Swimming along

Well I am doing well. I have lost almost 4 pounds on WW and I hope to increase that number tomorrow. It is great how easily I have slipped back into portion control and counting points. It is a comfortable hat.

I have also started to go to the pool. My neighbour, L, and her husband A, got married in February of 2010 and they are also trying to conceive their first child. She is also doing WW, but the online program. She invited me to go to the pool with her one evening, and I forgot how much I love to swim. For the first couple of times I was just swimming laps - but I am going to try out deep water aerobics tonight. It is a start in getting some exercise in everyday.

We have been having issues with our wireless router at home, and we only got it in September. I am not sure what is going on but I tried a bunch of different things, and nothing has worked so far. So unfortunately we have to keep the laptop hooked up to the internet with a cord. Hopefully my husband can call the help line and get this figured out. I love him but I am the more technologically savvy member of this partnership. He is the one who has more time though as he is not working . . . which I do not think I have mentioned yet. I will go into that another day.

Right now it is back to work for another couple of hours and then home to eat the yummy stew that has been simmering away in our slow cooker all day. Delicious.

1/1/11

It is very neat that today is January 1, 2011 - so 1/1/11. I like when the numbers are the same like that.

It is also Cycle Day 11, as in the 11 Day of my menstrual cycle, and all signs point to me ovulating tomorrow. I don't really want to get pregnant this month. My BMI is at 45 right now, and I just do not think it would be healthy for me or a baby. I am working on this and I know that I can lose weight on the WW program, it will just take time. I just need to figure out home to get some exercise everyday as it is too bloody cold outside to walk right now. I have a couple of videos, I just need to get off my lazy butt.

It's 2011, yep it is

There is so much going on in my head right now, and I finally realized that this would be a perfect place to unload some of my thoughts.

OK, so my first thought is that I need to blog more in 2011. It's not so much a resolution as it is a goal. It should not be hard to write a couple of posts a month.

I started back at Weight Watchers on last Thursday. So far it is going well. I like the new Points Plus program as I get to eat lots of fresh fruit (they are zero points), and since we now figure out points using protein/carbs/fiber/fat, I have 48 points a day. They are different points, but I still love that I have more.

My grandmother, my dad's mom, my only living grandparent was in the hospital. She flew to Edmonton on Dec 17 an was supposed to fly out of Edmonton to Victoria on Dec 20. The whole family was gathering at the new home in Victoria for Christmas. Well it did not go as planned. On the night of Dec 17, my grandmother slipped on the stairs, twisted, did not fall, but did manage to break her leg. She had surgery on Dec 19 to place a pin on her femur.

It has not been going well. He leg is fine, and healing nicely, but all these other issues cropped up. Her back is a mess, has been for years, but it contributed to the broken leg. Her stomach was bothering her from the pain medication her doctor prescribed for her back pain. So she was not eating. She is still not eating well. She has lost a lot of muscle tone.

Now, she is in assisted living back in Medicine Hat. They discharged her from the hospital on Jan 7 and flew her home with barely an hour's notice. Urghhhh. So my mom had to travel down there in horrible weather and will now try to get her eating and up moving and better enough to fly her back to Edmonton. Then my parent's can set her up in their house with home care.

It's complicated and aggravating and my grandmother is being so stubborn (not eating and fighting everyone).

I just want my grandmother to be there at my cousin's wedding this year. I want her to be able to hold her first great grandchild, hopefully mine, after I finally get pregnant. I want her to move out to Victoria with my parents (which was the plan all along).

Hopefully my mom will have got her eating again when I talk to her today or tomorrow.

Happy Belated Birthday to Me !!

On Wednesday I turned 33 - overall it was a pretty great birthday/birthday week.

We had friends over On October 1st to watch the Oilers and Flames play preseason hockey. The Oilers lost but I got to wear my new jersey (an awesome present from my husband), and han gout with a great group of people until about 2:00am.

That Saturday, after sleeping in, we managed to buy a few groceries and then we just stayed home. We played a new game (also a birthday present from RW), and watched a movie.

Sunday we met up with our Calgary neighbours/friends again for breakfast. Then we went shopping (under bed storage makes me happy).

Monday after work we went out for an early birthday dinner at Boston Pizza.

So by then time we got to my actual birthday, I had already celebrated it a few times.

I actually managed to pick up some hamburgers to cook for dinner, go downtown and help prepare for a breakfast work event the next day, have Shaw over to fix the phone/internet signal, have birthday cake, and get our passports signed by our guarantor.

Yesterday, while I had to get up at 5:00am (and then slept in until 5:45am b/c my alarm did not go off), I got a nice free breakfast, listened to an interesting panel talk about business in Calgary & Alberta, got a nice free lunch and was only really at work for a total of three hours.

Today my husband and I got our passports sent in, they should be ready for pick-up on Oct 14, and they already called our guarantor and everything looks good.

So, it has been a busy week, but a pretty great one.

Wedded Bliss

Wow, has it really been 3 months since my last blog post?

Well I am now a happily married woman. The wedding was beautiful and fun and only had a few bumps that really did not matter at all.

Now I am trying to get my name changed to Mrs C everywhere and get organized for our honeymoon. We are going on a cruise to the Eastern Caribbean - specifically the Bahamas, St Maarten, St. Thomas, and Grand Turk - at the end of October. I am really excited.

It has been crazy around my home since the days right before the wedding. My in-laws arrived on the Wednesday, we traveled to Edmonton on the Thursday, the rehearsal was on Friday, the wedding on Saturday, the gift opening on Sunday, and Monday we traveled back to Calgary.

My in-laws stayed with us for another week and then we dropped them off at the airport very early on September 13. Then RW's best friend, CJ, who was the best man at our wedding, arrived in town this past Saturday (from Grande Prairie, about an 8 hour drive north). He was unable to get more time off around the wedding as he was finishing a project at work, and now he has 2 weeks off, and is spending 8 days with us in Calgary.

We keep staying up too late socializing with family and/or friends so of course I caught a cold.

All I really want this weekend is to sleep in Saturday and Sunday morning - for a very long time.

First comes marriage?

I don't remember when exactly we started discussing having children. I mean actually trying to conceive - not the conversations we had on our first dates about how we both want kids, and what we wanted to name them, and how many.

What I do know is that we were at a party at our friend AC's house, and for the first time we met GP's girlfriend/fiance. Somehow we ended up discussing how I wanted a ring, a wedding ring, on my finger before we got pregnant - and how RW really wanted to have a child, and did not care if we got married first.

By the end of March he had me thinking that having a baby, right now, would be great. I mean I started to think about it all the time and realized it didn't really matter if we were married first.

So April 1, 2009 I took my last birth control pill.

I had been on them since spring of 1998.

Maybe we need to go back and give a little medical history. I started my period when I was 11, and by age 14-15 the cramps were so painful that my dad (a doctor) got me some prescription anti-inflammatory drugs. A few years later and I would end up taking this combination of different over the counter drugs that let me function the first two days AF made her appearance on top of the prescription ones.

When I started BCPs when I was 19 - I remember thinking "why did I not do this when I was 16 or 17?".

I was worried that with going off the pill I would end up back in pain every month - but it actually was not that bad. I take an Aleve and maybe some Tylenol Menstrual - and I am fine.

I also used to have 35 day cycles before the pill . . . now . . . I am pretty much textbook with an average of 28 day cycles.

Ok enough with the TMI - point is I stopped taking birth control pills . . . and . . . nothing.

Sigh.

Living in Sin

So back in October of 2008 - RW and I moved in together. I love that I get to go to sleep every night in his arms and I don't have to drive 3 hours to spend time with him.

In December of 2008 we traveled back to his hometown - Sydney, NS - for the wedding of one of his best friends. I got to meet his parents and family. I loved it there, and I know, at least for me, that at that point I knew I wanted to marry RW and spend the rest of my life with him.

In February of 2009 we celebrated our first anniversary - and RW gave me a promise ring. He wanted to give me an engagement ring, but he was saving up money for the bling, and he wanted to have his divorce finalized.

Yes, RW was married once before. He was young, and in love, and he wanted to be a dad to her young daughter. They barely made it past the one year mark before they were separated. I could write a whole book about all the drama and lying and betrayal - and I probably will talk about some of it in future posts - but all I have to say right now is that it did not work out.

So back to February and March of 2009 - we started to look at rings. All I wanted was something simple and unique (in fact I even considered using birthstones instead of a diamond), that did not cost more than a month's rent.

Eventually I found something I loved. So, RW began to make payments on it in secret (which was very talented of him as we had opened a joint banking account).

Then we started talking about the future and having children and maybe having kids in the present instead of waiting.

This is where my broodiness began.