Termites

Five days ago when I was gardening I noticed that we had termite tracks!!!!

You can see the brown line, thats the mud track they make so that they can "stay underground" and get around the concrete slab into your house!

The Termite Guy came around yesterday and he noted that the tracks were old. He had an infrared camera and we couldn't see any activity, and no obvious damage. This house has steel frames which is amazing.

So that's great news! All clear! They must have poisoned them in the past. I can't believe I missed that for 2 years. See look how much backlog I have been carrying around!



Today has been one of my first slow days in the history of the year so I have managed to make a little meal plan and start to regain my focus. I went for another bike ride today which still kicked my butt, but was a little better than last time.

Shift in thinking

For a long time I have thought of the excess fat on our body like a debt. Similar to a credit card debt that racks up when you spend money you don't have, excess body fat is the bill that comes from eating calories you can't afford. What I am realising now though is that it is more than that. The extra fat is actually representative of all debt, not just calorie debt. At least it is for me.

I have a beautiful house. It could be absolutely gorgeous, but it is has sooo many unfinished jobs. To list a few, the exterior needs painting, the gardens need weeding, plants need rearranging, we need new plants. Inside I need to set up Jules' new bed, find homes for many things that "float" around the house because they don't have a home etc. As well as educate my children, do the extra curricular stuff and have fun and maintain friendships. There isn't a lot of time and there is so much to do that it is often overwhelming. My body fat represents the times when it was too hard.

This is why losing weight is so much harder than calories in vs calories out. To lose weight you need to meal plan, shop ahead, keep the kitchen clean, the fridge organised, exercise and limit the eating side of socialising. To do all of that successfully you need to keep your life in order.

With so much pressing on your time you can see why that is so hard to do. But a couple of things have changed to help me start to progress.

* Scheduling some at home days. There is so much to do and most of it needs to be done at home.
* Scheduling and limiting how often I go to the mall. Its a bit of a time waste as you spend time getting there, and back and then putting everything away. Not to mention its hard on the wallet.
* Actively increasing how often I go to the hardware store, including doing workshops to increase my fix-it skills. I am also making friends in there including Marian a 93 year old wonder gardener who gave me lots of cuttings for free!


My curbside garden (above) is starting to have some colour after she helped me understand cuttings!

I am starting to get things done, slowly, slowly. Gardening is exercise, I don't snack while I am doing it and it gets things off the overwhelming-can't-believe-I-haven't-got-to-that-yet-list!

I now have two pretty pots with flowers outside my house.











And Geordie is getting into the herbs after doing the supermarket Jamie Oliver garden books. He is making his own labels, isn't that the cutest thing!

We are starting to do more exercise and have started training for a little mountain bike event in 7 weeks time. Here is Jules with his new flash mountain bike. It has hydraulic disk breaks, fancy gears and a lock out, which is a suspension fork which can be locked and rigid, or loose and springy. Jules is getting a little tummy and it is already getting in the way of his trampolining and circus. I don't want him to suffer like I have so we are getting out more with him.

 This is the fabulous five. They are my friends children that I have know since babydom. They are really good for my children's development. We have them for sleep overs about once a month.  Jason looks after them at night and all the parents, Karen J, Michelle, Nikki and I go and have some girl time.

Kai is the boy at the back on the left. Asha is the girl. They are brother and sister,  children to Karen J (not Karen S). We are going to take Kai to the mountain bike event as well.

One day we girls want to go on a cruise together (quad share) for a few days. It will work out to be about $400 each. I had definitely better lose a bit of weight before that happens!

I went for a ride on Jules bike today. It has amazing brakes!   And a really hard seat so you can't sit down on it. I am glad I have more time to start training for my mountain bike ride. lol.

Parties, Parties, Parties!

I think I finally have my head around why it is so hard to lose weight.

The first step is to recognise that what you do or don't do effects your weight.

This is pretty much the hardest step because we already feel so defeated. 

Its about finding the right strategy. 

Whether for you its, high protein, calorie counting, vegan eating etc. You have to find something fairly easy to get results with, and then stick with it long enough to see the results. How I see it is that you need to find a pattern of eating that fills you up, within your boundaries and doesn't take too much effort or time to do.

When we put the effort in we see results... and then we get cocky

Its human nature to try and do things with less effort. We get excited by the results and then we slip, often times we get away with the slip, then it catches up with us and we start to gain. When we stop putting in the same amount of energy we don't get the results.

Parties completely undo about a weeks worth of effort.

My scales are awesome, right now they pretty much reflect how I ate the previous day accurately. And I can tell you when I go out to dinner its about 800g increase, when I go to a party its about a 1.5kg increase. I notice these things pretty consistently as I weigh myself daily. 

Parties are amazing and seriously the stuff memories are made of. But we have to space them out so that we have time to lose the weight back off and make it a bit further before the next one hits.

When we do lose weight Fat thinking makes it easier to rebound.

You are probably heavier than you ever thought you would be, and losing 5 kilos you are still probably heavier than you ever thought you would be. The problem is like our skin, our mind has stretched. Its a bit more comfortable with the wieght than it should be and its easier for the weight to creep back on.

Keeping the weight off takes diligence

You need to be real about whether or not you are gaining or maintaing and kick into gear over the little stuff, otherwise you will be like the majority of people that gain it all back within four years.

You probably knew all of that anyway, but I am getting a real kick out of watching my body respond to whatever I feed it. I never knew I had so much power and that parties were that evil.

My evil time of the day is afternoon tea time. In the past it wouldn't matter  how many calories I consumed I would still want more. I have made a few little tweaks that really help things. I eat more oats at breakfast it seems to curb my cravings a bit in the afternoon. I bake a potato and eat it with the smallest amount of light butter. You heard me. And I loooooovve it. Potatoes are yum! The thing is they are so much more filling than bread with a third of the calories so why not. I get serious contentment for not many calories so it works for me. The other thing I am doing is having cup of soups. They are yummy and effortless so I am pretty happy with that. they are a bit loaded with salt though :(

Do Over!

My weight skyrocketed to 105kgs after camping and Easter from too much chocolate and chips. I felt really unattractive and I also felt like I had entered a danger zone. Which I had as my blood pressure was high.

So on Easter Sunday I decided to go back to my old faithful Calorie King. What I have been eating and am planning to eat is up there, my calorie king name is Reu, pleased to meet you :) . Its not perfect, I do have a bit of a life, but it has been good enough to give me a loss of 2.3 kilos in four days!

I'LL TAKE IT!

My sister-in-law had gastric bypass surgery and she has been advised by her dietician to have around 1000 calories a day. So I am trying for 1000 calories a day too, I figure it worked well for her. I haven't managed to actually pull that off. It seems that I always go over so I do better aiming for lower and accidentally going over has been good damage control.

I have thought about the weight "debt" that I have and how it is very similar to credit card debt. Like a credit card you can't just stop spending (eating) there are bills to pay (meals to eat) but its about trimming back the excess until you are out of debt.

I have often made this analogy, but I started to realise that I was in house debt as well (so much back log of clutter and disorganisation). I have put in a lot of work over the last month starting to find things a specific home, labelling the box, and labelling the shelf where the box goes). The advantage of this is that ANYBODY who comes into my home can find things and put them away. Which means that I can get help. Up until now it has been my sole responsibility to cook, clean, organise, and sort the kids. Seriously no wonder I accumulated a lot of "debt".

After I organised things a bit, I felt more in a position to tackle my weight. I think there is an analogy between house clutter and body clutter. And after that I came up with a cooking schedule. Basically on Wednesdays, the kids take it in turn to pick and make a dinner. It has to be healthy and budget conscious. I came up with a big list of healthy meals for them. Sundays, Jason (or James while he is living with us) are taking it in turns to cook a dinner. This isn't as hard as it sounds, as basically I organise the food for them, and with the kids they more help me, but they are picking up skills along the way.

So this food plan is a great help, because it allows me to know what I am eating in advance which helps me save calories, save money and time. Its a winner!

I also formalised the chore routine. Essentially at this point its a list on the wall, with morning, afternoon and evening routines. Biweekly, weekly, monthly chores. I am hoping to progress to some automation of the housework and hopefully some more help from the fat cats I live with.

So I am resetting my wieght loss table, full of new hope and off I go!

So thats why I am tired!

The results of my hormone test has come in. There seems to be nothing wrong although the test was for day 21 so I need to go in again to get the test again.

But my iron results came back and I am not surprised that I have been tired, but I am surprised I have been functioning! My iron is meant to be in between 10-30, and it was 3.2! So there you go!

Janette came up this weekend and we had a good time together. She is such a lovely person. We did some shopping, went for a walk, scrapped and watched DVDs. It was a nice relaxed weekend. I also managed to finish off a lego system that I am super proud of.

So that's what you really think!

Janette and Karen were very good friends for years. Janette even flew down from Darwin to celebrate Karen's 30th birthday which ended up being a rather non-eventful "Girls night in".

So when Janette moved from Darwin to Brisbane and needed a place to stay while she found a house Karen was more than happy to help. But two weeks turned into six weeks as they found it unusually difficult to find a house. Janette's dog Diva was fighting with Karen's dogs. So I took Diva for a month while Janette sorted their housing.

There was no blow up, but there was a negative vibe between the two of them. I don't have much to do with Janette because she lives an hour away. But occasionally she likes something on my facebook and she is a very loving person.

She has absolutely copped it these last 14 months though. She had trouble finding her house, then she found that most of her stuff she had stored in the trailer which was covered well with tarps had been wrecked by mold from the near constant rain we had. Then her eldest child dropped out of school. Her husband left her and moved to South Australia. Then her youngest child decided to move to SA to be with his Dad, which was the worst idea ever as Mark is a selfish, rough, deliberately intimidating man.

So two nights ago Janette pops up on my facebook. She has a weekend off and would like to come and visit. We talk about going to the beach, maybe catching up with Karen as she hasn't seen her since she moved out. We talk about how her oldest can play computers with Jason and my boys and everything seems great. Then she messages "had some shitty news and would just like to make some time up with u guys". I reply "Hey that sounds serious, is it your health?" and she says "yes". 

Janette is a tough girl, she has had mini strokes before, and with her taking a line like that, I am fearing for her. Obviously she wants to talk about it in person, so I am going to wait until she comes up on the weekend. 

So the next day go about setting up the coffee with Karen for Janette. It goes like this - Me: "Hey honey, how are you going? Are you free for a coffee this Saturday?". 

Karen: "Hey not bad you? Sorry heading up to meet my new niece this weekend". 

 Me: "Oh how exciting! Enjoy meeting the new little one x We will catch up soon. Jay was coming up and wanted to see you. Next time."

Karen: "have fun catching up with her".

Is it just me or does that comment sound a little bitchy? 

 Me: "She messaged me last night, shes going through a rough time. I think women need to stick together as life gets pretty rough sometimes. She wants to catch up with you but is scared you don't want to."

<no reply> Several hours later...


Karen: "I was hoping to just let this all go and we would just catch up sporadically as I don't really have the energy or inclination to explain myself. First of all I was not impressed you stepped in when it had nothing to do with you regarding Janette etc. Secondly it is up to Janette to contact me as frankly she owes me far more than an apology and I have received nothing from her. I don't particularly care if she is scared as she has to make the first move. Thirdly I don't really care that she is going through a rough time as she didn't really care when i was needing help"

"I don't expect you to understand why i feel like this and i also don't really care what your opinion of it is as this is how i feel and i am entitled to my feelings."

"As for women sticking together well you only seem to feel like this as long as it's on your terms so i really am not interested at all."

"You have asked why i don't spend a lot of time with you recently it's because you always have an opinion on my life and seem to beat me over the head with it but if i offer any advice to you well i couldn't possibly know what i am talking about..."

"I frankly don't have the energy as i have my little girl to care for and that is the most amazing thing to me so i only see people if i have the time after her needs are met and of course i have some time with rick"

"You don't need to reply to this and if we are no longer friends then that's fine too. I guess i have felt like this for a while but didn't really have the time to get it down succinctly enough without babbling or getting really angry and hurt like when i first had these feelings"

Picture me like this ????  And then I realise I am done. I can not believe she would speak like that, and I do not believe what she accused me of. It has been coming for a while I guess, and I am done. I have changed her settings on facebook so that I no longer get her notifications. I am not going to contact her, although I will respond if she contacts me. 

Even though I am done with her. I don't like to burn bridges. So I respond with this: "It sounds like I have been quite rude to you, and I am sorry as I never meant to offend you."

Karen: "Thank you so much for saying that".

"I have felt like this for a little while but i just didn't have the head space to really deal with it"

"I was just so hurt by Janette..we were friends for 10 years..."

"She does love you. I guess I laid it on too thick with the parenting advice?"

"yeah but to be fair it's not just you...Tara does too and other people. It just frustrates me because no one takes anything i say seriously as if what would i know....but i know a lot of things and i am not a moron..."

 "I think you're a fantastic mum"

"thanks :)"

Before I close this chapter I would like to add that newborns take up a lot more of first time around mother's time than second time around mums. From my perspective, she doesn't have to work, she bottle feeds and her baby sleeps 7 hours a night. I don't see where this huge commitment of "meeting baby's needs" is coming from. Karen has not yet learned that she looks after her babies needs by having a life herself and getting out and about to safe places and taking the baby along with her. It seems quite clear that she doesn't want anybody to tell her. I wish her well, I am sure I will cross paths with her in our random future. But for the foreseeable future: I am so done.
 

Its good to have a few parties

My main objective for this year was to slow down and take care of everyone's physical and mental health. So that meant not hosting any official parties.

Well that went right out the window when I realised that Jason's birthday was about to suck!

I arranged for his friends to meet him for an hour of laser tag and arcade games. Then we went out to our favourite chinese restaurant. We ordered heaps of dishes and split the bill, including dessert it was $18 each!

Then he had a surprise net con. I made jewellery with the girls and everyone felt comfortable and stayed for the weekend. I had a really good time, and the house looks great (nothing like a good spring clean before a party).

I gained a kilo from the adventure but my house is cleaner and I am motivated to keep going.

Its a balance :)

Trip to the Uni

The trip to uni went really well. Geordie was excited not to have to go to school. He was an angel all day. Hes my special little one :)   There was a lot of people there at orientation week so it had a very different feel :)  Its changed a lot since I went there in 1997, but somethings never change. Here he is infront of the beautiful sandstone buildings which line the great court. 

It was nice to show him a massive library, which is only one of 24 libraries the university has. Here he is sitting in a lecture hall with fold out desks. 

 Geordie's favourite parts were eating pizza and walking over the bridge.

That pizza place was there when I went to uni and I know it was there long before that too. It is still incredibly fine pizza :) and only $11 :) Gotta love university prices :)










I wish they had a bridge when I was living near the uni. I used to pay a dollar each way to get across the ferry.

 After going to the uni we headed to Chermide shopping centre to get some pearl tea. We both love that stuff :) Its nice to know someone who enjoys it as much as me.

I decided to let him build a bear. Here he is holding down the pedal while the bear stuffs.

We chose a sound to go in his hand and a strawberry scent patch. He had a choice between putting in on his tummy or on his butt.





 Hes a seven year old boy...what do  you think he chose?


That's right! And he found it absolutely hilarious x

Here he is filling out  Elmo's birth certificate. And they even have a bear promise as well. It was such a nice experience. I want to take Jules on his special Mum day :)





After that Geordie had a chance to see Jules' Autism Queensland School. He has been wanting to see it for a long time so he found that special.

Pretty nice digs :)

Jules loves the freedom of the spring free trampolines! The school has 3 of these big, beautiful tramps :)

Tired, so tired

Ahhh yes, now I remember the real reason why I began walking daily. So that I would have more energy. I can't believe how lethargic I have been lately. Tommorow I am going to take Geordie out of school so that he can have a tour of The University of Queensland, or UQ. I will have a good chance to get a walk in then.

My instinct is that I am not going to get pregnant this round. I am going to obsess about it as little as possible, I really don't need a repeat of last months disaster!

I had a big chat about it with Jase, We are both scared of having another little one, its been so long since we had a baby and they do turn your life upside down. I had a big chat with Jason last night trying to determine where his head is at. He said that he wants a baby, but not as much as me, and he too worries about the same things.

Let the tests begin!

Fertility tests got done today. The doctor wanted it to be timed for ovulation, but I am fairly sure the 21 day test is to check that you have ovulated. I saw the doctor to make sure and then got the test done today which is ovulation day.

This is easily the best work up to ovulation we have ever had. We have sperm from the 5th, 3rd and day before ovulation so its looking good. What is extra impressive is that Jason has managed to get there each time we have gone for it, even last night when he felt a bit ill.

I am grateful as for the cauliflower veggie soup I cooked up a few days ago. It is so yummy and its great to have insta-great-food available when we are hungry. I found tossing in some spinach leaves is quick, palatable, healthy and bulks it out a bit.

When I was in the doctors office I saw my father in law there and I really couldn't avoid him so I said hi and started chatting. He asked why I was at the doctors and I lied and said its because my arm hurts. (It does hurt, but that wasn't why I was there). Then my mother in law rang to worry about my heart, and recommended weight loss and physiotherapy. Thank god I didn't tell them the real reason I was there. I don't want people to wonder even more about when/if/how I will get pregnant.

I have no money and a messy house so it is officially a no shopping week. Instead I got a good book from the library and had a 2 hour nap and then went about washing sheets and tidying my room up.

Jules is getting a belly from eating too much cheese and cake after school. So I pointed to his belly and said that he is getting fat and that he needed to eat more vegetables that vegetables were the answer to weight loss. He touched my belly and seemed to be understanding that that is what I mean by fat. The next day he asks for a carrot from the fridge, there was none. He asked if the cucumber was a vegetable and I said yes that would be good for him to eat if he was hungry. He then gave it to me, I took a bite and he literally expected me to transform like magic into a slim person! LOL bless, kids keep you surprised and laughing :)