Too often

Who last IM'ed you? I don't use IM's

Do you think Bigfoot is real? Yep, and his real nature is something like The Greenman in the Middle Ages in Europe

Is there someone you wish would just fall off the face of this earth? Nope.

Do you like the show Greys Anatomy? Never watch the show

Are you ashamed of your childhood? Nope. It was the reason afterschool programs were invented

Who are you thinking about right now? Wondering if I should succumb to doing Tweeter or Facebook

Is there anyone you look up to? Sadly, no

Are you hungry right now? No

Has anyone played a practical joke on you? Yep

Who was the last person to call you? Hubby

What did you do last night? 'Watched Walk the Line

Do you think you're good looking? Looks are in the eye of the beholder- i only see the inside of me and from that angle I am terrific

Are you cold right now? No

How is the weather outside? Sunny and 74

Have you ever had a broken heart? If so, how's your heart now? More than once. Now my heart is fine

Is there anyone who you love more then anything in the world? Yes.

Do you know the difference between "your" and "you're"? Yep

Do you have a facebook? If no, then why not? No- not yet and i don't know why

Do you do surveys often? Not on this blog

Do you have a best friend? Yes, and i am married to him

Do you hate it when people ask you question about the war? Which one ? I cannot hold a rational conversation when the topic is the Punic war

Are you interested in politics and what's going on in the world? Yes. It is proof that evolution is still in progress and there are still life forms crawling out of the ooze

Where is the next place you'd like to go vacation? Minnesota or Ireland, but odds of either happening are slim to none for many reasons

Name one of your fears: Ventriloquist dummies selling Mary Kay Cosmetics at a farmers market. Yes, it can happen

When you go to the theater, do you buy food there? If so, what do you get? Just the vat o diet soda.

How many hours of sleep did you get last night? About 5

Is there anything bothering you right now? Yes. I want ice water but I cannot fit ice cube trays in my freezer

Where is your sister right now? All three of them are most likely in their homes or at work

Is there any songs stuck in your head right now? If so, what? Yes-From the Beginning by Emerson Lake and Palmer

What is one of the worst things about waking up? Stiff joints

Have you ever felt like/have run away from home? Sort of- I tried to kill myself when I was 17 for a really stupid reason. A boy.

Last encounter you had with a police officer? Cannot remeber

Weigh in is what begins each Saturday

So it has been a bad week for exercising, good week for food intake and a week of another dietary change for reasons beyond weight loss.

Me- DOWN 0.6- I think it is hilarious that I tend to lose on weeks that I do not work out.
Son- UP 2.2- no exercise and the dietary change
Hubby- UP 1.4most likely the diet change

This past week we added yeast back to our diet because I was not seeing a great change in son's autism from the two weeks of cutting it out. This coming week we are going to eliminate dairy to see if this is the substance that is doing the most harm. It will be a much better week for exercise !

Metabolisim, wake up !!!

Still in planning mode, but at least today the sun is out and the dampness has drifted down to feeling like you are being splashed instead of being soaked. That being said, there is a plan in the works for a walk this morning.It will help not only our weight loss, but give both son and I a big dose of the Vitamin D we so greatly need !

This morning, in rare turn of events, son slept in. This is a kid who normally wakes anywhere from 4 am to 6 am, and has done so ever since he was a baby. He also likes to eat within a half hour of getting up, so we normally have breakfast pretty early. You get used to that. I got up early with dad, as the damp was making me very achy and it hurt to sleep, so I had some quiet time alone after he went off to work. I was starting to get hungry, but told myself to wait because the boy would be up soon and I don't want to cook breakfast twice. He did eventually wake up around 7, but by then i was so hungry I was starting to feel sick to my stomach ! We had our usual breakfast of oatmeal with the toppings, and normally this is enough to keep me going . Today because I was so hungry before, it did not seem to satisfy.

It got me to thinking about the other advantages of living by the extreme schedule. And then in got me to wondering if perhaps this action has caused my metabolism to get very lazy, and contribute to my stall that has lasted a year? Perhaps if I find ways to make myself starving to the point of sick a couple of mornings a week would help to make the scale move again at long last ?

Not moving, but grooving !

Exercise ?? Who- me ???!!!???

This has been a bad, bad week for exercise.I have done none. Zip. Zilch. Nada. Well at least since Monday when I did some work with the stability ball and hand weights. It has just been one of those weeks. Trapped in planning land( Spend 3 hrs looking for one specific form you know you have on disc and discover 50 other things you can use and then learn that new stuff you thought you were saving did not save so find a substitute and...oh yeah, what the heck was I looking for ???)And then somewhere in there son reminds me it is dinner or lunch or something andI forget what I was doing all together. And interestingly enough, he has also ignored the chart for exercise. Only reason for this is that it was posted and not carried out for a week before posted, so it has no meaning to him.

I am not upset about it. The break has been for good reason, plus it has been so incredibly humid and cold out that my arthritis is flaring up. I have it in my right knee , due to an old injury, and in my spine. I know moving will help it be less painful, but sometimes certain things take a greater precedent than losing weight for a short time. I just have to take care that the short time does not stretch into a long one. At least I am guaranteed of getting in some walking tonight at the store, as we do one of three different grocery stops for the week. And it has been a really good week food wise, so all is not lost.

How to convince yourself fat is where it's at

I am working very hard on creating some serious butt callouses right now. I am in major surfing /gathering/planning mode for net year's homeschool. What ? Take the easy way out and go to a home school convention to drop big bucks on numerous curriculum that may or may not work with my son or buy one of those school in a box things ? No way.My son's needs are too specialized to expect to find the right fit through either of those choices, so it means doing a lot of researching , creating and then laying it all out in lesson plans for the next year. It gives me a new respet of teachers everytime I do this. Lesson plans make for very dull writing tasks !

In the meantime, when it feels like my brain will explode from contemplating one more math concept or potential Language Arts lesson, I flip to reading the blogs of those I find inspiring for the weight loss journey. One of my new blog friends wrote yesterday about her inner motivations behind her weight gain. It was an earthquake, and the aftershocks were with her for a long time in her psycological landscape, and I understood very well just how those things beyond your control can grab you and keep a control over your life that is very hard to shake. It made me think of my own motivations, and come face to face with the fact that I am only begining to deal with many of them.

Flashback to the past. I was a little kid, very overweight but active and happy. I had gotten a wrong message that strong people were good eaters, and I was working on becoming Hercules. My weight was never really an issue to me ( my doctors always had other ideas), for there were so many other things in my life that had nothing to do with weight. I had boyfriends, dated when I wanted to , hated gym class but loves informal sports like most kids and so on. My mom would try to get me to diet in different ways ( including Aydes candies- remeber those ?), but I had no real reason to lose weight ,so I did not. I got married, expected to be a mom soon, and it did not happen. After 8 years I learned that my weight was preventing me from getting pregnant, so I worked hard at losing weight. I dropped 110 pounds , and at long last was pregnant.

That was only a teaser it seems, because I lost my first baby to a stillbirth. He suffered Intrauterine Fetal Demise( he died inside of me and stayed there long enough to put my life at risk from infection), and I delivered my first son knowing he would never take a breath or cry. His birthday was also his official death day. The event was traumatic, but is seems that it was preperation for what was to come. It was as if the Universe was asking me if I was really, really serious about being a mom, because nothing about that role was going to be anything like what I had anticipated that role to be. I greived, I searched for answers, I lost the baby weight I gained, and had a major abdominal surgery to correct the last of the damage from my first pregnancy ( a tiny bit of the placenta had broken off and drifted into my falopian tube, causing some massive ovarian cysts). And 10 months after my first son's birth, I was pregnant again.

Here the fun began. At 8 weeks I started bleeding heavy, and it was the first indication that this pregnancy was not going to be exactly normal. I experienced just about every problem that one could develop. I was on total bedrest, locked into an endless schedual of Dotor visits, test, high level ultrasounds, meetings with perinatologists and more. I was scared, and afraid of my own body. First infertility, then stillbirth, and now this. I started to feel a level of self hatred that few people talk about, but because of my baby I did all I could to stay healthy and moderately sane. Then he was born via C Section, and that did not go as planned. I was so big I could not arch my spine enough for an epidural, so I was totally knocked out for his birth. All this work, and I had to take a vacation for the big event. He did not stableize for almost 13 hours, so I did not get to meet my son till he was almost a half day old. He instantly knew my voice and my scent though, so no bonding damage was done. As atypical as all this was, it still was not the whole story.

I choose to exclusively breastfeed him, and while breastfeeding is something you can learn in theory, the experience supplies a million things no book or consultant ever could. My three sisters breastfed their babies with no problem, and I anticipated the same experience. He would latch on feircely( picture your toes being pulled through your breasts), but need to be on the breast for HOURS. He hardly wet or had a BM, and after 4 days he was down to one wet diaper a day. The staff at the hospital felt this was normal and discharged us. The first day home his eyes had fallen into the sockets, ,his color was grey and he was crying nonstop. I called the doctors and they told me to bring him to the ER. He was dehydrated and reccived IV fluids. I was tested and found that my body does not have the hormone required to produce milk, so I was starving my son for the first 5 days of his life. This fact brought on a whole new form of body hatered. I felt like I had the word fail written on my forhead.

Things then fell into somewhat normal for a time, and I struggled with the challenge of building back my body strength after all that bedrest and c section birth, being a new mom to a very active, bright little boy and my husband in training for the Deaconate. It was a red letter day if I got to shower and eat lukewarm food ! At 7 months Nick developed a serious ear infection, and that began an edless parade of doctor visits for the ear infection that would not quit. Then came the normal baby immunizations, and suddenly the bright boy on project head start was gone. What was left was something that had numerous problems that just were not what the books list as the normal baby things. By the time he was 4, I was totally fed up with the medical community and decided to part company with them. Shortly afterwords I learned the word Autisim and my son had met and become one. This was the final straw in my self esteem. Not only couldn't I do what an insect could do( get pregnant and nurture it's own young), but anything I touched in that vein turned to shit.Then I had a series of very early miscarriages, and I felt like I was the reincarnation Lucretia Borja. At that time I got this weird idea that if I made enough food in really good flavors, it would make it all better. If I made enough bread, sweet rolls and homemade pasta, I could make all of this go away. If I could cook and can massive amounts of food to over nurture my family, it would not matter that my body could not do so in other ways.

It didn't. It only packed on pounds and problems.

Now, as we deal with diet and supplements and exercise, I keep bumping up against my thoughts from that experience, as if it is finally time to take them out and heal. And heal I shall. I have learned that smothering is not the same thing as feeding, and quantity does not replace quality. Quality can get buried in quantity very easily. And rather than see myself as a failure because of my maternal experiences, I am begining to see that I am pretty Damned good. God does not give you more than you can handle, and if He belives I am up to this challenge because I have the skills, who am I to argue with that ?

This little piggy...

The sun was out for about 2 hours yesterday, and then the rest of the day was grey, windy and COLD ! We had a fairly icy winter, and now we have the season of snapping tree limbs. Damaged limbs survive the winter storms, but come summer with the renewed growth cycle of the trees they lose their hold and the strong spring winds break them off. Between the damp and the dangers , it makes the idea of going to the woods not very appealing. So we had a day of lie low and retail therapy.

Started the day off with Pumpkin oats for 3. (Rolled oats cooked with solid packed pumpkin, cinnamon and brown sugar) We each take ours with slightly different toppings, just like the Three Bears. Baby bear had coconut, flax, crasins, butterscotch bits and toffee bits, Papa bear with cocnut, flax, crasins and goji berries, me with the same as papa plus wheat bran. It is one of our favorite ways to start the day !

Papa had to go sing at the Memorial Day services at the cemetary, and son and I stayed home to do our own things. First was some work with the stability ball and hand weights, and then our own intrests. Son was involved in some marathon on TV and I started combing the net for homeschool materials and lesson plans geared for special needs students. This is my 14th year of doing this, ( we began with two years of preschool and continued on since then) and I now know enough to spot something that is going to involve major work for me, and this year is going to be major prep work for me. Depressing ! Son was looking for a snack somewhere around then so we had our morning usual
Good ole yogert with fruit salad. It is so simple to toss together and so satisfying ! Then back to work for me. I was just starting to investigate math options for the year , and I realized a basic list of school supplies that I was going to have to assemble to make this all happen. It seemed very overwhelming to me, and by the time hubby got back my head was spining with a list of things I would need at Staples and places of that nature. We decided it would be a good day to go shoppingand hit out for lunch at one of our favorite places to expidite matters. Sweet tomatoes, here we come !
For those who have never been, Sweet Tomatoes is an all you can eat salad and soup bar. The also serve some amazing breads, muffins and pastas. The great thing is , you first hit the vegetarian salad bar with so many veggie options that your plate explodes if you take just a tiny bit of a third of the options. They also offer very healthy salad dressing options. My salad had too many veggies to remeber, let alone list !
They also offer 4 "signature salads", which change every month for the most part. This weeks offerings that I chose were a spoon of a Thai brown rice salad, Broccoli Madness, Strawberry feild forever and Wonton Chicken. Strawberry lemonade accompanied. So many veggies !
Then I made a pass at the soups and breads. I got a bowl of Chicken and 8 veggie stew/soup, two peices of whole wheat red pepper foccacia, and two little fat free fruit oatbran muffins( these guys had big chunks of real strawberries in them ! So good ! Another plus is the soup bowls hold about three quarters of a cup in total and the plates for the breads are saucer size. The portions are small, so it looks like a whole lot more on your plate. After this I was totally satiatied and knew that if I skipped all veggies at dinner I had still gotten in my goal of 5 veggies a day !

So then off the the stores and I got some of the supplies I needed. We decided to just come home because my knee and back was having a really nasty arthritis flare up because of the damp. Tylenol and arnica gel were not cutting it this time, and every step made me feel like my knee was going to snap in half. So we came back and I continued doing my surfing and word processing chores. Now mind you we had just eaten a feild of salad, and in normal human beings this would keep us. Not my son, the Autistic Boy who Must Live By Scheduals. If it is posted, it shall be. He got all confused because lunch did not contain the grilled chicken burgers as posted, and it was now snack time and we HAVE to have a snack.Uggh. To bloow him off would cause a melt down and a week of hard work to get him back to the schedual ( if it says we will have spinach, you must eat spinach) and every meal may turn into a meltdown. So I told him we could do things a little different because it was a holiday
So everyone got a cup of cherries and 17 cocoa dusted almonds. I am probably pushing my own tolerance level with the nuts, but with this everyone could just kind of graze on this if they did not eat it all at once. Sort of making the best of a situation if you will.

Now if that was not stimulating enough, 5 pm rolls around and dinner was not ready. This fact caused him a good deal of anxiety, and I could tell from my mommy sense that this second meal hiccup would cause a meltdown if not dealt with. Undersand that it is not because he is acting like a brat, but rather in the mind of an autistic, the world hits them as if everything in life happens at a painfully intense level of sensory perception. Routine allows them to keep a kind of tether to the world. If they know exactly when to expect what, they can deal with the stimulation better and find their own flow through it so to speak. Things not following the schedual are sort of like 9/11 happening in their brains( remeber the shock you felt ?). So, inner was assembled and served
Heartland Omega 3 Plus pasta, california Blend and Pork Ribs in the crock pot. The guys have a real thing for ribs, where as I have never been a fan of them. They always make me feel kind of sick to my stomach from the grease, but when you live in a home with others, you have to sometimes eat your least favorite things.

Looking back, somehow it felt like all I did was eat this day ! Eat , and develop sincere butt calouses from looking over homeschool possibilities !