Wha... huh?

Heya folks!

I know it's been awhile. I've been tied up with new puppydom (Teddy is doing marvelously and is right at 3 lbs. at the moment), the start of the school year (year-round here for one more school year), and well, the general basic facets of life. Combine that with a very small bit of a social life -- yes, I'm dating -- and other obligations and *poof!* you have a languishing blog.

The huge downside of this is that the quality of my writing now totally sucks. Urrrgh. Oh well, in time...
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First up, at the moment my focus is my weight. Skip this part if you don't want a detailed analysis of what I've eaten over the past 48 hours or so.

I've mentioned previously that I lost a fairly significant amount of weight over the past couple of years (over 40 lbs.), and I've kept it off for the past year. I had a brief dip into the 140's toward the end of last year due life stress issues, but other than that it's pretty much stabilized right in the low 150's. Not bad, all things considered. According to just about everything I read I'm at a healthy weight for my height and bone structure (5'-7", small-medium frame), so that's all well and good.

However, I can also reasonably chop a few more pounds off my body and am attempting to do so at this time because a) my younger sister is getting married at the beginning of November up in New York City. I'm the Matron of Honor (or whatever the name is for the twice-divorced elder sister of the bride *eyeroll*), the most elderly of all the attendants, and the hell if I'm going to be waltzing down that aisle in my periwinkle bridesmaid's dress with a caboose the size of a small island nation; and b) the holiday season is fast approaching, and I will eat what I want to at the holiday gatherings, dammit.

Regarding the caboose comment: even though I'm a so-called "healthy weight", I am a classic pear shape. "Baby Got Back" is my theme song. I swear to you, I had pneumonia back when I was 16 years old which caused my weight to drop to 108 lbs. I was hollow-cheeked, flat-chested, and STILL I had this backside. So, erm... yeah, it's pretty non-negotiable.

However, the less I weigh the smaller it gets -- all things are proportional -- so I'll be working to slim down a bit more before that momentous occasion. By my calculations, I can lose from twelve to eighteen pounds by the wedding (and another 4-8 lbs by the holidays, depending on which specific holiday you're tracking) if I keep my average daily calorie intake around 1200.

Brutal? Yep. I'm a fan of food, quite frankly, and keeping my calories right around 1200 for me tends to look something like this:

Yes, I am this Type-A about it. This is my spreadsheet.

I know it's heavy on the cheese, processed foods, and you'll also notice there's some ice cream I sneaked in at the end of the day that pushed me over my total allowable calories by 65. But all in all, it isn't terrible. I have vegetables in there, protein... eh, it could be much worse.

Kind of like today's is much worse (and bear in mind, I haven't even had dinner yet):

So... erm... yeah. Doable, but brutal, especially when I decide on the deep-fried lunch option. At this point I have precisely 263 calories left to consume today, whereas yesterday prior to my departure from the office I still had 335 calories remaining.

The last column on the spreadsheet is my water consumption. Yesterday I had 3 32oz. cups of water. Today I'm at 4. I'm not sure if it's an increase in sodium from what I ate at lunch or what. I somehow doubt the sodium has caused my increased thirst, as the foods I'm eating even on a good day are processed to hell and back and already contain PLENTY of sodium. I'm also discounting the caffeine from the coffee today, since the one thing I don't tabulate on this spreadsheet is my Diet Coke intake.

Don't ask on that. You so do not want to know.

But anyway, the point to this is that today I'm sucking down water like a sponge whereas I didn't yesterday. I'm thirstier today. It could be due to the change in the food I've consumed, or it could just be my body deciding it liked yesterday's water, so it figures even more water today would be a fine idea.

Something else I'm tracking is that I skipped my snack this morning, then caved and went all crazy at lunch. I've only been charting this for two days so far, but experience has taught me that when I skip the mid-morning food, I tend to eat more at lunch. I need to watch that.
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In other news, Sunday night my elder son ran up to me yelling, "Mommy! He broke a legal contract!" while pointing at his younger brother.

A legal contract? Let's see this...

Now bear in mind that all afternoon the boys had been very peacefully playing together with their stuffed dog toys. It was a bit strange as usually the elder isn't so interested in playing with the younger, but it wasn't totally out of the realm of normal behaviour, so I didn't think much about it beyond "oh, how sweet."

Fond, foolish mother that I am.

I was handed a piece of paper, the afore-referenced "contract", painstakingly hand-written by my elder son which said, in essence, that the younger child agreed if his older brother would play "puppies" with him during the afternoon, the younger would wrestle with the elder in the evening.

The five-year-old's refusal to wrestle his elder brother is what constituted the breach of contract.

It's also what kept the five-year-old out of trouble, because one thing the boys aren't allowed to do is wrestle. They've done it before, and it gets out of hand instantly... and they know this.

The nine-year-old, on the other hand, was so incredibly busted.

Lesson for the day, my dear son: never put proof of your planned misdeeds in writing.

(But dang, it was funny... heh)