Let's Talk Solutions

So, it's been a week since my first post, and I feel like I should talk about what kind of progress I've made. First, my attitude is better (yay!). The baby's still sick (in fact, I found out Wednesday morning that he has another ear infection, which explains why he was so miserable on his birthday). But at least now he's on antibiotics, so although he continues to wipe snot all over the place, he doesn't seem to feel as awful as last week. Today, as we were sitting on the floor, he wiped his nose on the bottom of my shirt. When I lifted it up to determine just how gross it was (bad enough that I need to change my shirt?), he realized that he could see my belly. Wow, fun, mommy's soft, squishy belly! What fun to climb on and squeeze! Look, I can blow raspberries on it! I can cover it back up and then uncover it again, peekaboo! We were both giggling and having a good time. Well, until he bit me, that is, and then I decided having a soft, squishy belly was not such a fun thing after all.

I joined Weight Watchers today. I got an email from Daily Candy that there was a special running until Saturday that I could join and save lots of money, and who can resist that? Well, I really only signed up for the one-week free trial, so I need to remember to cancel before midnight on Monday or else be charged something like $65. But I've been curious about their "points system", so I thought I'd check it out and see if it would be a helpful tool to get me to eat better. (Weight Watchers assigns every food a point value, and you are allotted a certain number of points per day, as well as some extra points for the week for special occasions.) As I was signing up, I was eating a Trader Joe's chicken pot pie, so I figured I'd plug that in and see my point total. I realized before I started that this wasn't the healthiest food choice, but I was still surprised to find out that I was in the process of consuming 17 of my 21 allotted points for the day! Yikes! Now, I have the option of eating "zero points" foods for most of the rest of the day (baby carrots and diet soda, anyone?), or I can accumulate "activity points" by going out and exercising. Wondering just how much exercise I would need to do in order to eat dinner, I decided to check out what going for a walk would earn me. Turns out, if I walk for 30 minutes at a regular pace, I earn one point. I think I need to walk for the next eight hours in order to eat tonight.

Okay, maybe eating healthier is still a little ways off for me. But I am trying to do a better job of at least eating at home (and no take out). I'm pretty certain that I have made more meals at home over the last week than I did in the entire last month. Which is especially impressive considering that we were away for the weekend, so I wasn't cooking anything at the hotel where we stayed. I'm still trying to get the hang of how I am supposed to cook dinner while tending to the baby and the preschooler, at approximately the same time that the baby needs to go down to bed. As I see it, I have two choices. One is to cook dinner earlier in the evening, eat with the kids, and then get them ready for bed. Chris would then eat by himself after he gets home. The other option (which is the one I've been doing), is to feed the kids their own meals first, get them ready for bed, and then cook after the baby is asleep, and eat with Chris after he puts the other one down for bed. But by then, I'm hungry, grumpy, and low on patience. I'm still not sure how to make this work.

I do have one success to share, though. My car is not full of crap! It's still not clean (I'm not going to the car wash when it's been raining every week). And it desperately needs to be vacuumed inside (dried peas and cheerios are everywhere). But other than that, there's nothing that doesn't belong in the car. And I created a system- a bag for trash, and a bag to put all the little stuff that gets collected each day (preschool artwork, baby toys, etc.), so that I can carry it all inside at once, and a notebook to write down all those things that I don't want to forget while in the car. It's helpful because I don't feel like I need to text someone or write an email immediately. And it turns out, if you just stop checking your email every two minutes, sometimes you even forget about it for a whole hour!

In case you were wondering, no, that number on the scale has not changed over the last week. I mentioned that we went away for the weekend. I actually thought that pushing a stroller around the zoo (man, that was a big hill!), swimming, and carrying the baby all around would have been more helpful. But those activity points didn't count for as much as I thought, and apparently it's hard to lose weight when you stuff yourself at Benihana, eat mac 'n cheese and chicken strips at the zoo, and drink lots and lots of coke.

Oh, and since we were away, Brody just would not nurse (too distracted by the new places), so he weaned himself from breastfeeding. Honestly, I was only aiming to do it for a year, so I was ready to be done, too. But I am feeling a little guilty that it happened while he's sick, and a tiny bit nostalgic since I plan for this to be my last baby. And now I'm thinking about those 200-500 calories per day that breastfeeding supposedly burns, and missing that, too. Time for some more walking...

This next week, I need to come up with a plan for cutting soda out of my diet, and making it to the gym. Wish me luck! I'd better go now, so that Brody and I can start our walk. Otherwise, I won't be able to eat dinner until midnight.