Soup to Dutts

It's been exactly four months since my last post. Yikes. Well, here's a quick recap of some things that have been going on with us... Little E turned 2 in March, and we threw her an Uncle-Phil-themed birthday party. No, not the Uncle Phil from Fresh Prince ; I'm talking about my brother Phil, who is pretty much E's favorite person. We made decorations in red and black plaid (Phil's wardrobe color/pattern of choice) and cat-ear headbands, in honor of Phil's cat Kiki. The  pièce de résistance , though, was the Kiki birthday cake made by yours truly. So, it's not a great likeness, but it was my first time ever making a cake like this, so I was pretty proud of myself. Also, don't tell E, but I really don't like cats, so I think this was quite the labor of love on my part. Just sayin'. Anyway, she loved her party, which was the most important thing. Tom was in Louisville for classes at the end of May/beginning of June, so it was just the kids...

Happy Friday! How was your week? Or month, I should say, since that's how long it's been since my last post... Weight change since last GFF post: +0.9 pounds Net weight change since starting GFF: +6.9 pounds So, I'll start out with a couple of celebrations: 1) A weight gain of any amount usually isn't cause for celebration, but I'm celebrating it today. Why? My last weigh-in was four weeks ago. Since then, I've been to a Super Bowl party and gone out to eat several times (including a pizza buffet with my family on Valentine's Day). I've also been sick most of this week, which has made it difficult for me to exercise. The fact that I've only gained 0.9 pounds since then is pretty astounding to me. 2) In the last couple of weeks, I've become much more diligent when it comes to tracking my calories, and most days I've had a pretty easy time staying within my limits. It hasn't been all good, though. I've actually been dealing...

Starting out with a couple of celebrations today: 1) Worked out three times this week, in spite of having a nasty cold. 2) Ran on the treadmill for four whole minutes last Thursday! It might not sound like much to some of you, but this is a huge fitness milestone for me. It's been years since I was able to run for even one minute, let alone four. This is not simply due to being overweight; I've also had asthma for over two years now, so being able to run at all without having an asthma attack is a pretty big deal. There have been a few lowlights as well: 1) I'd made some good progress with losing the holiday pounds, but I'm up about half a pound from last week. Could be worse, I guess. 2) Ripped a hole in a pair of jeans I bought less than a month ago. It was a weird rip, too; not on the seam, but kind of started from the seam and went toward the middle. Ugh. I'd like to assume that they ripped because they just weren't very good quality, but it's h...

Happy New Year!!! Who's excited about 2019? I know I am! I don't know about you, but if I were to post my Facebook relationship status with New Year's, it would definitely be "complicated." When I was a kid, I loved New Year's Eve because it meant staying up late, but then I kind of hated New Year's Day because I was expecting to suddenly feel different but never did. When I got into my teens, I grew to hate the whole idea of celebrating New Year's because it was an annual reminder that I had resolved to lose weight and failed miserably once again. In my 20s, I was sort of indifferent, especially when it came to resolutions. I would often try to sound cool by saying things like "Why wait until the start of a new year to change for the better?" (I still feel basically the same way, but I'd like to think I'm less pretentious about it than I used to be.) Now I think I'm back to loving New Year's, but for different reasons. It...

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...