Soup to Dutts

Sorry I've been MIA again. I was out of town for a bit, and getting back into a routine after a trip is always difficult...especially when you don't have much of an established routine to begin with. Just sayin'. I know it sounds obvious, but trying to get healthy during the holidays can be incredibly difficult. And it's not just the actual days of Thanksgiving and Christmas; there are also holiday parties and other get-togethers that seem to revolve around food. (I'm thankful that I no longer work in an office setting; it seems like the office break room is always a dangerous place around the holidays, with everyone leaving homemade treats lying around.) My birthday also happens to fall almost directly between those two holidays, so there's a lot of cake and going out to eat. Plus there's the fact that I pretty much never want to exercise when it's cold; I just want to sit on the couch wrapped up in a blanket with the space heater aimed directly at...

Wow, I'm really killing it in the consistency department. I debuted Get Fit Friday three weeks ago and haven't posted since. Welp, there's a mini-goal for myself: to actually show up once a week for this thing. I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving last week. We actually celebrated Thanksgiving twice (once with my family on Thursday and once with T's family on Saturday), and both times were wonderful. I didn't track my calories; instead, I just tried to be mindful of portion sizes. I wasn't even super careful about that, though, if I'm honest. There was quite a bit of "I'm on vacation, so calories don't matter" mentality going on with me, which at one point translated into eating leftover mashed potatoes at midnight while working on a crossword puzzle. As an aside, I think Mashed Potatoes at Midnight will be the title of my autobiography. My mother-in-law and I celebrated our birthdays together last weekend, which meant cake and...

So, about a month ago, we did a thing: We moved to Charlotte! T got a new job, so we sold our house in Louisville and moved to Charlotte all within a matter of weeks, which is a lot easier said than done when you have two small children, not to mention a ton of stuff (we did a LOT of decluttering...but that's a separate post). We're loving our new city! In addition to having lots of fun stuff to do, we're also a few minutes away from any store or restaurant you could think of. My favorite discovery so far is just down the road from our house. It's a full-fledged brick-and-mortar Family Video store. Talk about a blast from the past; I had no idea any video-rental stores were still around in 2018! It's great, though; they have just about every title you could think of, including several that you can't find on Netflix or Redbox. In fact, to save a bit of cash each month, we've cancelled our Netflix subscription because renting from Family Video is way cheaper...

About three months ago, after much deliberation, I decided to quit Weight Watchers (or WW, because apparently they just recently changed their name...I honestly have no idea what the WW stands for anymore). It was a tough decision because I absolutely love the program, and I've had fabulous results with it. I reached my goal weight with WW back in 2013; then WW helped me get back to goal weight after Baby #1, and I went back to WW earlier this year to try to lose the post-Baby #2 weight. Honestly, the only reason I'm quitting is the monthly expense. Lately, Tom and I have been trying to cut down on unnecessary expenses, and that was one that suddenly didn't seem worth a budget line at this point in our lives. However, just because I quit Weight Watchers doesn't mean I'm giving up on losing this baby weight. (Huh. Can I even still call it "baby weight" even though my youngest is closing in on her 2nd birthday...?) I'm just going a different route by t...

My most recent morning retreat with God (for my 99 in 999 list) was about three weeks ago. That morning, I was weary in both body and soul, and I couldn't make myself feel any other way. I was just physically and mentally exhausted. (You may know the feeling, especially if you are or ever have been a parent of small children...!) Anyway, when I sat down to read the Word, something told me to take a little break from my Bible reading plan and read something else. When thinking about what I might read instead, particularly with regard to how I was feeling, the first thing that came to mind was "He restores my soul," from Psalm 23:3. So I spent the morning doing a bit of a deep-dive into this familiar psalm, and I came away with some interesting insights on the idea of self-care. Self-care is a popular topic at the moment, but I've often wondered: What does self-care look like for a follower of Jesus? After reading Psalm 23, I would propose that self-care for the Ch...

So I've definitely been MIA here the last few months. Sorry! I'm still chugging along on my 99-in-999 , and this weekend, I was able to knock out a pretty big goal: organizing the storage room. This has actually been a goal of mine ever since we moved into this house, almost 3.5 years ago, so it feels incredibly good to finally have it completed. Here's a before pic... This is just a fraction of the clutter. What you can't see is that there are many more piles of stuff just to the right, as well as another shelf in complete disarray. I ended up just taking every single thing out, getting rid of stuff we don't want/need/use, and putting back what was left in a more organized fashion. And after... Yes, it's still cozy, and there's a lot of stuff. But you can walk from one end of the room to the other without having to clear a path! And everything in this room is in a place that actually makes sense, which is more than I could say before this ...

#2. Watch every Best Picture Oscar winner... Last weekend, Tom and I watched An American in Paris . We both love musicals, and this one was no exception. Gene Kelly was fabulous (as always), and you can't possibly go wrong with the music of George and Ira Gershwin. I do have a question, though: Why did so many musicals from that time have these incredibly long dance numbers that seem to have nothing to do with the rest of the story? I mean, I love watching dance as much as the next person (especially tap, which I've always kinda wanted to learn #confession), but come on. The one at the end of An American in Paris just went on forever. Oh well. I guess it was just one of those things. #19. Have people over for a meal 10 times. So, the first of 10 of these meals is officially in the books. But we didn't just have people over for a meal; we hosted a full-blown 4th of July party! There were 20+ people in our humble abode, which is the most we've had at one time...