Monday in Pictures

The weather is almost perfect today- except when the clouds are covering the sun. My idea of paradise on earth would be temperatures in the 70’s all year round. There’s no need to point out the flaws in that scenario or how much I would miss the seasons or anything like that. Let me have my dream of perfection to hold to! 

It’s Monday.  I used to do my laundry on Tuesdays (and one other day of the week), but lately I have been doing it some Mondays. Today is laundry day.  Kierra has school today. I always have a plenty of things to pick up around the house on Mondays. It seems we take Sunday as a day of rest and a license to not pick up after ourselves. Oh, who am I kidding?  I am the one that picks up after myself and pretty much everyone else around here. And since we usually go flying out the door without a lot of time to spare on Sunday mornings, we leave a tornado of clothes and towels on the floor and unmade beds and toothpaste on the counter in our wake.  In the afternoon, if we are home, everyone else usually takes a nap. I usually don’t, but why would I pick up things when everyone else is sleeping? That’s my quiet time! And it’s actually fairly rare that we are home all afternoon and evening, so that adds to the lack of time to keep up with everything and everybody.  I actually don’t mind too much- it’s kind of fun to get everything put back in its place on a Monday morning.

I am thinking a towel shower would be a good idea for tenth anniversaries. Most of our towels are falling apart. The ends have mostly came off, leaving them way too short. They work, but they aren’t ideal and a lot of them won’t last a whole lot longer. We’ve been married 9 years, hence my idea that a towel shower would be nice next year. LOL!

Today  is also the day that I needed to go out to the garden to pick whatever produce is ready. There wasn’t that much, so it’s not overwhelming, but it should give us a good meal this evening.  It’s so wet this year that it’s impossible to till the garden at all, and the weeds grow like crazy.I guess I could pull every weed in our large garden by hand, but that would be an enormous amount of work. Keeping the rows free of weeds is hard enough, let alone pulling them all between the rows. And even then, the ground is often so muddy I have to be careful where I walk. Let’s just say that there is no way I could win a neat, weed-free garden award this year!! 

 

A not-so-pretty cabbage that I think can be salvaged for Kai Si Ming from the Trim Healthy Mama book. It’s hamburger and cabbage cooked with spices and while it’s not pretty, it’s always better than it looks and better than I remembered. I am not a huge fan of cabbage, if you can’t tell.

So I think we’ll have Kai Si Ming with fresh broccoli and green beans this evening.

I am not getting a lot of beans this year. I only canned once, and since then, I’ve gotten just barely enough for a meal twice a week. My beans were damaged by late frost, and apparently never fully recovered. I should have replanted, I suppose. We actually eat green beans fairly frequently. The girls don’t profess to love them, but they eat them fairly readily.

I am collecting cucumbers to make Claussen pickles. Last year I canned pickles and had THESE in the refrigerator. We went though quite a few quarts of these in a really short time. The only thing I didn’t like was that in my pickling spice, there were some whole cloves, and I didn’t care for that flavor. Other than that, they were divine. We ate them like candy for snacks!! I want to do as many this year as I think my refrigerator can hold while leaving room for other things. If I had a spare refrigerator, I would fill half of it with these Claussen knockoff pickles! The other pickles that I canned have hardly been touched. 

I have a number of plants LOADED with these garden salsa peppers and no idea how to use many of them. I will use a few in canning, but I don’t know what else to do with them. My jalapeno peppers frosted in a late frost, and I could find any more at the greenhouse so I chose these. Then one plant of jalapenos survived so those will get priority.

And then since we have pictures of imperfect produce that hasn’t been cleaned yet, I give you pictures of some girls who seem just about perfect to me- you know, when they aren’t making me pull my hair out!

 

 

 

Emily loves her cats and sneaks them inside whenever she can.

 

Kierra was complaining about school this morning and how her fingers hurt too much to write, blah blah blah. Someone had a big day yesterday and didn’t have enough rest. I am proud of her though. We got home at 5 something yesterday afternoon, having been gone all day, and then she and I went on a bike ride. I don’t know the exact mileage, but it had to be at least 7 miles total. She was sure she was going to die when we were about a mile from home. But when we got home, she was so happy with her accomplishment that she forgot how hard it was. She just learned to ride this spring, and we hadn’t done much riding most of the summer because of the heat, so I think she’s doing great! It’s fun to have someone to be active with, too!

This morning I had Emily put uncooked macaroni in a mini cupcake pan. It actually kept her happy for awhile, but after a certain point, it became something to haul all over the house, so I will have to sweep it up when she’s not around. 

Emily is a busy little girl challenges me only a million times a day, more or less. But she is so loving and affectionate. She gives hugs and kisses freely. She learned the song “Baby Mine” recently and wants me to sing it to her, and then gets all lovey and cuddly.       

And outside, there are flowers. I don’t plant a lot, but I am glad for the ones we do have. Actually, my girls picked these out, otherwise we might not have any! 

We pruned our grapevines down to almost nothing this year. They weren’t bearing  fruit to speak of anymore, so we had nothing to lose, even though we don’t know much about growing fruit. For the longest time, everything looked dead, but now there is the most prolific growth. There aren’t any grapes though. Maybe next year. I am sure I could find several spiritual lessons to draw from that, but I will spare you!

Happy Birthday, Lauren

It’s been four years. Four short, very long years. It’s hard to imagine having a 4 year old running around here. I wonder what color her hair would be. It could be any color, really. If we could have a redhead, we could have a child with any other color from very blonde to almost black. I wonder if she’d have as many curls as her sisters do. Would her eyes be brown or green or blue? Would she be outgoing or a little shy? Would she be talkative or quiet? Would she have boundless energy, or would she rather look at books and play with dolls? Would’ve she gotten the stubborn gene or the fiery temper gene, or would she have escaped both?

We won’t ever know the answers to these questions, at least not until we get to heaven. I imagine her with medium brown hair, brown eyes, a little more petite than her sisters. She probably would have lots of energy judging by all the crazy acrobats she performed before she was born. I can’t even guess what her personality would have been like.

 

When our Lauren was stillborn at 37 weeks for no apparent reason, it was the most devastating thing I have ever experienced, and it’s not like I was a stranger to grief. There’s something about losing a child, a part of yourself, that is just seems so wrong. There were so many times I thought I would never be happy again. There were days when the pain wasn’t so sharp, and I’d think that I was finally healing. And then there would be days at a time when the grief was overwhelming, and I wondered if it would ever stop hurting so much.

A very wise friend who had lost a child herself told me that it never really gets easier. But gradually there will be more and more good days, and the times that the pain is so crushing will get further and further apart. She was totally right, although at the time I wasn’t so sure. I have thought of what she said often, and 4 years later, I can say that I have found that to be true. Life has gone on, filled with all kinds of challenges and busyness and another little girl, who has healed our hearts in many ways.

But we still miss her. Very early this morning, I dreamed that a tiny dark-haired, brand new baby was placed in my arms. I wanted her so badly, but I only held her for an instant and my dream moved on. Somehow, I don’t think it was a coincidence that I had that dream on Lauren’s birthday. My heart was so heavy this morning, even though I wasn’t really consciously thinking of Lauren. The heart remembers, even when the mind doesn’t.

And Kierra misses her sister so much. It surprises me, really. She wasn’t even two at the time, but I realized how much she remembered 8 or 9 months later when I took her along to the doctor for my first visit with Emily. Apparently that triggered a flood of emotions and memories, and since she was much more articulate at that time, we realized how much she understood and how much she really loved and missed her baby sister.

(I love Mom and Dad and Emily and Lauren the best)

And she still does. She wishes to have Lauren to play with. She begs to go to heaven so she can see her. She hope that Lauren is still little when we get to heaven, because she doesn’t want the baby she remembers to be all grown up (I don’t either, to be honest, and I have no idea how that all works in heaven). Kierra probably cries more over missing Lauren than I do these days. It’s not often, but now and then it really hits her. She often draws pictures for or about Lauren. It’s really sweet and touching to me.

So yes, it’s been 4 years and somewhere along the line, I think we accepted what we could not change, even though I can’t say when it happened. It’s easier to be happy that she is experiencing heaven’s glory and it’s easier to be comforted by the fact that she gets to be with Jesus than it was when the grief was too great to see past.

We know what it’s like to be carried. I am sure that everyone has heard of the poem “Footprints in the Sand.” There were times there is no other explanation for how we got through some of those times than that we were carried by the Lord. I am pretty sure there were times when I was like my two-year-old when I have to carry her somewhere she doesn’t want to go. She kicks and screams and protests, but sometimes I have to carry her anyhow, for her own well-being.

It was also because of this that I have become a believer in the power of intercessory prayer. Kendall and I both experienced it at different times. He was having a hard time going on and moving past Lauren’s death a number of months afterward. Finally he told some men what he was going through, and asked for them to pray for him. He says that was the turning point for him.

When I was pregnant with Emily, I naturally had a lot of fear. We had no idea why Lauren died, and therefore no idea if it was likely to happen again. Most of the time, I managed could manage my conscious mind, but I couldn’t control my sub-conscious. I was having bad dreams almost every night about losing my unborn child in some way, and then I would wake up scared and traumatized, unable to go back to sleep. After I asked some ladies to pray for me, I never had those dreams again.

We will never be the same for our little girl’s very short life. We have learned so much. One of the big ways that it changed both Kendall and me is that we realize (not perfectly, but more than we did before) what matters and what does not. And it’s given us a deeper longing for heaven, because there is a little girl there that we never got to spend enough time with that we can’t wait to see.

Happy Birthday, Lauren! It’s like your birthday every day… only better!

Changes, Beginnings, and a Quick Trip

Last Friday, we all made a long one day trip to Missouri to pick up something for Kendall. Almost 1400 miles, almost 24 hours, and a flat tire later, we made it back home.  We were all very tired, but still mostly sane. The girls did better than I expected, really. That’s a lot of sitting in one day!

My girls don’t always get along very well. Actually, to be honest, they usually don’t get along very well. Not right now, anyhow.  But sometimes they are nice to each other, pick flowers in the hot Missouri sun together, and even hold hands or play happily together. They love each other more than they want to admit, and can’t live without the other one very long!

These first pictures were taken while we waited on Kendall to get his stuff loaded.  We were bored and taking pictures. Who knew you could snap photos through the headrest of your seat?!

The other week, we started school again. It’s early, but Kierra needed more to do. Emily isn’t being very gracious about it. I think she is jealous- we went through the same thing last year for awhile. We haven’t gotten a full week in yet, but that’s okay- part of the benefit of starting early is being able to be very flexible when other things come up, like 24 hour trips to MO!  Today was Kierra’s 7th day of first grade.  She is enjoying it, I think, although it’s a little different than kindergarten.

She hasn’t mastered writing neatly yet, but I can tell a vast improvement even since the end of kindergarten.  She is starting to write notes- I find them here and there, and it makes me smile. Yesterday she wrote a note to give to her best friend at church “I love Rachel. I will miss you when you go to Missouri. It will be a sad day. Love, Kierra” or something like that. I can’t remember exactly how she ended it. Of course I had to help her spell Missouri and another word or two.

I am dreading the day Rachel moves away. They have been best friends ever since they were born, almost. Kierra has already cried her heart out about it  more than once, but when it actually happens in the near future, she is going to be inconsolable, I think.  I probably will join her, though. It’s SO hard to see such good friends move so far away! We will still be friends, but it won’t be the same!

Change is a part of life, though. We have to be willing to let go of what’s in the past to make room for the things in the present and future.  People come and go.  Things happen that change us forever.  We make changes that aren’t easy because it’s the right thing to do… it’s life, whether we like it or not!

Of Diets and Such

I have my windows open today for the first time in a long time! There is some sunshine, it is only 73 degrees, and there is a breeze. I’ll take it!

This week has been both good and bad… it’s good because I’ve been able to stay home for 4 days in row. I don’t know when that last happened. Maybe never. It’s good because staying home means I don’t cheat on my diet and that means better weight loss. I actually spent quite a bit of time in the kitchen yesterday cooking and baking, and didn’t even mind it too much. The kitchen is not my favorite room of the house. Not even close!!

But it’s been a fairly rough week as far as being a mom goes. A couple days ago, it wasn’t very pretty around here. This morning was a really rough morning.  Emily has been kind of hard to live with again. She rarely obeys me and she’s often really mean to Kierra, and that makes it hard for all of us. Nap time is my favorite time of the day, really! Then we have some peace and quiet. Yesterday Emily was awakened early from her nap because of a thunderstorm. I knew she was scared, and didn’t have the heart to tell her she had to go back to bed, but she didn’t get as much sleep as she needed, and it still showed this morning in her behavior.

But… we carry on. Some days are harder than others, but I choose to believe that Emily won’t be like this forever. She’ll either outgrow this or we’ll figure out what makes her act like she does. I hope that time comes sooner rather than later, but if it’s later, may God give us lots of grace and wisdom!

(and no, we do not actually drive on the road like this. Kendall came home from work and they rushed out to meet him)

Back to the diet thing. I feel like talking about this today since I had the lowest number on the scales today that I’ve seen in almost 9 years! I don’t remember what I weighed when we first got married, but I know in the year before and the 2 years after marriage, I gained at least 60 pounds. I still am not sure what all that was about. It was mostly stress, probably, because Emily has been a high stress child for the past 2 1/2 years, and that’s when my weight started climbing again. Not as quickly, because I knew more about nutrition and health and exercise than I did before.

So by the end of  2006, I had reached my about my highest non-pregnant weight. Then I got pregnant, and only gained 20 pounds which I lost in a week or two after Kierra was born. I stayed about that weight until I got pregnant again, except for a brief moment when Kendall and I went on the South Beach diet. I did lose then, but gained it all back fairly quickly. That was such a short phase in our lives that I don’t really count it!  I got pregnant with Lauren the end of 2008 and weighed the same as I did before Kierra. I was pretty sick that time which helped me not to gain too much, and I lost all that weight within a week or two after she was stillborn. I ended up pretty much exactly where I had been. Not more, not less.

About 6 weeks later, I got serious about losing weight, and from September 2009 to March 2010, I lost 30 pounds, averaging just over a pound a week, simply by cutting back on portions. When I got pregnant with Emily, I knew I wouldn’t be losing for awhile, but I figured that I could just resume where I left off soon after she was born. That was so naive of me!! I gained a few more pounds with her than with the others because I didn’t get very sick, and then I didn’t lose the normal 20 pounds after delivery. I ended up 7 pounds more than I was before pregnancy with her, and that is where I stayed. I hung around  that one number for the next year and a half, a few pounds less if I was really strict, and a few pounds more if I wasn’t. I literally could not lose weight the way I could before. Believe me, I tried. Then last summer, we were gone a LOT from the end of May to the middle of June, and I gained a few more pounds that I could not get rid of.

I think the reason for all this was a lot of stress and hormone imbalances and depression. I don’t know what caused what, but I believe they were all closely intertwined. There were some really dark moments and a lot of frustration when things that were supposed to help (like exercise) only made things worse. Then I read a book called The Mood Cure by Julia Ross that made a lot of sense. It explained so many things to me. I had 3 of the 4 mood disorders that she talked about. What fun! No wonder I was so messed up! When I take the recommended supplements, it helps a lot. My problem is, I hate taking pills so I have a bad habit of skipping them for extended periods of time. Very unwise of me, I know.

Anyway, these supplements, when taken faithfully, helped ease the stress and the dark cloud and the lack of energy and motivation, but it didn’t help my weight. By the beginning of this year, I was at my very highest weight since losing those 30 pounds. (I only gained 15 back, so I was still smaller than I was once was, thankfully!) Like any good woman, I resolved to lose weight in the new year.  😉 But I wasn’t very faithful in a diet, although I did exercise fairly faithfully and lost some inches, and a couple pounds.

I kept hearing about the Trim Healthy Mama diet. And yes, any THM’ers reading this, I KNOW we aren’t supposed to call it a diet, but a lifestyle.  I may follow this long-term, but I still am going to call it a diet since the first definition of diet is “what a person or animal eats: the food that a person or animal usually consumes.” That totally fits!!

Anyway, you can read more about this book at http://www.gwens-nest.com/natural-remedies/trim-healthy-mama-book-review/. There is also a facebook group that you can join-http://www.facebook.com/groups/trimhealthymamas . It has a LOT of information . You can buy the book  at http://www.trimhealthymama.com/. 

Now I will tell you about my experience with Trim Healthy Mama. I started this diet exactly 4 months ago in March. The book is kind of expensive, so I borrowed it from the library to see if it worked. I spent a week reading it (it’s a big book) and that gave me 2 weeks to implement what I read to see if it worked.

Essentially, the premise of the diet is that you don’t eat large amounts of carbs and fats together. Apparently, our bodies burn carbs first, and if we also ate plenty of fats, by the time our body is done taking care of the carbs, it’s tired and never gets around to burning the fats we ate. But if we eat them in separate meals, our body is better able to efficiently metabolize both. Things like pizza are not off limits, if you have a very low carb crust with it. Regular pizza crust is not low carb at all, if you wondered!

It’s a big learning curve at first, but it soon gets much easier. The first few days were absolute torture for me. I made the mistake of deciding to wait a couple days to have any carb (or E for energizing) meals, and my body groaned and protested and screamed for carbs and sugar. Most of the time I do one E meal a day (usually breakfast) and 2 meals with healthy fats (S for satisfying) a day. That works the best for me. After the initial detox off sugar, and after adding in healthy carbs, I was fine. In fact, I soon realized that I seldom have low blood sugar symptoms anymore. I never officially tested my blood sugar, but I am positive it would dip very low if I didn’t eat often enough, which caused me to get very irritable if I didn’t eat soon enough and led to eating more than I should have and to eating things with unhealthy carbs to make me feel better.

This is essentially still a low carb diet, since the E meals have a limit of about 45 carbs. That means you want to be smart about what carbs you eat. I forgot to say that each meal should center around a protein, and then the carbs or fats will round it out. There aren’t really calorie limits and you aren’t supposed to let yourself get really hungry. How the diet ends up looking is a little different for everyone.

How you lose varies greatly from person to person, too. Some people lose 20 pounds in the first month. I lost 7.  Some people feel way better physically than they have in years within a short time. I can’t say that I can tell a dramatic difference. But then, I don’t think I am allergic to any of the food I ate before. Some people feel physically terrible when they cheat on their diet, and I can’t say that I do. I almost wish I would, because then it would be easier not to cheat.

It’s been up and down for me with this diet. I do believe it works for most  people. I believe in the principles behind it. It might not be The Only Way to lose weight, but I think it is a good way. In the past couple months, I haven’t been losing much, but we were away more than at home, and sometimes it was impossible to eat the THM way, and I often didn’t make the best choices I could have. I don’t crave bad food as much as I used to, and I don’t actually LIKE some of it like I used to, but there are some things that I still have a hard time saying “no” to. This diet is fairly forgiving, but you can’t cheat almost every day and still hope to lose, and that’s what I’d been doing.

But today, I finally saw a new number on the scales, one I haven’t seen for a lot of years! That puts me at 19.5 pounds lost in 4 months. It’s not dramatic, but it’s so much better than having gained a couple more pounds, which I undoubtedly would have done in the chaotic busyness of the end of May and the month of June otherwise! My clothes are pretty much all too big, and some of them are WAY too big. That’s a good problem to have. The downside is that I can’t really afford a new wardrobe right now, but I am sure we will figure something out!

Also, along with the too big dresses, I measured myself for the first time in a long time today, and since March, I have lost inches almost everywhere. One problem area measured 6 inches smaller. Woohoo! I have a long way to go, but I am glad to have gotten this far, and I have renewed motivation to stick to this thing!

I don’t have an official before and after pictures, but here I am September 2009, January 2013, and July 2013.  36 pounds lost total, 21 pounds since January, and 19.5 pounds on Trim Healthy Mama. These aren’t great pictures, especially not for before and afters, but you can at least see my face, and that alone says plenty. I think I will keep on trying. It may be slow, but it is progress!