Stop and Take a Breath

As the great Ferris Bueller said: "Life comes at you pretty fast." I would also add that relativity is a b*$@#. High school seemed to last forever but my son has been alive almost as long and that feels like an eyeblink. It seems like time just races by lately so I apologize for the lack of posts.

As I predicted, I had a gain for last week but not too bad. With the weight loss this week, I'm less than half a pound up from where I was. We haven't been getting a lot of sleep but it's been getting better. Last night Nicky slept through the night for only the second time in the last month. His skin is much clearer and through a bit of mental manipulation, we hope to get sleep more often than not.

Nicky had his allergy testing yesterday. Interesting results. Oak and hickory which accounts for the outside reaction. Fish, shellfish and treenuts which means we get to start carrying an epipen around. He's actually never had shellfish or treenuts so we don't know how he'll react. And dog. He's allergic to dog. Both the previous renter at our old house and this current one had dogs. So we're getting some high quality hepa air filters, shampooing the carpets abd getting the air ducts cleaned. Wow. Gotta say, didn't expect that.

So with John back to work and Nicky doing better, I have high hopes for a nice steady weight loss the next couple weeks. On the food front, a couple interesting notes. The shrimp in the dishes tends to be a little tough. Not sure if that's from the freezing or the reheating. But there's a dish on the mail-order menu only that I had for the first time. Shrimp and pasta salad for lunch. Oh, that was yummy. It was shrimp and spaghetti with red peppers in a vinegar based dressing. We heated it just a little and it was quite, quite tasty.

Time to put itchy boy to bed and do a little messing with the head. He knows that his allergies make him itchy. So last night, I asked him if he had licked a dog, tree, fish or nut. At first he said he licked a fish but we giggled him out of that. I told him that if he hadn't licked any of those, he shouldn't be itchy. We'll try that again. Convince the mind, convince the body, huh?

What a Week!

Can't believe this week is finally over. It seems that we've been going night and day. Literally. Nicky has had a couple bad nights. Last night I got about 3 hours of sleep. I can't wait to figure out what he's allergic to. It's something outside. He was fine yesterday morning. Then we went out to Chuck E Cheese and the outlet mall. His face started getting red last night and he itched all night long. Hopefully staying in all day will have cleared up his system.

We finished the playset Made one error that we didn't catch until it was too late but it was cosmetic, not structural. Of course, with 95 degree heat and him rashing up outside, he has only done a test run on it. Jason loves the swing, though.

Lost a little bit last week. Another 0.6 for a total of 27 so far. People may wonder why I'm happy with such low numbers. That's because I'm not really trying. I've been treating a lot lately. John is still home from the move so we've been doing a lot of family outings. Whuch means eating out a lot. Any weight loss makes me happy. This week is already a wash. Lack of sleep means major snacking all day long. It's the only way to keep my brain functioning above the level of chimpanzee.

Midnight Ramble

The doctor here is wonderful! We left with five prescriptions to clear up his infection, calm his receptors, and clear his skin. He started doing better right away. We have to wake him up in the middle of the night for his antibiotic but he was sleeping well. Until tonight. He's been up for two hours tonight. We've learned a valuable lesson. He was outside right before bed so there wasn't time for a bath. Next time, we make time! Poor itchy guy. It's something outside, that's for sure. Just a little sad because Jason woke up at 4:30 yesterday and now I'm looking at the clock wondering if I'm going to be able toget another two hours sleep for a grand total of five hours!

The building of the playset is going well. I'm really glad we followed the advice of people who boight it and labeled everything. Some boards were identical except for 1/4" length. Some were identical except the pre-drilled holes were placced 1" differently. Sheesh! We can only work on it when the babies both nap and only in the morning. (I don't do NC summer sun) So we've only done about 5 hours work and we've finished 11 steps of 27. We'll get it eventually. Had to go out and get longer bolts for one step. I'm not trusting my kids to hardware where the nut only goes on half its depth. But it's going well. We've got the swing side done and so John lifted up the horizontal support beam to give Nicky a chance to test the glider. He likes it so far.

Posted a loss this week of 0.6 so I'm at 183 pounds with a total loss of 26.4 pounds. I've talked before about setting smaller, reachable goals. I haven't been under 180 since I don't know when. At least since before I got married 13 years ago. Probably college. I'm wearing clothes I wore in college. So I have a short-term goal of seeing 17- on the scale. Long-term goal, and I can't believe it's possible that I'm talking about this, but 14 pounds will see me no longer classified as overweight! The medical term is "normal". Which I kind of resent because that means I'm currently abnormal.

What I really like about DTG are the people. Besides being some of the nicest people I've met, they really do care about their customers and listen to them. I noticed this week that the shipping containers were reinforced around the lower edge. They are constantly working to make everything better, from adding an entire new week of meals to using more recyclable containers to adjusting shipping procedures to find the best way to insure proper procedures.

Had one of my favorite meals this week 0 chicken pesto sandwich. I was slightly disappointed that the pineapple in the regular meals is replaced with mixed fruit. I like putting the pineapple in the chocolate pudding. But the meal was still tasty.