Trying Again

Well hello to my old friends. I bet you forgot I existed.  It has been so long that I couldn’t remember my password!  I fail to understand why, as much as I love to write, I cannot blog on a regular basis.  I guess it goes hand in hand with my inability to stick with anything!  Diet, exercise, resolutions, etc.  My weight yoyos like crazy.  When I exercise, it is down, when I am highly stressed, it is down.  Anything in between and I begin to look like a hippopotamus!  I don’t seem to be able to find a happy medium.  And so, I am starting to work on a new me all over again!  Is that a collective groan that I hear from my readers?  I don’t blame you in the slightest.  Nonetheless, I am going to give it a shot.  And since it is spring, this is an apt time for Springcleanedmom to do some spring cleaning!

What exactly are you doing, I hear you ask?  I don’t usually do things in half measures so I am throwing myself into a Whole30.  Yes, me, the anti-high protein, -low carb girl. Yes me, the anti-paleo girl.  I couldn’t care less what my cave-person ancestors ate and I don’t believe that today’s diet should reflect what they ate.  I know, I know, this doesn’t make sense at all.  Well, here is what I like about Whole30.  They are not advocating for a caveman diet.  They are advocating for a healthy diet.  A good deal of what they say makes sense to the scientist in me.   And a part of it is plain desperation.

It all started when I was a wee-little lass.  The “sick headaches”, the fatigue, the anxiety, the depression, and the insomnia.  And it only got worse through my college years, partially because I discovered alcohol (actually, that discovery was a little earlier than college).  My 20s were the worst years for depression, my 30s for migraine.  My 40s haven’t seen much in the way of depression, but pain has been my companion for a very long time now, as has insomnia.  I started running in my 30s and although this new-found love went hand-in-hand with a healthier lifestyle and weight, it also went hand-in-hand with chronic hip pain.  While surgery fixed some of the hip problems, it hasn’t been the complete answer to my troubles.   Every so often I have major flare ups which require steroids.  And in the past two weeks I have had shingles and debilitating back pain.  Out of shear desperation, I have turned to the internet and as luck (or misfortune) would have it, I stumbled across the Whole30 program!

Anyone who knows me, knows that I love to eat.  I am addicted to food.  While I am fortunate enough to enjoy healthy foods, I am a potato chip addict.  If it wasn’t so bad for me, I’d live on a diet of dips, chips, and red wine 🙂  Who wouldn’t want to do that?  As you can imagine, I don’t feel so good when my diet consists largely of fat and sugars.  It is time to detoxify.  I am also treating this as a migraine elimination diet. I have started many of these over the years but have a hard time sticking with them.  Why do I think Whole30 will be different? Because it has an end date.  They even have a plan to add foods back in to the diet after the 30 days.  The one problem for me is that I am scheduled to have surgery mid-way through.  I thought about starting the “eating plan” after my surgery, but why wait?  If I cannot stick to the diet during my overnight stay in the hospital, so be it!  Technically, the folks who developed the 30 day plan would require I start over.  I will wait and see.  I am highly unlikely to beat myself up about eating something “off-plan) while in the hospital.  The two weeks of healthy eating prior to my hospital stay can only be of benefit.

Today is Day 2 for me!  Day 1 was a breeze.  Today I am lacking energy but given that I am on pain killers and muscle relaxants, I don’t think the diet is soley to blame!  I am looking forward to the morning when I wake up with the “extraordinary energy” that so many Whole30 and Paleo folk describe.   I am not hungry.  That is a good thing.  I do want something sweet but I can handle that.  I am feeling rather positive about this new journey even though I have never experienced a diet-induced change in how I feel.

How about you?  Who has made a significant dietary change and reaped benefits?  I’d love to hear your stories!

And This is Why Resolutions Are Silly!

How about it?  It is May 29, 2013 and the last time I blogged was January 1, 2013.  So much for good intentions!  I’d love to tell you all that this mom has been spring cleaned in the many, many days since her last post.  That too would be silly!  It hasn’t been such a bad year so far though.  After hitting the 20 lb post-surgery mark, I joined Weight Watchers and lost half of those pounds.  The switching of doctors to one who has me on a better pain-control regimen has resulted in more exercise.  The acceptance of the fact that full-time employment and mothering are just barely compatible has also helped reduce my stress levels.  I think I am finally heading towards a better place for me!

So what’s next on the agenda?  More weight loss would be great.  I have been enjoying a great book called “The Blue Zone” by Dan Buettner.  It is an interesting look at some small communities which have an unusual number of centenarians amongst them.  I haven’t quite finished yet, but the overwhelming thing that jumps out at me is that most of these folks are vegetarians, or rarely eat meat.  I have often wondered what the data tells us about the health of vegetarians vs. meat eaters.  I am not sure that “The Blue Zone” is exactly a scientific thesis, but it is interesting just the same.  A meatless diet is also very conducive to weight loss.  Do you see where I am going with this?  There is just one major obstacle for me – I LOVE MEAT.  And so does my family.  I am definitely not a slab of steak kind of girl and prefer smaller pieces of meat to great chunks of it, but I do enjoy meat.  On the upside, I also love vegetables and if I was on my own, I don’t think I’d have much trouble at all to convert to a meatless diet.  Instead, I am trying to formulate a plan to reduce the amount of meat that my whole family eats. To be honest, we aren’t huge meat eaters so we won’t have to make big adjustments, but there isn’t much easier than grilling a hotdog when there are not enough hours in the day!

So in my first attempt to substitute meat, I decided to buy various products and try them out on me.  I have discovered some wonderfully delicious veggie burgers in the frozen section of my supermarket. I actually think my husband and boys will like them.  These will be a great substitute for those nights when we do the horribly unhealthy processed chicken patties and oven fries.  When I joined Weight Watchers, I cut out potatoes. I have added back a tiny bit, but I need to find a substitute for fries. I don’t even like oven-baked fries unless they are made from potatoes that I cut up.  But alas, my husband and one of the kids, love them.

Snacking is my downfall.  I get the 4 PM munchies every single day.  So far, I have found nothing that works to curb them.  Sure, I ignore them at times, but if I reach for something salty at that time of day, I am in big trouble. I cannot bring myself to eat fruit at this time of day. It doesn’t do it for me.  So I need ideas – lots of them.  Added to my fruit woes is the fact that I have some fairly severe tooth sensitivity going on.  So if you add fruit plus cold together, I cannot eat it comfortably.  Since we are heading in to summer, fruit doesn’t do well on the kitchen counter, and if any of you know me well by now, you know I am not organized enough to take fruit out of the fridge so that it warms up by an appropriate time for me to eat it!

So there you have it.  I am a meat-loving, veggie-eating, salt-craving, fruit-hating mom.

So Much for Good Intentions

Why is it so hard to blog regularly?  I love talking and I love writing.  Yet, blogging is a chore. It isn’t as though I have nothing to blog about either.  Heck, no one needs to have material other than day to day life!  But here I am.  Perhaps one of the reasons I haven’t been blogging is because all of my good intentions to change my lifestyle have not come to fruition.  My recovery from hip surgery was a lot longer than I anticipated and as a consequence, I have gained 20 pounds since my last marathon.  I also had a very busy semester so time was not on my side.  The upside is that I feel as though my hip is 99% recovered and I can run again.  I joined Weight Watchers online on Monday and plan to use it to help me through the silly season.

The easiest way for me to lose weight would be to give up my wine in the evenings.  During the semester breaks, this is easy, but during the academic school year, I have made a habit of unwinding with a glass of wine while cooking dinner and then usually another one with dinner.  And my glasses are no 5 oz!  What can I do instead?  That is really what I need –  way to unwind in the evenings that doesn’t involve alcohol.  Having two young children means that I am not free to just disappear and do whatever.  I have the Tony Horton Power90 DVDs and they have been instrumental in getting me back into some form of shape but the kids hate it when I do it.  They want my attention.  I even try to get them to do it with me, but they last through one set of exercises and then they’ve had enough.  So today I have two questions:

How do you maintain and not gain weight during the holidays?

How do you unwind after work?

The Old New Me

I was doing so well.  I was off the booze, off the Lortabs, off the Ambien.   Life was starting to look better, feel fresher and I was sleeping OK. My semester ended on a high note.  So what, you may ask, is the problem?

Put simply, I do not do injuries well.  When you take away my exercise, you also take away my mental health therapy.  Add to this the fact that the weight stacks on quickly when I am not exercising.  I have gained about 10 lbs in the last couple of months.  Fortunately, I have a consult with the orthopedic surgeon on Monday.  I want resolution.  I don’t want months more of conservative treatment.  Clearly, conservative treatment isn’t working.  I am ready to confront this thing head-on.  My MRA shows a labral tear and detachment.  Again, no mention of osteoarthritis.  I will be interested to find out from the OS if he thinks I have any OA.

So here I go again, time to spring clean myself.  Actually, if I am honest with myself, the booze hasn’t been much of a problem, and neither has the Lortab.  I take it because I am in pain.  The problem is that I am on a narc contract and taking it for the hip (which is not why it is prescribed) makes me feel like a junkie.  After Monday, I will be able to contact my neurologist and perhaps do away with the narcs for the time being.  If I am given a cortisone shot in the hip, I shouldn’t need pain meds for a while.  This would be good because if I need surgery, I don’t want to have any degree of tolerance to any of these drugs.

I really feel for those who are worse off than me.  This is the first time that I have ever been totally restricted due to mechanical failure!  And I am proving to be a great big baby.  Yes, there are other forms of exercise I could do, but I have a 3 and a 5 year old and most other forms of exercise take a lot more time than going for a jog or lifting weights in the basement.  Somehow, I need to find a happy medium.  I am still searching.

Savor the Moment

So many things lead to this point in time. Tonight/tomorrow we are expecting snow.  Yes, snow in April.  Not only are we expecting snow, but we are expecting accumulation of several inches.  Last weekend we were outside spraying each other with the garden hose!  Last weekend I rode my bike on the trail.  Monday just past, it was in the 90s for the Boston Marathon.  Tomorrow, parts of PA and NY are going to get over a foot of snow.  I am thankful I spent most of last weekend outdoors.  Just as my title says, savor the moment.  Who knows what tomorrow will bring.

Exercise.  Many of us take it for granted.   Many of us don’t do it.  We always say we will.  But we never seem to start or if we do, we don’t continue. There is always tomorrow, or is there?  My hip is continuing to get worse.  I am still able to get about and I could still probably run or cycle but the payback pain isn’t worth it.  We walked for 3 hours with the kids at the mall on Saturday.  Today I struggled to walk around the supermarket.  For those who keep saying they will start tomorrow, my advice to you is start today and enjoy every moment of it.  I had hoped to train for my third marathon this summer and perhaps get a couple of short distance triathlons in.  Now I am wondering if I will be spending my summer recovering from surgery.  For those who can, savor the moment.

And how am I doing with the spring cleaning?  I devoured a bottle of wine on Friday night.  Not very pleased with myself for doing this but one slip up in about 3 weeks is pretty good.  I fought the temptation to refill my Ambien prescription today.  I have no reason to do this.  I don’t seem to need it right now and it wreaks havoc with my short-term memory.  It makes me sleep like a baby though!  Migraines/headaches have been responding well to Zomig and nothing has escalated to the point of requiring intervention from a health care provider.  This is good news.  Perhaps I am finally outgrowing my migraines!

Tomorrow it is back into the battle zone at work, but I do actually practice what I preach.  We had a fabulous weekend with the kids, even though the weather was miserable.  Littlest one fell asleep before 10 PM tonight which is a miracle!  Now I am going to savor some moments of responsibility-free time.

Life in the Fast Lane

Long time, no blog.  This isn’t an unusual phenomenon for me.  I have these wonderful intentions to write daily but life just gets in the way.  Take for instance, the fact that both kids got strep throat.  Before they had even finished their course of antibiotics, dear child number 1 wakes up with horrendous croup.  Several days later, dear child number 2 wakes up with even worse croup.  A day later, dear mom wakes up with a rotten sore throat.  And so it goes.

Work has been steady and ever challenging.  But this is a good thing.  I haven’t been as stressed as in previous weeks which means that I haven’t felt the need to self-medicate.  In fact, tonight, for the first time since, well, I am not sure, I would have to read back through my posts to see when the last drink I had was, I had some wine.  I bought a bottle (after much deliberation) to have with dinner.  I had one glass of wine with dinner and a second after dinner.  It was a very drawn out process though and it left me without any buzz whatsoever!  I had no desire to keep drinking to seek that buzz either.  This is a major breakthrough for me.  I wasn’t sure if I’d be capable of sensible drinking again and this gives me great hope.

Along with my sore throat, I have had really nasty headaches and so I have had to dig into the migraine meds the past two mornings.  But they did their thing – one pill each morning of the weekend – and I have managed to have a reasonable weekend.  I even wiped the cobwebs from my bike and went out for a ride on Saturday morning.  It has been a very long time since I have been on the bike.  It will be quite some time before I can sit on the seat again!  My hip pulled up sore after the ride and I continue to chase down a specialist who can give me a firm diagnosis for the source of pain.  Because the weather was relatively nice this weekend, I managed to get out into the garden to dig up weeds and plant new plants.  In a couple more weeks, I will head to the nursery to buy some seedlings.

I love to watch things grow.  Gardening is something that my boys can help me with too.  Last year, they each planted a gerbera daisy plant.  My older son delighted in watching it flower all summer.  I love gerberas so I plan to do this again this year.  They don’t seem to have much interest in vegetable gardening just yet!

Well that is about the sum of my life over the past few weeks.  I am proud of myself for not hitting the bottle and I am not feeling guilty for enjoying a drink tonight.  I never intended to quit drinking altogether, although there have been times when I wondered if I would need to.  I am still trying to figure out how to spend enough time with the kids in addition to working, keeping a clean house, and exercising.  Exercising has somewhat fallen by the wayside due to the hip pain, but the house still needs to be cleaned, meals to be cooked etc.  I wonder if working moms ever truly figure this out?  If so, please let me know how you do it!

Recent Travels

As the school year winds down, I find myself dreaming of vacations.  Of course, I cannot take any real vacations this summer since I well and truly overdrew the vacation purse over the past 6 months.  Fortunately, my last trip home was for a happy event.  This is where I witnessed someone close to me get married:

Only my husband and I went on this trip.  It is difficult to make the decision to travel without the children.  However, when each child costs over $1000 to fly to my homeland, it is difficult to justify.  We did take them late last year and my older son has been twice now.  It is unfortunate that it is so expensive to travel, but at least there are many things for us to see and do in the US.

Today is Saturday and although cold, it is a beautiful sunny morning.  Makes the ever so glad that I did not succumb to the desire to buy a bottle of wine last night.  This reduced alcohol thing is working out ok, even if I do have some fairly strong cravings at times.  I have had a dull headache for the past few days but that too is bearable.  We took the kids to see The Lorax last night and it was delightful.  Tonight, hubby and I will go to The Hunger Games.  We are not big movie buffs.  In fact, the only movie my husband and I have seen together at a cinema since we have been married is Race Across the Sky (I think that is what it was called – the Leadville Mountain Bike race?).  With two kids and no family to watch them, movie nights become expensive.  We have found a great sitter, which is lucky, be every time we need a sitter, we are spending at least $100 for the whole evening.  I guess one might argue that you cannot put a price on sanity, but sometimes I find it hard to justify paying a sitter.

And somehow I am back to the balancing of family and life again.  I keep hearing how important “me” time is or “couples time”.  And I totally agree.  My husband and I have quite a strained relationship and kids haven’t made it easier.  But stressing about money also puts strain on a relationship so where is the balance here?  Add to the fact that the kids are at daycare all day, and you might come to the correct conclusion that we don’t want to spend time away from them in the evenings.

I know you are hearing lots of complaints from me, but keep in mind that this is my outlet.  It is healthier to vent here than at home.  I tend to fall into a vicious circle – get stressed, drink too much, take too much migraine medicine and cannot sleep.  Take sleeping pills, brain gets foggy, coping abilities decline, stress increases…  and so on.  It has been nice to have a less clouded brain as of late.  The stress is still there and sleep doesn’t come as easily as I’d like, but I feel more motivated to do things well when I am a little more “sharp”.  For me, these things come in cycles.  With one month of the academic year left, I know I have three months of down time ahead of me.  While I will be expected to work, work takes on a different meaning over the summer.  The boys will still be in daycare, which sounds cruel but they get to do all sorts of fun stuff in the summer – like go to the local pool every week.  They get to do more stuff than they would if they were home with me (because technically, I am still working – gotta love a 12 month contract at a teaching institution).  But I will have the luxury of taking them late and picking them up early.  They can have the day off if I want to stay home with them for the day.  Yes, summers are my saving grace, my mental health care. I cannot wait!

And Time Goes By

Do you want to know how many blogs I have started?  Hmmm, I think this might be the 4th.  One of them actually got a lot of mileage but it was a private blog with lots of photos for my family and friends on the other side of the world.  I don’t even remember how to log in to it, and to be honest, it doesn’t feel the same now that my mother is no longer here to read it 😦

Enough of that for now!  This week has been a true test of my grit.  Both of the kids came down with strep throat, this being the busiest time of the year for my husband and me having various teaching commitments and various other meetings.  However, we survived the ordeal and both of us walked away tired and with moderately sore throats.  The good thing to come out of this is that I haven’t had so much as a craving for a drink since the weekend.  I wish I could say I have been headache and hip pain-free.  No such luck. A couple of Zomig and the rest of my Lortab later and my headache is mostly gone but the hip remains a literal thorn in my side.  Tomorrow is an exciting day as I get to visit with a friend of a friend who happens to be a Physical Therapist who specializes in, you guessed it, hip problems!  And she is doing this as a favor, as in, for free!  I don’t ever get stuff for free so this is a very exciting prospect.  I feel a bit guilty as I actually have a referral to see a PT, but, as seems to be happening more frequently these days, I don’t know where it is!

Let’s talk about mothering for a bit.  I have been at it for over 5 years now and I don’t feel as though I am any better at it.  It is just plain, hard work! My biggest problem is guilt.  I feel guilty that the boys are in daycare all day and I feel guilty when I do non-work stuff on work time.  I never feel as though I am giving my all to both of these important facets of my life.  I give even less to my husband but he is wonderfully non-demanding and he is excellent with the kids.  I sometimes wonder how different things would be if we’d had girls instead of boys.  Would I be better at playing with them?  I grew up with two brothers so I thought I’d have no trouble with boys, yet, I just find it difficult to want to play with cars and to even play hide and seek.  Come to think of it, I hated cars as a kids and never wanted to play hide and seek with my brothers.  My boys NEVER, EVER stop!  We have trouble getting them to bed at night, we have trouble slowing them down enough to eat dinner and we have trouble getting them moving for daycare in the morning.  Weekends are totally exhausting to me and I feel guilty for being this way.  I know it must get easier at some point.  Am I a bad mom for wanting to have me time? The only real me time that I get is when I am working!  And at 10 – 11 PM at night if I happen to be lucky enough to get the boys down that early!  With the little guy rarely sleeping through the night (he is 3 by the way), and me getting up around 6 AM most days, I am just plain tired all the time!  My mother-in-law is coming in to town this weekend – THANK GOODNESS.  This means downtime for me. I love having her visit and so do the boys!

Well, since tonight is a night when the kids decided to cooperate at bed time, I should take advantage and get my butt up into bed. Buenas noches.

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

How often does your day start out well and then go rapidly downhill?  Fortunately for me, it isn’t too often.  And even more fortunately, my downhills are really only very small anthills.  It seems as though perhaps I could be labelled something like “Drama Queen” if I was to be totally honest with myself.  Fortunately again, there are only a limited few who get to see this side of me.  Most people around me think of me as the rational, stable one.  Boy, have I got them fooled.

So the good.  I went for my run this morning.  This happened despite the cold (weather) and despite the cold (virus).  I got the boys to daycare, got out on to the trail and got my 2 miles in.  It wasn’t fast or pretty, but I got it done.  Home, shower, work.

The work day started out well.  I had to relieve a colleague at 11 AM from her role as exam proctor.  So I got to sit on my butt for 90 minutes and do nothing.  Nothing included checking email on the iPad and starting a new free book that I had downloaded from Amazon at some point in time.  Since buying a Kindle, most of my stuff is on the Kindle.  Of course, that Amazon cloud thing is the best thing ever and I can put all of my books on all of my devices.  It even syncs it all up for me so I can start out on the same page on whatever device I am reading.  But I just started a new book this time.  The book I am reading on my Kindle isn’t that gripping.  Shortly after my colleague left, a student had a problem with her computer.  Between me and another proctor, we managed to hook her up on a loaner computer.  Crisis solved.  But before long, another computer gremlin attacked.  This time, I was the only faculty member left in the room.  The other proctors had no idea what to do.  I managed a half-arsed solution and in the meantime, resolved yet another computer issue by emailing my colleague who had already left. Things didn’t turn out so bad until I looked at the exam stats.  My questions sucked!  Seriously, they really, really sucked.  It means that either the students are dumb (unlikely since they are medical students), I didn’t teach the stuff well, or the questions were simply too hard.  My guess is that it was a combination of the latter two.  I have been teaching this section for several years and this is the worst my students have ever done.  While this doesn’t sound like a catastrophe to most, it is a big blow to the ego to me.

This brings me to the ugly!  Yesterday I blogged about my debate over buying a bottle of wine to enjoy tonight.  As you can imagine, my somewhat drug-dependent mind rationalized that I would feel much better after a couple of glasses of wine.  Just a couple because if you remember, two is my safe migraine limit.  Three is usually, but not always OK.  Any more than three and I can kiss tomorrow goodbye (unless I have a stock of migraine meds – which I do, even if it has almost dwindled away to nothing).  So I crack open the bottle as I put the pizzas in the oven.  Sit down with 3 year old to relax in front of some SpongeBob Squarepants, a favorite in this household.  Dinner is ready before I finish my first glass.  Doing very well in my humble opinion.  Refill not quite empty glass and drink with dinner.  I then rationalize that I haven’t yet had two full glasses so I fill it up again.  I tell myself that my very few blog followers will be expecting some sort of weakness or set back so I might as well go for it.  Older child wants to watch a different movie so we go upstairs to the guest room.  Pop in Toy Story 2 and I read from the Kindle while he watches Woody and Buzz.  Enter into the room a one year old miniature Golden Doodle at the same time as my husband.  Before I could comprehend who was in the room, the dog has jumped into my lap, spilling my full glass of red down my almost non-existent cleavage!  Since I am sitting on a white comforter, I leap up and break a record running for the bathroom.  Husband is laughing his head off.

I put shirt and my favorite PJ pants into a sink to soak and head downstairs to refill the almost empty glass.  But here is where things get very strange.  Instead of refilling my glass, I find myself rummaging through my plastics cupboard in search of a funnel.  Then, as though driven by some divine force, the remaining wine in my glass ends up back in the wine bottle!  I have had enough wine for one night!  What the heck has got into me?  I decide not to fight it.  Instead, I rush for my office and head straight to my blog!  Somewhere out there in cyberland, someone will understand what just happened to me!

And now, the grand finale.  I want to post a pic.  I got to see some beautiful pictures by PhotoBotos.com and they inspired me to put some of my less talented photos up. Since this is a blog about me, I suppose I should explain my pics, but for now, let’s just say, I really love these birds.