Archive for June, 2011

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Another week of Stati


2011
06.21

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Ya know, like cactus/cacti, only it’s status/stati. Ha ha ha!!! Okay, guess I’ve been on my own a little too much out here. ;-) Or maybe too much sun? Anyway, I thought it was funny! Here’s the stuff I would have said on FB if I had an internet connection.

I went sleeveless for a couple of days on my walk and now have a scathingly uncomfy sunburn on my shoulders. :-( Stuart is convinced I’m going to get skin cancer. Guess I’ll wear sunscreen next time!

The oven is home!!! I think now that it’s working well and we are friends I may come up with a name for it. Any suggestions? Hmmm… was there an oven on “The Brave Little Toaster?”

Ella has figured out how to move via rolling. She finally “gets” the rolling back onto her back part though she leads with the head so it makes a startling “thud” every time she does it. Cracks her up though so it must not be as painful as I think I would find it.

Stu and I did INSANITY today. It’s fun to do the workouts together, but man those things are killer! We’re going to do them 2 or 3 times a week rather than the actual 6 that the program calls for. I think I can handle that much insanity. ;-)

I sent Qade outside after his shirt that he had taken off and when he came back in he had a worried look on his face and said that a noise up in the sky scared him. I asked him if it was a plane and he said no and tried to mimic the sound. Then he said, “Maybe it was God sewing.” It was all I could do not to burst into uncontrollable laughter!!! Oh my!

Need to do some shopping. I don’t think one really worn pair of carpis are going to last me through the summer, and I know it’ll be too hot for jeans.

We’re planning a tent camping trip. Yep, that’s right, 4 kids 4 and under and 6 adults. At least we outnumber the kids! :-)

Swamp cooler is hooked up now. We held out for as long as we could, but it was time. Ahhhhhh…. Summer! I think I we should lobby that summer last from April to November. Any takers??

Glad I found the kind of shirts that help hide the jelly-belly because I begin to think that nothing but a tummy tuck will work on getting rid of it! *sigh*

Have been enjoying fruit smoothies lately! Glad I invested in a stick blender! Since there’s no Kiva Juice in a couple hundred miles of here, this works great! Plus I probably paid for my little blender in the first few smoothies considering what I’d be paying AT a KJ. ;-)

Despite the prevalence of LOTS of different poking plants and stickers, the lads refuse to keep their shoes on outside. I can see going all Tom Sawyer in the lush green grasses of the South, but here??

I read in a parenting magazine that it is now recommended that children ride rear-facing till the age of 2. My question is, where in the world do their feet go?

The Qade-man loves watermelon nearly as much as me (no one can really love it as MUCH as me) and he often says, “Don’t eat it all, Mom!” as if he’s never going to get his fair share. Ha!

Tonight was the first night in forever that bedtime went smoothly with the lads. I needed this!

Goodnight Moon!

Wow, I am SOOOOORE today from that INSANITY workout! Wouch!

Ella is getting good at sitting up these days. I still put the boppy around her for support, but she enjoys sitting up now.

Bread baking today. Gonna do a few loves so I can take them and share with friends and fam. :-)

Got a kick out of watching Myles try to sort out the illustrations in a Shel Silverstein book! Ha ha!

My daughter’s favorite toys these days are her brother’s cars and tools. Uh-oh! ;-)

Pickles and Pistachios, great combination! You have GOT to try it! Really!

Wondering what to make for dinner. Yes, I had a menu and I’ve been recklessly ignoring it recently. Partly because of the oven problem and partly cause it’s summer and I just don’t want to cook. :-)

I’m SO tempted to pull a Brittany Spears and just shave this mop off! Ugh! My hair has become such a thorn… just don’t want to have anything to do with it.

Read a couple of Kipling’s “Just So” stories to the lads this morning. They were totally over their head, of course, but we had fun anyway. Need to dust out my drama voices so I can do the “Elephant’s Child” properly!

Trying to wrestle 3 kids to get a decent portrait is not an easy thing…. especially when they are my OWN kids! :-) We’ll see if any are salvageable. I can always try again when we go to CO, there are prettier backdrops there anyway!

Sounds like our kitchen is going to get a much needed make over. Stu is already planning to send me away during the process. Ha! Guess they don’t need a kitchenless female prowling around while they try to work. Ha ha ha!

There are about 14 million things that I could be/should be doing right this very minute, and I am ignoring them all!!! :-)

I think an iced coffee is a must for this blustery summer afternoon.

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Oven


2011
06.20

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Tis Monday. I’d do a “not me” but I can’t remember all the funnies to put into it this week. I’ve had too many headaches. Remember the ‘water’ headaches I mentioned? Well, I don’t think they are from water. I’ve had one nearly every day for hmmmm…. too long. I can’t think right now. I am however going to attempt to see a chiropractor soon and hopefully that will help.

Anyway, I miss having an oven. I didn’t really fully explain what happened with ours did I? Well, one day last week I thought I’d be oh-so-smart and do my baking in the evening. I don’t know why this seemed like such a good idea to me other than the fact that I hadn’t been able to get it done in the mornings or afternoons for some reason. Ha! So I set up the bread machine to do my dirty work for me around dinner time and I was going to pop the loaves in the oven a couple of hours later. Things went as planned except I kinda forgot about the loaves while they were rising so they got a little bigger than usual. Not a problem though. Nothing in this world was bound to save those loaves from the oven of doom!

Just about the time I was going to pop the loaves in, I heard Ella crying, “Mum-mum, Mum-mum!” It just wrings my heart when she cries my name. :-) She’s been teething so has a harder time getting to sleep. So I put the oven on to pre-heat and asked Stu to stick the pans in in a couple of minutes. Ella calmed down quickly and I came back to watch more of “Miss Potter.” Have you seen that movie?! If not, you should. Really! And a few minutes more I started smelling “bread smell” only it went quickly to “burnt bread smell” which is not pleasant. I rushed to the oven and flicked the light on to find 4 very black loaves of bread in the oven. I turned it off as fast as can be and tried to pull them out without burning myself.

Meanwhile the house filled with smoke and the detectors started buzzing. Ugh! I turned on the fans and opened the windows trying to get some of the smoke and smell out of the house. I was also watching the oven waiting for it to go “off.” It’s a gas oven/range, and I’ve had a love/hate relationship with it since we’ve known each other. Cooking on gas hasn’t been something that I’d had a lot of experience with. So I kept my eyes on it, but it didn’t seem to be going off like usual. Eventually I mentioned it to Stu and as we both stood in the kitchen pondering the problem the kettle which had been on top in the middle, on a trivet, started to whistle. Uh-oh! That meant that the oven was REALLY hot!!! Stuart went outside and turned off the gas at the tank since we couldn’t figure out what else to do.

The next day Stu took the oven to get fixed. Unfortunately the ‘fix it” guy called back to say that “there was nothing wrong with it. It ran fine for him” which is not very comforting to me when something was very obviously wrong with it while it was here. Stuart insisted that there WAS something wrong with it and that they’d better check it again, so they did. The guy who had been on vacation came back to work at the place and whipped them into shape and they finally figured out what was going on and hopefully it’s now fixed.

Anyway, not having it has helped me realize how much I like to have an oven. Ha! I’m so spoiled, I know! We have plenty of means of cooking without it, but I’m picky about my bread loaves, don’t care for their shape out of the machine, and I like to be able to cook things on the stove top and bake in the oven. :-) I used to think I would have loved to live as a pioneer, but now I know that I probably wouldn’t have been very good at it since it involved so much hard work! Ha ha ha!

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Kids Photo Shoot


2011
06.19

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This morning we did a photo shoot with the kids. One of my goals for this summer is to get a good family portrait that we can use as a gallery wrap. One, because I think gallery wraps are awesome wall art, and two, because it will be so much easier to sell them to clients if I have one to show. But, it’s going to be a challenge. I can’t take the pictures AND be in them, may come as a surprise but it’s true! So it’s going to take some careful planning.
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(S)Low-Carb


2011
06.17

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I have long been against the “fad” diets, and I have always found (not being an excessive carnivore) the low-carb diets to be rather repulsive. BUT I did give it a go as you know, since I seriously needed a kick-start to more weight-loss. The first go round it did work. Not as fast as the book(s) say. I never saw a 5 lb per week loss, but then, I didn’t have 50-100 lbs to lose so maybe that’s why. Dunno.

I found the diet to be very difficult to follow. Partly because it’s so limiting, and when I have that in the back of my mind, it seems like all I can think about is food. So maybe that’s why it hasn’t been so successful for me, but here are my personal thoughts on the matter. ;-) LOL… for what it’s worth.

The first time I lost 10 lbs bringing me back to my pre-preg weight. It took MORE than a month, but was still, in my mind, a success. However, even though I was eating oodles of protein I “felt” hungry much of the time. I don’t really understand why that is. But if I had bacon and eggs for breakfast I’d be STARVING for lunch. Perhaps I just didn’t space my meals well. It is harder to do that when you’re chasing monkeys after all. But I started to notice on my Carb-days that I felt much more satisfied after eating a bowl of granola or oatmeal for breakfast, and while I was generally ready for lunch by 1 (which is typically when I have a chance to fix myself something and eat) I wasn’t ready to bite chunks out of the cabinets because I was SO hungry. Weird. When I would eat a substantial protein meal, I often felt “full” but not usually satisfied. Hmmmm….

Then there were other things that irked me about it. I often had tummy aches and there were times that it even felt like my kidneys hurt.

Long story short….. I don’t like that diet! Blah!!

I have given it a try 2 times since the first successful trial run and the weight-loss has been insignificant. Certainly not worth the effort of conforming to the strict diet and the subsequent discomfort.

This week was my last attempt and I was encouraged because I dropped 2 lbs at first. Then I went back up one and that’s where I stayed. When I finally said phooey and went back to my “regular” diet, trying to watch portion sizes and still stay away from highly refined carbs, I dropped 2 lbs in the first day. Hmmmmm……

So I’m “quitting” the slow-carb diet. I don’t like it, it’s not at all fun, and for me at least, seems to be not so effective. I know, I know it’s probably user error because I know so many people who have met with good results on it. I’m just not one of them. It’s unsustainable in my case, and I’d rather not have to think about food so much.

My ideals for the rest of the summer, diet wise, are to eat much more fresh fruit and veggies (this means that I have to meal plan or I just won’t do it) and eat both protein and carbs in moderation. :-) There ya have it. I’ll letcha know how it goes!

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Water, water, everywhere!


2011
06.15

Posted in About Me | 1 Comment »

My thoughts about water.

Very deep.

Really. ;-)

Okay, so you may recall that one of my summer goals is to drink more water. Specifically a gallon a day. Yup. I want to it with a rather grim determination to “choke” down a gallon of water that first day. See, for some strange reason I go through seasons… sometimes lasting a very long time, where I just don’t “like” water. Apparently this is actually a common phenomenon, especially among women. Anyway, I just knew that having to drink that much was going to be difficult.

Cue first day on a gallon:

I was shocked to discover that first day that it actually wasn’t hard to drink that much water. Especially if when I went to get a drink I drank a BUNCH quickly instead of trying to sip it all day. Drinking before, during and after meals helped as well. I didn’t think I was quite going to make it through the whole gallon that day, but I did, and I noticed a couple very interesting side effects. (besides the obvious)

First, I was SOOOOOO thirsty all day! Imagine that! I felt as if I simply couldn’t get enough water. Surprising, since I’m sure I had been drinking no where close to that much water at all in the preceding days, weeks, months…. year? Weird. The other thing I noticed especially that first day was that I was much less hungry all day. Perhaps my tummy was just trying to deal with the flood and therefor couldn’t send any “food” signals to my brain, but either way I thought it was a good thing. :-) The third thing, which may be unwater related, but that I did notice the first few days of my gallon consumption was a very sharp headache in the late afternoon. I wrestle with headaches on a regular basis, so it COULD be completely unrelated, but for some reason I was associating them together. Maybe it was the detox of having extra fluid cleaning things out or something that caused it, but it was interesting anyway. If a headache can be interesting. ;-)

I haven’t been tracking my water intake as strictly as I did the first few days, and we did have some travel time last week which always kills it for me. But since then I know I’ve been drinking at least 3 quarts a day. I have a big Sigg bottle that is one quart, and that’s how I gage my intake. I’m going to ramp it up again this week and get back to the (self) prescribed 4 quarts. I can’t believe how not hard it is compared to what I was expecting. Water, and plenty of it, has great benefits, and I’m glad that I took this step to get more of it in my daily routine.

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A Week of Status Updates (more or less)


2011
06.14

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I miss Facebook. Not going to lie, I do! It has been nice to be “unconnected” for awhile, but I do miss keeping up with my friends online. So in an attempt to keep up with it, I’ve been keeping track of my status updates for the past week. Ha ha ha!! They won’t have dates and times attached, because well, I don’t like being THAT specific when I have to keep track myself. LOL. Here’s what’s been “on my mind” recently.

Feeding Ella more than three bites of food is a challenge that I am not always up for. Guess we’ll call it good after 3, and try again tomorrow!

It’s SO smoky here from the Wallow fire. I hear the smoke goes all the way to South Dakota!! Poor lads don’t understand why they have to play inside today.

Made stir fry with actual stir fry sauce for dinner tonight. Why haven’t I tried this before??? It was yummy!

Trying to find ways to use my pressure cooker. Doing beans right now. If it works, this will be a hit. Cooked beans in half an hour instead of an all day ordeal in the crockpot only to have tough beans in the end!!
It worked!! They were tender and SO flavorful!! I dished up a bowl for me right THEN for lunch and put the rest in the crock pot for chili! YUMMERS! Glad it worked out because I was so close to sending the pressure cooker to my mom. Now I have a use for it! Yay!

Thinking up ways to get new biz this summer… really want some of those babies and mammas to start coming my way. Patience…… *sigh*

Naptime today is so peaceful!! Makes me want to take a nap too instead of work on some projects I know I need to do.

Slow-carbing again. :-) Gotta get these pesky pounds off, so I don’t feel like a lump all summer. Still eating watermelon though. ;-)

Family walks would be so much more enjoyable if Myles’ enthusiasm lasted farther than the end of the driveway.

Just call me “Queen of Dishes” since that seems to be the only thing I was put on earth to do. Oh wait… there is another thing I’m good for…. Laundry. Boo!

Finished my first fringe blanket for a photo prop!! Also got a couple tutus in the mail. Now to get some cutie-patooties to model with them. ;-)

Managed to get 1.5 bites of cereal in Ella and about 3 Cheerio’s. :-) She was HILARIOUS eating the Cheerios!!

Miss internet…. *sniff*

Have “fringe blanket fever” after making the first one. Started on a second and have plans for the third. Then I think I’ll take a break. ;-)

Crunching numbers with the Hurb. Makes me realize that having a biz is a LOT of work… and actually making money is even MORE work. ;-) Hope that clients keep coming!

Oven is on the fritz! Last night I tried to bake bread and it burnt it to a crisp in a matter of minutes. THEN it wouldn’t turn off and got so hot that the kettle set in the middle of the stove, ON a trivet started whistling!!!! Yikes!!! Hurb finally had to go shut off the propane at the tank for it to stop. Weird.

Ella’s teeth are coming in like popcorn! She just got her third tooth and now 2 more on top are looking like they’re about ready. Poor girl! She keeps on smiling, but I know it’s got to be painful for her!

Quitting slow-carb. Blah! I’ll be writing my thoughts on it in a blog post soon, but I have to say, me no likey! ;-)

When I asked Ella where she was going as she attempted to climb out of her swing, Qade answered “She’s not going anywhere. She can’t drive.” :-) Ah ha ha ha!!!

Finished my surf inspired fringe blanket! Love it!

Ovenless isn’t so nice, but I’ve realized how “spoiled” I am to have the conveniences that I do. I can still bake bread in the bread machine, even if I don’t like the size of the loaf, I can still cook good meals in the crock pot. Plus we have a grill and a microwave. Apparently a stove top and oven are just “luxuries” ha ha!

Stu downloaded my e-mail for me when he was in internet land. A zillion junk mail and not one “real” e-mail. *sniff* It’s starting to be like USPS.

This morning when I mixed up a yogurt/berry smoothie for my lads for breakfast, Myles response was “Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!!!!” Ha ha ha! Glad to have hit on a winner. ;-)

Potty training has been at a stand still because this ol’ Ma is just so unmotivated. Contemplating implementing my friend’s “Bottomless Lemonade Brigade” next week. ;-) LOL…. we’ll see.

Still haven’t taken Qade’s 4 yr old pics. Need to get on that!

When Qade saw that our oven was still gone this morning, he asked, “How will we cook bacon and eggs?” Is he his father’s child or what???
I love the warmer weather, but detest the bugs! Seriously, I can’t sit outside for longer than 10 min because they plague my life out! Ugh!

Our cat is in kitty heaven chasing and subsequently torturing the lizards that roam around here. The lads often watch on with a gruesome infatuation. Boys!

COFFEE!!!!!!

I dressed up Ella in some cute flair jeans and a little frilly girl top today and just had to sigh over how big she looks. I think I might just keep her in baby rompers till she’s 10!

Ya know it’s summer when you can’t even remember what day of the week it is! :-) Wait… I can’t remember it any time…. oh well. SUMMER!!!

Have to send my 50mm back to Nikon to see if it can be repaired. Good focus is a must in a “fast” lens.

Going to start work on a few more “props” that I’ll make for myself. Not sure if I’ll keep doing the Etsy thing…. doesn’t really seem to be taking off.

Is connecting with my “inner Anne” as I read the Green Gables books again. :-) Lovely!

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Time to time


2011
06.12

Posted in Daily Life, Uncategorized | No Comments »

I have written several blog posts that I will be scheduling to post at intervals on here so that you all know that I’m still alive. Though I guess technically you won’t REALLY know that since they are scheduled…. but you know what I mean. ;-) A couple of the posts I had prepared had pictures too, but my slippery mind forgot to transfer the pics from my desktop to my laptop, hence I can’t post them now. :-( Sad for you, cause they are really cute too! ;-) I’ll have to wait till next weekend to get to those, so be patient.

I have been missing my cyber-connection, but doing surprisingly well without it. Still, feel free to e-mail me and keep me updated with your lives since I can’t catch up with you on fb right now. We can usually download e-mail a couple of times a week to check that stuff. I have to say I was disappointed this week when all that showed up for me was a TON of junk and not any personal e-mail. So consider that a whine for some real e-mails. And yes, I will write back though there may be a slight delay. Brings back the ol’ pen-pal days of yor. LOL!!

We’re doing well, enjoying our summer, and haven’t even had to connect the swamp cooler yet!! That’s pretty amazing. The lads are reveling in the day light that lets them roll in the dirt and smoosh stinkbugs to their heart’s content. ;-) Take care and enjoy your warm weather too!

Ta ta!

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