Phew! Life is crazy.

While this last week wasn't as crazy, the week before was insane. I worked 42.5 hours the previous week, but because of the holiday and not getting a sub call on Friday, I only worked 30. I still feel very, very tired.

First, my goals.

1. Water: I'm doing such a better job about drinking water these days! Woohoo! I also don't think I had more than one or two sodas the whole week.

2. I'm still doing a good job on my veggies! I've eating at least one serving of veggies every day.

3. Exercise. I taught class on Monday and Wednesday, so I got those workouts in. I ran on Thursday - quite a bit further than I had intended (4.67 miles) Oops! But it felt amazing and it was so nice to be out side. I swam for about 20 minutes on Saturday. Definitely not where i want to be, but improvement - that's for sure!!!

4. Time for me. I've managed to finish knitting Kara's bag and now I'm working on a blanket for a friend's baby boy. It's proving to be much slower than I hoped, but so far it looks good. I'm doing a checker board pattern of warm, light blue and a bright white. I'm doing it in strips right now and then will sew them together to make the blanket. I'm also going to crochet a boarder around the edge. I have a white yarn with blue and brown flecks that think I'm going to use on the border. I'm also knitting with two strands together to make it thicker and so far I really like how it's turning out.

5. Patience with the girls: Ehh! Not so good. we're struggling with Jana and her reactions. She's so over tired, so instead of handling corrections or frustrations well, she's throwing fits, kicking and screaming, and hitting. Ugh! Not a fun stage!!!! The girls and I had a wonderful day on Friday, though. We headed to Michaels and then we played at McD's for about 2 hours. They had so much fun! They played together so well and just had a blast being together and playing. I also got some knitting done, which was nice.

J and I had a date night last night at is was wonderful!!! We had an amazing dinner at this little restaurant that is in a converted house and then saw Invictus. Sooooooo good! We had lots and lots of time to talk and talked about all kinds of great things. We definitely enjoyed reconnecting in an adult-married way, instead of a worn out Mommy and Daddy, how do we get everything done way.

We also had a chance to talk about having more kids. I'm really, really struggling with my desire to have more kids. With all of our financial struggles, it's driving me crazy that I would even be so desperately wanting a baby, but I can't seem to shake it. J brought up the idea of adopting. His hesitation with having more kids is a very interesting one that I'd never thought of before. He's an environmental science guy and thinks very intellectually about everything. His great concern about having more kids is that the over population of the world is something that is going to have a huge impact on our kids and grandkids and we have no idea what is going to happen to the world because there are just simply too many people on the Earth! So, we had a long discussion about adoption. We'd both like to have boys - that's a given, but of course if we had biological children, it wouldn't matter what we had, but we'd have two more. So we talked about the idea of adopting siblings. I'm intrigued by the idea of adopting sibling boys from Ethiopia. We already have a bi-racial extended family (on one side of the family) and my siblings are adopted, so this is a comfortable option for us. It makes sense to ease J's global responsibility concern and if we're going to wait until the girls are in school, to reduce the childcare costs and to reduce our debt load, we'd be getting into the 35 and over age bracket for me - which is worrisome. This doesn't abate my baby-fever and desire to be pregnant (yes, I'm saying those words!), but there are so many pros to this idea.

We've got a lot of time before we'd be doing anything about this, but we've also got a lot of thinking to do!!!

Goals and a good day!

Goals for 2010

As always, I want to lose weight. We're heading to Hawaii in July, so I really, really want to be at a weight that I won't be embarrassed to be in the pictures, or hide from the pictures. It's amazing to look back and realize that no one would know that you were on the trip because you hid from the camera the whole time. So instead of that being my goal, here are the ways that I can get there.

1. Eat at least one serving of veggies every day. I'm horrible at eating veggies on a regular basis, so this will be an improvement.

2. Be active everyday and make working out a priority. Even if I can't go work out, take a walk, or take the long way so I walk a little more, park further away so I have to walk further, take the stairs, etc.

3. Be more patient with my daughters.

4. Have special one on one time with both girls and hubby every week.

5. Either continue knitting or find another way to relieve stress or boredom instead of eating!




So far,

1. I am on day 6 of eating at least one service of veggies every day. One day it was just a bowl of carrots before bed because I had forgotten, but I wasn't in the mood for ice cream after eating the carrots, so that's improvement. :-)

2. I worked out, Monday, twice on Wednesday, and Saturday. On Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, I decided to leave my lunch in the car, so I had to take at least one extra walking trip a day. Not much, but something. :-)

3. I had a great day with the girls with only a few moments when I was getting frustrated.

4. Kara and I have been having wonderful snuggly time most days. Ahh, I love how much she lets me snuggle, hug, and kiss her. :-) Jana and I had a fantastic "date" today. We returned one of her broken Christmas gifts (never worked) and she got to choose a new present, went on a quick errand to Target, picked up some more yarn and a crocheting starter kit (to crochet a border on Kara's new blanket that I knitted her, since she never got her own, new baby blanket), and then a trip to DQ for some ice cream with one of my friends that Jana adores. It was such a nice day!!!

5. Today I knitted Kara a new hat (which Jana immediately took as her own and Kara didn't mind). I'm currently working on a bag that matches Jana's hat and about to crochet a scalloped border on Kara's new blanket... no unnecessary snacking or stress/boredom eating today!

What a week!

Phew. I'm pooped.

It's been a crazy week.

I'm now trying to pick up 2 days a week subbing, as well as my regular teaching days on T/Th.

So, I subbed Monday in the other High School program at the college and then today at the middle school next to the girls' childcare center. It's been crazy, but it is what it is. I just keep saying, I love my family and if this means I actually get a summer break this year, that's wonderful.

I had a huge blow up with a colleague at work. She's a freaking nut job. She tries to mother me (one of her sons graduated with J from high schools). Apparently she was displeased with how well I cleaned up scraps of paper that fell out of my kids' spiral notebooks, so she swept them up, dumped them on my teaching supplies with a note that said, "I think you left something behind." Then she attempted to berate me and tell me I'm disrespectful and a brat. Are you F*%^ing kidding me? She's the passive aggressive one who got mad when I took the box of overheads over to the copy machine to make a copy. She's a total control freak and apparently I don't kiss her ass enough, even though she has no power/responsibility over me at all. She blew it so out of proportion that our supervisor had to get involved. How ridiculous!!! I had about a 40 minute meeting with her where all she could say was, "It's her, not you." Next week will be very interesting to say the least.

Other than that, teaching is going fine. I'm really trying to do some work with progress monitoring and data collection and analysis to drive my instruction. The kids are good and happy to see me again, which is nice. I'm just remembering that maybe I did like being in my own building and not really having to deal with other adults! :-)

Exercise didn't go great this week. I taught class on Monday, but it wasn't a good class because I was so tired. Tuesday and Thursday I was way too busy to be able to leave and go to the gym between classes. Wednesday I taught class and it was an awesome workout and I did my Biggest Loser workout DVD as well as some wii fit.

So, the girls are now going to childcare full time. :-( It makes me so sad, but it has to be that way so I can either be miserable about it or just accept it. They are fine. Kara cried so hard as soon as she saw me this afternoon when I picked her up. Gulp! I think we're going to send them M, T, be home with me on W, then they'll go Th, F.

I'm quitting one of the gyms I work out. This way, I won't work Friday nights and then I'm going to cut down a bit on my hours on M and W evenings. I'm hoping to just work from 6 to 7 on those evenings and then take the girls swimming from 7 to 8. It puts them to bed late, but on T, Th, I don't have to be to work until 9:30ish, so we can be later. They also go with me on Saturdays and swim after my classes. We're trying to make our time together be better time!

Thanks for still reading guys! I miss you too!

Wow, I don't even want to look at how long it's been.

I've said this many times, but I'm hoping to keep this blog up this year. I've been really horrible this year about losing sight of myself and not taking care of myself. :-(

In the past year, I went from mostly staying at home, to working 8 part time jobs, to working full time, to now working 3 part time jobs. I really hope we can find a happy median, but we'll see as it looks like I need to start picking up some subbing days to supplement our income. Yuck! The good news is that it looks like there's a teacher that needs subbing on a regular basis, so I can sub for the same classes every week. Plus, it's at the school really close to where the girls go to school, so that will simplify things and it's where one of my best friends works.

They've changed the schedule at the college and I'm really excited. This new schedule will actually better reflect what we're getting paid for since they've been overworking us. :-) I will teach Math Fundamentals from 10 - 11:30, Basic Math from 12:15 - 1:45, Reading 1-2 from 5:00 - 5:50, Individual Focus 6:00 - 6:50, and Reading 2-3 from 7:00 - 7:50. While I think it will be a lot of work, I am really excited because I think I have a much better structure set up this time.

I have gained back all of the weight I had lost after Kara's birth and some. Yucky! For me it seems to be an all or nothing quest. I either have all the pieces in place: healthy eating, exercise, and good sleep, or nothing. I'm hoping to find an exercise class to take at the college between my classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I'm also planning on getting up on Monday, Wednesday, and Fridays at 6:00 with J and either running, doing a workout video or doing the wii fit. I should be able to do that for an hour and still get the girls out the door for school on time.

I have picked up knitting this break. I really enjoy it. I think I often am doing things that I don't see an immediate result: working out, teaching, parenting, cleaning (ha, ha)! so, I feel like I'm spinning my wheels a lot. But, with knitting, I am creating something tangible and can see an instant result to my work. I've mostly just been practicing and learning how to make fewer mistakes, but I'm getting better. I've made the girls lots of blankets for their dolls and stuffed animals. I attempted to make a hat, but that turned out to be a miserable failure, but with a little adjustment has made a fantastic sleeping bag for one of Jana's stuffed animals. :-) I'm trying to teach myself the purl stitch so that I can make Kara a new blanket. I love the blankets that have the checkerboard appearance, so I'm going to try to make one once I master the purl stitch. Kara picked out one of the babysoft yarns that is yellow with flecks of all different colors in it. I'm really excited to get started and hope that I can still knit even when school starts.

Plus, I plan to start writing everyday. I'm hoping this will help me reflect on each day and its blessings as well as help me to focus on myself a little more (okay or even just at all).