Well, maybe once. But it was a freak thing.

Clark has taken to decorating the house with (fortunately) water color markers. So far, it’s only been the sliding glass door. Today however, he took on my bathroom. I’m having a difficult time getting the blue out of my grout and off from around the edges of the white travertine tiles.

So lame.

I am still overwhelmingly fatigued from being sick. I don’t feel sick anymore, exactly, but I’m seriously dragging. And next week is huge. Well, the rest of the month is huge. SO much going on. And I want to crawl into a little hole and hibernate for a year or so.

I am so hiding the Sharpies.

Sorry I’m late again. I don’t know how there can be so much going on and nothing going on at the same time.

Anyway… I’m still sick-ish. Too sick to exercise and spend much time cooking. Clark was sick, then was better, now seems sick again. You know, we made it through most of the sick season pretty much unscathed (if I’m remembering correctly), and now we’re getting slammed. When mom’s sick, everything falls apart, and we’re on week two.

But, I’m getting better. I’m on antibiotics and an inhaler now, so it should be uphill from here. Right? Provided I find ANY time at all to rest.

I’m not going to bore you with long tales of things that have gone wrong (car trouble, for one) and things that have come up to keep me busy and not resting during the day. (Some of them have been fun). Just know that there are stories. Long, boring ones.

So, aside from the fact that I’m growing out of my clothes (grrrrr), nothing much is happening with Health Group right now. BUT, I’m still looking forward to starting things up when I can move and breath at the same time. And hopefully, that will be soon.

How was your week?

We’ve been acquiring and playing with musical equipment recently. Clark loves the amps. He loves all the cords everywhere with multiple ends that plug in to the amps. He loves to plug both ends of the same cord into one amp. I don’t know much about electronics or amps, but that just seems like a bad thing.

I want to take a shower.

I turned off and unplugged the amp Clark was playing with. (Fully aware that he could attempt to plug it back in at which point he’d be entirely capable of turning it back on).

He got mad.

I’m worried about what might happen while I’m in the shower.

Fortunately, during the writing of this post, Clark has moved on to my GameBoy.

How fast can I shower?

(and rambling on, apparently). This turned out to be a long post!

Well, I’m not dead yet. I keep thinking I’m better, then I keep being not better. I’m mostly tired during the day, then an hour or so before bed, I can’t breathe and I cough my guts out.

But I’m still managing to socialize some. Yesterday, I met a few spinners at a local bookstore and we spun in the common area. I hadn’t spun since January. It was nice. I pulled out a hand dyed roving of superwash merino and alpaca. I can’t spin those fine fibers short draw with any consistency. I get thick and thin clumps. So I pulled off a length, wrapped it over the top of my finger and spun long draw, double draft off the fold. It took awhile to get back in the groove, having been all about guitar for so long, but I soon started to relax into it and enjoy the colors.

So here’s a catch up on photos over the last week or so since I started feeling crummy.

Mmm, we’ll back up a little further.

On Saturday night, a week and a half ago, Nate took his Christmas present from me out for it’s first ride with some friends and their cars.

(See the truck flying through the air on the right?)

It didn’t take long for Nate’s car to start making a weird noise, at which point everything stopped and the car was torn apart into little pieces.

I’m not exactly sure why I was so eager to enter Nate into a hobby so perilous. When you talk to anyone that runs RC cars, their car/cars are always broken. Some random part always needs to be picked up at the hobby shop and replaced before they can go out and run cars again. And yet, there we were.

As it turns out, the noise was undiagnosed, and eventually went away on its own. We had tremendous fun.

Liv’s birthday party was on Thursday. I was a walking zombie. It’s hard to post pictures of a wild and crazy party while politely omitting pictures of kids whose families may not want them seen on the internet. So you get a blurry, cropped photo of the party. And yes, that’s totally a grocery store cake. I didn’t want to spring $50 for an ice cream cake again (that caught me off guard the first time. Mercy). So it was my intent to make a cake for Liv and serve ice cream along side. Then I got sick, yadiyada, and in the end, Nate went to the store and bought one. It didn’t even say “Happy Birthday” on it. But it looked festive.

It’s been snowing on and off since Friday, when my in-laws came over to celebrate her birthday more quietly.

See the snow back there? In the twilight. It was the oddest color as the sun went down.

On Saturday, we took the kids out in the morning, came back for the babysitter, and Nate and I went out in the afternoon to shop for mattresses. Thanks for all the comments and suggestions, by the way. I really appreciate it. We first went to Kasala and tried their Celsius foam mattress.

Then we went to Sleep Country and tried the Temperpedics. Wowza. They’re expensive. Especially when you add the groovy adjustable base part. Nate tried the Sleep Number while I was still on a Temperpedic and didn’t like it at all, so I didn’t bother trying it. We went back to Kasala to try the Celsius again, and bought it. It’s warranted for 20 years, we get a 30 day trial period to try it out, and it was under $1200. They’re supposedly a group that branched off from Temperpedic and think their mattress is better. It has a different foam on the bottom that enables you to put it on a regular box spring, or slatted bedframe, or whatever. To me, it feels firmer than the Temperpedics, but it’s still completely comfortable. It felt good. It arrives Saturday, and I’m excited.

So, Saturday evening was rather mellow. I’d say quiet, but it wasn’t really quiet. Liv played with her new toy.

The girls read.

Clark admired the new electronics.

Yesterday evening, Clark was blowing bubbles on the front porch and watering flowers. I swear I didn’t set these photos up with the perfect colors and everything. I walked by and saw it and ran for the camera. It was so beautiful.

In this photo, he looks JUST like me at that age

Veronica read,

and then the girls came home from softball practice

And that brings us to today, when I’m still tired and not feeling well. But people are coming over at 12 and I have a guitar lesson this afternoon.

And finally, (I’m wrapping it up, I swear), my very good friends at The Web Flipper are going to be updating my site so I can post audio files, so you can hear me sing and attempt to play the guitar. So if the blog is down for awhile in the near future, that’s why.

No Health going on here. I’m sick and miserable. Sinus infection. Coughing my brains out. Bleh.

So, not much going on here. Still not knitting.

My arms still hurt. I’m going to have to cut down even more on the guitar.

Liv’s birthday party is tomorrow, so I need to clean up, go shopping, and get ready for that.

Nate and I are thinking that we’re tired all the time and not sleeping well because our bed sucks. I think we’re going mattress shopping on Saturday if we can work the time out with the babysitter. Any suggestions? Nate wants to look at the Temperpedic memory foam mattress, and some mattress that is air adjustable. Sleep Number mattress, maybe? I’m not sure. He’s done the reading up, not me.

I talked a little bit to my friend Rachel about the Zone Diet on Monday afternoon. Quite frankly, I’m not in the mood to acquire and read yet another diet book, but I think I might try to incorporate some of the things she talked about into Calorie King. It’s time to renew Calorie King for the year, and after talking with Nate about it, I think I’m going to.

The Zone diet, according to Rachel, wants you to balance “blocks” of protein, carbs, and fat in each meal and snack so your body and blood consistently have the acids and such it needs to utilize your food and stored energy. Makes sense. She suggested I start with a 4 block diet, and if I’m not loosing weight, to move down to a 3 block for awhile. That’s what she did and she lost over 40 pounds. She was losing about 2 lbs per week, which is still in the realm of “healthy” weight loss more than freaky-fast-fad-diet weight loss that isn’t as healthy or sustainable.

The more muscle a person has on their body, the more blocks they need to sustain their muscle mass instead of breaking it down.

It’s basically similar to a lot of other things I’ve read and heard, when you look at the actual foods they want you to be eating. Good choices, healthy fats, good grains and veggies, etc. But perhaps a little more protein, and maintaining a balance of the three mentioned nutrients at each meal.

1 block of protein is 7 grams
1 block of carb is 9 grams
1 block of fat is 1 gram, which I think needs to be added on top of the fat that is already in the carb and protein of choice, provided they are already low fat choices.

A meal is 4 blocks of each. A snack is 1 block of each. Don’t go over 3 hours without eating (heard that before) until night time. (Hee hee. Nate asked if I have to set my alarm to wake up and eat when I first told him that, which is why I added “until night time” on there).

So, I figure that since Calorie King already breaks down everything I eat into their nutrient components, it should be easy to blend the two. I’m curious how these modifications will affect overall calorie consumption.

And I’m probably going to join a gym for some classes. If it EVER warms up and acts like spring here in the glorious Seattle area, I’d love to start walking the hills around my neighborhood again, but it’s freezing cold, and I’d be subjecting the boy to the elements as well as myself.

That’s what’s going on here. Nothing remarkable. But constantly busy, busy, busy. Seriously, I can’t believe how much stuff I have on my calendar. It’s really annoying.

I heard Janell say that when she started the 20/20 diet, they told her to treat it like a part time job, and to make that much time for it. I feel that I need to do the same. To change my habits. Mostly, to make time to plan meals and then shop for them. That’s my biggest hang up right now. I can manage to get exercise in if I really try, but the food part is killing me.

Wow, the weeks are flying by. I only managed a walk this week.

So my friend Rachel is coming over on Monday afternoon to talk to me about the Focus Diet. Have any of you heard of it or had any experience with it? She lost over 40 pounds on it, and she said it’s kind of a trial and error sort of thing to figure out exactly what my particular body needs to eat and needs to avoid because everyone’s body is different. That rings some bells to me.

She’s a personal trainer at a local gym, and I’m thinking about joining and taking some pilates classes, something I’ve never done before, but have been interested in.

I’ve been wanting to do something different, to freshen up my attitude and outlook, and hopefully, this week will get me going.

How was your week?

The kids are off school this week, which is why you haven’t heard much from me. It’s been busy. Clark’s been sick on and off, and didn’t sleep well for a couple nights. So, we’ve been home, but busy.

Abby and Liv planted some pots for our porch the other day

They’ve made fleece pants, and pudding, and phad thai… had playdates, read books…

I’ve been feeding, cleaning up after, assisting and caring for everyone. But I’ve enjoyed having them around.

I made it through the party, and it went amazingly well. We had 8, 10 year olds over for dinner. They got to choose between tortilla soup and enchiladas. Nate made pina coladas and strawberry daiquiris. They played with a mic and amp for awhile, each made a quilt square for Abby, planted a pansy for themselves to take home, and everyone’s happy. The nice thing about Liv is she’s happy about an exact duplicate party for herself, so a lot of my work is already done on the next one. I think we’ll go italian food however, I’ve eaten enough mexican-style leftovers for now and won’t be near ready to repeat it in a week and a few days.

Abby loved her shawl. She wore it to church on Sunday, but I don’t have a picture yet. It wasn’t until I told her it was called “Angel Shawl” that she even remembered me knitting it.

I went to the doctor yesterday. She put me in braces for tennis elbow and told me to take Aleve and vit B6 along with my multivitamin regularly for a couple weeks. She asked me to stop knitting for a little while, but didn’t make me stop playing guitar.

We both think it was Sam’s scarf that did it. She’s not a knitter herself, but apparently, all of her relatives are serious knitter/crocheters, and she’s tried it many times without success.

I’m ready to start knitting again, but I think I can survive another couple of weeks, and I hope that the braces and vitamins and such work. If not, she wants to give me cortisone shots. Neither of us think it’ll go that far.

I have a guitar lesson today. I’m finally starting to feel like I’m getting better at fingerpicking and can do it semi-automatically without feeling like I have 10 thumbs. There’s still much room for improvement, but I’m good enough at it now that I at least enjoy it.

My friend Sara, who just started up playing again and is also taking lessons with Roger (and seriously kicks my butt at the fingerpicking and speed of chord changes) has some $$$ to buy a new guitar and we’re trying to find a time to get out sans kids this week so she can spend it. It’s so exciting!