I've started using My Plate at Live Strong to track my eating and I LOVE it. It makes it so easy to keep track of everything, especially since there's an app for it so I can use my iPod to record what I eat when I'm not at my computer. :)
Busy Bees!
Real life has been really full lately and I’ve been severely neglecting the digi side of life. I’m sure I mentioned sometime in the last year or two that things had been kind of rough with my husband out of work. At the start of the year he decided that he was never going to be able to find a job his area of expertise and went in a different direction entirely! He went to driving school, got his CDL, immediately found a job and is now a long haul trucker.
And I almost never see him, but at least our bills are getting paid! That is SUCH an enormous relief I really can’t express it enough. But I miss him and now everything here at home is my sole responsibility. (I don’t know how military wives do it, I really give them a lot of credit!) But we’re okay, we’re doing great, but we’ve been so busy!
School is going to be ending soon for summer and we are getting into gear for swimming lessons and trips to museums and all of those other fun summer things. I have no idea how in the world I’m going to keep these two guys busy during the summer! It gets so hot here in AZ that we really do need to stay indoors most of the time, but at least they also have speech therapy, feeding therapy, occupational therapy, and habilitation to take up some of their time and keep them going. They have been growing by leaps and bounds lately and Adam has recently lost two of his teeth and gotten glasses. I think he looks adorable! (My husband says that with his teeth missing he looks just like the monster on his shirt. lol)
So it will probably be another couple of months before I post again, but the boys start going to kindergarten full time in the fall and I will have tons of time to work and blog then. Until then, enjoy your summer!
Who Me? Superstitious?
This past week has been a rough one here in the Lash house. Last week I had taken Luke to the doctor for a check up and after looking at his ears she asked me, “Does he ever stick things in his ears?” I was like, “No, he never has.” Then of course we discovered that he actually had stuck a little plastic pellet in his ear! What the heck? lol So after much trauma and drama we got that removed and she asked me, “Does he ever get ear infections?” Apparently I hadn’t learned my lesson because I told her, “No, he’s never had an ear infection before.” So yesterday morning I woke up to Luke crying and holding his ear! After a trip back to the doctor she confirmed that yep, he has a raging ear infection.
On a similar note, I had taken Adam in to the doctor and she asked how his breathing was. He has asthma and sometimes it gets pretty bad. I said, “Oh, we haven’t had any terrible episodes in a while.” So of course now he has croup and we had to take him in for steroid shots and are giving him breathing treatments every four hours just so he can breathe! I’m not very superstitious, but it seems very coincidental, doesn’t it? Anyway, I’m just going to keep my mouth shut from now on, just in case! LOL
Aside from taking care of sick kids and trying to sneak a nap or a book every chance I get, I’ve been working on rebuilding my personal store. Somehow it got deleted. One day I went to check on it, just on a whim, and it was gone, just total whitespace! I have no idea what happened, but I suspect that it’s all my fault. I probably forgot to move certain files over when I changed hosts. Anyway, it’s re-done now and I really like how it turned out.
If you visit my shop you’ll notice that there are other people selling there as well, sort of. I’m not actually bringing on new designers, just collaborating with a couple of people. My friend Barbara is helping me with converting some of my designs over to Studio cutting files and mixing them with some of her own original stuff. That’s Momo & Ellie, and right now we only have one thing in the shop, but we have lots more almost ready, I just need to find the time to preview it and upload it! Wild Lime Design is a collaboration with my friend Iolanthe. She finds me interesting color palettes and ideas, names the kits, does a little designing, and previews the kits. I do most of the designing. Even though I “retired” from designing personal use kits last year, I’ve still been making them for my own personal use. Iolanthe (and my mom) convinced me that other people might want to use them, too. I didn’t want to bother with all of the boring stuff (previews, uploading, pretty much anything beyond designing and scrapping, lol), but Iolanthe doesn’t mind that sort of thing, so here we are! I also have a couple of kits that are completely my own that I’m working on getting into the shop.
Here are some previews of what’s in the shop. Oh, and everything in the shop is 30% off through the end of the month.
Okay, I think I’ve officially run out of steam. Thanks for stopping by! Have a great weekend!
Autism Awareness Day
As most of you may know, I have twin boys. This is Luke.
He is loud and crazy and roll-around-in-the-dirt fun. He has more energy than 10 puppies and the strength of a gorilla. He LOVES anything by Disney/Pixar and is attached by the fingertips to my iPod Touch. His favorite food is white cheddar rice cakes (I know he didn’t get that from me! lol) and he has a frighteningly deep obsession with 20th Century Fox (the logo! the fanfare! the searchlights! oh my!).
This is my other son, Adam.
Adam is sweet and gentle and loves anything with wheels. He is very concerned with everyone’s feelings and is so empathic that he cries whenever anyone else is sad or upset. He LOVES the Wonder Pets and his favorite “character” is the Fly Boat. LOL
I just wanted to take a minute and show off my boys – both of whom are dealing with the challenges of autism, but are otherwise normal, healthy, lovely children. Autism is quite prevalent these days and most people know someone who is autistic or has an autistic child. Jodi and I made this kit to celebrate those people/kids/families. We’re giving it away FREE and we made the colors slightly more useable than the usual primary-colored autism kits so that you’ll be able to use it to scrap all kinds of things!
Just click the links below to download my part of the kit, then head over to Jodi’s blog to get her part.
Thank you super-duper-extra-much to Jodi’s creative team for the beautiful layouts!
Now head on over to Jodi’s blog for her part! 
Happy Valentine’s Day!
I hope you all are having a wonderfully sweet day with the ones you love most! Our day got off to a so-so kind of start. Adam had an appointment at the doctor for a well visit bright and early this morning and ended up getting a shot, poor kid. He did great, though, and I was so proud of him. I told him he could have whatever he wanted for breakfast after that and he chose a cherry Pop Tart. The pink frosting was very appropriate for the day, even if I shudder at the thought of Pop Tarts for breakfast. I did say he could have whatever he wanted after all!
I’m sending the boys to school this morning with treats for classmates, teachers, and therapists. They turned out SUPER cute, too, although I can’t take any credit at all for that. I used Shabby Princess’ XOXO and Yours Truly Confection Collections. I love those things! She has so many cute little wrappers and packages for treats. The mini takeout boxes are my favorite! Here’s how mine turned out:
Sorry about the photos being a little blurry; I’m not exactly a photographer! hehe
My husband and I don’t have any plans for the evening since he doesn’t get home from school until almost 8pm, but he did bring me flowers earlier in the week, and today he brought me some chocolate and a DVD (Breaking Dawn, he knows me well!) so we can chill out together after the boys go to bed. All in all, it looks like a nice relaxed day ahead! I hope your day is filled with love and fun stuff, too!
Weight Loss Wednesday: The Beginning
Since I’m going to be posting about my weight loss journey occasionally, I thought it might be a good idea to start from the beginning. I was pretty much a normal sized kid until somewhere around the fourth grade. I don’t have a lot of photos from my childhood (yet – my mom is scanning them, but she’s still working on the early years right now), but there are a couple. Here’s one from when I was about 8. Pretty much normal.
(Isn’t my mom pretty???)
Here’s where I started to put on a little weight, but still not too bad. I was 11:
I had a really, really awesome home life and would never even think to blame my weight problems on my parents or the way I was raised. However, my childhood was pretty unhappy outside of the home. I LOVED school until I was about 10. Coincidentally, that’s when I started to put on weight. I grew up in Hawaii, in a neighborhood where the vast majority of people were Chinese and Filipino. I loved my Asian friends, but they were all SO MUCH smaller than me. One word you could not use to describe me was small! I got teased a lot about my size (and my color, being one of the only white kids in the entire school, but that’s a different post altogether) and was called a lot of really mean things. Looking back on it all now I realize I wasn’t actually as huge as I thought I was, but in my mind I was enormous! One day during PE in the sixth grade we had to be weighed and measured. All three classes were in the gym and they did us one by one, calling out the numbers to be recorded. When it was my turn the PE teacher yelled out, “Five-foot-seven, 164 pounds!” I swear, the entire gym burst out laughing. That has stuck with me throughout the years and I have never quite been able to shake the humiliation of the moment. My best friend was 4’11” and weighed 90 lbs, so you can imagine what we looked like together. No one in the entire school weighed as much as I did, but I never stopped to think that no one in the entire school was as tall as me either. I DREAMED of being 5 feet tall and under a hundred pounds!!!
That was the point where I decided something had to be done and I embarked on what would be the first of MANY fad diets. Through my teen years I fluctuated between 150 and 180 lbs. My height topped off around 5’11” so my weight was almost normal for most of those years, but my mind was so messed up when it came to my weight that I couldn’t see that. All I could see was that I was so much heavier than all of my friends and therefore I was fat and ugly.
When I started college I was 170 lbs, but by the end of my freshman year I had gained 30 more. I went up and down through my 20’s and after I met my husband (Chris) I put on even more weight. Chris was the first person outside of my family who I really and truly felt accepted me the way I was. He has NEVER cared what I weighed and has always told me that I was beautiful no matter what. So I got lazy. And I ate. And I got even heavier. But I was stilled loved… except by me.
I won’t discuss numbers anymore, since they got so high that I can’t think about it without shuddering, but after I had my twins in 2006 I was at my highest weight so far and I was miserable! But you know what having a baby is like, right? And having twins was harder than I had expected. I was tired all the time, a complete zombie until they were about 9 months old. When they were about a year old I started trying to lose weight again. I’d lose 5 pounds, gain 10 pounds. Lose 10 pounds, gain 15 pounds, and I was getting unhealthier and unhealthier by the day! I don’t have any pictures of myself during this time (except that one above from 2007) because I wouldn’t let anyone take my picture, I was just too embarrassed!
Here I am last year, at my absolute heaviest.
I cannot look at that picture without wanting to cry. That was the picture that caused me to break, to really take a look at my life and try to make changes. Since then (Nov 2011) I’ve lost 18 pounds, which isn’t much considering what I need to lose, but the holidays really slowed my losses down. January got me back on track and my goal is to back at 170 pounds by June 2013. It’s a long time, but the time is going to pass one way or another, I may as well put it to good use! lol
So now I’m basically following Bill Phillip’s Eating-for-Life and it’s going good. I feel a lot more balanced than I have in a long time and am finally starting to get some energy back. I’ve been walking on the treadmill for exercise and want to add some weight training soon. Chris has been supportive, as always, but it’s been my parents who have really helped me along with this. My dad is a health nut (and will probably outlive me by decades), and he’s been great about checking in with me every week, letting me talk about my progress and my failures. My mom has been awesome, too! My husband goes to school in the evenings, so the boys and I always go to my parents’ for dinner and my mom is just amazing about cooking healthy and making sure there are appropriate things for me to eat. I really feel like I can’t fail this time!
I’m hoping that in a few months I’ll be able to take some comparison pictures to post here to help motivate me, but for now I have this stuck on my bathroom mirror and I read it every morning before I start the day:
I’m looking forward to sharing my progress with you and I hope that you’ll share your thoughts with me, too – on this and anything else!
Another Year Gone
I can’t believe Christmas has come and gone already. I say this to myself every year, but it’s so true. I LOVE the holidays, but there’s always so much to do that by the time they have come and gone I’m always left thinking that I wish I could have slowed down and enjoyed them more. I did have a wonderful time with my family, though, and I hope you did, too! I haven’t scrapped any photos yet, but I did put together a little collage of photos from Christmas morning on Picnik.
We had to finally wake the boys up at 10am to open presents, if you can believe it. Granted, Luke wasn’t feeling well, he’d had a fever the day before and was still not quite himself. They eventually rolled out of bed and opened presents, but afterward Luke decided he’d rather play with my iPod than any of his toys and Adam took some of his new cars and hid away to play. One of our family gifts was Just Dance 3 for the Wii and Chris and I spent 2 hours playing that morning. It was so fun, I don’t think I’d ever laughed so hard as I did when he danced to Britney Spears’ Baby One More Time! I wish I had gotten that on video. lol We’ve been playing every day since and can I just mention what a workout that game is?! Now I’m hoping to get Wii Fit Plus for my birthday. (Anyone have that? How do you like it?)
So now I’m thinking about the new year and changes that are coming and other changes that I want to make. My husband will finish his classes in a few months and already has a job lined up for the end of April. We finally got Lukey a diagnosis of autism and he will be starting his new therapies this coming year, which we’re very excited about. Now we need to get Adam an official diagnosis and we can start getting him the help he needs, too. I think 2012 is going to be a much better year than 2011, although I can’t complain too much. 2011 was a rough year, but it was successful in a lot of ways, too. And I can’t complain about a year where I had so much time with my husband and kids, that part was excellent!
My biggest goal this year will (of course, as usual) be my health and weight. I did pretty good through the holidays, though! I managed to lose 11 pounds, despite the amazing food and treats I was surrounded by. I figure if I can lose weight through the holidays I can pretty much do anything. lol Food is my kryptonite, after all.
What are your plans for the new year? Anything exciting happening for you?
Oh, one more thing! Are there any tutorials you’d like to see? I’ve been thinking about adding some to my blog (and also to my CU blog), but I don’t know what people are interested in learning. Any ideas?
Thanks for stopping by! Have a safe and Happy New Year!
Merry Christmas!
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays, guys! Wow, it’s been a really long time since I posted last. Like everyone else I’ve been busy with family and the holidays and it’s been wonderful! My brothers (all except one of them and he lives in New Zealand, so he’s excused, lol) and their families all came down here to Arizona to visit for Thanksgiving. My parents live right down the road from me, so it was really nice to have so much of the family here with us. It’s the first time my boys got to meet any of their cousins! Here’s a layout I did of them all together. (Those are my two on the far left. Yes, the crying one is mine. Of course. lol)
I used Flergs and Eva Kipler’s Leaf It to Me. It’s one of my favorite autumn kits!
My husband is starting school again in January and we had to run some paperwork over today. Fortunately, my parents had agreed to take the boys for the morning, so we didn’t have to drag them all over town with us (because there’s nothing five year olds love more than being stuck in a car all morning)! When we went back to pick them up my mom had made gingerbread men and she said the boys helped! Adam helped cut them out and Lukey frosted them, and there was a whole plate waiting for us! Have I mentioned how much I love gingerbread? Especially the kind made with so much love?! Haha!
Anyway, I wanted to wish you all a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! I hope it’s wonderful and you get to spend lots of warm and happy time with your loved ones! Be safe and have a great weekend!
The Right Thing at The Wrong Time
This post isn’t scrapbook related at all, just personal stuff. (Just thought I’d let you know so you can skip it if you aren’t interested.) :)
I don’t know how many of you out there are like me and need to lose a few pounds (okay, maybe more than a few, lol), but I have been pretty much struggling with my weight my whole life. I’ve had times where my weight was normal, but it’s always been such a battle to keep it there. I gained a lot of weight while I was pregnant with my twins and then afterward I was just too tired to care about anything, including my health and my appearance. But the boys just turned five and I figure I’ve given myself more than enough time to slack off, so I’m hopping back on the treadmill, hitting the weights and getting my eating under control.
Of course, this is the absolute worst time to get started, with Halloween (candy, candy, candy!) right around the corner and then Thanksgiving (pumpkin pie, candied yams, stuffing!) and Christmas (cookies, fudge, cinnamon rolls!) coming up, but I figure if I can make it through the holidays then I can do pretty much anything. :lol:
The hardest part for me right now is sticking with my exercise schedule. Because I’ve given up both sugar and caffeine I am SOOOO totally dragging. I know it’ll get better in a week or two, but right now I have no energy at all and am having withdrawal headaches. Not fun! So hopping on the treadmill or lifting weights is something like torture, but my husband has been awesome about getting me out of bed and working out, even if I am half dead while I’m doing it. :lol: I’m so glad for his support, even if I am swearing at him in my head for the first 5 minutes. Haha
The best tool I’ve come across so far is My Plate at Live Strong. Does anyone else use this? It’s awesome! I love being able to track what I eat, how much water I drink, my weight, my fitness and there’s even an app so I can record it through my iPod Touch when I’m not near my computer. I put a widget in my sidebar (scroll down a ways) —–> that shows how much weight I’ve lost so far.
Anyway, I’d love to hear from anyone else who’s working on shedding some weight. How are you doing it? What do you find works best for you? Leave me a comment, I’d love to hear what you’re up to! :D
Finding Pumpkins & Little Miss Spooky
Yesterday we took the boys out to a farm to get pumpkins for Halloween. My parents went with us and we all had a really great time, but it’s still a little on the hot side here in Arizona and I was more than ready to head home after a couple of hours in the sun! The boys had a great time, though! I haven’t had time to scrap the photos yet, but I did make up a couple of collages on Picnik that turned out pretty cute!
I also have a little freebie for Halloween coming up. I’m thinking I should have put a witch’s hat on her, but I didn’t think of it soon enough. I hope you like her anyway. Just click the image to download.
Thanks for dropping by!
My New Favorite Drink
We’ve all been sick with colds/flu the last few weeks AND it’s been kind of rainy and cold so I was in the mood for something that would encourage my daydreams of being on a nice warm sunny (deserted) beach when I closed my eyes. lol I recently discovered Our Best Bites and they have a great assortment of awesome recipes, one of which is Brazilian Lemonade. It uses whole limes, which is how I was snared. I love lime flavored anything!
Anyway, I made this drink a few days ago and I pulsed the limes a few too many times in the blender (it’s NOT a good idea lol) and my drink ended up being a little too bitter. Since I apparently can’t control my over-blending tendencies, this time I took the skins off completely. I’m sure I’m missing out on some of the flavor from the rind, but at least this way I could overblend and still drink it. 
And it turned out… AWESOME, especially in a big glass of Sonic ice! Then I got a bright idea and added a couple of drops of coconut extract and yeah, that was it… exactly what I was looking for to facilitate my beach daydreams!
In fact it reminded me a little bit of a Tongan drink my dad used to make when I was growing up. It’s called ‘otai and consists mainly of watermelon, coconut and coconut milk. Sometimes he’d add mango or pineapple, but usually it was just watermelon and coconut. OMGosh, to this day I could still drink ‘otai every day of the week and not get sick of it!
Do you have a favorite drink recipe? I don’t drink alcohol, but I’d be interested in trying anything else. Leave me a comment if you’ve got something good!
ETA: Here’s a recipe I found for ‘otai that is pretty close to the way my dad always made it: ‘Otai An Unforgettable Watermelon Drink
