Move It Mama Monday! Did I Make My Goal?

No.

No, no, no, no. I did not make my Wii Fit goal. In fact, if you ask Wii Fit, I'm only a pound less than where I started from three months ago. I know that sounds terribly disappointing. However...

My bathroom scale says I'm about four pounds lighter. And my weight has been fluctuating between 146 and 148, rather than 149 and 152. And I've even gotten as low as 144.5 at one point. Plus my clothes fit better. For Mother's Day, I wore the slinky dress I made for my honeymoon almost 16 years ago, and it fit perfectly. And my knees are doing a lot better in karate class. I can now get through two hours of class without limping out of the dojo afterward.

So I'm going to say this was a success, even if I didn't lose the 11 pounds I set out to lose.

But I'm also going to say that there are areas I could stand to improve, and they're things Wii Fit doesn't monitor. Things like sleep, drinking water, and eating lots of fresh fruits and vegetables.

I know what it takes for me to really lose this weight. The biggest factor is the amount of sleep I get every night. I do best when I can climb into bed at 9PM. Then I have no problems getting up at 5AM the next morning to start my day and go on to accomplish everything on my to-do list. Also, if I can sleep straight from 9PM until 5AM, I don't end up craving sugary or salty foods all day long. However, if I don't rigorously enforce that early bed time, I'm pretty much screwed. I won't be able to get out of bed at 5 and I won't be able to take control of my day from the get go. I end up scrambling to get stuff accomplished, including exercise, and my eating habits go south fast.

When I'm tired, I have problems doing things I know I should do to lose weight, like drink lots of water and eat fresh fruits and veggies. Instead of water, I'll down cup after cup of hot tea or coffee with plenty of sugar in it. Instead of reaching for an apple or pear when I'm hungry, I'll dig out the chips. It's stupid, I know, especially since I know the fruit is better for me and I know I'm sabotaging myself when I go for the chips. But when I'm tired, I just don't have the will power to do what I should do. Or rather, I refuse to summon the will power to reach for the fruit instead. There's this little voice in my mind that tells me I'm tired and I've been working so hard, why not just relax a bit and reward myself with some comfort food. Again, really stupid, and I know it even as I do it, yet I do it anyway.

It hasn't helped that I tried going to bed early last week, but had insomnia just about every night. That really killed my fitness goals, and I couldn't do much but suffer through it. I've been plagued by insomnia off and on for as long as I can remember, and I really wish I could figure out a way to beat it. I don't drink any coffee or sodas after 2PM, so caffeine really shouldn't be the problem. I do tend to use the evening hours to catch up on work, so that's probably the culprit. I should stop working in the evenings and do some winding down instead, but if I cut out those work hours, I'm afraid I'll really get behind in work.

It may be that I need to look at my schedule again and try something new. I loved doing some exercise early in the morning before doing work, because I know that helps me lose weight, but I need the word hours desperately, especially if I'm going to eliminate those work hours from the evening. So my plan for this go around is to move the exercise to later in the day, probably mid morning after I've gotten some work done and gotten Pixie outside for some play time and gardening. We'll see if that helps.

Two final notes: first, I'm still waiting to see what Wii Fit says I weigh after I get through my current menstrual cycle. Remember, I'm carrying around a lot of excess tissue held over from the previous cycle, and I'm wondering if that's causing me to hold onto a little extra weight as well. Second, I'm waiting for the new EA Sports Active game for Wii Fit to come out. I pre-ordered a copy and am anxious to see how it works. I love the current Wii Fit, but would like to have something to add to my repertoire of fitness tools. Variety never hurts when it comes to losing weight!

Next week's Move It Mama Monday will probably be late. I'll be up in Maryland for Balticon all through Memorial Day weekend and won't get home until late Monday, so look for an update on Tuesday instead. I could write the post in advance, but I'd like to give myself a week to see if I can convince Wii Fit I weigh a little less. So until then, have fun and keep moving!

Move It Mama Monday! Crunched For Time

Greetings and salutions on this fine Monday morn--!

Eh, who am I kidding? I'm dead on my feet today. But hopefully you're doing better.

I'm going up on my first three months with the Wii Fit. This week is the last week for me to meet my goal, although I'm not going to make it. I had set a goal of losing 11 lbs in three months. I'm 6 lbs short of that goal. But I'm not upset about that, especially considering how high my weight shot up last week (water weight really sucks, but it can be gotten rid of, thankfully!).

While I won't manage to meet my goal, I did lose and manage to keep off 5 lbs, which I haven't been able to do before. My scale these days more often reads 146 than 151, and that's a huge difference for me. My jeans fit much better (hurray!). But better than that, I've noticed a huge improvement in my knees. I have lousy knees, ruined by sparring injuries and hormones from two pregnancies. They'd gotten really bad this past year, but after working on Wii Fit for a few weeks, I started noticing a significant difference in my ability to hold the more demanding stances. I can get lower and hold those stances longer, and that makes me really happy.

Still, I'd like to eventually lose those last 6 lbs., and I've been thinking about what it will take to make that happen. Do I need to exercise more? I'd love to, but my schedule is pretty full, and I'm already having a hard time fitting everything in each day. So I started playing around with my daily schedule to see if I could squeeze in an extra half hour of Wii Fit each day. I got up most mornings at 5 AM last week to do 45 minutes of Wii Fit, and then scheduled some sort of fitness activity later in the day like swimming or karate. I definitely got results. Unfortunately, I normally get up at 5AM to work on my writing and podcast, and I couldn't figure out how to fit in the work time I needed now that I'd given up an hour or so each morning to do the extra Wii Fit.

Bottom line, the schedule change helped me shed that water weight plus another pound or so, but it ruined my work schedule, and I can't have that. So I'm trying a different schedule this week. I realized one of the reasons the Wii Fit early in the morning worked so well is that I was getting my cardio exercise in first thing in the morning.

Cardio in the AM has always helped me maintain my weight, so this is something I want to continue. However, I don't have to do 45 minutes of Wii Fit to get those results (and keep in mind that 45 minutes on the Wii Fit translates to at least an hour of actual time). What I do need to do is about 20 minutes of cardio, either using the Wii Fit or the new monster elliptical machine the Hubster bought. Then I could do my body test, an extra 5 minutes or so, and move on to writing for the morning. Then later in the day, after the Pixie and I have had some time to play outside and garden, I can come back in and spend another 20-25 minutes doing the strength, yoga or balance games on the Wii Fit. Or I can head out to the Y for a swim or the dojo for an hour of karate class.

I'm hoping this compromise works and gives me the time to both workout and work. I'll let you know next week how it goes.

Meanwhile, I'm doing okay. I spent some time working on Operation Kill A Lot Of Plants this past week. I've filled a total of 23 pots with soil and seedlings. Yeah, I'm nuts. But remember, this is Operation Kill A LOT Of Plants, so we're good so far. I also have some plants that have survived previous gardening attempts, so right now my deck is pretty full. I still have some sunflowers and marigolds to plant. They'll go in one last big pot later this week.

For Mother's Day, the Hubster took me to Barnes & Noble, where I picked two blank journals, one for me and one for Princess. I told her we would keep journals this summer of our gardening and other activities. We also got a simple weather science kit for Princess and set that up yesterday. She spent the afternoon taking little notes about the weather and then drew our deck with all the plants on it. I'll have to scan in her drawings later this week, but for now, here are some picks of the garden so far.

We've got lots of herbs on the back deck...

Plus tomatoes and corn and peppers...

Did I mention we had lots of herbs on the back deck?

Okay, that's it for this week. Pixie's starting to climb all over me, so you know what that means.

Mama's got to move it!

Move It Mama Monday - Operation Kill A Lot Of Plants

I have never been big on yard work. Growing up, I can recall spending entire weekends devoted to raking cut grass, bagging up scratchy clippings from bushes, painting the back deck, etc. It was hot, sweaty, painful work, all of it, and I never enjoyed it.

In spite of all the yard work I did growing up, I never did learn how to do much more than rake and bag stuff and haul it to the curb. Mom just told me what to do, but never explained why we did certain chores at certain times (like she also told me what to do in the kitchen, but never taught me how to cook). So even though I'm forty years old, I've got this major disconnect about how to handle my lawn and garden. When do you actually plant stuff? When do you weed? How often do you water the lawn? And fertilizer! What do I do with that crap (pun intended)?

I've tried my hand at gardening. I've got two plots in the back yard, one of various perennial greens, and the other containing one giant rosemary bush and a lot of oregano. But there's no grace to either garden really. I just sort of slapped them together with no idea of what would grow and what wouldn't, what would look nice, and what would look like a tangle of weeds.

As for the rest of the yard? I've pretty much left that to Michael all these years. He handles the mowing, the watering, the edging, the deck and porch repairs, etc. In fact, he handles so much of it, I almost never have to go outside.

But that's about to change. I need to get the kids outside more, and I need to get myself outside more. The fact is, I'm bored with going to the playground and chasing after the kids. It's not that I don't love my kids, but I really don't fit into the jungle gyms they've got so all I can do is what most moms do at the playground - sit on my but and make sure my kids don't fall and break their necks. It's boring! If I'm going to be outside, I at least want to be doing something. And I want to be moving, because moving equals exercise, right?

So this is the plan. Last week, the Monday after we got back from Arkansas, I pulled out a bunch of peat pots and some soil, and the girls and I planted some seeds. Again, I have no idea what I'm doing. I let Pixie pick out most of the seeds. She selected corn, beans, tomatoes, and sunflowers. I did pick a few herbs out. I am most familiar with herb gardening, especially in small containers on my deck, so I think I can do okay there. But the plan is for the girls and I to try our hand at gardening together. Maybe we'll all learn something. Maybe my children won't grow up as gardening ignorant as I did. And maybe we'll all have an enjoyable summer outside this year.

We've all got gardening tools. Mine is a mismatched collection accumulated from previous attempts at gardening; the girls collection as pretty much all plastic beach toys. But I figure we've got the basics. I've also got a couple of gardening books, including one called Trowel and Error: Over 700 Tips, Remedies and Shortcuts for the Gardener. I've flipped through it and am finally starting to see how some gardening concepts I've heard about fit together. Plus, it's just a fun little book with all sorts of weird ideas that might be fun to try.

I can't say I'll do any better job gardening this year than I have in previous years. I am notorious for killing a lot of plants. But so far, two-thirds of the seeds we planted over a week ago have sprouted up, and I've managed to weed and mulch parts of the front yard. The fact that I know what mulch is and I know where to put it shows a huge improvement in my gardening skills already. Plus I spent three hours outside hacking up the lawn with a pick ax to get all this done, so you know I burned some calories. (Yes, I used a pick ax to weed and mulch my front yard. It was necessary. Have you seen the weeds in my yard?)

I am a little intimidated by my kids' expectations. They keep jumping around, shouting "We're growing a farm! A real live farm!" So there's a little pressure on me to make sure something survives my black thumb. But at the very least, I'm sure we'll all get plenty of fresh air and sunshine this spring and summer, and yours truly intends to drop a few pounds by
digging around in the dirt.

Or kill a lot of plants while trying.

Swimming With The Little Mermaid And Banana Boat Girl

Summer is here and we started taking the girls swimming. I’ve been taking Cassie to the YMCA pool on Wednesdays, where she is a big hit with all the life guards. They think she looks adorable in her swim costume. Yes, I said costume. Grandmama bought Cassie a purple Little Mermaid bathing suit, complete with terry cover up and wrap. She also has a set of Little Mermaid fins, hand paddles and face mask with goggles. All of this is done up in aqua, green and purple. Her floatation vest is not Disney themed, but it is the same shade of purple as her terry cover up, so it fits in quite nicely with the rest of the outfit.

Grandmama also bought an outfit for Sam. It’s a little red and white Minnie Mouse swimsuit with ruffles sewn around the butt. It also comes with a matching cover-up, but no fins and goggles. Sam’s too little for that. She does however, have a float. It’s a sort of yellow inner tube with an inflatable palm tree sticking up the back and a banana-shaped back rest. The tube has a seat in it with two little leg holes so Sam gets to dangle her little tootsies in the water as she leans over the front trying to drink straight from the pool.

Our neighborhood pool opened up this weekend, so Michael and I took the girls for a dip yesterday afternoon. I’m sure we looked quite the sight with the Little Mermaid and Banana Boat Girl. Cassie is finally tall enough this year that she can stand in the shallow end of the pool without drowning. With her little floatie vest, she can actually swim. She gets into the water and starts to paddle and kick like mad, splashing water everywhere as she screams, “Look Mommy! I can swim, I can swim!” Then she goes under for a few seconds until I drag her back up by the straps of her vest. She only sputters for a moment however before demanding that I let her go so she can swim some more.

Sam, meanwhile, floats along serenely, still trying to drink the pool water. She’ll actually stay in her float for a good long while before deciding to climb out of it to get herself a drink. She must really like the taste of chlorine.