Ugh

Feel terrible. Hot. Threw up. Julia was bothering me being all wiggly and squiggly and when she invaded my sick space on the couch one time too many by crowding me with toys she wanted me to hold I said, "Julia. NO. On the floor." very firmly and she burst into tears and went to lay down on the rug.

I asked her if she was ok and she said, "No."

"Do you want me to hold you?"

"No, Mommy."

And she just lay there feeling bad.

I felt bad too, but what can you do? I'm feverish and sick and I don't want to lie under a mound of play food, Lego, and pop beads.

Later she brought me a wadded up Kleenex and applied it to my head. "Mommy, ice. Feel better?"

That made me laugh. I don't think she understands being sick. She only knows when things hurt from falling down and since she usually asks for ice to put on whatever it it she banged up, I suppose she thought applying ice would fix me.

Sick! Again!

Sore throat. Congeted nose. Grumpy, sniffling kid.

So we're at it again with the latest daycare cold. It gets to where I see some kid coming at me with snot hanging out and I want to scream, "Stay away from me!"

Ugh.

Busy, busy

I want to get fitness back up on the front burner. Even though things here have been super busy, I want to keep trying to balance everythign in my life out so fitness doesn't get the short end of the stick.

But overall, things are good.

My labs came back and all is well except for elevated testosterone. Which is why I'm losing hair. Endoc wants me back on Glucophage to help with that once I'm done nursing but since I don't know when exactly that will be my other recourse is to buckle down ont he exercise in hopes that it will help with the insulin resistance which in turn ought to help lower excess androgens. PCOS can be so bizarre sometimes.

Things are coming along at work -- so we'll see if preschool gets some church funding or what. I have an early shift today to help cover for Carla so last night I was packing up all the food from organic produce delivery and then leftovers.

I got my new Tupperware and I like it. The "Crystal Wave" small divided bowl is a much better size for me than the "Rock 'N Serve" divided rectangle. The other just holds way too much food for lunch.

I'd made that corn chowder again Sunday so I'm finishing it up with broccoli and oranges on the side:

Yoga and Corn Chowder

Yoga with Julia again. I'm enjoying the time with her but I need to get back to "real" workouts.

For Amy... the corn chowder recipe. It was based on the recipe from Vegan with a Vengence but I omitted the olive oil and sauteeing the veg first. I also had a shortcut to the potatoes because I happened to have leftover mashed potato made with soy milk from the night before.

Corn Chowder -- makes about 8 cups

• 2 medium russet potatoes, chopped
• 3 cups water
• 2 vegetable boullion cubes

Boil the potatoes in the water in a large pot. While this is happening get these ready to fling in:

• 1 medium onion, diced
• 3 cups corn (frozen is fine)
• 1 cup carrot, diced
• 1 red pepper, diced
• 1-2 jalapeno chiles, seeded, deveined, minced (skip or use less if you don't like the heat)
• 1 tsp thyme
• 1 tsp rosemary
• 1 bay leaf
  
• pinch cayenne
• juice from 1 lime

When potatoes are tender, blender what is in the pot to form the "creamy" base to the soup. Immersion blender workes best, or you can transfer to regular blender in batches and put back in pot. Make it all smooth or leave some chunky. Or don't bother to blend at all. Your preference.

Add the other ingredients. Simmer for 20 min til onions are clear and carrots tender.

When that is done, remove bay leaf and stir in...

• 1 tbsp maple syrup
• 1/4 cup plain soy milk
• salt and pepper to taste

and heat a bit more. Garnish with green onion. I served it with a chunk of sourdough loaf and then cut up oranges.

Here it is in detail:

Yummm! :)

Food Stuff

I'm on my game this week foodwise. Corn chowder was excellent, peanut noodles fast, kitchen organized and house in decent shape. I'm getting enough sleep. What I'm not getting is enough fitness, but sooner or later all three parts of my life will fly.

Right now I'm obsessed with food to go. Between work, church, playgroups, running around in general... I need ways to make food portability easier. Hot stuff? Hands down the lunch jars. Cooking group? Tupperware is my friend.

But I'm not totally sold on Tupperware for cold stuff. And the lunch jars are too tiny for salad. I stumbled upon http://www.fit-fresh.com/index.html and their salad container and I'm going... hmmmm....

The runner up is the one from the Container Store and really I like the looks of it better but it doesn't tell me the brand nor the capacity.

ABC Yoga

Another round of family yoga to the ABC one.

Julia decided to get naked smack in the middle of it and finished her workout nude. A luxury I, as an adult woman, do not have because I greatly dislike boob bounce. Then Julia led the conga line to the bathroom where we proceeded to get through the bath-story-bed routine and at last, she's asleep!

Long day tomorrow and a really busy week. My focus is going to be eating decently and getting workouts knocked off one day at a time.

Yoga En Famille

It's late and it was a long day.

I still want to get myself organized for school tomorrow and get a jump on my lesson for Sunday since it's my turn to do Sunday School so I need to sack out pronto and then get up before Julia so I have time to work in peace.

I didn't get to do any of this stuff in the day because while today was one of my days off, I went to school anyway to meet Carla to get on with our clean up mission. We didn't get to do everything we planned, but we got a lot of other clean up stuff done. I woudl love to see us get to the point where the preschool is bringing in enough bucks to hire a daily cleaning staff again.

It was a long day and after we all got home (Paul came home early) we crashed. Long naps til 11 PM! Then it was a scramble for dinner (junk food, ugh) and mopping the gross kitchen tile (ugh) and finally we could spend some time with Julia.

(I need to get ON with cooking ahead and freezing because when I fail to plan dinner ahead of time, I plan to fail at eating something sane. At the very least make the trip to Whole Foods and so on and lay in some frozen food despite the expense.)

We did the Yoga Kids 3: Silly to Calm this time.

This one didn't grab her like Yoga Kids 2 did because it does not have interspersed scenes. Yoga Kids 1 cuts to film footage of the animals described by the poses and then Yoga Kids 2 cuts to cartoons of the letter of the alphabet for the upcoming pose. Yoga Kids 3, while still pitched at kid level, is getting closer to an actual session for yoga practice so I think the older end of the 3-6 spectrum would "get it" better than my 2 year old. Her attention span wasn't as good on this one and she'd wander off or try to sit on us or go play.

Paul and I were struggling to balance in "stork pose" and then "flamingo pose" and finally "tree pose" and she came up and sat on his foot and beat on his leg and he said "Help! My tree is being attacked by a logger! I am being felled!" This started me giggling and then my own tree fell over.

I really hope we can stick to doing these with her on Tuesday & Thursday nights. No, it's not an especially challenging workout for me. But it is an introduction for her and at least SOMETHING of a workout for non-exercising, stress prone Paul. And I really love doing something together as a family that is so peaceful and grounding.

Paul and I both got a kick out of watching Julia running in circles around the room grabbing handfuls of air yelling "Reach for the sun! Reach for the sun!" and then bounding along with "Grasshopper hop! Grasshopper hop!" turning into an impressively fluid downward dog with "I do yoga stretch." Little kids are so supple.

The DVD has the kids "marking territory" when in downward dog as a means to increase the stretch of the pose but I don't think Julia realizes the joke. That when she's lifting her leg to "do yoga stretch" she mimics a dog cocking his leg to take a pee.

Intervals

• What:treadmill intervals (program 4 done 2 times)
• Duration: 40 min
• Distance: 1.8 miles
• Calories Burned: 312

Forgot to turn on my HRM watch, so no details. Pleasant walk, Julia kept on sleeping and I got a little further into The Birdcage. She woke up just as I was finishing and now I need to get lunch togehter and get us ready for school.

dietfacts.com tidbit

And I just noticed... when you look up food at www.dietfacts.com, you have the option to plug that sucker right into your fitday.com log (if you are logged in.)

Saves some typing!

Yoga en famille

Julia does yoga at preschool sometimes and I like the Yoga Kids 1 video they have got. I happened to spot a double set of Yoga Kids at Target for $15 so I picked it up and today after dinner we did one as a family. It is called Yoga Kids 2: ABC’s:

It basically gives the letters of the alphabet different names (ie: "A" was "alligator, "C" was "Caterpillar" and "W" was "wheel." It’s 40 minutes long and Julia hung in there until the letter "T" so that was pretty good. The rest of the time she ran around while Paul and I finished the alphabet. It’s a mixture of what I’d consider "real" poses and then poses that have been kiddified to make them simpler.

What would be cool is if someone did something like this, and then in a small box in a corner had an adult demonstrating the "adult" way of doing the pose and then you could workout with your kid and feel like the workout was a good one.

Not that I have a problem inching around on the ground with Julia doing the "Caterpillar" thing. Well… other than the boobs.

Paul and Julia were inching away much faster than me and I yelled, "Help! I’ve got drag holding me back!" and that cracked Paul up.

Weights -- Legs

Washed my sneakers and even though I put them in the sun in the patio Ithink they are still a bit damp. So no cardio yesterday.

Today was a leg workout while Paul took a nap. I still hate sissy squats, I still love abductor/adductor work, and I still could go a lot heavier on weights but free weight squats and "good mornings" make me a little nervous on my own and extremely nervous with Julia running up to me every few seconds to try to feed me her pretend cooking.

She made me laugh when I was doing leg curls because she came up to my head which was face down and then hunkered over to peer into my face and then annouced "I watching mommy."

Calf raises I’m going to have to kick up. 100 lbs is too easy and 20 lbs when I do it dumbbell style is a joke. I’m not working at all — it’s just fooling around.

Dumbbell Split Squat
1st set (20) @ 16 lbs
2 (20) @ 16
3 (20) @ 16

Dumbbell Good Mornings
1st set (20) @ 12 lbs
2 (20) @ 12
3 (20) @ 12

Sissy Squat
1 (20) @ Body weight
2 (20) @ body weight
3 (20) @ Body weight

Leg Curl
1 (20) @ 40
2 (20) @ 40
3 (20) @ 40

Cable Adductor
1st (20) @ 20 lbs
2 (20 @ 20 lbs
3 (20) @ 20 lbs

Cable Abductor
1st (20) @ 20 lbs
2 (20 @ 20 lbs
3 (20) @ 20 lbs

Calf Press
1 (20) @ 100
2 (20) @ 100
3 (20) @ 100

Dumbbell Calf Raise
1 (20) 20
2 (20) 20
3 (20) 20

Crunch!

I adapted this from Peter Berley's "Fresh Food Fast." Dropped the oil and switched to sugar. And I've been obsessed with eating celery this way lately. In theory it serves 4 but I just eat the whole thing for a slightly over 500 calorie lunch.

• 8 medium stalks celery, chopped
• 1 apple, peeled, chopped
• 1/3 cup walnut, chopped
• 1 garlic clove, minced
• 2 tbsp lemon juice
• 2 tbsp Gulden's Spicy brown mustard
• 2 tsp sugar

Mix the last four in a separate bowl before mixing everythign together.