Day One

5:30:  30 minutes on elliptical (while watching an episode of Revenge. I'm hoping that wanting to know what happens will get me out of bed tomorrow)

6:30:  hot water and lemon

I've done this before on another health craze and it doesn't get any easier. I don't know why it's so hard for me to get it down but I do not like the taste of    hot lemon water. I love it cold on ice, but this is entirely different.

7:00:  green smoothie

I made these yesterday because I didn't want to run the blender and wake Louis      in the morning. First, I don't think I added enough water and secondly, it got really thick overnight. This may not be a step I am willing to cut time on. We'll see. I'm also pretty lazy. If my options are getting up earlier or choking down a thick smoothie, I have a feeling sleep will win.

9:00:   detox tea

While the taste is good, it's definitely not coffee and that makes me sad. I also took ibuprofen with it to ward off the massive caffeine headache I'm liable to have by the end of today. I should have cut caffeine out more gradually last week, but I just love it too much

10:30:  clementines, water 

I love clementines. Love them! They are juicy, delicious and not too messy. They also make my office smell AMAZING! Side effect of all this water...I have gone to the bathroom half a dozen times already today. I don't have time to keep that up!

12:30:  salad (spinach, red cabbage, carrots, sunflower seeds, chia seeds with fresh avocado dressing), water 

I put WAY too much lemon in my avocado dressing. Holy buckets! Otherwise, the salad was good though. I wish I had someone to cook for me. I love a good salad, but it's so time consuming. Cutting everything and putting it all together. It's never as good when I do it myself! Gotta run off an fill up my water bottle again. I'm keeping the headache at bay by flooding myself, I think.

2:30:    cranberry-pumpkin seed trail mix, water 
Yummy. Yummy. Yummy. It was a struggle not to eat cup after cup of it though!

7:00:    roasted vegetables with olive oil

So glad Nev and Lou went to a basketball game tonight, I'm not sure I could watch them eat plates of spaghetti without being super bummed. I thought I would be starving by the time I got home, but instead I'm feeling less than interested in dinner. When I get off work tomorrow I plan on making a giant pot of soup (butternut squash) but I just don't have it in me tonight. 


8:00:    antioxidant smoothie, a date
This smoothie was tart but much more palatable than the green one. And the date tasted like dessert. A sweet way to end the day!


Things I'm thinking today:
I'm not nearly as hungry as I thought I would be.
I wish I had a personal chef. I don't mind eating healthy but the preparation is killer. 
I miss coffee. I love coffee. Sob. Sob. Sob.

Cleanse

I have been reading about the Whole Living Cleanse for the last month and tomorrow I'm jumping in. I planned to get started last week but a family emergency (aka my brother's appendix rupturing) and lack of preparation kept it from happening. I was going to do it in conjunction with Dusty on All Things G&D, but I actually think it may be to my advantage to be one week behind her.While this means she'll be through some of the struggles before I get there, it also means I can take her organization and preparation and use it to my benefit. On Friday, I pulled together a bunch of recipes and a pretty complete grocery list. Today I took a trip to the produce section at HyVee and chopped bags of vegetables and mixed up some fresh dressing for my salads for the week.

While I'm sure no one recommends starting a diet in the worst valley possible, I definitely overindulged today on the things I won't get for the next couple of weeks. Pancakes for breakfast, M&M's and a frappuccino for lunch, pizza for dinner and I plan to pair the Grammy's with a nice glass of wine! I'm not sure my diet today will make tomorrows veggies, fruit, nuts, and water that much easier but at least I'll have the memories of today!

This week I plan on focusing my blog on the cleanse. That may make my posts boring (cranky), but it'll be an easy way to hold myself accountable. The big rules of the three (to four) week cleanse is NO added sugar, NO processed food or beverages, NO gluten, NO dairy, NO caffeine, and NO alcohol. Week one focuses on fruits, nuts, vegetables, seeds, and plant-based fats and oils. I can do anything for a week, right?

One of the points of the cleanse is to think about why exactly I'm doing it. While I do hope to lose five  pounds, my three main goals are related to my longer term relationship with and want from the food I eat.

1. I hope to find a more genuine energy and wakefulness. It doesn't matter how much caffeine I drink lately or how early I go to bed. I am exhausted ALL OF THE TIME!

2.  A would like a better sense of control over what I'm putting in my body. I've done a genuinely good job of cutting fast food almost entirely out of my diet (except for the rare occasion when I don't really enjoy it anyway and regret it almost immediately), but cutting processed foods out is tougher. I'm in a busy, working family. It's hard to find the time to cook and consume balanced meals.

3. I long for a stronger connection to why I am eating what I am eating in this moment. I am a comfort eater. It is a way of celebrating, mourning, relaxing, de-stressing, worrying, and procrastinating for me. I would really like it to be first and foremost, a way of sustaining.

Cheers to a new adventure!

Discipline

At 16 months old, Louis is starting to push our limits. There was a short window of time when he began to understand us and then was excited to follow any directions. He is now a big fan of "no" and running away from us when we are trying to get his attention.When he gets really frustrated, he has started throwing a mini temper tantrum that ends with his butt up in the air and his forehead on the floor like a tepee. It would be adorable if it wasn't paired with an awful screaming.

This week an angry father's YouTube video disciplining his daughter went viral. People have commented on the video in a variety of ways. Some liken him to a parenting hero while others accuse him of child abuse. It is clear to me that his daughter is a frustrated and spoiled fifteen year old who is using strong language in order to ridicule her parents. But it is also clear to me, that in his disciplining, this father is frustrated and spoiled and he is using strong language in order to ridicule his daughter. I understand his frustration, but he is doing exactly what I try to resist when I want to form my own tepee next to my son. Discipline would be a lot easier if we didn't have to worry about reinforcing the very behaviors we are trying to change.

Last night I left Louis to his tepee and walked into the other room. He eventually stopped throwing a fit in order to find me and we grabbed a book and moved on. While the fits will become more difficult and loaded as the years go on, I hope that I continue to respect my child as a person and remember to model the behavior I expect from him.

Stream of consciousness

My son needs his hair cut. I've been trimming it for the last six months but I am not a hairdresser. It needs some loving  but I don't want to pay for a $35 haircut. I feel badly every time I pull his stocking hat off and the static cling grips every strand of his hair to his face. Poor guy!

<3 

I have really been neglecting my camera and memory keeping since Christmas. It's one of the first things to go when I get busy and this semester has been swamp worthy.

<3 

Sitting on the couch surrounded by a freshly scrubbed home is one of the greatest feelings imaginable. Especially when my husband did the work and I get to reap the benefits.

<3 

They have Valentine's Day cups at Starbucks right now. I always look forward to the Christmas ones, but I don't remember these. It put a smile on my face this morning when the barista handed me my caramel macchiato though (as if a giant coffee doesn't always do that for me)!

I'm teaching research skills in my oral communication classes today. It's such an important topic and yet SO HARD to teach. They get bored and check out and later when I'm grading their speeches and they did crap research and didn't even try to do a proper citation, I want to bang my head against the wall. I think I have a solid plan for the day though...we'll see...

<3 

I ate a lot more healthy when I was pregnant and breastfeeding. Now that I have no one to take care of but my own body (after almost TWO YEARS of incubating and feeding another human), I am AWFUL. At work I just get so busy that I grab less than nutritious snacks. I'm not one of those people that doesn't eat, instead I have tootsie rolls and crackers for lunch. Yesterday it was a ginormous UNI sugar cookie. Perhaps taking care of myself needs to become a priority?

<3 

I've thought about cutting Grey's Anatomy  and Private Practice out of my DVR almost every week for the last two years, but I just can't make myself do it. As awful as they both are, I can't cut ties. I have to know from week to week exactly who is sleeping with who and how everyone feels about it. 

<3

Tonight for our Friday family night dinner I adapted a recipe I found on Iowa Girl Eats. These mini Mexican bites are wonderful! Instead of the chili I mixed up black beans and refried beans with some taco seasoning and put them in regular sized muffin tins. They were delicious and Louis even ate them. A Valentine's weekend miracle!

<3

This is one of the single most random thing I have ever written. Hopefully my three readers won't be too disappointed!

Toot Toot, Chugga Chugga, Big Red Car

Louis hates the car. This is not a new thing. It has been going on since he was 36 hours old and we bundled him into his car seat for the first time. He started screaming that bloodcurdling shriek every parent knows and fears. Nevin and I walked out of the hospital engulfed in panic as all eyes were on us. We had been parents for less than two days and our child was already embarrassing us.

Screaming as we put him into the car seat.

Lou is now almost 16 months old and other than a brief fascination with Christmas with the Chipmunks, nothing has kept him from screaming in his car seat since that first ride a year and a half ago. I have reached my breaking point. Getting him out the door to daycare every morning is tough enough, but when I get anywhere near putting him in the PT he tightens his legs into a plank position and lets out a guttural howl. I don't know if it is more a showcases of his strength or my weakness but after the howling starts, he wedges his giant melon against the top of the car seat and his legs against the back seat and I CANNOT get him into a seated position. At this point (every day, mind you) I have two options, 1) physically force my child to do something he does not want to do...something I am against on all levels or 2) wait it out and hope my eardrums survive and we aren't too late for our day. The only solution I have come up with is something with which I'm not entirely comfortable. Do we go against the new(ish) APA standards, and turn his car seat around a full eight months before he is two?

Still screaming one year later.

I was considering taking the leap a couple of months ago. I had never been in a car accident, we didn't exactly have a child on the small side of the spectrum, and I recognized that being a parent was constantly trying to make your own decisions in the midst of multiple, contradictory "well meaning" recommendations. The day after Nevin and I decided we would make the switch that following weekend, I pulled out in front of a car and ended up in a collision with another person. Now we were back to worrying about the safety of it all. It goes without saying, I would rather listen to him screaming than the alternative.


Am I being ridiculous? Will turning him around even stop the screaming? Am I going to be driving my screaming, fifteen-year-old, six foot tall son to basketball practice or jazz band rehearsal?

Newton's Third Law

For every moment last semester that I felt like I could not only survive being a working mother but maybe even survive it with a little grace and class, I have had a moment this semester where I thought perhaps I not only shouldn't have had a child but maybe I should quit my job too.

It's been a rough few weeks. Some semesters I am blessed with students that are easy to accommodate. While they all require their own specific relationship, I usually figure it out pretty quickly with not a lot of stress. This semester has been the exact opposite of ease. I have one particular student this semester who is challenging my confidence as a college instructor. This student has taken more patience than I have mustered for anyone in a long time. I want to help but worry I don't have the tools. To add to this students clear need for a specific sort of relationship and understanding, there is a very negative attitude that makes it hard to see the person under the negative exterior. I have a hard time with bad attitudes. I can deal with a lot of things but negativity is hard for me. Sadly, this is not the only student I've been spending extra time with this semester though, I have quite a few that are dealing with things that are beyond imagination. There is a lot of pain, turmoil, and adult circumstances underneath these "typical" college students' exterior. Being 19 is not as easy as we all like to pretend it is.

School has been zapping my excess energy and has left me pretty worthless at home. I feel like I've hit an all time low when I snip at my just over one-year-old for squishing his banana hands into my dress pants on a morning when we're already running late. Even in the moment I know I'm overreacting, but I'm so twisted up that it takes very little for me to spin out of control. I'm very lucky to have an understanding husband to pick up my slack, but I worry that one day he'll have had enough of my antics and lose the patience he's always had enough of for the both of us. I've been practicing deep breathing. Thinking before I speak. Remembering what's really important. All of that mumbo jumbo!

Other than the mumbo jumbo, I do not currently have a great solution for my overwhelmed nature. I'm trying to slow down and appreciate the small things and be more gracious with myself. When I feel my organized life spinning out of control I often try to overcompensate with list making and scheduling every waking (and occasional non-waking) moment. We know this mama is losing it when "shower," "fill water bottle," and "wash face" are scheduled into time increments on my weekly calendar and are color coded by category. For the record, "fill water bottle" is blue for Fuel/Recharge and I've allotted five minutes every two hours to get out to the water fountain and back.

Losing it? Maybe a little bit.

Resolutions

So I like writing resolutions...keeping them is another story. Because my goal is to be better, not be perfect though. I'm doing okay.


1. plant a garden.
I received my seed porn in the mail today. Seed Savers Exchange, Burpee, Johnny's and Gurney's. They have my motivation up. Now I just need to figure out exactly how to start a garden. Details.

2. spend more time at the local library.
I haven't been back, but I'm hoping to go on Saturday afternoon. We start Louis' Parent/Child swimming lessons on Saturday though, so we'll see if we have the energy for it.

3. buy local.
So far, fail. I have bought one gift and it ended up being from Kohl's. Now in my defense it's something Dylan will really like, but it's not exactly unique.

4. focus my energy on cultivating relationships. 
Nevin and I got away for 30 hours to celebrate our anniversary. It was a great trip in Decorah! We ate great food, enjoyed a couple of adult beverages, did a little shopping, and got to sleep through the night.


Winter break allowed for some time with my friends and family and I hope to continue that priority once the semester get's going.

5. establish a method for organizing my pictures. 
Nothing, nada, zip, zilch, nix.

6. blog more as a way of memory keeping. 
This is my first blog posting since I made that resolution. Hmmm...we'll see.

7. get up before Louis in the morning.
I've gotten better at this and today I even worked out before Louis got out of bed. Will this continue? I hope so. 

8. be more thoughtful, kind, gracious, patient, happy, pleasant...
Always a work in progress.