May 18, 2009 at 8:04 am (Uncategorized)
Tags: gardening, kids, running
An Adventure in Home Construction has been updated with planting news. Fun! It will be nice when we are actually living out there and we can actually maintain a garden.
Things have been going well here. My husband and son went off to help his parents with some house work this weekend so Sophie and I had some girlfriend time. Except for her couple of bouts of extreme crabbiness at inopportune times, we had a pretty good time. She has been sleeping well (all night long in her own bed – GASP!) and I’ve been feeling a little better. It is taking a really long time for me to actually feel good. But I finally feel like I am coming out of the baby fog and wanting to do little things like wear more jewelry and accessories (now that little hands aren’t always yanking on them) and do more things to make our house look better. It’s a huge undertaking, though, because I have a lot of cleaning to do and that always takes up way too much time!
On the running front, I ran a mile a couple of weekends ago for the first time and this past weekend, I ran our side street two full loops. I was pushing S in the jogging stroller and took a lot of walk breaks but we went about 1.25 miles. (It’s 1.5 miles round trip to do it twice.) I am at a point where the novelty has started to wear off and this is WORK!!! I know I will get stronger and get past this point, and get to a place where a little run down the road feels good and doesn’t feel so much like work. But, I am enjoying the results – I have a little more energy, I am sleeping a little better, I am looking a little better. It’s helping so I’m going to keep doing it. Sometimes I really have to kick my butt out the door but I know if I keep going, I won’t always feel like that.
I have been working on trying to get the flower beds cleaned up here. Boy are they a mess. They have suffered from 4+ years of pregnancy/infant/sleep induced neglect. There is a ton of work to be done but I keep picking away at it and hopefully by the end of the summer (if I don’t totally crap out from the heat) they will be looking OK.
Leave a Comment
May 3, 2009 at 2:32 pm (Uncategorized)
At the age of 2 years and 3+ months, my daughter did the unthinkable. She didn’t take a nap so she fell asleep in my lap around 7:30 pm. I put her to bed just before 8 and shut the door. She slept in her own room, in her own bed, without waking up, without yelling, without fussing, until 7:30 this morning. What, you say? Why, most children are doing this by the time they turn 1. Not my kids!
The other thing that happened today was that I ran a mile. A whole mile, without stopping. My pace is painfully slow, probably a 20 minute mile, but I still ran it and I still did it without stopping, without walk breaks. I haven’t done that in over 20 years. So, while I have managed to maintain the 10 pound weight gain since I started about 6 weeks ago, I can now run a mile. And something else cool happened during that mile. I found my “groove”, just at a point of where my running was comfortable enough that I was relaxed and not dreading the next 10 feet. I felt a couple of small endorphin rushes too and I knew that once I was in my groove, I’d make it the whole mile. I think I could have gone farther but I wanted to take some time to cool down a bit as I had a short walk on a very busy main road to get home. There is a little group of houses down the road here in the woods and their road is dirt, there is almost no traffic and lots of wildlife and a lot of it is shady. I think I will plan to do most of my longer runs in there until it becomes too short. (I actually find that statement a bit funny but then again when I started out running only feet at a time, a mile sounded impossible!)
While I am a little discouraged by the weight gain, everyone who has been here before me is telling me to trust the process. If anything, I am not as hungry as I was before I started running and people keep reassuring me that it will come in time. I cannot imagine being this heavy and running several miles, several days a week and maintaining this weight. Some of it HAS to come off at some point! Geez. I am much better hydrated than I was before and I am still breastfeeding… so I am sure my body is confident there will be a famine any day, and it needs to be sure it can turn my butt into milk. I feel better and I am sleeping a little better so I will keep running, regardless of anything else. It’s a good thing for me right now.
1 Comment
May 1, 2009 at 2:31 pm (Uncategorized)
Tags: cooking
Just a little funny story. I was making cookies yesterday and I love my Kitchen Aid stand mixer. I use it for cookie dough all the time because it can handle stiff doughs without a problem. I got my dry ingredients in the bowl and turned it on, LOW. BLAM!!!!!! Flour and cinnamon and baking powder clouds engulfed the kitchen. WHAT the H??? I say, as I shut it off. I gently start it again, and BLAM!!!! Another cloud of dust.
So I then add the oatmeal. I gingerly turn on the switch again, and BLAMO!!!!! Oatmeal bits EVERYWHERE!!!
This is not normal. My sweet Kitchen Aid mixer does NOT shoot oatmeal unless I crank ‘er up to 10 from the get-go. She does NOT do this on 1.
However, it’s been a long, long time since I made cookies. Maybe my memory is not good. So I add the wet ingredients, thinking the wetter, heavier dough would help my mixer to mix things more gently. I am wrong. I cannot get the mixer to slow down and I do not know why. So, I pulse it like one would pulse a food processor just to get the dough together, and I remove the bowl.
There is brownish water all over the counter. At first I thought my beloved coffee dispenser that we just got a few months ago was on the fritz. But, then I look around. It was the plant. I over-watered the plant that is on the shelf over the mixer and it went everywhere. As I turn the mixer around I can see brown water dripping out from the vents around the motor.
I said any number of bad words at this point because one time I fried a TV using the same plant-watering method.
I hesitated to tell my husband about it but then I did anyway. I did not get the razzing I’d expected… since he had given me heck in a handbasket for watering the TV (even though it meant he got to buy a bigger TV!). He said, he was sure kitchen equipment such as that could take a splash.
Thankfully this morning, my trusty Kitchen Aid is no longer on crack. Low speed means low again.
Note to self – do not place plants above any type of equipment that needs to be plugged in.
1 Comment
