New toy

Happy Yule Eve !
We are a mixed faith household, and my faith path celebrates the winter holiday as Yule/Alban Athan on the day of the Winter Solstice. Basically we celebrate this as a new solar year and the beginning of the tide of increasing light. Even though the coldest part of the winter is still to come, the days are going to get longer from this point till the Summer Solstice. More hours of daylight are a good thing ! Because Christmas involves Bob singing at several services, he is away from us from dinner time on Christmas Eve till mid day Christmas day, and then we gather with my family for extended family Christmas, we do not have a family Christmas time. Instead, we celebrate this on Solstice. Special meal, family game time, presents and goodies. You do what you have to do in this world ! We have also done away with the tradition of wrapping gifts- and the reason for that was completely out of necessity. We have one car , and at this time of year it is often gone with extra rehersals, Masses, end of the year work commitments and more. As soon as Nick was old enough to learn about Santa, we began simply shopping together instead of giving gifts. It's a lot of fun ! So yesterday was our big shopping day for us ( took care of extended family the day before) , and we all made out like bandits. One of the things I got was a whole new wardrobe ! I have been holding off buying clothes because even though the scale is not budging my clothes are getting a lot looser, and I did not want to make an investment that would last for only a few weeks. The other day I noticed that EVERYTHING I own was looking thread bare and frumpy, so I determined I needed to buy at least a top and pants for when I had to go out. Low and behold I found a bunch of things that flatter my body on sale, and I indulged. I have to admit, I do feel less frumpy now.

Another thing I got was Daisy Fuentes Pilates for the Wii. I had heard about this game a few weeks back and it looked promising. I tried it this morning and found a few problems with it. First, there is no instructions for the exercise- you simply watch and attempt to follow along with the same moves. Problem with this is you get no warning about what to avoid doing in order to avoid injury. Second problem is that it keeps having you step on the balance board and then use it for the exercises without instruction on how you should place the board. It can be very confusing ! However, with some thought you can overcome these, and then the game becomes pretty cool ! I did a half hour session, in which my thighs were informing me of how unlimber I have become and my abs felt as if they had been woken from a very long sleep. I even broke out in a sweat and started to feel somewhat nauseous from the work out- a sign that you are challenging your muscles in big ways. I plan on using this one at least a couple of times a week. I think pilates will help to build up some of the muscles that have fallen asleep, so to speak, and perhaps this will help kick the weight loss in.