It's finally feeling like spring again!

It's monday and the sun was shining! I really hope that spring is here to stay! This snow every week has gotten really old! I want to get out in the yard and start getting some of that work done but lately everytime I have a day to start, the weather decides not to cooperate!

My 2 goals for today: 125oz of water and all my fruits and veggies (I have been lacking in this area lately!)

Today's sumary~
Water: 84oz so far
Pts eaten:29/27Fruits and Veggies: 3 - fell short. Challenge carries over to tomorrow!!
1 C strawberries
1 banana
beans and tomatoes in my chili

Workout: (6ap's)
Elliptical 25 minutes (2.1 miles)
Stationary Bike 10 minutes (2.3 miles)
Strength training 15 minutes
Running Club 3/4 mile - ran 1/2 walked half

Tomorrow's goals: 6ap's again. 1 mile with D before school, cardio at home after work (elliptical and one 30 minutes DVD workout). Pack lunch instead of stopping and buying lunch from somewhere!

Time to refocus

The last few weeks have been pretty crazy and I need to stop and refocus. My next phase of staying on facus will bring me here daily. I will post daily in regards to my workouts, eating, downfalls and successes of the previous day.

yesterday... coming off of a busy weekend with Darirn's birthday party, pizza, dining out, starting spring cleaning and shopping for new jeans, it is time to stop and refocus!

Water: 119 oz.
Pts eaten: 23.5

Exercise: nothing structured, but did some walking around the mall while shopping for new jeans.

Daily Discovery: Erberts and Gerberts Chili. Ok, not a NEW find, but was finally able to figure out the pts for the Chicken Chili and I was excited to find that it is only 4pts per cup! We picked up a bucket of it at lunch yesterday when we were heading to the mall, so I will be eating some of that for lunch again today!! WooHoo!!!

Tomorrow's plan: Workout in morning at Y (cardio plus strength), Eye Appt, few errands, Running Club with Darrin after school. No sweets, 125oz water, 5 AP's, total 1.5 miles run between Y and Runnign Club.

Over the weekend I also discovered that my body is definetly not use to having Pizza Hut pizza anymore! Friday night I had 1 silce of cheese lovers pizza and a slice of pepperoni lovers and it did not agree with my stomach later! Not sure which one it was that did it, ot maybe it was both. Thinking that i will stay away from the pizza in the future!

Knitting Project 2

The new project is coming along. I decided to do a knit tank top with some awesome yarn that I found at Patti's Yarn shop over on the east side of town. After knitting and ripping, then knitting and ripping some more I think I finally got the pattern figured out! And the scary thing, it was not a difficult pattern to begin with~ I was making it harder than I needed to!

The back is now finally just about half way done ~ everything seems to be going a little faster now that I have my brain working the right way on the project! I was making things way more difficult that they need to be!

I finally had a chance to stop at Loops and Links in DePere! What a great little shop! I will definitely be heading back there again! I found so many different yarns that I would love to add to my stash to use later, but I need to hold myself back sometimes so that I don't buy too much right away without a project in mind! I don't want my yarn stash to turn into the scrapbook stash that I have upstairs - tons of stuff and no ambition to do anything with it!! One of these days I will pull all of that back out and finish some of those scrapbooks!!

I did find my next project though!! Darrin has decided that he wants to new hats. One, he selected as just a simple stocking knit hat and the other he wants a Jester Style hat similar to the fleece one that he has now. BUT I found an awesome pattern online this morning for a Shark Hat (Thanks Allison for creating this!!!) I am going to bounce that pattern off of him when he gets home from school and see what he thinks! Then maybe once I get that one finished, maybe I will attempt a smaller one in a baby size for Jim and Jen's baby!

Easter Weekend

Easter Weekend has come and gone. It was a busy weekend but we all had fun!

Friday we spent the day doing some Geocaching around Rhinelander - this kids had fun finding the caches for this year's Winter Warrior challenge. Some of the caches were fairly easy to find, tohers, not so easy! One of them was so small that I actually touched it AND picked it up without even realizing it was what I was looking for!! We found a total of 7 of the caches in Rhinelander, now we just had to find a few in Boulder Junction and St Germain. Those are on the agenda for tomorrow!

Saturday we made the drive up to Boulder Junction where the Chamber was sponsoring an Easter Geocaching event! Darrin decided that he had to team up with Papa and find all the caches before us. It was a sunny but yet chilly day, but it was nice to get outside and enjoy the sun! Each of the caches was fairly easy to find (as long as you went the right way to get to it!) as it was a ice cream bucket filled with plastic easter eggs! Each cache contained a different color egg. The mission was to find all 12 different colored eggs. They even had some special Gold eggs hidden inside soem of the caches. We spent a lot of time laughing at ourselves falling through the knee deep (and sometimes higher) snow to get to the eggs! In the end we got a lot of great photos, had some great laughs and met some new friends!

We also comleted our Winter Warrior Cache card through the local Chamber offices! Darrin and Papa are going during the week on afternoon to turn in our cards. In total, counting the caches at the event, we found 24 caches this weekend! We have decided that we are going to try to spend more time caching this year - the last few years have been pretty busy and we just never made the time for it!

Have you ever tried having an easter egg hunt while there is still snow on the ground? This year we knew that the Easter Bunny was going to have fun trying to hide the kids eggs without leaving trails right to the eggs - there was still piles of snow in Uncle Mike's back yard! Not to mention the fact that he had to work hard to figure out where to hide the 178 eggs that he hid for the kids! Yes that is right, the Easter Bunny hid 178 eggs - both inside Uncle Mike's house as well as around his yard! That bunny got creative as there were eggs hanging from trees, lights and the gutters, as well as in foot print around the yard, in the deer feed sacks and anywhere else that he could think of! In the end, the kids found all but 6 of the eggs. We all started making bets on the date that Uncle Mike will see easter eggs in his yard

I can make you thin

Last night I caught part of a new "reality" show in TLC. This show, called "I can make you thin" featured British guru Paul McKenna. This show is designed to help you lose the weight without "dieting". He urges people to follow 4 simple Golden Rules and it will ehlp to "reporgram" the mind to help you lose the weight.

Dont' get me wrong, I am not out for the quick fix. I love weight watchers and the program it follows - it works! But watchign this show last night really make me stop and think. Not about WHAT I was eating, but HOW I was eating! So many times we eat without thinking. We are mindless eating. When you are watching TV and you grab that pag of potato chips, are you relaly hungry or are you just eating them because that is always what you have done in the evening? How long do you spend actually ENJOYING your food? Did you really taste that last meal you ate? Most of us will say no. It is not that we didn't like what we ate, we are just eating too fast becasue we are on the run!

75% of the time that you think you are hungry you are just thirsty. How many times have you thought you were hungry, went to the fridge to eat something, only to find yourself feeling "stuffed" after eating just a little bit? Chances are, you were not hungry, but rather thirsty! Next time to think you are hungry, try a glass of water first! You mgiht be pleasantly surprised!

I will add more an my thougths here, but I have to find my way to the Y and get some of my workout in anyway!!

Glove Bunnies

I tried my attempt at getting crafty today! I found these really cute patterns for animals made out of gloves and decided to give them a try! Apparently Marth Stewart featured them on her show not too long ago... After some quick looking this monring I found everything I needed at Wal-Mart and the Dollar Tree.


After a few hours, this is what I ended up with. I have decided that the project would have been much easier with a sewing machine, but I did everything with hand sewing and glue today.

My mom has told me that she has an extra sewing maching that she no longer uses so she is going to bring it down to me next time they come this way!

I am actually looking at a few books at Amazon to make other glove and sock animals. This will probably be some great crafts for the kids to work on when we are all at the cottage during the summer too!!

I just think that these little guyes are so cute! This one has some minor issues and will have to figure out how to fix them with the next ones - for example, the directions did not have anything in them on how to attach the head to the body so I had to wing it! When you look at him closely you can see where it needs to be done differently, but for a first run I am not complaining!!

The proof is in the numbers!

BiosLife Slim works! Not that I ever doubted Tina and Kent, but when you see the numbers yourself, you can't help but to believe it! Once a month I will update my data here so that you can see it working...

Starting data (2/01/08):
Weight ~ 206
Chest ~ 47
Waist ~ 41
Hips ~ 46
Thigh ~ 24

Current (2/29/08):
Weight ~ 201.2
Chest ~ 45
Waist ~ 40
Hips ~ 45.5
Thigh ~ 23

According to the data on BiosLife, it usually take at least 8 weeks for people to start seeing results. Taking this into considedration, if I am seeing numbers change like this already, I am very curious to see what they are going to do once I have been using the product even longer!! The numbers are only going down from here!

I decided not to sign up for Shape Up again this session. Instead I am goign to try out some of the other FREE classes that are offered. I tried a new class at the Y yesterday. Zumba. This was actually one of the first times that this class was ever offered at out Y - Wednesday night was the first. It is a lot of fun and very fast moving, but it was worth the sweat! This will definetly be working it's was into my regualr workout routine!