Busy busy!

 To keep this short and sweet........ there have been:

 Lots of smiles

Lots of laughs

Lots of rain

 Lots of accomplishments

 Lots of soccer

Lots of messes

 Lots of family together time

 Lots of love

 

 

Getting Behind

Well I've been on the computer a lot lately, but I've neglected the blog. Well, this blog. I started up a new weight loss group and it has taken a lot of my time. It was a little more involved than just losing weight, so I've been putting together score sheets, setting up rules, putting together a blog and more.  This time it was more about setting up healthy habits and hopefully losing the weight in the process.

 It's been good. I was having a hard time losing the rest of my weight once my last group ended, so I needed to start another one. Brian is my partner and it's going pretty good so far. Brian has lost 10 pounds in just less than 2 weeks and I was at 5 pounds. It ha s about 6 weeks left and I'm hoping I can make it where I want to be at that point.

We've been going back and forth to Sandy a bunch this month. There have been bridal showers, Easter, and work meetings. My sister Caroline gets married next week, so there's been a lot going on with that. It's been fun. The only bad thing about the bridal showers was skipping all the treats. I really wanted to cry the first night. Jill was there to make me be strong. If she would have tasted..... I would have tasted. Oh well.

  Easter was good. We were actually home but the weekend after we went down and had an Easter dinner with everyone and an egg hunt with the kids. It was fun. The next day my sister Mellie and Greg blessed their twin boys. More food unable to be eaten. :(

 

 As with the rest of the country, we've had SOOOOOOO much rain and snow! This has not really been a nice spring. We are grateful for the moisture, but a little sun would be nice too. I snagged this picture the other day after a brief shower. One of the nice things about rain is how it makes everything clean and sparkly.

Well our little Kiki had her 6th birthday yesterday. I asked her what she wanted for her birthday. She said, " I want shell soup for dinner, pancakes for breakfast, chicken nuggets for lunch and my cake for dessert." There's a girl that knows what she wants. I was only asking about dinner! :) She had a great day and I think she felt pretty special. She wore her hat from school all day. These are her knew sunglasses and outfit which she loved and looks so cute in!

 

Luckily Charlotte fell asleep and I got to take the time to decorate her cake. I had fun doing it. It's a lot more enjoyable when I am left alone to do it

After all the cake and presents we went downstairs to play her knew Wii game and Bella took the Barbie and sat it up next to her to watch. I thought it was so funny I had to take a picture.

 Other than that Brian has been working in the garden trying to get things going. We have some peas coming up that I'm thrilled about. We've had to wait on the other stuff 'til the ground wasn't mud and it's warmer. Hopefully that will be this week. I have another story to share about our squirrels, but that will have to wait until next time. Here are 2 more pictures that I love. No story, just cute kiddos!

6 months old

Well we hit 6 months and all is well. We love Miss Charlotte. Such a sweet baby. Here are just a few things about her:
* been crawling for nearly 2 months
* stands up on furniture
* feeds herself finger food
* gives the best smiles when you smile at her
* has her 2 bottom teeth
* has been holding her bottle up for about 2 month
* climbed over the step in the living and fell down the first set of stairs
 * started walking yesterday. Just kidding... but that is just around the corner I'm sure!

I love this picture 'cause it looks like she's totally posing and you can see her little teeth.

This one she just looks so darn cute in.

 

And this one makes me want to eat up her cute little face! Love this girl!

My journey so far....

I started a weight loss group January 1st and to recap the story I was in 2nd place the whole way until the last 2 weeks I took the lead and the next person closest to me had to lose 4 pounds to beat me. We were down in Sandy and I brought my scale and planned on trying my parents 'cause my scale kept wigging out and this was our final weigh in on April 2nd. On my scale I'd be up 1 pound and then 2 minutes later I'd be down 1.5 and it just seemed very inconsistent. Well, I got on my parent's scale and I was 1 pound less on theirs than on mine, but mine seemed to be pretty stable so I was going to take that weight. Then I got on and saw the girl had beaten me by .2%  if I went on my scale and I'd beat her if I was on my parents scale by that same amount. If I averaged the 2, we'd tie. So after a long day of debating, I figured I started on my scale I had to end on it and had I posted first and not seen her weight I wouldn't have even had this debate. I would have been excited with my loss and figured she wouldn't have lost 4 pounds since rarely lost more than 2 pounds each week. Anyway, I felt like it was the right decision to just stick with my scale and it is what it is. I took second place and I still won $120 but more importantly I lost 27 pounds and that is worth it all in the end!

So I've gone back and forth and debated about whether or not to post these pictures anywhere. They are, after all, more revealing than I'm comfortable with and fairly embarrassing.  I took the pictures just for me and to hopefully keep me motivated. Funny thing is that over the last 6 years I've taken quite a few of the "befores", but never reached the "afters". Finally I feel like I'm at a point where it's worth having the afters. Still, sharing them makes me a little nervous, but when I started the biggest loser group  one of the girls had already gone through a major weight loss journey and posted her B&F pictures and that's one of the things that motivated me, so if this motivates anyone else who may feel like they aren't where they want to be, then it's worth doing it. So.... eat your eyes out. JK.

I showed a few family members and of course they were nice enough to say that they would have never guess I looked like that and no, I'm not pushing it out or sucking it in. It's just relaxed and standing there. I still have about 10 more pounds to go, but the weight loss group ended and this is where I finished with that.

Future Missionary

Drama

Well I guess it's been over a week since the drama so I better update it. 

So there I was..... it was middle of the night best as I could guess. I need to roll over to get more comfortable, yet as I tried, I was paralyzed with pain in the base of my neck and unable to make the desired position change. I laid there in the dark with only Charlotte to reach to for help. Obviously that wasn't going to get me very far. Brian had slipped out in the night to sleep with another woman, or little girl.... Isabelle. She called for him in the night and he quickly ran to her side which left me alone, or as mentioned before, with one little one at my side. My eyes started to adjust to the light and I barely lifted my head enough to see the clock read 5:00. As I pondered my situation, all kinds of thoughts ran through my head-
 " Maybe I have cancer in my neck and am going to die?"
 " I can't get out of the bed, what if Brian has to call an ambulance to get me on a stretcher and to the hospital?"
 " What if it's a herniated disk and I am paralyzed to a wheel chair for the rest of my life? Will my kids take care of me?"

I started tiring of the drama I was creating for myself and started making a plan. I figured if I took some Ibuprofen I'd be able to let it kick in, get out of bed and still make our trip down to Salt Lake, so I did what any strong woman would do.... I yelled for Brian, in a quiet manner of course, as to not waken the children. That would have only made matters worse. I tried again.... no response. I tried again, this time I gave him a little more time to wake up and realize that yes, I was indeed yelling to him in the middle of the night. Finally, I gave up and beat on the wall. Okay, it wasn't a beat, more like a desperate rapping as best as I could since raising my arm also caused me great pain. At last, he awoke and came to my call. I explained the dire situation and asked him what I should do.
    Of course he had no idea. I'm sure he didn't even really know what was going on, so I asked him to get me some drugs, some heavy Ibuprofen. I took it and eagerly awaited a great change which I was sure was going to happen and yet, as 40 minutes passed, my situation remained the same. Now at a complete loss as to what to do, I called on Brian to help me up. A few failed attempts due to pain I then realized he would have to hold my head for me and I would try again. This was not an easy task. As I walked, he was walking backwards holding my head up for me. Deciding it was a bad idea, I got back in the bed and waited until the morning chaos subsided and then we tried to figure out what to do. I knew it wasn't a muscle issue from sleeping on it bad, it was a pain I had never felt before. We called a chiropractor and he wasn't in and then we were trying to figure out the best decision financially. Chiropractor's aren't covered, but then going to a doctor and getting xrays and whatnot add up and we have to hit our deductible first, so it wasn't a toss up and we decided to try the instacare.
   A neighbor was nice enough to offer to watch all our kids while we went in. I had to hold my head while we walked in there and I'm sure people were thinking that was pretty funny looking. It was.... I saw it. So we met with the doctor, he gave me a shot which I figured wasn't going to do anything since it was basically just a large dose of Ibuprofen and that hadn't worked yet. Then they wanted to get xrays. The gal was having me do all kinds of angles and then she wanted one where I tipped my head backwards and I told her that was going to be pretty hard to do since that's what caused the most pain. I did it once and she said we had to do it again and after that second time I got this immediate rush that I was going to throw up. I told her and she grabbed a trash can. Then I thought I was going to fall over. I was so dizzy and hot and as I was sitting there I just got so weak and nearly fell over. They were starting to get a little worried and so Brian just lifted me up and put me on the table because they were afraid I was going to fall over. Of course all of this was killing my neck. They got me on the table, called in the doctor and then all of the sudden, aside from being extremely hot, my hands started getting really stiff and tightening in contorted positions. I was telling them and having them pull my fingers apart to try and relieve the tightness. Then my chin and throat started getting tight and I was starting to freak out that maybe I wasn't going to be able to breathe. The doctor was at a loss at what was going on, so they called an ambulance and rushed me over to the hospital. I was freaking out 'cause the doctor didn't know what was going on, so then my thoughts of dying were flooding in again with no calming words from him. Idiot. And let me just say that an ambulance ride is so uncomfortable!!! Well, for someone with neck pain or if they had anything broken. It was so rough and bumpy. I would have rather Brian took me in his car! So already long story shortened, I got to the hospital and they were concerned about my heart rate. It was around 39 BPM  for about an hour, so I had an EKG and some blood work done and they finally just gave me some medicine to get it pumping faster. It didn't work on round one, but after round 2 it did. I was nervous about having it wondering if I was going to have some sort of other reaction. After several hours there was still nothing done about my neck. They figure I had something called a vasovagal attack        happen when I tilted my head back. They were thinking it was most likely a pinched nerve although it didn't have all the signs of one, but that was the best they could do without an MRI or CAT scan, so we left no better off and actually worse off from all the expenses we just incurred. OH well. All is good for the most part. I'm feeling better and Brian was great doing everything for 4 days and letting me recover. So now we just have all the wonderful bills to look forward to!

5 months old

We took the 5 month old pictures and I really wanted a naked bum one. However, we waited almost too long. Most of the pictures were of her getting ready to crawl or sit on her side or roll over. She did NOT want to sit still, but I think we got a few. Good thing we didn't wait to do this 'til next month! Love this nugget!

Picture Sunday

Results of late night and 7:00 A.M. meeting:

Results of no tv or computer on Sunday:


                                                                      The Bride

The Happy Couple

                                                The Guests

                                                       
                                                                      The Sealer 

Afterwards I finally got some pictures of Elizabeth in her baptism dress (thanks to WeeMama for putting in the sleeves). Such a beautiful girl! She let me take pictures until satisfied, okay, not really, until she said her mouth hurt too much. Love this girl!



The Big Man is 4!

Well yesterday was Coop's 4th birthday. We started off the morning with a haircut. Definitely not fun for him. This was his before picture, which actually, I think his hair looks good, but it won't stay. I gel it and it's all crazy in like 10 minutes. I could have trimmed the sides and kept it long, but I love me a boy or man with a new clean short haircut. Well, only one man. :)

See..... so much better right? Well, of course after the haircut we had to take his 4 year old pictures. Again, not very fun for him, but he endured it well and with a sometimes semi smile. It took some work. For lunch we met up with Brian and took him to play at Chick-fil-A. That he enjoyed. We were there for about and hour and his favorite thing was getting the fruit punch. I hardly ever buy soda pop, so he was really excited to get some.

We bought a the Megamind movie at Sam's club with some of his birthday money from Grandma and GranChud, so we came home and he watched that. He told me he wanted pancakes for breakfast, but he didn't eat any and I'm thinking he thought pancakes were his birthday cake. His cake was super easy for me this year. He wanted Batman and so I went for easy. I'm sure I could have gone more elaborate, but no time or patience for it right now.

After dinner we played some BINGO and the kids really had fun with that. I was trying to make it more of a birthday party for Cooper, but BINGO was as far as we got and he seemed pleased enough. Then we opened his presents, watched his birthday video and then had cake. All in all I think it was a good day for him. We went to bed and read his new Superhero Squad book. He was pretty interested in all the heroes and that was fun to see. Here are a few more from our "photoshoot". Isn't he so handsome?!