Back in the Saddle Again

... well, almost.  Last week, my darling and beloved treadmill went on the fritz, right before we had to go to Dallas for Uncle Bill's funeral.  It felt absolutely catastrophic.  I've been doing really well on my Couch to 5K (my secret weapon: Bruce Springsteen concert DVDs), and to have my treadmill poop out on me left me in the depths of despair :::back of hand to forehead:::  Luckily, it's still under warantee, and the fix-it guy is coming tomorrow morning.  Good thing, too, because I tried doing Week 3 Day 1 with Bean in the stroller, and the Texas heat just about killed me!

In Shrinking Mom  news, I went to Weight Watchers this week, and the downward trend continues.  I'm down another 2.6 pounds, bringing my WW total to 26.4 pounds lost, and I'm down 61 pounds from my pregnancy high.   I only have 18 pounds of baby weight left to lose!!!  Woo hoo!!!

Things that worked for me this week:

• fruit fruit fruit!    I've been snacking mostly on fruit.  I love those little Cutie clementines, and Bean loves the little apples still.  The watermelons have just started getting sweet & wonderful, and I'm sitting here with a gallon Ziplock of it and a fork.  I got some nectarines today at HEB & I'm really excited about them.  There were some peaches, but they didn't smell like anything, so I'm going to wait. Cherry prices are coming down... I'm getting excited about them.
• compensation    Since I'm in the midst of a blasted migraine cycle, I've been drinking more Coca-Cola than normal (about 2 90-calorie cans a day, at 3 PointsPlus each), but I just make sure that I track everything.  
• wine as a treat, not a ritual     I used to have a glass or two a night of wine in the evenings.  I've basically given that up.  I drank more this week than I usually do: a few glasses of wine at the funeral reception, a few drinks Saturday night, a couple of glasses with dinner last night (more on that later), and I'm sure a couple tonight (it's bill-paying day. Blech.)

In Growing Boy news, last night we had a rather uncommon family dinner night (in that all three of us got to eat dinner together)!! I decided to make Jamie Oliver's Shrimp & Pea Risotto which is always a big hit in our house, and it was again last night.  It's found in my first JO cookbook, The Naked Chef Takes Off, but it's very simple to make.

I use about a pound of raw frozen and peeled shrimp and a few handsful of frozen peas.  Let the shrimp defrost a bit while you're cooking the risotto, and put them in at the end of Step 3.  Throw the peas in at Step 4 (don't use the butter or parmasean cheese).  Before serving, julienne a handful each of fresh basil and mint and stir it in, along with either lemon juice or rice vinegar (my preference).  Serves 4 (at least in my house)

Weight Watcher's PointsPlus Value per serving : 17 (definitely for special occasions, but still pretty darn healthy.  You take a BIG hit on the rice.  I wish Arborio rice came in brown...)

I've noticed that Bean prefers his food to be cut up into smaller pieces than he used to.  His sandwiches get eaten more if they're cut into 8 triangles, for some reason.  At dinner yesterday, I just cut up his shrimps into about 3 pieces each.

On the menu for this week, Chicken Thighs with Spinach and Mushrooms (from the Weight Watchers Ready Set Go! cookbook), Pork Tenderloin with Spring Veggies (from WW PointsPlus cookbook), and Texas Chicken Soup (also from the WWPP cookbook).  I'm excited about the new dishes!!!! I just hope that Mr. Bean enjoys them as well!

Long Time Gone

Sickpocalypse 2011 has officially ended.  I have been absent from the blogosphere for the last (eep!) two weeks due to a migraine headache that lasted more than a week, followed by a pretty violent stomach bug, a death in the family (we say goodbye to Uncle Bill on Wednesday), and me catching up on all of the housework I missed during the aforementioned events.

In Shrinking Mom news, last Tuesday I went into Weight Watchers, not anticipating a big loss.  I hadn't exercised much, and had been guzzling the 90 calorie cans of Coca-Cola like crazy (Coca-Cola helps my headaches a bit).  Remarkably, I lost weight!  I was down 2.2 pounds from the week before! 

So, for those keeping track, I'm 2.6 down from my when I recommitted to WW on 5/3, 21.8 down from my starting WW weight, and 56.2 down from my pregnancy high. 

My next three goals are:

• 25 pounds lost (from my starting WW weight), which is 3.2 pounds away!!
• lose 7 more pounds in the next 5 weeks (it's a new weight "decade" and I have 5 weeks left on my weight record card)
• my pre-baby weight (my weight at my 1st OB appointment in May 2009)

And in Growing Boy news, while I was incapacitated with the migraine from hell, he got a stomach virus, poor dude.  We did the BRAT diet for a few days, and of course he bounced back like a chunky little toddler does.

Some things that have worked for us in the last 2 weeks:

Spaghetti Night!  I used Marky Ramone's marinara sauce, which is a great substitute for homemade for us busy moms.  The ingredients are: tomatoes, tomato puree, basil, citric acid, salt, olive oil, onions, garlic, black pepper, and oregano.
We cut up one slice of peppered bacon into 1" pieces, and rendered it down.  Saute sliced baby portabello mushrooms, and then brown about a pound of 93% fat free ground beef, and then add about a jar of the marinara sauce. 

Boil a package of whole wheat fettucini and serve it up!  I find that for Bean, the wider noodles work best for him, since they're easier to grip.  We've been trying to encourage the use of utensils, but he's still pretty dependent on his hands. 

Snacktime tends to be rather hit or miss with us.  Like any human, Bean goes through phases.  Our go-to snack foods are: string cheese, raisins, bananas, clementines, and apples.  I recently found these marvelous little apples that are perfect for little hands.  I used to give him regular apples, but so much went wasted.  He likes already sliced ones, too, but those are rather pricey.  I got these little apples in a bag for $4, and there were about 15 or so apples in it.  If he has an apple for each snack (which he's been doing lately), that's a week of snacks for only four bucks!

And sadly, we will be heading to Dallas this week to bid farewell to the very last member of my family in the "grand" generation.  My great-uncle Bill passed in his sleep last week, a few days shy of his 90th birthday.  He was a fantastcally eccentric man, a brilliant engineer, and was the first person to expose me to "fancy" food. Bon Voyage, Uncle Bill!

Super Trouper

Today was one of those days that make me feel like a total supermommy.  Tuesdays are my Weight Watchers weigh-in days.  I try to make the 12:15 meeting if I can, but they have open hours until 3:30, so if my afternoon gets away from me, I can still go and weigh in.  And since WW is on the other side of town, I use Tuesdays as my west side errands day:  Costco, the nice grocery store, and the mall if I have to go there.

Today included all of those PLUS my going waaaay up north to get my computer from the really great people at Heroic Efforts data recovery.  They did a great job diagnostically, were very friendly and accommodating, but I decided that between all of my camera memory cards, my old computer, and my phone, that I could probably get most of my info on my own.

It felt like we were always moving today,  just boom boom boom!  I tell you what, I love running errands with Bean.  He is such a cheerful and curious little person and loves people so much.  He causes so many happy smiles when we're out and about; it fills me with joy to think that my boy could have made someone's day.  He's totally that cute baby that you tell your husband about after encountering!

I know it's probably not the best idea, but I don't really like to eat much before I weigh in at WW.  When I make my meeting, it's fine.  But on days like today, I didn't get to WW until about 2pm (I lost 0.4 lbs this week.  Not great, but not a gain!), by the time I got to Costco, I was wilting.  I had a slice of their really bread-y cheese pizza, and I felt disgusting about it later. Especially when I read that the ONE piece of "Fast food style cheese pizza" was 15 PointsPlus!!  I get 31 for the day.

Thankfully, I got my meal-planning stuff together, and while tonight was crazy, thrown-together dinner night (thank the sweet Lord for whole wheat flax waffles), I'm on track to make some great stuff for the rest of this week.  I got these amazing list notepads at Anthropologie a couple of weeks ago, that I think are going to make my life much much easier, and I truly started utilizing them this week. They have a Farmer's Market notepad that I also have, but I'm not quite there yet...  

This is what I use for my grocery lists.  Both of these notepads have magnets on the back, and they live on the fridge for easy updating.  I use a red marker to check off the things that I need at Sam's or Costco, and pencil for grocery store.

For meal planning, I write down the recipe I'm using, along with a short code for the cookbook, and the page number, so I can easily access it when I need it. 

After dinner, playtime, bath, stories, and bedtime, I realized that I still hadn't gotten a workout in.  So, I hopped on ye olde treadmill and did Week 2, Day 2 of Couch to 5K, even though I've been in PAIN all day from my strength training workout yesterday.

Today is Tuesday (or it was), which is bathroom cleaning day, so I scrubbed the toilets & bathtubs and then went downstairs to sweep the floor and clean up after dinner.  I guess the workout energized me, because the next thing I knew, I was organizing my cookbooks (something that desperately needed to be done)!  I realized that I might just have a mild obsession with Julia Child and with Jamie Oliver.  I have 4 Julia books (not including biographies & My Life in France), and 6 Jamie cookbooks!! I found my little stash of Bob Greene's Best Life books (I have the book, the cookbook, and two copies of the journal) that I had completely forgotten about.  I think I'm going to start reading the book tomorrow.  I looked at the journal, and I really liked the format, so I'll add that onto the pile of things, too!

I set aside all of my cookbooks that had to do with fresh eating, family eating, kids eating/ cooking, and my WW cookbooks, and those will be the ones I will be consulting primarily for this whole SMGB (Skinny Mom & Growing Boy) project.

Now that I see it's nearly 1:30am, I'm going to take my bath, read a little Manhunt, and go to bed.  Tomorrow, I have to clean our home office (eep!!) and do some cooking, but it's PapaBean's day off, so he will be spawnwatching while I have a day to do stuff like, well, clean the office.  I'm also going to do Bob Harper's Yoga workout.  These tired muscles need some stretching!

Do You Feel Like I Do?

I love Mother's Day, just love it.  Before I was a mom, it was a day for me to honor and thank all the moms in my life.  Now, it's "my day" (which is funny, because I heard that was supposed to be my wedding day...).  I don't know about your book, but apparently in my book, "my day" = copious amounts of beef and champagne.

Since restarting Weight Watchers last week, I have been diligently journaling my food intake, looking up their PointsPlus values, exercising and journaling that, and making generally good choices (I swear those Peeps on the sideboard are sitting there mocking me, though.  Thank God fruit has a 0 PPV).  I anticipated yesterday being a crazy food freeforall, and made sure that I had all of my weekly PointsPlus saved up.

PapaBean, Bean and myself went out to brunch, and I had migas and fajitas (no cheese, no tortilla strips in the migas, TYVM), and a couple of mimosas.  Since PapaBean had to work yesterday, Bean and I took a jaunt to surprise my mom, who lives about 100 miles away, for the afternoon.  We went out to lunch, where the three of us picked at a LuAnn platter at Luby's (YES, I like Luby's.  You got a problem with that?), and had a fantastic time.  I loved spending Mother's Day with my mom and my kid.  My mom turns every little thing into a fun game with Bean, and they invent their own little language that they speak as they go, mostly involving cleaning things.  Hey, my future (or even my current) self isn't going to complain about my mom making my kid think that cleaning is fun.

After putting a particularly rambunctious Bean to bed (a bit later than normal, but yesterday was just plain weird compared to our normal day), PapaBean made a crazy delicious (and very naughty) dinner of the most gorgeously marbled inch-thick ribeyes you've ever seen and some beautifully seasoned Yukon gold potatoes, all grilled to perfection outside by my remarkable husband, and washed down with a lovely Bordeaux.  Oh, yeah, and we split a bottle of Tattinger.

Since I eat dinner with Bean every night, I usually eat at about 5:30.  Last night, since I had been eating all day long, we ate at about 10pm.  So, the combination of  French wines, Texas beef, and the late hour gathered in revolt against my body and woke this mama up at about 5:30 this morning with a bellyache, a pounding head, and a mouth that somewhat resembles a litterbox...

And if all of that wasn't "what the hell were you thinking?" enough for you, I decided at about 7pm (and after my 4th or so mimosa of the day), that I was going to hop onto the treadmill and do a quick Couch to 5K workout.  What I had forgotten was that my next C25K was the first of Week 2.  :O  I think that if I didn't have my Springsteen concert DVD (Houston '78.  Came in the recent Darkness on the Edge of Town boxed set), I'm almost certain that it would have killed me.  But I finished it!  Yay!

I sit here, one eye on the Today show, the other on Bean playing, contemplating a cup of coffee, still full from last night... and I'm wondering what workout I'm going to do today.  Bob Harper's Super Strength DVD or another C25K?

Mother Nature's Son

I find myself with a rather pedestrian problem.

I, like millions of women before and after me, gained far too much weight while I was pregnant with my sweet Bean in 2009.  I've been Weight Watchers-ing off and on for the last year or so, but have seemed to plateau  30-40 pounds higher than my goal weight.  So, I got my chubby patoot back to my meeting last week, hopped back on the treadmill, and have recommitted to Project MILF.

And if you did your math right, dear reader, you also realize that I have a toddler.  What you might not realize is that my sweet Bean is a gargantuan 16 month old boy.  He is 33" tall, weighs 32 pounds, wears 2T or 3T clothes and 6.5W shoes.  The word on the street is they only get bigger as time moves on. 

My problem is, how to I transform my rather chubby self into a svelte, hip, mom-on-the-go whilst encouraging the growth of a Beanzilla simultaneously?

While I'm not a dogmatic seasonal locavore, I do try to feed my family real food that is minimally processed and well-balanced.  I have a gorgeous herb garden, and green tomatoes on the vine as we speak.   I have a stack of Weight Watchers cookbooks and kid-friendly cookbooks ready to go on this grand journey towards health, growth, and de-chubbification.

My plan is to post links to the cookbooks and recipes I'm using, Weight Watchers PointsPlus values, and any modifications I use to make a certain recipe either toddler- or WW-friendly, and of course, the reactions of Bean, PapaBean, and myself, hopefully with a few pictures, as well. 

So, on the eve of my second Mother's Day (which I anticipate being very not WW friendly), I'm embarking on this exercise in accountability, a venture I that I hope will end in success... and not in another Miraclesuit next summer. Those things are rather heartbreaking, and I have 2.