postpartum fitness update

Well, week three of Weight Watchers Online is completed.  I’ve lost a little over 13 pounds so far.  As I’ve said before, it comes off quickly when I’m nursing.  I’m doing their Simply Filling Technique which requires a minimum of tracking, measuring and counting.  I really like it.  It’s not quite a lifestyle for me, but I see how it could become one.

I’ve also been exercising for three weeks now – mostly on the treadmill.  I have my eye on the goal of being able to jog for thirty-five minutes straight.  So far I am walking four minutes, jogging three minutes and repeating this five times – for a total of thirty-five minutes.

I keep wanting to do a Pilates dvd, but I can’t seem to find the time.  The jogging is my priority right now and I’m only able to squeeze in about three of those per week so I’m going to have to tweak my schedule a bit if I want to fit something else in.  I’m sure I’ll figure it out.

The treadmill is turning out to be a great place to listen to online sermons.

What happens when you don’t let your kids have coloring books?

I’m not a big fan of coloring books or kids’ “activity” books.  Sure, we own a few, but mostly I find them boring and when we’re looking for something to do, I usually forget we have them.  So, what’s a deprived boy do?  He makes his own dot-to-dot.

deep blue

I have some deep thoughts somewhere in the cracks and crevices of my brain but I haven’t the strength to scrape them out right now.  I actually have a draft waiting to be worked on in my wordpress dashboard.  I don’t usually save drafts because it feels like unfinished business.  But contemplating the nature of sin probably shouldn’t be pecked out one-handed while simultaneously nursing the baby and begging the kids to be nice to each other and please don’t wreck the house.

So for now the depth I am interested in are the depths of my newborn’s eyes.  The color seems very light to me.  Maybe he’ll have John’s steel blue color.  (No, they’re not steel blue – they’re cloudy sky gray.)  I keep thinking of that scene in Gone With the Wind where Scarlet tells Rhett that all babies have blue eyes and he says that they are blue and will stay blue like the bonnie blue flag.

It has taken me about an hour between interruptions to write these few words so I’ll stop now.

ppbbbttt

I’m below my pre-pregnancy weight.  It comes off without me even trying when I’m nursing.  Now for the hard part:  I was overweight to begin with and I have to lose about forty pounds to be in a healthy range and fifty to look really good.  ;-)  

So how to go about it?  Well, I’ve heard that it’s all about using more calories than one consumes.  So I could eat less or exercise more.  I’d really rather not do either.  Are there really no other options?  Ideas? Suggestions?  C’mon people!

binky, snooli, bobo, passy, dummy, soother

With every baby I’ve thought that I’d like to avoid using a pacifier.  With my first, I wanted to avoid all things unnatural.  With my other two, I just wanted to avoid the eventual difficult weaning.  There’s nothing like getting up several times a night to put the pacifier back in the crib with the baby who threw it out of the crib just to get you to come into his room.  And I’m just not that bright apparently, because it took me a loooonng time to realize that these wide-eyed little lumps of sweetness were actually capable of doing such a thing intentionally.  

After being used as a living pacifier for the past several days, I went out to buy the plastic variety for my newest son.  I am particular about the brand:  I like MAM pacifiers.  Unfortunately, I have been having a hard time finding them this time around.  We’ve tried several other brands, including the ones they give you in the hospital, and he just doesn’t like them.  I am sure it’s because he is partial to the MAM pacifiers too and NOT because he wants to be perpetually attached to my breast for the next two years.  Anyway we finally found some today but they were the wrong size.  Did you know that they have sizes?  

I guess I’ll be blogging all things baby for awhile, huh?

stinky mama

The baby can sleep through the sound of the vacuum, but my whisper wakes him.  I’m sitting up in bed trying to type in between patting his bottom to get him to sleep.  He’s almost there, but he’s fighting it.  

I think I had some thoughts about interesting things to blog earlier today, but they’ve all washed into the muddy water and it would take a team of divers to help dredge them out and now all I’m really thinking about is how soon I can get a shower to wash off the smell of sour milk.

Spiritually dry?

I’m feeling pretty unspiritual lately.  This fading temporal life has been obscuring my view of the eternal reality.  In the past I’ve been able to love my family, and cook and clean and enjoy the garden and still know that this world is passing away.  But lately it’s like I’ve been living in this masquerade world and have almost forgotten what things are really like.  

It’s been a struggle lately to remember who I am in Christ.  I know that emotions alone are unreliable as an indicator of anything, but they are a part of who we are and I figure the Lord gave them to us for a reason.  Taken together with more objective measures, they can be a help and enhancement to the spiritual life.  

I know that part of the problem is that I’ve not been making time to read the Bible.  or pray.  Why?

family life stuff

John’s been out of work for a couple of months now.  Actually, he’s just been on unpaid leave since Mother’s Day because the demands on his time were unreasonable and I needed him at home more toward the end of my pregnancy.  We’ve been living off of our emergency/car fund.  I guess I won’t be tooling around the neighborhood in a new minivan any time soon.    He has an interview on Tuesday and he has to give his old job an answer soon as to whether or not he wants to come back.  I’m praying for wisdom and the right open door.  

Baby Neil is doing very well.  He is making this annoying clicking sound when he nurses though.  I’m pretty sure it’s a bad latch that’s causing him to swallow a lot of air.  I’ve tried moving him around this way and that but I can’t seem to fix it.  You might think that I’d be able to figure this out as he is my third baby, but I’m at a loss.  Any ideas?  

Tomorrow we start school again.  We took some time off when my belly got so big that sitting, standing and lying down were uncomfortable.  We’re six weeks into the Sonlight kindergarten curriculum and we’re happy with it so far.   I’m looking forward to adding some more structure back into our lives.  I thrive on flexible routine, as do my kids.  

We’re thinking of going to the zoo today.  I’ll have to check the weather first to be sure we won’t be thunderstormed out.  It seems to have rained here almost every day, or maybe every other day, since April.

Tomorrow is another day, Lord willing.

hoo hoo hoo hoo hoooooooo.  What’s that?  The noise my kids are making as they march around the living room.  Let’s see, it’s twenty after eight, so that means we only have about eleven more hours of incessant, unnecessary noise.  I am way too frustrated to be writing today.  The sick cat is looking for a place other than the litter box to pee; the baby just spit up on the couch; I’m still in my pajamas; I can’t remember if I took my blood pressure medicine.

70’s & 80’s memory dump

Remember those plastic thingies that slid down over the post in the center of a record player so that you could play forty-fives?  Remember block parties when some genius would leave the albums sitting in the sun and they’d melt and warp?  

Remember block parties?  short shorts.  Those moon jumpy ride things.  riding bikes right down the middle of the street just because we could.

Remember open fire hydrants – with or with out the special spray cap.  We lived across the avenue from the 106th precinct and we could go over and ask for a cap pretty easily.

Once when we were goofing off in the hydrant, a car drove past at the same time that I happened to be flinging a plastic orange juice container.  It went right in the man’s window.  He stopped, backed up and threw it back to me.  We were all shocked silent.  The thing I feared most was that the black driver would think I’d done it intentionally or that it was racially motivated.  

Racially motivated and the 106th precinct?  Stun gun torture.  I don’t remember all the details.  I remember that my “Uncle Joe” was a cop there though.  

Uncle Joe wasn’t really an uncle – he was my mother’s on and off boyfriend for many years and the only one of her boyfriends who was ever genuinely nice to me.  Of course, he was probably a real jerk to my mother but I’m not sure about that because I absolutely refuse to let her tell me anything about that time of her life for fear she’ll start talking to me about sex.