Nevermind

The house isn't going to work out. There's too much to repair and we won't have the funds to do it all. I knew this was probably going to be the case, but still.... I'm bummed!

My Olympian

I was watching the mens figure skating yesterday (it was recorded because I had to work and I love the figure skating!) and Alexis started "skating" around the living room! It was so funny! I especially loved it when she would stop for a second to watch the TV to see what to do and the guy on TV would fall out of a jump, so she'd jump and then fall too! Two year olds are so much fun! Well, so are six year olds! I tried to upload the video, but apparently the file is too big and I don't know how to make it smaller. Anyone know how?

Christmas 2009

I hope everyone had a great Christmas and has some fun planned festivities to bring in the New Year! We all had a great, but semi-crazy, Christmas this year! There were the four of us, Peter's parents, Uncle Charley and Aunt Kelsey, Aunt Betsy and Uncle Justin, three dogs and two cats. Needless to say the living room was very crowded that day!

Santa treated the girls very well this year, which must mean that they were very high on the nice list! :) Their big gift this year was a bunk bed, which both girls were very excited about coming down and seeing the bed all set up and everything in the living room. They immediately started climbing on it! Alexis was ready for a big bed and there was no way we were going to be able to fit two twin beds plus their dressers and their toys in the room they're in and still have some floor space for them to actually play with their toys. So a bunk bed was a necessity! Good thing Santa knows about these kind of things! He also brought Natalie a kid's digital camera and Alexis an ABC train puzzle. With all the stuff that Santa and everyone else got them (and still yet to give them) you can imagine how spoiled they were!

The rest of us fared pretty well as well. Peter and the girls got me a very nice coffee grinder and some syrups to put in my coffees so I can have my favorite mochas right at home and stop spending the $5 per coffee that I've gotten addicted to! Peter got some new video games and CDs that he's been wanting.

I don't know about you, but it seems that there is always a lull in the present opening. A point where everyone is tired and a bit bored. So this year I got everyone a gift to help dispel that when it happens. When our lull hit everyone got to open their gift at the same time. What was this miraculous gift? Silly string of course! Haha we had a 10 (9 1/2-Alexis wasn't too sure what to think) person silly string fight! It was so fun! Yes, it made a huge mess, but the good thing about silly string is that it may look messy and difficult to clean up, but really it's quite easy; just pick up the string and the shop vac the small parts. As long as you're careful not to step all over it and squish it into the carpet, it really is quite easy and quick to clean up! The amount of fun we all had was totally worth it! I still have to get the pictures off of Bill's camera!

Our Christmas was great! Now I'm off to put together the slide show of pictures to post above! That should be up in a few minutes! Have a wonderful New Years!

Nothing too important

Yes I realize it has been awhile since I've done an update. And no, I'm still not going to catch up on everything on this post, I have to start getting ready for work here soon. This month has been so excessively busy that some things just have to get neglected. But I just wanted to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! Maybe after Christmas, I'll be able to sit down and do an actual post.

Halloween 2009

We had a lot of fun this year for Halloween. On Friday, Natalie's school had their fall festival, so we went to that! It was a lot of fun. They had a bunch of great games that they got to play and the win candy. The games were easily adjustable to be simple enough to be able to accomodate the younger kids or more difficult for the older ones. The most popular of the night was, by far, the bouncy house! The girls just loved that! They also had a bean bag toss, a bowling the monsters, hay treasure hunt, stick the nose on the jack-o-lantern, plus a few more. That was all in the gym. They also had the classrooms set up with other games like bingo, a cake walk, painting pumpkins, and a secret science laboratory where the kids stuck their hands in boxes with the icky things hidden. I made Natalie do that one and she thought it was icky.... but had to do it again later too. The local fire department also came out with a couple of their trucks for the kids to climb in and honk the horns and set off the sirens. That was a lot of fun for the girls too! There are a couple funny stories to share for the night now.

First. Mrs. Benson (Natalie's teacher) dressed up as a clown. Big frowie wig, face make-up, the works. She came up to Natalie and said hello and asked if she was having fun. Natalie came to me and asked why this stranger was talking to her. I laughed and told her to look again to see if she recognized her. So she did and after a couple minutes (she was literally just staring at her for a few minutes while Mrs. Benson and I were laughing pretty hard) before she saw something that she recognized and then shouted "Mrs. Benson!!" and hugged her. So funny!!

Second. I thought Alexis might have been a bit overwhelmed with things and turn into her shy personality. But she did great! She was running around with Natalie and her friends just like she knew them too and had a lot of fun! Seeing her interact with the kids like a kid herself was amazing for me. She grasped onto the rules of the games veyr easily and was able to play them pretty well.

Third. It was very windy that night. Very windy. We were just about done, just checking out the book fair that they had going on, when the power went out. When it originally went out I panicked for the few seconds it was out because I had left Alexis a couple steps away from me because she was nicely looking at a book and Natalie wanted to show me something. Natalie's school is old so it doesn't have any emergency lights or anything so when the power went out, it was BLACK and you couldn't see a thing. I immediately told the girls to freeze until I found them. I turned around prepared to crawl on the floor if I needed to to find Alexis, but then the power came back on. I knew it wasn't going to last long, so I grabbed Alexis and Natalie just as the power went out again. If you know Natalie, you know she freaks out easily so I started talking to her telling her it was ok that the wind just caused the power to go out and that we were going to go home now. Natalie was actually doing really well. I was very proud of her. Then the parents in the room started freaking out. "Oh my gosh, I don't know where the flashlights are!" "What do we do?!?" "How do we get out of here and make sure all the kids are with their families?!?" etc. Finally, before they could get Natalie going, I said, "There are two fire trucks outside with a bunch of firemen hanging around them. Guaranteed they have a few flashlights. Wait until they come in with one." Sure enough, seconds later a fireman walks in and asks how we're all doing. As I was leaving, I overheard one of them saying that they didn't realize they were going to actually work and have to do an evacuation. I giggled.

On Halloween, we dressed the girls up again and tricked or treated in the Sedro-Woolley business areas. They did great! They made out like bandits. Then we went and visited the aunts and uncles and grandparents (Peter's) in the area. They all thought that Natalie and Alexis were adorable. We planned on going to the mall for their Halloween trick or treating event, but when we got there it was just one continuous line around the mall. It would have taken FOREVER to get through it all, and by that time the girls were tired and hungry, so we skipped out of there and came home for dinner!

There are pictures above in the new slide show of the girls at the fall festival. Enjoy!

OWIE!!

Well, I did it! I took the first bootcamp class, and I made it the whole hour!!!! I was hurting and REALLY wanted to stop halfway through it, but I pushed myself and finished it out! Oh but I hurt now! I am so sore, but that's a good thing! Tomorrow I get to do it again, and I can't wait! Although I hope that my muscles will have loosened up a bit before then.

Now, do I let my muscles heal and take today off from working out, or do I push myself a little bit and do a smaller, not quite as intense workout?

Scared... Inspired... Determined...

I didn't know which one to title this post, so you get all of them. They're all accurate so it works that they're all in the title.

Scared: I weighed myself today and I'm just 5 pounds from being at the weight I promised myself I'd never get to. 5 pounds! Right now, I'm the heaviest I've ever been in my life, including when I was 9 months pregnant. If I don't do something now, I'm going to hit that mark that I told myself I'd never get to, and who knows when I'll stop. I don't want to become a person who can't play with her kids, or has to ride in a motorized cart at the grocery store, because she's too fat and doesn't have the energy.

Inspired: There is a lady at the health club that I work at that has met a very, very impressive goal. Last year, at this very time, she was very heavy, like over 300 pounds heavy. On November 4, 2008 she set a goal for herself, to lose 100 pounds in a year. She not only has met that, she has surpassed that! A week ago, when I last spoke with her, she had lost 115 pounds!

Determined: Now I don't have 100 pounds to lose. But I could lose 50. So here is my goal. I'm going to lose 50 pounds in 6 months. If she can do 100 in 12 months, then I can and will do 50 in 6!

Here's the thing. I didn't get to this point because I love to workout and hold myself accountable. Frankly, I'm just the opposite. I hate to workout! You'd think that since I work at a health club, and have a free membership because of that, it'd be easy for me to get in and use the facilities. But that's not the case. Part of it is that now with teaching so much and then going to the club afterwards three nights a week, plus a Saturday, I don't want to take any more time from the girls. Another part of it is that I work there. You'll always hear people who work in retail that they hate to shop in their store on their days off. It's no different for me at the health club. I already spend so much time there, I have a hard time coming in to work out. But I realize those are just excuses. No more! Tomorrow I'm going in to sign up for bootcamp this month and see if I can maybe do that for all six months. The health club has this thing where you can sign up and workout with a group with one of our trainers in a high intensity workout. They meet twice a week for an hour each time. That would mean at least two hours that I'm currently not doing now. It would have to help! I'm hoping that having something that will keep me accountalbe to showing up will help me actually show up and do the workouts! Today I went out and bought a kettle ball to do at home workouts. There are so many excercises you can do with a kettle ball that I don't think I'll ever get bored with it. At work, at the health club, I will do a 10 minute walk on the treadmill, bike, or whatever cardio machine I can get on during my break!

A friend and I have a private blog that we had started to help encourage each other to keep up the good work and lose weight. We started out OK, but we both just quit doing it. So I'm making my journey public. I think I'll post pictures there of my progress, and maybe put my actual weight there so that those aren't quite as public, but I will occassionally update this to let you know how I'm doing. But I need your help. I need your help keeping me accountable. Ask me occassionally how I'm doing. Encourage me, especially when I'm thinking that this is going to be impossible, because there will be those times. Thank you in advance and here's to me becomming a better, healthier person!

On an unrelated side note: We had a fun and adventure filled Halloween weekend! I will post more about it tomorrow and I will make a new slide show to show off costumes and some of the activities the girls did!