Category Archives: Health & Weight Loss

Where have I been?  Well, in short, I found out why I was so exhausted and sleeping so many hours a day, and just not ready to share it with the world. 

Those of you out there that read my previous blog (some day the hubby will figure out where he backed it up and I’ll get those entries in here, or so I keep telling myself), may recall that one reason I started a journey to health so long ago (six years!) was to prove the doctors wrong — that I could get pregnant and be a mom.  It so happened that the kidlet came along, a miracle through the foster system that you couldn’t hope to duplicate, and being unable to get pregnant stopped being the heartache that had plagued me for years.

However, it seems that we are going to have a second miracle child.  When I last posted I was 10 weeks pregnant.  We didn’t know that of course.  For all we knew I was just barely pregnant and things could go south in a heart beat.  It was after my second visit to the doc, when all my tests had been coming in normal that I started getting an inkling that maybe, just maybe the “problem” could be a bun in the oven.  I woke up at some ungodly hour in the morning and was violently ill.  With the surgery being sick after eating was no strange occurrance; I would just assume that I made a mistake, ate something too large, rough or otherwise unsuited to the environment created by the lap band.  But this was 4 in the morning, on an empty stomach, with no good reason to feel sick.  I’d had a few other incidents like that, but when you are eating every few hours, it’s easy to assume it was just the last meal.  I started counting back and realized that it had been longer than I recalled since my last period.  By itself that isn’t so crazy; I’ve never been regular, but more than 8 weeks without a period is unusual, even for me.  Together, it put the idea in my head that I needed a pregnancy test, so I jumped in the car in the dead of night and headed off the 20 minutes to a 24 hour pharmacy.

The next visit to the doctor was to confirm the home test.  When she came in and said positive, it was a shock, despite the + on the EPT stick.  I was bawling and worried, half convinced that a miscarriage was moments away.  The last several years of my life and have been filled with learning about my hormonal imblances and realizing that I never even had a normal puberty and hearing that conceiving would be nearly impossible, and carrying to term even more improbable.

Yet somehow I’m now 19 weeks pregnant.  I’m 38 years old, hormonally unfriendly to a fetus, and 19 weeks pregnant! (well, technically not until tomorrow)  We’ve done all the tests that we can safely do.   Our odds of having a healthy child have been upgraded several times.  My OB says everything is normal.

Miracle Child, take 2

Posted by Kristen in Brain Dump, Health & Weight Loss

The appointment went fine.  We talked about my issues, tonsils, sleeping, lack of weight loss and so on.  I filled out the paperwork so she can get my records from her old office (she changed locations, to a new facility), got a flu shot, and then went and had 47 vials of blood drawn.  (well, ok, just six, but it felt like 47).

The results take a couple days on some of them, so I’m guessing I won’t hear anything until at least Monday.  Hopefully by then the records will be faxed over or whatever as well, and then I’ll go back in.

Posted by Kristen in Brain Dump, Health & Weight Loss

Normally, getting enough sleep is difficult for me.  I’ve suffered from insomnia for as long as I can remember, and I usually get by on 4-6 hours of sleep a night.  Lately though I can’t seem to get enough sleep.  I’m crashing shortly after the kiddo goes to bed at 8, and then sleeping until he wakes me in the morning (between 7 and 8 most days).  I take him to preschool and then odds are good that I’ll come home and go back to sleep for at least 3-5 hours before I go pick him up.

I don’t know if its a diet issue (am i getting enough iron?) or something else medical, but mom was really worried when she heard how many hours I’m in bed a day, and I promised to see the doctor. I made an appointment for Thursday morning.  It was the only time available this week, so sadly, I’ll have to skip the kidlet’s preschool trip to a pumpkin patch.  I went last year to help chaperone and he really had fun.  Those pictures were some of the ones I lost in a computer crash, and I was going to tag along this year and get updated ones.  Ah well.

“Obstacles cannot crush me. Every obstacle yields to stern resolve. He who is fixed to a star does not change his mind.”  ~Leonardo da Vinci 

Posted by Kristen in Brain Dump, Health & Weight Loss

Even for someone as news-phobic as myself, its impossible not to realize that our country is facing an economic crisis.   The presidential election alone brings it into focus, and even I know of the culpability of the banks and the unsecured home loans that are dragging the economy to the ground.  Certainly I can’t fail to miss the price at the gas pump.  I know that my mom’s minimal investments for her future have lost nearly 25% of thier value, and that people everywhere are suffering, struggling, even losing thier homes.

Overall, my family is very fortunate.  My husband has a good job, and seems in little danger of losing it.  We have health insurance, a little money saved, and not much credit card debt.  Our home and cars are owned outright.  With me a stay at home mom, we don’t have a ton of extra money, so we don’t have any stocks or other investments to watch spiral down the toilet.  (Who would ever think that NOT having such things could be a blessing? =p)

Unfortunately, our personal ecomonic crisis is a making of our own.  We are still paying on my surgery, and since the only place remotely available in the area was out of network, we did have quite a chunk out of pocket.  We just received our property taxes for the year, which of course are based on the original purchase price of our home, instead of what we could get if we were trying to sell today.  We also live in a county with extremely high property taxes.  This home a mile south or west and we’d be paying a fraction instead of the 7K a year that hit us in the face.  We knew that higher property taxes was a penalty of where we chose to buy a few years back, but at the time it seemed worth it for the neighborhood (we live at the corner of 2 dead end roads, in an area that is one of the safest in Portland, bounded by a nature preserve, and with neighbors that are amazingly friendly, and even have block parties and the like) and the schools, which are superior to those in the neighboring counties, if any public schools in PDX can be called superior.

So we need to tighten the financial belt around here.  There aren’t a lot of places to cut the proverbial fat, mostly we have to watch the entertainment/incidentals and food budgets. The “entertainment” budget has never been especially large, and all we can do there is be more aware of the money that is going out for incidentals, and throttle off any hemorrhaging there.

But ah, the food budget!  The food budget is difficult to trim when you are trying to trim your waistline as well.  Eating well is more expensive than not, it just is.  It’s more expensive to purchase chicken breasts over thighs,  4% fat ground beef over 15% fat ground beef,  fish and brown rice over hamburger helper,  organic items over non-organic.  (Mostly things like pastas, breads, and whole grain crackers and other packaged items.  Not because I believe that organic foods are inherently better, but because things that are not organic are full of junk that we don’t want.  I don’t personally value an organic apple over a non-organic one.  I do value annie’s mac and cheese with no enriched flours and all natural ingredients over kraft, with its flour that was stripped of everything good and then “enriched” so that the gullible or uninformed thinks its the next best thing to sliced bread.)  So I’ve been working on finding ways to cut back on what I spend on food, without sacrificing healthy eating.

I’ve started by taking inventory of what’s in my pantry, to try and use up what we have before buying something new.  We took a trip to Costco yesterday to stock up on some chicken and fish in bulk, at the reduced price per pound that it brings (while initially expensive, it certainly pays off in the long run).  I’d been buying conveinently portioned salmon pieces, which when I actually figured it, came to nearly 11$ a pound.  Instead we picked up several fillets packaged together for just under 5$ a pound.  I think I can managed to slice them into portions and put them into freezer bags for future use for that kind of savings.  (On a side note, shopping at Costco is so very dangerous for me!  It’s difficult to resist bargains, and I have to keep telling myself ‘It’s NOT a bargain if you wouldn’t have purchased it anyway’ and ‘It’s NOT a bargain if you can’t use it all up before it goes bad’.  I have to resist the 2 pound jar of olive tapenade, the gigantic sack of bell peppers (but, but they are only 20cents each! ;)), and so on.  That’s why I try to drag the Hubby along with me when I go.  I’m less likely to lose control with an audience!)  I can be less wasteful in vegetables and fruit by shopping more often.  When I try to stock up for a week or more, something always gets buried, something always goes bad before I can put it to use.  The grocery that I prefer to frequent is between home and the kidlet’s preschool, so I can combine the trips and manage to shop more often without expending gas for separate trips.  I’ve also resolved to be better about using leftovers, instead of packaging them up and letting them sit until they’ve worn out there welcome and hit the trash.  Finally, I’ve located the online versions of weekly ads for several grocery stores in this area to watch for the so called “loss leaders” — the item(s) they advertise at big savings to draw people in, hoping they will stay and do all thier shopping there. 

So hopefully putting in the extra work I will be able to continue to prepare healthy meals, and still spend less on the grocery bill. 

“He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice.” -Albert Einstein

Posted by Kristen in Brain Dump, Health & Weight Loss

I’m back from our trip.  It was mostly relaxing.  I have to admit that I was a bit of a slug.  I much preferred laying around reading to being on my feet all day at the conference.  Especially after I managed to get shinsplints at Disney. 

I wasn’t expecting much from weighing in this morning after most of the week on room service, snack machines, and restaurant food.  And lo!  No change in my weight from last week.  Could be worse right?  Coulda been a gain from all that salty fatty food and lack of movement!

“No pessimist ever discovered the secret of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land, or opened a new doorway for the human spirit.” ~Helen Keller

Posted by Kristen in Brain Dump, Health & Weight Loss

Weighed in this morning at 283.5, which is down 2 pounds this week.  I had taken a “preview” peek at the scale midway through on Saturday and actually was down 4 pounds then, so am feeling just a tad let down.  On the other hand, its been so long since the scaled moved at all, that’s a cause for celebrating!

I am reluctant to rejoice completely at this point.  It could be just a random flucuation in my weight — I wasn’t checking in weekly this past year as I’ve been stuck.  But I am hopeful that it is a sign that my body is ready to once again shed some fat.

I’m *finally* feeling better, after nearly 3 weeks of that nasty nasty cold, so my appetite and energy levels are returning to normal.  Of course now that I am feeling well and could give 110% to this plan, we actually have a mini vacation planned over a long weekend.  I’m leaving Wednesday for anaheim for Blizzcon, which is a convention by the game company that produces Diablo, StarCraft and World of Warcraft (which is the game I play.  It’s an online, massively multiplayer fantasy style 3-D game).  We’re heading out early to give us a full extra day since our hotel is a hop, skip and a jump from Disney, so we thought we’d take a day for that.   Out here in Oregon there really aren’t any theme parks or amusement parks or anything like that, so it should be fun for us to go play kids and ride some rides.  We took the Kiddo to DisneyWorld last February, so I know at least I don’t have to worry about fitting on the rides, since I am no bigger now than then.

“Striving for success without hard work is like trying to harvest where you haven’t planted.”  ~David Bly

Posted by Kristen in Brain Dump, Health & Weight Loss