Oh 2ww I have missed you

I know, it's been forever since I posted. Things have just gotten so hectic, both at home and at work and I barely find time to check my email much less write anything here.

The big news is that I'm in the 2ww and actually have something to wait for. It took a long time for my cycles to get back to something resembling normal after having QT but I think I'm just about there now. Couple that, along with almost being done taking the Coumadin and it equals going back to trying to conceive. According to Fertility Friend I've ovulated and should wait until the 23rd to test to see if I am pregnant. Of course, between now and then I will obsess about every little thing. Yesterday I had heartburn and so I wondered if that might mean that I'm pregnant as I tend to only have heartburn when I'm pregnant. Today I seemed to have a very strong sense of smell and so those same thoughts starting creeping in. It's super exciting and at the same time it's brings the worry about what if I don't get pregnant, how long might it take, what if we need to do more fertility treatments, what if we can't afford more treatments, etc. Right now I'm just taking it one day at a time and trying not to think too far into the future. It's easier to do that this time around than last because I know that we have one little frozen embryo waiting for us and so I know at the very least will will be able to do a frozen transfer and have a chance at success.

Good Days, Bad Nights

I find it so much easier to eat healthy foods during the day while I am at work and then things get so much harder once I get home. Things have been going okay and I am really working harder on not being so hard on myself. If I eat well the whole day and then have something junky at 9:00pm I don't want to totally beat myself up over it because at least I'm making strides forward.

QT agrees with my new policy and says "yea mom, don't be so hard on yourself."



I love peppers, just hate the price. This year I'm growing peppers in my garden and I have a couple of good ones going right now. Oddly, the plant is growing peppers but I swear it hasn't gotten any taller. So, it's a midget pepper plant with now big peppers weighing it down. Last year the actually plant grew super tall but I think I got all of two peppers from it the entire summer. Here are some beautiful red peppers that I got from Peapod.com. I sliced up an orange pepper and put it on a low-carb tortilla smothered with a wedge of Laughing Cow cheese along with some shaved turkey, tomato and a green pepper fresh from my garden.



On Sunday I decided to do some "real" cooking. I wanted to use up the peppers and I've had a bag of shrimp in my freezer for a long time now and so I decided to make shrimp stuffed peppers. I boiled the peppers for about ten minutes to help soften them and up and while they hung out in the water I made some rice. Next, I chopped an onion and cooked it in a little olive oil. To the onion I added a can of diced tomatoes and maybe a tablespoon or two of tomato paste and once that was all nice and hot I stirred in the cooked rice and some chopped shrimp. That whole mixture went into the peppers and then I just heated them through by putting them in a 350 degree oven for about ten-minute minutes.





The husband was super excited because he loves stuffed peppers and so to find them stuffed with shrimp seemed super special. I really think that the best part of the whole meal was when the husband did all the dishes afterwards!

Yesterday I made another turkey wrap for a quick, easy dinner. That lettuce was fresh picked from my garden. Lettuce is so easy to grow and this year mine has really been growing like mad. Normally that would be great news but I'm still on the Coumadin and thus still on a reduced Vitamin K diet. I ate my dinner off of SB's new monster plate. He likes monsters but he especially likes robots.



Tonight I stopped at KFC for dinner. I came home with the grilled chicken and am simply amazed at how good it is. Not only does it taste good but it's not horrible calorie-wise. I can have a leg, a thigh, some mashed potatoes and corn for right around 500 calories. Thinking ahead to tomorrow I made a salad with freshly picked lettuce and leftover chicken breast.



I also decided to make overnight oats to have for breakfast tomorrow. Overnight oats involve some good, old fashioned Quaker Oats, some vanilla soy milk (although you could use regular milk too) and then some kind of add-in. I chose dried cherries.



I dumped half a cup of oats into a container and then added about 3/4 cup of the soy milk. That will sit overnight and the oats will get all nice and mushy gushy and then tomorrow I will add the dried cherries. Yummy!



Well, that's enough about food. On to my super good news. No, I'm not pregnant. The husband has finally passed all of his preliminary exams for his PhD and now he only has to write his dissertation before I'll have to call him the doctor instead of the husband. I have been trying to figure out a good way to really celebrate this accomplishment and I'd love to take a vacation, either with the kids or just us two but I haven't been able to find anything yet that I would be excited about and that we can also afford. This would be the perfect fall for us to take a New England cruise since the husband isn't teaching until Spring but they are so pricey. I keep checking the last minute deals on all the cruise web sites hoping against hope that I can find one that is unbelievably cheap. We have both wanted to take a New England cruise since we had such a good time on our Alaskan honeymoon cruise. So, barring some mircacle in that area, where else could we get away to for a few days in October without spending too much money? Help me out here.

Thank you Peapod!

Thank you Peapod grocery delivery for doing my grocery shopping for me. Thank you for delivering beautiful produce right to my door. Thank you for not tempting me with tortilla and potato chips. I hope you return soon.

Is that really my butt??????

After I had SB I noticed a distinct change in the distribution of fat on my body. Instead of it just hanging out on my lower stomach it seemed to migrate to my upper stomach, my butt and my thighs. I can remember that in those first few months after having him I would sometimes think that I could actually feel the fat growing on my thighs. So much for that whole notion of breast feeding helping you to lose weight. I can't say that I've felt the same way now that I've had QT but although I haven't felt anything I can see it. Right now, today, I weigh less than I did when I got pregnant with QT and yet my butt is quite a bit bigger. Yesterday I took SB to the air show down at the lakefront. It was a mommy and me day for him as my mom took care of QT. We had fun just walking around, sitting and watching the planes and eating ice-cream. On our long trek back to the car we passed by some glass office buildings and I did a double take to make sure the fat woman I saw in the glass was really my reflection. Everything, and I mean everything, was giggling. When I get dressed in the morning I look in the mirror and don't think that the front view is too bad, or the back view but the side view is hard to take and my reflection was the side view and it was moving. It was a depressing moment and a horrible end to what had been a very enjoyable afternoon. All this begs the question what am I going to do about it?

The Hours

Some days drag on and on and it seems as though the end of the work day will never come. Today was not that kind of a day. Today I looked at my clock and was shocked to see it was past 12:30 when I honestly didn't even think it had hit 10:30 yet. We are in the midst of a big system upgrade at work which equals extra work for me. At the same time a co-worker is on maternity leave and so that too equals extra work for me. Honestly, I'm busy but I'm also enjoying it. I can remember after I had SB and I was home on maternity leave thinking about how much I'd love to be a stay at home mom. Not returning to work was not an option but what I found after I did return was that I had actually missed my job. Being a mother gives me a huge sense of purpose but not in the same way that my job does. I think that could be because the reward is so much more immediate at work. As a mom my reward will be seeing SB grow up into a great young man but every day at work when I accomplish something it is rewarding. Also, upon realizing that I have at least 30 more years of work to look forward to I thought it might be a good idea to make certain that my work is not boring but instead challenging and more of a career than just a job.

One thing about working that is not so rewarding is the amount of food I've been eating there lately. A while back my boss instituted hour long lunches. Previously we had the option of taking half an hour or an hour depending on how late we wanted to work. With only a half an hour most days I tended to not go out to lunch all that often and it's way easier to eat better when I pack a lunch. Now that I'm forced into taking an hour lunch everyday it just tempts me everyday to go out to lunch and going out to lunch only leads to eating things like Real Chili, chicken pitas, tacos, tuna melts, etc.

Today I had another blood draw to have my Coumadin levels checked. If I have a good reading I won't have to go back for another for an entire month. Please keep your fingers crossed for me and help me to get up the nerve to ask the nurse if I'll really be able to stop taking it altogether come October. I've seen a ton of pregnant women the last few days and it makes me want another baby all the more. I have adjusted to putting our baby making on hold but in my mind we'll be able to start again come October so I'm not prepared to hear anything other than that.

Getting Warmer

I read something yesterday which just made so much sense to me and it got me to wondering if every question we're faced with can really be answered by answering one simple question. The simple question is am I getting warmer or colder. You know that game where someone hides something and then you are only told if you are getting colder or warmer to the hidden object as you move around the room? Well, that's the idea you should apply to your entire life. Decide what it is that you want, so health, to lose weight, eat better, have more free time, read more, spend more time with your husband/kids/dogs, etc., whatever it is, whenever you have to make a decision ask yourself if your decision will make you warmer or colder.

On a side note, I may have discovered something else that could make losing weight easier. Behold the mighty iron supplements:

As I reported before, it has been discovered that I am anemic. Now, everyone I know who has ever had to take iron supplements has complained about how hard it can be on your stomach. That made me not look forward to taking them and then I read in the drug information that one possible side effect is "lack of appetite" and I immediately popped open the container and took my first pill.

On a really side note, how in the world did I miss the entire third season of The Tudors on Showtime? I kept wondering when it would start up again so I checked the web site and saw that the third season had already aired. Now I have a lot of catching up to do. When I last left Henry he had just had Ann Boleyn excuted and now he is currently on his third wife, Jane Seymour. You know, the one who actually gives him a son. How odd is it to look back on that entire period in history and wonder what, if anything, would have been different had they known that the sex of a baby is determined by the man's sperm and not by the woman? Thus, that Henry kept having girls was his own "fault." I think even had he known this he still would have beheaded two of his wives. After he killed Ann I'm really amazed that he managed to get four more women to marry him. Some women are just gluttons for punishment I guess.

Nowhere to Hide

Here's the rundown of the last three days:

Friday - Decided to walk over to Bastille Days for lunch and ended up eating some wonderful garlic steak, sour cream and chive fries and a super rich chocolate mousse crepe. For those of you not from or familiar with Milwaukee we are not just all about beer, although don't get me wrong, we are a lot about the beer, but even more so I'd say we are all about festivals. Beginning in May and going through at least September there is some sort of festival going on every weekend. Summer is so short in Wisconsin that we tend to try and pack everything in to just three months because you never know when it's going to snow. We are the home to Polish Fest, Irish Fest, Festa Italiana, German Fest, Mexican Fiesta, Pride Fest, Asian Moon Festival, Bastille Days, River Splash and the fest to beat all fests, Summerfest, the world's largest musical festival. Add all this to some additional ethnic fests which are slipping my mind and the church festivals and the state fair and it adds up to opportunities to eat around every corner. It's really hard to get out in the summer and not be faced with a wide array of too tempting, not healthy enough foods. Not that I'm trying to make excuses...........

When I got home from work the husband wanted pizza and so we ordered in and my dinner was a meatball pizza with a slice of garlic bread.

On to Saturday- Started the day with coffee and egg burritos. Honestly I don't even remember lunch but I do remember dinner. My other husband came over and babysat the kids which allowed the husband and I to go the Brewer's game. Imagine a sold out game at the wonderful Miller Park. Imagine a big bowl of nachos, a hot dog, peanuts and a beer. Imagine the Brewer's winning and you'll have a pretty good picture of my Saturday night.

Sunday - More coffee and then an all too familiar feeling came over me. It's a feeling of defeat and disappointment. It's rationalizing that since I've already eaten so much junk over the last few days that I might as well just keep eating that way the entire weekend.

Let's hope that there's a better week ahead and that I can shake these feelings and cravings.