Not Yet, But Almost There

We didn't close on Friday, which meant that we weren't able to use the lovely weekend for the move, but it did give me an extra couple of days to paint Ethan's bed (which I didn't do) and whine and complain to Brian about not being able to move yet (which I did do).

As long as the title gets here, we should be signing papers tomorrow and moving in on Tuesday. It's going to be a crazy week! There are so many wonderful things happening right now. Life is fabulous. I am happy.

Have I Lost My Self Control Or Just Regained My Sanity?

Last week a nurse came to my home to draw my blood and test my urine and write down my height and weight. Why? Brian and I are applying for life insurance. I know, we're officially grown up now. We're buying a house and getting life insurance. Officially adults.

So all of these tests were no big deal. The kids were concerned that I would be getting my blood drawn, but when it came time for it, they were busy watching the Green Anaconda song on You Tube, along with other various anaconda videos they kept clicking on, so they really didn't mind all that much. I'm used to peeing in a cup from being pregnant, so, yeah...no big deal. Height: 5' 5''. I knew that. Weight. Well, I might have acted all nonchalant about the numbers showing up on the scale, but the minute the nurse was out the door, I exclaimed, "Are you serious?!?"

Let's back up a little bit to last year when Marcus was still nursing all the time. I wasn't sleeping well. I was constantly tired. But I was skinny! Nursing does great things for my weight. I usually lose my baby fat pretty slowly for the first six months, but then once I reach that point, the pounds just fall off. If you factor that in with the fact that I was painting and cleaning when we moved back to the Tri-Cities and walking Alyssa to and from school, I lost the baby fat from Marcus' pregnancy pretty fast. And it just kept coming off.

I'll be honest with you and say that I don't judge people for their weight. That is just not something I really take notice of when I meet someone. But here's where the real honestly comes in: I loved being skinny. It was wonderful to fit into clothes I hadn't worn in years. It was wonderful to feel sexy when Brian came to visit, even with the loose post-pregnancy skin and my c-section scar bump that I hear will never go away. And it was wonderful to just feel cute, even on my frumpy days.

The down side to all of this is that I could eat anything I wanted and as much as I wanted while I was nursing, and the minute Marcus was weened, the pounds started to pile back on. I ordered a special dress online for Brian's graduation a couple of months before Brian's graduation, and when it came in the mail I considered sending it back and getting a smaller size. I'm glad I didn't, though, because it fit perfectly when graduation time came around. Then, a couple months later, it was a bit snug.

Do you see where this is going? I wasn't happy with gaining this weight, so I started exercising and "watching what I ate" in July, and I've been doing reasonably well with both of those since then. So I was surprised that it was that bad when I stood on the scale last week. And when the nurse left and I finished my exclamations, I resolved to really, really do something about it.

It was the day after my birthday, and Brian had called earlier that day to say he ordered a red velvet cake (so yummy!) to have our parents over on Friday, so I decided that the diet would start on Monday. (Well, originally it was supposed to be Sunday, but my brother's birthday party was then planned for Sunday, and we celebrated a late Chinese New Years at the same time. You don't want to be on a diet for Chinese New Year at my parents house. Yum!)

I spent the week researching and planning. I decided to do the Atkins diet, since I've had family members have success with it in the past. (Please don't leave comments saying whether or not you like Atkins. I don't want to argue either way. Right now it's the concept of a diet that's in question, not THE diet.) Anyway.

So Monday I started limiting my diet to meats and vegetables. No more bread. No more cake, or cookies, or milk. Oh, no milk! I love milk! This is me being honest again: I don't eat goodies as much as I say that I do. I think I bake more than I eat, and talk about baking more than I actually bake. So actually, I don't miss the sweets, especially since I just had a birthday weekend and got myself all caked-out. I do miss baking for my kids, though, or really the thought of baking for my kids. It's only been two days.

I realized today when I was making pistachio pudding and putting them in white chocolate shells that have been living in our freezer for a while that I was making something fun for my family to celebrate St. Patrick's Day, and that I wouldn't be sharing that fun with them. That's no fun! Not sharing the fun is no fun! I realized that I would rather be a little overweight and enjoying life than be skinny and not allowed to eat anything.

So the plan is to make my own rules. We already do a pretty good job of eating healthy. We get our fruits and veggies, eat at home a lot more than we eat out, drink lots and lots of water. I've been doing a great job of getting up in the morning to exercise, and really no matter how big I am, as long as I'm exercising regularly I feel good. Both physically and about myself. I think I just need to be a little more aware of what I'm eating and how much of it I'm eating, and I'm going to come up with some rules on that to follow.

So there it is - diet canceled, or altered. Brian actually just walked in. Here's the conversation:

Carrie: Hey, I'm just finishing up a post. I'll be done in a minute.

Brian: About your diet?

Carrie: How did you know?

Brian: I know you.

(Brian then walked back out of the house and came back in carrying a box of boxes of Girl Scout cookies.)

Brian: I don't know why, but Bruce bought 60 boxes of Girl Scout cookies today....Are you going to alter your diet to include thin mints?....If they say, "thin" they must work!

I'm so glad I am now allowing myself to drink milk, because we have a lot of cookies to eat.

Waddle-ee-Hoo-Hoo!

Did you catch that excitement? I don't even know what I said, I'm so excited. We just got a call from USAA, and they've moved our closing date from the 22nd of March to the 19th of March. We're moving into our own house THIS weekend! Yea!

And here's a couple of random pictures we took in January, since everyone keeps asking for pictures:

My "Surprise" Birthday Party

We've put off school for a bit this morning so I can finish my lesson for Achievement Days this afternoon. My mom and Alyssa (especially Alyssa) think I should take the day off, because it's my birthday, but I've got a week or two marked as vacation for our upcoming move, and I don't want to get too behind. We'll start school in a few minutes, and we'll just take it easy today. It's History and Science day anyway, so it should be pretty fun.

So while I was working on my lesson, the kids kept hollering, "Don't look!" as they brought up play houses and pillows and blankets from the basement. Then Alyssa yelled, "Look when I say three! One, two three!" and they all yelled, "Surprise!" when I turned from the computer.


They had set up a birthday party for me, complete with stuffed animal guests and presents wrapped in blankets. All the presents came from around the house. I got Whack-a-Mole with one hammer, an embroidery hoop, my favorite pair of shoes, a flash light, a toy dirt devil vacuum, and a piece of wood Alyssa once painted.


The kids had me sit on all of the pillows in the play house to open my presents. It was so fun to see how happy they were to give me my presents!

Aaaarrggg!

Yesterday we received a letter in the mail from Seattle. (Guess who was in Seattle with us over the weekend who might have sent it.) It said that it was from Captain Blackbeard Pegleg Hook and that we had one of his buried treasures in our garden. We had to finish our school work before we went out to dig, so we called Grandma and Grandpa Jacks to come over and help us find the buried treasure.Alyssa was so excited! She told all of our neighbors, and she almost had the neighbor boys, Michael and Martin, believing that there could possibly be millions of dollars in our backyard. Bu the time we had our school work finished, and Grandma and Grandpa over, Brian was on his way home from work, so we waited for him to get here, and then the treasure hunt began!

Brian counted off the paces and we lifted a carpet to find a bamboo X laying in the dirt.
We've always had this mysterious layer of white dirt about two feet down, and the directions said that once we hit that we would know we were close. So the kids started digging...

..and digging...

...and digging...

until they finally hit a layer of white dirt.

Brian started helping at that point, and pretty soon he was scraping the top of the treasure. It took him a while to get to the point that we could pull it out, because the kids were helping him, and for every shovel he scooped out, they would knock almost the same amount of dirt back into the hole!

When we pulled the treasure out we discovered that it was full of gold and silver chocolate nuggets, and twenty dollar bill paper with "Good for one ice cream at McDonalds with a grandparent" printed on the back. No one got greedy, and we split the chocolate with the whole group. Some of the gold nuggets had toffee and almond bits in them, so I figure they're worth the most. But it's been only one day since we found the treasure, and we've already eaten all of the chocolate. We still have all those fake twenty dollar bills, though, so we're rich!

Thanks Captain Blackbeard Pegleg Hook!

Seattle Pictures

Aquarium

Pizza!

Chuck E Cheese's

On the ferry

The fish shop at Pike Place Market

At the bottom of the Space Needle

At the top

It's sad to say that this is the best picture I got of Mark and Becky all night.

Oh, We Had So Much Fun!

Caution: This is not proof read. I'm up way past my bedtime, but I want to remember our great trip. Pictures coming soon.

So we headed to Seattle for the weekend for Brian's cousin's wedding, and we had a blast! Brian negotiated home loans and homeowners insurance with USAA on the way up, while I drove and Alyssa became carsick and threw up - eight minutes away from our destination! She was a trooper, though. She started feeling sick halfway through the trip, with a couple of hours to go, and she was able to keep things under control until then.

We met up with the Sumsions (Will, Nelsa, Marley, Evie, Sydney, and Grant) at the Red Robin in Silverdale, then after a lovely dinner with surprisingly well-behaved kids, we went to Will and Nelsa's house, where the kids watched a movie until bedtime and the parents played Cranium's Playoff and watched funny video clips online.

On Friday we walked the shops in Poulsbo and had the best doughnuts in the entire world. I'm not exaggerating - they were that good! Nelsa had a fabulous day planned, and I was so impressed with all the places we went. When they said, "You have to try the best doughnuts," they really turned out to be the best doughnuts." When they said, "...the best pizza," it really was the best pizza. (Plus, the pizza restaurant had basement that we ate in, so it was like having our own private restaurant.) We went to a free aquarium, where the kids were able to touch things in the wave pool, and we saw a baby whale skeleton, and Grant threw a sea shell at one of the tanks because he was trying to feed the fish. (It scared the living daylights out of everyone that heard the crash, but it was so funny.) We went to a free underwater museum that had torpedoes and information about submarines and such, and Will explained a lot of the concepts and gadgets to us, which was so cool. And then we went to Chuck E Cheese's to let the kids run around for a while.

It was a great day! The kids were pretty well-behaved and they got along really well. Evie and Marley are just a few months older than Alyssa and Sydney is about a year younger, so Alyssa just ate up all the attention she got for being the novelty friend. Everyone wanted to sit by her or be her buddy while we were walking around, just like Alyssa likes it to be. She loves those girls, and she was so excited to see them and was so sad when we had to leave.

After Chuck E Cheese's we took a ferry down to Seattle. Ethan loved it and stayed up top with Brian almost the whole time. I wanted to stay up top, but Alyssa was whiny from leaving her friends, and Marcus was cold, so after a while we headed inside and then to the car.

We then checked into our hotel, and even though it was late, we knew the kids needed to eat dinner, otherwise we'd be hearing, "But we didn't even eat dinner!" when it came time to put them to bed. So we went to Azteca, one of the closest restaurants to the hotel, around 8:30. Alyssa kept falling asleep in her chair, Ethan was too tired to eat anything, and Marcus ate everything he could get his hands on. The minute we got back to our hotel room, we all crashed and immediately fell asleep.

We met Brian's parents, Linda and Ron, and Scott and Alexia for the continental breakfast the next morning, and then took off to Pike Place Market. It was so fun to wander around the shops and end up at the place where they throw the fish all about. There was a huge row of flower booths that all had huge bouquets of flowers for just five or ten dollars. They even had beautiful dried arrangements for way cheap, but Brian and I decided that we wouldn't be able to get one home without it being destroyed. If I lived in the area, I would definitely go there once a week or so and get fresh flowers - the tulips were gorgeous! Oh, Alyssa made friends with the "pot lady" (a lady who made and sold pots) and then she found a daffodil on the ground, which the flower shop owner said she could keep, and from that point on she was determined to make it back to the pot lady, "to talk to her," and when she found her, Alyssa gave her the daffodil to put in one of her pots.

After Pike Place Market we went to the Space Needle and actually got to go up to the top. I've never done that before! I was hoping to at least walk around the bottom and check things out, but we went up the elevator, and the kids loved it. Ethan loved it the most. It was his favorite part of the trip, he said. While we were driving around Seattle, Brian and I kept saying, "Look, there's the Space Needle!" and the kids would be, "Oh, nice, big deal," but after they visited it, every five minutes while we were driving around we would hear Alyssa or Ethan say, "Look it's the Space Needle," or "Look! It's uh Hace Yeedle," respectively.

We wore ourselves out again, so after a quick stop at McDonalds for lunch (and some Greek gyros for the adults from a neighboring place) we went back to the hotel where I fell asleep while Brian watched the Olympics and the kids ran around the room. Brian even cleaned up a diaper emergency while I was sleeping - yea!

So after watching the ending to "Independence Day" we got ready and headed to the wedding. Marcus made machine gun noises during the ceremony, and when I stood up with him in the back, he really wanted to eat the cupcake wedding cake, which I wouldn't let him, of course, so he wasn't too pleased with me. The wedding was beautiful. Becky looked gorgeous, and she pumped her arm when they kissed and kept doing little happy dances throughout the evening. She seemed like a very happy person, or maybe she was just happy she was getting married. Probably both.

We were all exhausted. Alyssa kept drifting off during dinner, and Ethan fell asleep during the toasts, so we took off just after Mark and Becky had their first dance. Even though the kids were tired, Alyssa and Ethan really wanted to swim. Marcus fell asleep on the way to the hotel, so Brian stayed with him while I took the other two down to the pool. We swam for about twenty minutes, then fell asleep the second our heads hit our pillows.

We left for home the next morning after breakfast and enjoyed a quiet Sunday afternoon together. Then Brian's parents came over after the kids went to bed so we could try all the fancy cheeses Brian and his dad splurged on at Pike Place Market. It was a fabulous weekend!