Move It Mama Monday! So How Many Plants Have I Killed?

I know, I know. I'm running late again. I apologize. The Hubster had a paper to write this weekend for a big important conference, so my little blogging adventures kind of got pushed to the side by a double helping of weekend child-rearing activities. It's okay though. I'm here now.

Anyway, I thought I'd talk a little about Operation Kill A Lot Of Plants, since I haven't mentioned it in a while. So far, most of the plants are doing... okay. Not terrific, but not dead. For some reason, a few of the plants had a delayed growth spurt and are only just now graduating from sproutling to actual plant. The vegetables we planted aren't exactly producing a bumper crop, probably because I started the seeds so late. I have been told that next year I need to start my seeds in February, which leads me to wonder where the hell I'm going to keep all those tiny plants for the two plus months I'll have to wait until we're past the final frost (which I have been told is on Tax Day in April). I also may have not helped things by trying to make a homemade pesticide out of apple cider vinegar, dish soap and hot sauce. That recipe came out of a gardening book I have, and I thought it would help kill the leaf eating pests we've been having problems with. Well it did, but it also caused the plants to shrivel up and nearly die too.

In spite of my attempts at planticide, we do have a few ears of corn coming up, but the bugs got one and now the others seem to afraid to come out of their husks. We have the odd tiny green tomato and banana pepper hanging on the plant. The herbs have done the best, though for some reason my basil took forever to hit puberty (do plants do puberty? I dunno).

The best grower by far has been the beans we planted. I have no frikkin' clue anymore what kind of beans we've planted, but they grew like weeds, trailing all around the tomato cages I set up around them. We harvested about 25 pods and got enough beans out of those to feed myself and both girls one serving of beans each. They turned purple when I boiled them (the beans, not the girls), and the girls thought that was a little too weird so yours truly is the only one who would eat them. For the record, if I die suddenly in the next few days, it was probably the beans.

The rest of the yard isn't looking too bad, except for the one side where the Hubster planted a slew of creeping juniper a few years back. I hate creeping juniper. Weeds get in there and the only way to kill them is to reach into the prickly, scratchy branches of the juniper to pull them out. I tore up my arms good this past weekend and only managed to weed about a square foot. I've still got another twelve square feet or so to go. Joy!

But the flower garden in the side yard looks good, as does the small herb garden in the back, plus a few other odds and ends I've managed not to kill over the years. Here are a few photos I took a week or so ago.

Princess, standing by the towering Russian blue sage in the side flower garden. I've also got some calla lilies in there, plus some daisies, yarrow and button flowers and a few other things I can't recall the names of.

The containers of herbs on the back deck. Note the delightful chalk art the kids drew for me!

Our vegetable container garden. The big bushy thing is the beans I ate that are probably going to kill me. And next to that is our stunted corn.

A mixed pot of sunflowers, colieosus, and marigolds. Probably the weirdest combination of plants ever thrown together, but they're doing pretty good. Nothing's blooming yet, of course...

This is not my garden. This is Norfolk Botanical Garden, about an hour from where I live. Norfolk Botanical Garden is gorgeous. I wish I could get my yard to look even a little bit like it. Yes, they teach gardening classes there. Would they help improve my black thumb? Probably not. Drives me crazy.

Anyway, that's what's going on with Operation Kill A Lot Of Plants. It's not a roaring success, but we are getting outside and digging around in the dirt, and I consider that a sign of success, even if all we manage to grow is a bunch of purple beans that kill me.

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.