"Mommy"

Being a mommy is hard work, on many different levels. Right now my kids are at pretty good ages and not too difficult most days. I mean yes I have to stop them from fighting with each other, make sure they get their homework done and make them clean their rooms, but it's pretty "easy" most days. What I am currently struggling with is just being on everyone else's schedule. Nick's job has been VERY busy lately. Plus he is in a Spanish class, and a few times a month he is on worship team (although he is taking a break from that), and then the occasional "other" meeting/practice has him away from home most evenings these days. So everything falls to me. So between homework, baths, dinner, dance lessons, soccer practice, Awana, school activies, and soccer games, I don't have much of a life. My job right now is just to take the kids to each of their activies. And even on nights when we don't have after school stuff (Monday and Thursday), it's still filled with homework, cleaning rooms, cooking dinner, and getting showers done. So there is not free time. It's just going from one thing to the next. And unless I am in the car or at an activity I rarely get out of the house. During the day it's laundry, and cleaning house, feeding Capri, and playing with Capri, grocery shopping, planning groceries/couponing etc.... Now let me stop here and say that I don't want to change what I am doing. I LOVE being a stay at home mom. I wouldn't want to go to work and put Capri in daycare. I love that I am home when the girls get home from school. I love that I get to take them to their activies and don't have to do all that on top of working full time. So I do understand that it could be worse. But it's still just really hard on my emotions sometims. I'm not Lindsay right now. I'm a wife, and a mother, and a cook, and a chauffer, and a maid, and a teacher. But I'm not Lindsay, and that's hard.

Sorry for my ramblings. Just had to get it out. :)

Weight loss commercials

I am finding weight loss commercials to be very funny these days. "Eat this, lost weight, don't eat this lose weight..." Special K cereal says eat 1 bowl for breakfast, and 1 for lunch and then a healthy dinner. Slimfast says drink one shake for breakfast, 1 for lunch, and eat a healthy dinner, and today I saw "eat one grain, 1 fruit, and a yoplait light for breakfast and lunch, and then eat a healthy dinner." The truth is you can eat ANYTHING you want for breakfast and lunch as long as it's around 250 calories, and then eat a dinner of around 500 calories, with 1 100 calorie snack, and you will lose weight. You can eat a donut, for breakfast, a snickers, for lunch, a granola bar for a snack, and a bowl of soup for dinner, and you will lose weight. Because the math behind weight loss is simple, burn off more than you eat. If you eat around 1000 calories everyday no mater what it is, you will probably lose some weight. But the problem I see is that most of American isn't fat because they don't know the right things to eat. So just saying "drink only a shake, and/or only a bowl of cereal" isn't helping. That works for a few days or weeks maybe, but it's not going to help them in the long wrong. Because even eating a snickers everyday would get old after awhile. I think weight loss is more mental than physical, and until we start to address those issues, I am not sure we are really helping anyone by telling them what to eat or what not to eat.

Half Marathon

I did it! I ran in my very first Half Marathon. I ran almost all of the 13.1 miles. I only walked during water breaks, and once on a road that was at an angle because it was hurting my ankles. Other than that I ran the whole thing. It was so much fun! I felt amazing all the way up to around mile 8, and then I hit a wall. But I kept going. It felt so great to see and cross that finish line. And 2 days later I feel perfect. Just a tiny bit sore, but no worse than when I do strength training. I am still in a bit of shock that I did it. It feels so nice to have reached a goal that I set for myself over a year ago. Here are a few pictures.

Nick too this picture around mile 4.

I stopped on the side of the race and asked a Disney worker to take this picture with my cell phone. :)

At the end with my medal.