Real Me: Update on C25K and WLB

I love acronyms, don't you?

Figured it was time for a little update on my Couch to 5K progress and on my Win, Lose or Blog participation as well, in case you haven't been following along on my contest blog.

C25K

So far? This is kind of my version of hell. Well that's not really a fair statement I guess. Hell for me would be being stuck for eternity in a bathroom my boys have used for a while without cleaning. And there's no antibacterial soap. And no clean towels. Yeah. That's probably a more accurate representation of my own personal hell. But running comes in as a close second. I'm so stinkin' out of shape that this just isn't fun at all yet. I say "yet" as if I'm hopeful that running will become fun. I have some serious doubts about that, but I'm trying to give die hard (aka looney tune) marathon runners the benefit of the doubt. This is HARD. Week one was okay. I managed my alternating 60 second "running"/90 seconds walking intervals with relative competence and without thinking my life was ending, just that it was temporarily really, really uncomfortable. But apparently the difference between 60 seconds of "running" and 90 seconds of "running" (which is the next interval requirement) is MASSIVE. The first time I did 90 seconds all I could think was "Thank heavens there are fewer intervals when we have to do the longer stretch of time because if I had to do this 8 times I would die." By the time I finished up my 2nd interval I was thinking "There's no way I'm even going to make it to 6 intervals!" It was HARD. Sheer will power, competitive spirit and pride got me through that new stage of the C25K training. And I was soooooooo dreading my "run" yesterday! I finally dragged myself outside at about 1:45 to coordinate my "run" with picking up Toby from school. The sun beat down on me and I clomped along during my first running interval. When I finished I honestly wasn't sure if I was going to be able to get my breathing back in control by the end of my 2 minute walk period. It was crazy! I'm at sea level for goodness' sake. I shouldn't have trouble breathing but man I could NOT get a full breath. It kind of scared me, to be honest. And then it passed and I found myself facing the next 90 second "run" interval. Ugh ugh ugh. I trudged my way through the 6 running intervals, again purely motivated by competition and pride and somehow I actually finished the workout. I can say I finished it, but it wasn't pretty. I'm literally terrified of the next change-up in the intervals. In my next change-up I have to do 3 minutes of jogging with 3 minutes of walking. I honestly don't know how I'm going to do that! I'm afraid that by accelerating the C25K program to coincide with my Win, Lose or Blog timetable I'm really pushing my body too hard and not giving it the time to adapt to the increases in the intervals. I'm going to keep trying this 6 week plan because I'm too stupid proud to dumb-it down (even though dumbing-it-down just means doing it the original way) but I'm starting to face the reality that I may have to revert to the 9 week plan and give my body a little more time to adapt to this entirely new form of torture I'm inflicting on myself. What an adventure! ROFLMBO :) (PS It will be cool, someday, in the distant future, to be able to drop the " " marks from the word "run". I just have a hard time describing what I'm doing right now with that word heheheh.)

Whining, moaning and complaining aside... apparently this stupid C25K plan is paying off! I lost 4.6 pounds this week (and 6.2 the week before) for a grand total loss so far of 10.8 pounds! Not too shabby if I do say so myself! My eating was a bit less focused during week two of Win, Lose or Blog and I went a little nuts at the buffet on Saturday night for my free day (after downing half a bag of popcorn at the theater when we saw Harry Potter 7.2 - LOVED IT!) but I'm back on my game and hopeful for another successful week. Body-for-Life style eating is starting to feel comfortable again and the only thing I really struggle with is remembering to eat at appropriate times (every 2-3 hours). My fridge is stocked with more fruits and veggies than it's ever been stocked with before. And the good eating is trickling down to my kids. I've given them free rein on anything fresh (meaning fruits and veggies) and we've eliminated all wrapped foods and the ones we have (like pudding, crackers, fruit snacks) are for lunchtime only. They're adapting well and I'm delighted to report that as it turns out, Brady, my make-himself-throw-up-before-eating-a-salad, non-veggie eating child is a big fan of celery! So we've finally found a healthy, natural snack that he'll eat willingly. Hallelujah! I'm really proud of my kids for adapting to this with me and I'm confident that we're laying down some much healthier eating habits as a family and this might make me happier than anything else!

So! Weight is down, running sucks and life is good! There's my update. You can follow along for detailed updates on my day-to-day WLB challenge over on that other blog, but I'll try to remember to update here every week or so, as well. Thanks again to all who've been cheering me on. I can't even begin to explain how helpful that is to me. It's one of the most powerful motivating factors and keeps me "running" even when it is absolutely the last thing I want to do in my day. (Well, the last thing AFTER being forced to hang out in my boys' bathroom...)

Real Life: How does this happen?

How does a family accumulate THIS quantity of outgrown clothing in just 3 years?!

And this doesn't even include the bags and bags and bags of clothing we've periodically donated to Goodwill over the years. It just doesn't make sense to me! I mean, I know I've got four kids. And one of them is a giant "child" who's stretched from a tall 10 year old when we got to Hawaii into a gargantuan, man-sized, towering 13 year old now, having seemingly blazed through entire size stages in a week at some points in time. And another of them is a girl. The only girl in a family with three big brothers. So it probably goes without saying that she has what might be described as a plethora of clothing. ("I would not like to think that a person would tell someone he has a plethora, and then find out that that person has no idea what it means to have a plethora..." Gold star to the first person to identify the quote!) Add to those two clothing-collecting scenarios the fact that every kind and generous person we know likes to donate their second-hands in our direction (which we are ALWAYS grateful for!! I'm not sure I've had to buy the kids new clothes the whole time we've lived here! LOL) and we suddenly find ourselves with about 73 garbage bags filled with the outgrown clothing accumulation pictured above.

My problem is that I see such value in these things. I can't bear to just dump them all at Goodwill and call it a day. I can practically plan the vacations we could take if we sold everything for a quarter a piece. So I have a hard time just parting with it. I do the laundry, cull the outgrown items, put them in a bag and toss the bag in the storage closet under the stairs to sell at a yard sale that we'll have.... someday. But we've been here 3 years now and haven't hosted a yard sale yet. The result? The entire under-the-stairs closet was filled with bags of clothing!!

Well we finally have major motivation to unload these bags (and bags and bags) of clothing! Time to purge once and for all. We're getting ready to move!!! The house we've found is just a few blocks from our current home, which keeps us in our school boundaries and church congregation boundaries which is a big, big plus for us. And it has 4 bedrooms instead of 3 which the Giant Child is super excited about. ("My own room!!! Finally my own room!!") but the second oldest is moaning about ("When will I ever get my own room!? Why do I still have to share!?"). The house has central air, which our current home does not (ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh!). And the clincher? Several hundred dollars cheaper per month in rent! Seems like a no-brainer, so we're jumping on it. There are a few trade-offs. There is virtually no yard at the new house (which Willy likes - no yard = no yard work) but concerns me a bit (where do I send the kids when I need them outside and out of my face?). And the house has less general living space than the home we're in now, so we're trying to figure out how to fit what we have and want to keep as far as office/t.v. room/dining room/piano goes. Also it's a home in foreclosure so we're only guaranteed to be able to stay in it through the duration of our lease (one year) but houses are sitting empty here for years and years in foreclosure right now, so it may end up longer (and we may be able to purchase the house when the bank is ready to actually move on it, if we've decided we're really happy there.) But the pros far outweigh the cons and if all goes as planned we'll start moving our stuff mid-August. We've lived in our current home longer (three years on August 1st) than any other home we've been in during our married life. For all the moving we did in the first 10 years of our married life, it feels kind of strange to be preparing to move again now after being planted for what feels like such a long time.

So anyway, the next few weekends are all about the yard sale! Time to purge, purge, purge! I will conquer that pile of clothing once and for all!!!

Real Me: Temporary Insanity

I've gone and done it. I've apparently temporarily lost my mind. I knew it would happen someday, and something just snapped inside today.

I've decided to run a 5K.

I know, I know. It's nuts, but it's happening. I'm 100% positive it's not going to be pretty but it is going to happen in about 6 weeks. I blogged about it over on my Win, Lose or Blog blog (hehehe blog blog). I'd love for you to cheer me on (heaven knows I'll need it) or even join the "fun" if you're interested.

I probably should have posted my intention here first so someone could have talked me back from the ledge. I've already gone and made it official and public. What was I thinking?!

Real Me: And now for the whys...

HERE is a link to my most recent blog entry for the Win Lose or Blog weight loss competition. I shared the reasons regarding how I gained the weight in my last blog entry. Now I've shared the reasons why I'm so over being fat. I'm curious to know if any of you can relate to some of the things on my list. I suspect some of them are a little universal, and some of them will be really relatable to my friends who struggle with obesity.

In good news, even though our official weigh in isn't until Sunday, I took a sneak peek at the scale this morning and I'm VERY happy about what I saw. AND! Even better than that, because I've eliminated diet soda this week, I was conked out by 11 last night (anyone who knows me knows I'm an extreme night owl so 11 is early EARLY for me) and had a luxuriously solid 7 1/2 hours of sleep which has given me a morning full of energy and enthusiasm that I haven't felt in a long while. I got my work out done first thing and have been doing great with my food. There's no underestimating the feeling of being well-rested, well-fed, and well-exercised. Here's hoping for a few more fabulous days this week so I can look forward to a great weight loss number to report on Monday!

Real Parenting: Inappropriate Music and the Fun that Follows

Ben had the "coolest teacher ever!!!!" this past year at school. He taught the kids how to listen to the local radio stations on their computers while they were online. Since then, Ben can't have his laptop on without it playing his radio stations of choice: 102.7 Da Bomb and Power 104.3. Maybe you can guess what type music they play? Constant bombardment of Chris Brown, Flo Rida, Pitbull, Rihanna, LMFAO, etc. He's found a favorite in Nicki Minaj. He pretty much thinks she's the best female rapper ever. (Pshaw! Apparently I haven't sufficiently exposed him to Salt. And Pepa. And Left Eye. Ahhh, the good ol' girl rapper days.) Consequently, all my kids are a smidge obsessed with Nicki Minaj right now. Specifically the song Super Bass, which actually is just catchy enough that I like to sing along, too.

But there's a line in the song where she says "somebody please tell him who the F I is." Aside from the wowza horrific grammar, I'm not really interested in the kids adding "eff" or "F" to their vocabulary, so I've cringed when I heard that line of the song in the past. I know darn well that Ben hears the real deal word a LOT at school (the mother-of-all-words is used as all parts of speech here! Have I ever mentioned that? Oh yes! Noun, verb, adjective, conjunction, maybe even punctuation, you name it, they use the word that way!!) and since he prides himself on being able to "rap" along to certain chunks of the song, I'm certain he's paying close enough attention to have caught the line and fully gets the meaning of the "F" in the song. But I've been crossing my fingers the younger kids haven't been picking up on it or understanding it.

I found out last night that Brady has been, in fact, hearing the lyric, but not quite understanding it. I found this out when he muttered after hearing that line in the song "I wonder who Eff-eye is, anyway?" I couldn't help but bust up laughing. In my super parenting style, I laughed and avoided the topic. He didn't direct the question at me so I didn't feel it necessary to explain :)

And we kept singing along to the song.  Aw yeah.

Real Me: How I ended up like this...

I just blogged my story of "How I ended up like this..." over on the Win, Lose or Blog page, and since it's about as real as I get, I felt like linking to it here on my personal blog was probably a solid idea. It's the first time I've tried to condense my life full of experiences and excuses regarding my weight (certainly not all-inclusive but I definitely hit the most defining moments). If you're curious about the story of my battle with weight feel free to hop over to my WLB entry which you can find HERE.

And if you're curious how I'm doing so far with my WLB competition? I'm rocking it! I've had a great week and intend to keep having a great week. I deserve a little success and I fully anticipate the scale rewarding my efforts this week.

Real Family: New School Year. Wait. What?! It's July!

I bet I did something this morning that probably none of my friends (local Holomua peeps aside) did. I sent two of my kiddos off for their first day of the 2011-12 school year! Yep, Toby and Brady have headed off to their first day of 1st grade and 5th grade respectively. And for those of you scratching your heads thinking "Didn't they just finish their school year later than everyone else just 2 weeks ago?"  you'd be correct. My boys' "summer break" was exactly 2 weeks long. Crazy, isn't it? We really do love year round school for the most part though. We get lots of three week breaks throughout the school year during off-season times so the crowds are minimal and the kids love having those chunks of time to break up the school year a bit. I love not feeling the pressure to sit on my kids all summer break long to maintain their skills and knowledge so they don't have to play a lot of catch up when a new school year starts. The education retention is awesome. The only kink in the awesomeness that is year-round school is that Ben doesn't go to a year-round school! So we have to try to juggle a traditional calendar with a year-round one which is, frankly, a joke. Sometimes it's more than my scatter-brain can handle. But for today we got it right. And I even remembered their signs!

PS - The Win, Lose or Blog competition begins today! I've posted up my first blog entry in the contest and I'd LOVE to have you cheer me on!  HERE is the link to my personal blog on the competition site.

Real Family Fun: A day at the Polynesian Cultural Center...

Yesterday was Willy's birthday. He took the day off work to have some family fun time, which of course translated into a bit of sleeping in, a bit of lounging around the house, a bit of wishy washy decision making about our plans for the day and finally getting out of the house a little grumpier and a little later than we'd expected. Once we officially hit the road toward Laie (after a doctor's office detour to pick up a prescription, a Walmart detour to pick up oil for the car and camping gear for Ben's scout camp trip next week and a Wendy's detour because in our sort of lazy then crazy departure from home we never got around to eating lunch) we had a really fun time!

We spent some time in the Samoan village attempting to climb a coconut tree and attempting to build fire. Attempting.

I think in the end, Brady got a tiny bit higher up the tree than the others. Toby didn't even want to try.

And Willy managed to produce some smoke (and a lot of sweat) while trying to start fire. The other kids just managed some sore muscles.

Then we stopped by Aotearoa (New Zealand) where Brady and Toby got the first of their various tattoos and the rest of the gang gave spinning poi balls a valiant effort with some surprising success (and lots of fun and laughter).

Whoops... Toby got himself in the face (but giggled about it)

Molly may have had more fun swinging her poi balls at others than actually trying to twirl them properly.

Off to Fiji next where the kids got to experience an activity new to the PCC since the last time we went: riding on the bamboo rafts. Brady and Ben hopped right on, Molly managed to convince me to let her go on (!!!!) and Toby was so reluctant to get on that the boat actually started to push away from the dock before he finally nodded his head to indicate that he wanted to ride too. I managed to watch them enjoy the experience without having a complete panic attack back on the dock. They loved it!

You have to check out a close up shot of Toby in the photo above. Seriously the best picture of him. Ever!

Next we stopped in the Hawaiian village where Molly joined with all the Japanese tourists in a tour group as they learned a hula dance while the boys headed straight to the Hawaiian games and entertained themselves for quite a while.

Hula girl Molly!

Since we'd arrived late we thought we weren't going to see anything else at this point, but somehow we managed to hit the final show in the Tongan village. Willy had never seen this presentation before and as luck (and a very small crowd at that time of day!) would have it, he got chosen to go up on the stage and participate. We all loved cheering him on. After the show the kids got to go on stage and bang on the Tongan drums to their heart's content. Fun fun fun. Enjoy the videos of our time hanging out in Tonga!

Next we fed fish, took some photos, threw some spears and then headed to McDonald's for a quick bite to eat.

Willy was just a few inches from hitting the target!

I think this is what Willy enjoyed most about the day... taking pictures. And I love taking pictures of him taking pictures :) He's so in his element.

Fancy pants McDonald's with a waterfall inside!

After dinner we headed back to the PCC to enjoy Ha: The Breath of Life night show. I was so excited to be going to see it with Molly more grown up than the last time we went as a family. She was only about 18 months old the last time we went and she didn't have the patience or interest to sit still for the whole show so I ended up taking her out and missing some of the show. I thought this time would be bliss because she'd be interested in the show and I was so excited at the prospect of watching the show without disruption. HAHAHA. Molly lasted through the first maybe 15 minutes of the show before the relentless squirming, seat-changing, lap-climbing, not-whisper-talking, potty-demanding and theatrical sighing began. And then all of that joyful goodness carried on throughout the entire remainder of the show. Fun, fun times. Oh well. Still saw the whole show and we all (minus Molly) enjoyed it a lot. Especially the fire knife dancers. That's always the most exciting! (And I personally love the Tahitian fast hip shaking dances, too!)

So a fun, fun family day. Maybe not the perfect way to spend a birthday Willy style, but he was a good sport about it. In fact going to the PCC on his birthday was actually his idea a few weeks ago, and I'm so glad we were able to go through with it! We'll enjoy cake and ice cream today since we weren't able to get to it yesterday. Of course he's out in the water right now so the birthday treats will have to wait even a bit longer.

P.S. Hey look at me! I've successfully figured out how to bombard my readers with videos and pictures on Blogger! Yay me :)

Real Parenting: I have big yellow boobs...

Today I was sitting at my desk stumbling my way through learning Blogger working hard when Molly, who has a severe aversion to modesty and wearing the same outfit for an entire day, interrupted my attempts at designing my blog hard work with a big proud grin and an even prouder voice by saying "Look Mama! I have big yellow boobs!!"

This of course immediately pulled my attention away from my blog experimenting hard work. I turned to look at my 3 year old who most certainly does not have big yellow boobs, only to find that, in fact, she did have big (relatively speaking) yellow "boobs"! She'd taken two pieces of Corn Pops cereal, licked them and then adhered them strategically to her chest.

A good mom probably would have used the moment to teach appropriate behavior. But I ...ahem... might not have responded that way. I laughed long and loud, told her to eat her big yellow boobs and put a shirt on, then I texted Daddy and told the world the story on Facebook. Real parenting at its finest!

Real Me: I don't have a clue what I'm doing...

I realized tonight that I've been posting comments on some of my Blogger friends' blogs the last few days signed in with this new Blogger account of mine. And it occurred to me that those friends may actually (wait for it...) click on my name and link back to a very boring, very empty blog with my name on it! So just in case anyone happens to be peeking in on me, I thought I better let you know that this new blog of mine is definitely under construction, definitely coming soon and until the grand opening (har har) you can consider this a pre-welcome message. I'm really excited about blogging again! But this whole Blogger thing is all new unexplored territory for me, so the "coming soon" may turn into "coming eventually" but I'm going to give it my best effort to get 'er up 'n running in the next few days. Bear with me, pretty please!