Feeling Healthy!

I felt "off" last week.  My eating habits were poor; I was skipping meals & not eating nearly enough fruits or veggies.  I didn't feel like exercising as much as I have been lately & as a result I felt very tired, stressed & sluggish.  I wasn't looking forward to weighing in on Sunday but I sucked it up & stepped on the scale anyways.  Much to my delight, I somehow managed to lose 1.6 lbs since my last weigh-in!  But I couldn't help but wonder how much I might have lost had I stayed on track with my diet & exercise routine...So I forced myself to get back on track.  On Sunday I went for two walks, ate a spinach salad & fueled up on fresh fruits.  At 9:00 last night I hopped on the treadmill, which was the absolute last thing I felt like doing at that hour, but I knew I needed to do it.  I'm so glad I did, too!  I woke up this morning feeling healthy, not tired.  I feel energetic enough to tackle the task of raising 3 little kids again, and lord knows I need an awful lot of energy to keep up with them!

Savannah's 2nd top tooth finally broke through the skin so she is feeling much happier these days.  She's back to smiling & playing again, which is nice to see!  She has her 9 month check-up at the Pediatrician's tomorrow morning.  I'm curious to find out how much she's grown since her 6 month check-up!

Isabella is "officially" out of diapers!!  Wooohooo!  On Sunday she had just 3 accidents all day between 7:30a-7:30p.  Yesterday she had only 1 accident all day.  This morning she woke up dry & hasn't had any accidents yet!!  She's only wearing diapers when she goes to bed & really seems to be much more on board now than she has been in the past.  Her speech has improved greatly, so she can communicate her needs with us a lot easier now, but more than that she just seems ready.  I don't regret trying to train her last year or trying to "re-train" her once Savannah arrived.  I truly believe that she's been capable of being trained for quite a while now, but the decision had to come from her.  Now that she's decided that she doesn't want to wear diapers anymore everything seems to be falling into place.  I have a new doll sitting in my closet for her; I'm planning on giving it to her over the weekend.

Kyle is really excited about his upcoming birthday, which is on Friday!!  I think this will be one of his most memorable birthday's yet...  On Saturday we're having family over to help celebrate.  We're keeping things simple - pizza, cake, a few snacks - because on Sunday we're having his friends party at the Science Place.  We've never been there before (I found it online) but the website looks really neat, it's affordable & Kyle loves Science-related activities!  There are all sorts of themes to choose from - Kyle chose 'advanced chemistry' - which looks like it's going to be a lot of fun for the kids!  A 'Wizard' will be helping the kids perform all sorts of different experiments. The only downside to this particular theme is that there is an age restriction (due to the materials the kids will be using during the experiments) & there are *no* exceptions.  We explained this in great detail to Kyle, because it meant that he wouldn't be able to invite all of his friends & cousins to the party.  He decided that was o.k. with him, because he really wants to see what the chemistry experiments are all about, so we went ahead & booked that theme.  I got it into my head that I wanted to bake cupcakes (for the very first time!) for his friends party.  Jim agreed to decorate the cupcakes with some various "easy to draw" Science pictures (test tubes, planets etc).  Seeing as how I've never baked cupcakes before I thought it might be wise to do a test run on Sunday -- just to make sure that I knew what I was doing.  I figured if I flopped I'd just come up with an easy back-up plan; run to the grocery store & grab a cake!  I went out & bought all of the supplies & set to work on Sunday afternoon.  Of course I didn't want to bake just any kind of cupcakes...I wanted to bake cupcakes with a cream filling in the middle.  It was a bigger project than I had anticipated but the end result was DELICIOUS!  The cupcakes came out moist - the cream filling was very tasty - & Jim did an excellent job with helping to decorate them.  So now we've got our game plan for Sunday morning - when I'll be baking 24 cupcakes at the crack of dawn so that they'll be fresh, decorated & ready for the birthday party that afternoon!

Oh, the things I do for my kids!