No Quit House

I've been failing at motivation for months. Months, guys.

And then a couple of days ago, my daughter and her plan-everything-a-year-in-advance mentality changed all of that.

Her: I want to be the Star Wars princess for Halloween.

Me: Which one?

Her: The 14-year-old one. 

Me: Padme? Princess Amidala?

Her: Yeah, Amidala. With the makeup.

Me: I think we can probably do that. Your dad wants to go as Darth Maul anyway.

Her: We should all be Star Wars characters! You can be the princess with the hair, Mommy. 

(The princess with the hair, if you were wondering).

8 months to get to a size that won't embarrass me in a Leia costume. I want that badly enough to work for it. 

What a few months it's been. 

I lost my uncle in December, everyone's been sick for weeks, and I got very busy with work at the same time. The weather hasn't helped, so I kind of did this number:

I've been mostly working, playing Warcraft, and cuddling up with my family. 

What I haven't been doing is losing weight. 

I wanted to teach my son how to search by using speech-to-text on my phone. He can't spell accurately all the time yet and the flat screen keyboard is difficult for him to navigate (me too...I'd be lost without Swype). 

So we tested it out, I showed him how to push the microphone button. After a few tries, he was starting to get it!

What he said was: "Kids Bop Leapfrog Explorer." (And it was crystal clear, I might add).

What the phone heard was (this is exactly what it said): "smiley f****"

In an IM to my husband:

so far today I've washed a load of dishes, finished a content page, drank a bottle of water, and clipped a toenail

Having a discussion with my daughter in the car about Miss America, how beauty is often mislabeled to a certain kind of body rather than to many, why beauty is fleeting, where our focus should be, etc.

One of the things that came up was health and fitness, how we should strive for our bodies to be healthy and fit, what that actually means, and why our country seems to have completely missed the mark.

(It was a completely awesome conversation. Made my whole week).

In that conversation, we got around to talking about what food is (fuel) and what calories are and how it all works. As an illustration, we told her about how my husband and I used to eat, and HOLY CRAP. When we were done, it's really no wonder we got as heavy as we did.

Typical Saturday two years ago:

Wake up around 9. Go to McD's and get sausage biscuits. (430 cals)

At noon, jump in the truck to go shopping. Stop to get lunch at Burger King. Have a Whopper and large french fries. (1130 cals)

Around 2, we're on the way home. Grab a bag of chips from the gas station when we stop to fill up. (200 cals)

At 4, grab a few cookies from the kitchen while we're tidying up: (200 cals)

At 6, Totinos pizzas for dinner (700 cals)

At 8:30, it's alt night RAID TIME! Can't raid an instance without snacks, that's ludicrous! During the raid, eat three handfuls of wheat thins, 5 pieces of candy, and 3 more cookies (700 cals)

Total for the day: 3360

One day calorie surplus for my weight at the time: 1217

Discovered on my desktop tonight. I wrote it right after my uncle died a few weeks ago, then promptly forgot it. Literally a note to myself reminding me that it's okay to just feel (or not feel) sometimes:

You're allowed to be sad. You're allowed not to be sad. You're allowed to feel like the whole world just crashed down on you. You're allowed to feel nothing at all.

It doesn't matter if he was your best friend, your brother, your father, your husband, your uncle, or your grandfather. It doesn't matter if you saw him every day or hadn't seen him in 10 years.

Your heart doesn't need to explain to you or to anyone else why you love the way you love, why you care the way you care, or why you grieve the way you grieve.

It's been a while since I did an update like this, so here goes:

On weight loss: My husband and I both stalled. We got frustrated. We gave up like wusses. We both gained a bit. The holidays forced us to realize once again what we were giving up, how much we missed being what we had been. So we're back on track now, and moving in a great direction. Honestly, you forget how good it feels to eat well and exercise often when you stop doing it.

On family: Things are going great right now for the most part. My husband and I figured out a lot of stuff about ourselves in the past year. We've developed a plan to pay off all of our debt (except the house) by the end of this year. We're conquering our housecleaning issues. 

My daughter (aka Cakes) is about to turn 8, and she has come out of her shell. She may never be a social butterfly, and that's fine by me, but I am so glad she has made friends.  She's doing fantastic in school, and hit the 90th percentile in both math and language arts on her last round of testing. She loves math. I have a feeling she'll be teaching me things in the not-so-distant future.

My son (Megatron or MT) is in school and therapy. We're careful to build in plenty of play time and zone time and rest time around those things, though. He's communicating with us on a level he never has before, and it's been wonderful. He's smart as a whip, but we already knew that. "Mommy sit on the couch?" How can you not love that? He's my snuggle bug, and I LOVE it.

On work: I found consistent work--or really, it found me. Either way, it's a solid job with good people doing something I'm decent at. Best part? I work from home. Writing blogs in my pajamas? Yup.

On Tumblr: I love Tumblr. It started out as a place for me to get weight loss inspiration, but it's really turned into more of a personal space for me. Most of the people I follow supply me with things that make me smile, think, or laugh out loud every day, and I appreciate it.

By the way, I am not at all offended if you followed me for weight loss and aren't into the personal stuff and decide to unfollow. 

I did create a second Tumblr for gaming-related stuff, since in my world, that is pretty much its own entity. If you play Warcraft or are a gamer, I recently resurrected the gaming Tumblr, and you can find that here.

My daughter's spelling test from yesterday.

A year ago, her 1st grade teacher was urging us to get her into OT for her handwriting.

3 months ago, any writing homework she had was a chore because she tried to rush through it.

She made her very own New Year's resolution to work on her handwriting, and she has. 

I'm with the kids all the time, so I see a lot of the cool things they do first hand. My daughter makes sure her dad knows everything she does in great detail, but he doesn't see much of what our son does. 

MT's been starting to talk to us more through his own words, which is a big departure from all of our communication up to this point. For the most part, his communication is learned phrases and echoing what we say. It hasn't bothered me much. This is how he talks, we've learned to speak his language as much as possible.

Here's how tonight's conversation would normally go:

Daddy: Hey bud!

MT: Hey bud!

Daddy: Hey! Did you have a good day?

MT: Have a good day?

Daddy: Yeah? I missed you today, son.

MT: I missed you today, son.

The first part of the conversation went as normal, but then there was a very cool diversion:

Daddy: I missed you today, son.

MT: I missed you today, Daddy.