Resolutions 2012

Welcome to Week Two of my new little blog.

I’ve been debating with myself this week about what my main post each week should be about.  There are so many issues that are important to me and I’d love to share my opinions with you and hear some of yours too, if ever anyone reads this. Lol.  I have decided to make notes on some of those issues till I’m a little more accustomed to writing my thoughts & instead get back to something I touched on last week.  New Year Resolutions!

In January 2011 I made a few resolutions.

1.     To have a NON camping style family only holiday at least once every 18 months.

2.    Focus on getting fit, losing weight would come with this & is much needed.

3.    To have coffee somewhere different at least once per month.

So, how did I go with those resolutions you ask...  BADLY!! 

To be fair we will be having non camping style holiday this June but it isn’t just our immediate family.  We’ll be sharing a holiday rental house with my husband’s family in Cairns.  We are all SUPER excited about it in this house, even though we are driving there & back.  With respect to Point two, I discovered during the first week of April that we were expecting our fourth child and although I continued walking and jogging for a short while I soon ran into problems with morning sickness & tiredness, and stopped doing it as often as I’d have liked to, thereby quickly losing any fitness I had built up from the previous year & those first few months of 2011, then from 32 weeks I was hospitalised and pretty much bed ridden till the birth.  And Point three just didn’t happen.

This year my resolutions have changed only slightly.

1.    Lose 10 – 15kg’s by late June (note, in time for the trip to Cairns.) This means losing ½ to ¾ kilo per week.  That means 1.1 – 1.6 pounds per week, or 22-33 pounds by June. That’s what the converter on my phone says anyway.  Now, I’m well aware that I could benefit from loosing DOUBLE that and perhaps then some, but I’m looking at this in smaller more achievable chunks for the time being.  Slow and Steady...

2.    To get myself to a hair salon at least once every two months.

3.    To have coffee somewhere different each month.

Thus far, this late in January I’m doing GREAT!! 

My initial weigh in was 2 & a bit weeks ago.  I’m weighing in fortnightly.  In my first week & a half I lost 1.4kg’s. (3 pounds)  It was only a week and a half because I have changed from a Wednesday to a Monday because it is easier for me to get there.  Hopefully I can keep this rate up.  At the moment we are focussing on the food and not so much on the exercise which is great because I’m a little scared to exercise my butt off.  I’m breast feeding (ALL THE TIME), and I seem to be one of those Mum’s that has trouble keeping up milk supply if I exercise too much.  That is one of my excuses for being a lard arse, oompa loompa, fatty boomba (etc etc) and, for now, I’m sticking with it! I have several excuses mind you, and probably several I’m not really aware of.  I intend to tackle some of these excuses this year.  Who wants me to dig out a BEFORE PHOTO for my next resolution update on this??

Moving on to the hair...  I like my hair when it is longer.  It tends to look scraggly though.  It can get a bit of a wave in it that I LOVE but I never really DO anything with it.  It’s always in a pony tail, never “pretty”, always just boring pony tail.  I had a cut in June 2010 & didn’t have one again until this month. Yes you read that correctly.  It is now January 2012.  My hair gets awfully dry & yucky when I let it get so long without looking after it. Funny that!!

The before, fresh out of the shower and just brushed straight look & the after, much shorter, much healthier looking & not at all dry & nasty look!! 

That is all just my natural colour there now too. The hair dresser said I didn’t have to be so strict with myself and that every three months would be fine.  Still, you better hound me in April if there’s been no mention of another visit.

Mmmmm COFFEE...  Two weekends ago, Hubby & I walked with the kids to a nearby cafe, Graze Brasserie, on Sunday morning for coffee.  The two older boys had hot chocolates & Miss Pants had a baby cino, which came home in the drink holder of the pram & got poured down the sink.  Honestly, I don’t know why we bother getting her things sometimes...  It was lovely, sitting reading the newspaper with a nice coffee.  Not too strong, not too weak, and not too bitter!  A little breezy outside, but we chose to sit outside so that we wouldn’t disrupt too many people. YES, middle of Summer and we could have done with long sleeves.

I’m going to try my hardest to drag a friend or two along for coffee every month somewhere new.  Well, new to me at least.  There is a place I’ve been before, about 6 years ago.  I wonder if that counts as new???

Bye for now, K

Food Resolution 2012

As part of this year's New Year Resolutions I have decided that I WILL make or cook something, every week, that I haven't tried before.  It might be a sweet treat (probably more of these than anything really), a main dish, a side or whatever else I come across.  I will endeavour to photograph my efforts but I'm not making any promises.

These are NOT my creations, but you can see why I'd love to learn to crochet.  They have instead been made by the wonderful Suzanne from Suzanne Houghton Designs.  Currently she has a facebook page but she's working on a web site too.  There are a few of these in our house.  I LOVE them!

I have two other resolutions this year too, but more about them another time.

Welcome and Hello

So, Welcome to my first blog post J

Blogging is something I’ve been thinking about doing now for well over 12 months.  There’s not really any one specific thing that has stopped me from doing it.  It’s more of a collection of several little things, the main one though has always been “what should I blog about.”

I even had the all-out-in-the-open blog VS anonymous-secret-squirrels blog personal debate.  Would I blog about the kids? Would I mention our actual names? Would I ask my husband how he feels about me blogging?  Would anyone read it? What would make my blog different from every other blog?  How often would I post?  What font will be easy to read & pleasing to the eye?  I don’t quite have all those answers yet...

I guess I’ll just see what happens as time goes on.  In the meantime I’m going to use my blog as a bit of a diary.  (I’m sure plenty of other people probably do the same thing).

I better tell you a bit about myself before I jump into it.

I am a thirty something stay at home Mum who is married to a wonderful man.  He is a very hard worker and a wonderful Dad to our four kids (and now that I think about it I don’t tell him that enough).  The four kids and my dear husband are the reason I get out of bed every day. They are my world!!

We’ve moved around a little.  Not like some people, but often enough that I’m getting itchy feet again after having only been here for just under eighteen months. To be fair though, we did live here for eight years before moving away for four years.  Employment brought us back.  The cold is partly what makes me want to leave again.  I’d forgotten about it. I mean it’s not Toronto cold, or even London cold, but it’s still cold.  The size of the house is a bigger problem now too.  Family grew, house shrank. What do ya do?!

Wow, I didn’t expect it to be quite so time consuming trying to write one little blog post.  I haven’t even contemplated the set up of the page yet. Goodness, at the ACTUAL time of writing this I haven’t even picked how it’ll be hosted.  I don’t even know if that’s the correct term to use in reference to a blog.  What I do know is that I better make a start on dinner while the littlest of the four is asleep.

Bye for now, K

P.S.  So when I did actually set up my blog using a template, I did it as a secret squirrel style but, when I went to bed I had a little freak-out & decided I’d better go with the honest-this-is-me open blog.  I decided I don’t have the skills necessary to keep up the facade (even for one night).