I’m back, baby!

Well, I’m back.

It’s been a crazy month. We came home from our cruise in August via Chicago, and days later, school began.

Big Sis is now a 3rd grader, and Little Sis started kindergarten.

And the day before school started, I started my new job.

Overall, I love it. The work is comfortable and familiar, and I love feeling useful and needed. It’s nice to be able to cross things off a to-do list and leave the building knowing I accomplished something.

The official office hours are supposed to be 9 am to 12 noon, but I usually arrive about 8:30 am just after I put the girls on the bus. I duck out about 11:45 am to pick up Little Sis. If the office is quiet, we’ll go home for lunch and I’ll do some laundry and cleaning. If we don’t go home, I might take Little Sis out for a quick lunch and out to run errands. If the office is busy, I can bring Little Sis back with me and set her up in the next room with some quiet activities and maybe a DVD or PBS Kids.

Life is busier, but so far, it’s a good busy. Before I started the job, I truly had no idea where the extra three hours a day was going to come from. But somehow, the Lord provides, and it’s all worked out okay so far. I don’t get to spend as much time with Chiquita, though. Instead of taking her to the doctor and out to lunch, for instance, we just hit the doctor’s office and head back home. The basics are getting covered, though. And even though she had a fall last week (thanks, Phillips Lifeline!), she’s in good health (well, for HER, anyway).

Regular exercise hasn’t made it back into the routine yet, but that wasn’t happening even before I started the new job. I did make a truly valiant effort to make it to the gym before Mr. Hoagie left for work each day, but that lasted all of a week before I got thrown off by Mr. Hoagie having to go into work early.

Oh yeah…and blogging isn’t routine again yet. Obviously. But I’m working on it!

Vay-cay!

Ahhhhh...

You may be wondering where I’ve been.

Or not.

Well, I’ve been on a lovely little vacation. Much needed.

And this one was a REAL vacation. Which means that we did not bring Chiquita, NOR the kids. The whole idea was that I needed a break from taking care of other people.

It all came together when we got an invite to a family wedding. Plus my in-laws had been hounding us to let them have the girls for a week this summer. Add to that the fact that I was starting to fantasize about running away someplace tropical and never coming back, and an idea was born.

We had planned to do a cruise to celebrate our 10-year wedding anniversary, but it never quite happened. A week in August opened up, and we started jumping through some hoops to make it happen.

We started with the wedding date. We checked the availability of cruises before and after the wedding. We came up with one before that worked out well. The only problem was that my sister had already booked a plane ticket to come see us that weekend.

Hmmmm….

So I talked her into flying out, putting the girls in our minivan, and driving them to Chicago. Piece of cake. (They made it in 8 hours flat, thanks to the promise of a new episode of Wizards of Waverly Place upon a timely arrival.)

But our flight left two hours before my sister’s arrived! Now what?

I arranged a sleepover with our next door neighbors. The girls came home Saturday morning, visited Chiquita for a bit, and drove all afternoon and evening.

My sister kept them the next day, taking them swimming and generally spoiling them rotten. She delivered them to my in-laws Sunday night. All day Monday and Tuesday, Mr. Hoagie’s brother took them to museums, shows and movies and generally spoiling them rotten. Wednesday and Thursday, Mr. Hoagie’s parents hung out with them, taking them swimming, rock climbing, bowling and generally spoiling them rotten.

In the meantime, Mr. Hoagie and I enjoyed this cruise. I’ll post more details soon; I have lots of pics, too!

In other news, I just got a job! It’s part-time and starts next week, as does school. So bear with me as I figure out my new responsibilities and schedule. I may be posting intermittently for a while.

It feels good to be back.

Kinda.

Kath’s Four-Day Win: Chapter 1

This post was originally posted at my new faith-based weight-loss blog: So Help Me, God… Come by and visit!

Oh, Martha. How I love thee. She cuts right to the chase:

“WHY ARE YOU SO DAMN FAT?”

Oh, right. Eat less, move more.

Honey, if ONLY it were that easy. I know all the right things to eat. I KNOW all the right exercises to do.

It was a couple of years ago, just before I picked up this book, that I had an epiphany of sorts: It’s all in your head.

Or my head…you know what I mean.

Not that I knew what to do with this piece of wisdom. I knew it HAD to be something mental or psychological tripping me up, because…darn it, I knew I had all the OTHER pieces of the puzzle.

“Why are you so damn fat?” posits Martha. “…Because of the way you think.”

Cue lightbulb. Aha!

She goes on to say:

“It turns out that certain ways of thinking can literally change the structure of the brain, for example, in ways that make it less prone to craving and more prone to happiness. The implications for weight loss are huge.”

I have actually noticed this in my life. During times of decreased stress, my weight is lower. Aha!

Okay, Martha…I’m with you. What next?

Jump-Start: An “early win…will help motivate you to continue on the program. The first 4 days of your weight loss routine will be the most difficult. After that, you’ll experience an accelerating increase in motivation and success.”

Boy, that sure sounds good. Four days, huh? I bet I could do that.

“If you think this means the 4-Day Win will give you more willpower, you’re wrong; it will just help you need less.”

Wait…what? Isn’t that…CHEATING?

Isn’t the whole GOAL of a diet to beat yourself into submission? It doesn’t COUNT if it’s EASY.

Or…does it?

And get this:

“Each step on the 4-Day Win program will enhance your entire existence, not just improve your body. Losing weight and keeping it off requires that you live an unusually authentic, fulfilling life. I believe it’s the mother of all psychological challenges, more difficult than kicking heroin, more delicate than surgery.”

And so the exercise for this chapter is to Open Myself to Hope. Not easy…on the weight-loss front; I’m pretty jaded. Been there, done it, gained it, lost it…over and over again.

“I’d simply like you to open yourself to the possibility that, no matter what you weigh, there is nothing basically wrong with you.”

“The biggest payoff from following the 4-Day Win is the self-evident experience of the fact that none of your pain has been pointless, and no part of your life has been wasted—not one moment.”

I hope you’re right, Martha.

Let’s do this thing.

Recap: BlogHer ‘09

Everyone has been home from BlogHer ‘09 for days now, and most attendees have put up their recap posts. I, on the other hand, needed a few more days. Quite frankly, I was a bit “blogged out” even after Day 1 of BlogHer. I had a great time. So let me just hit the highlights:

• Staying with my sister @busybeebecca in suburban Chicago was a DEFINITE highlight. My little sis is always looking out for me, and this trip was no different. She even loaned me her car for two days to drive in to the city! By the way, she blogs, too!
• Right after I picked up my badge on Friday morning, I sat down and had breakfast with a great group of girls. Unbeknownst to me, I was sitting right next to @amerrylife, who I had tweeted with just the night before! What are the odds?
• The Room of Your Own session on Blogs and Body Image was a definite high point! I got to meet and hug @mizfitonline, one of my favorite bloggers. And the discussion was so valuable. Luckily they started a new blog to keep the conversation going. Go check it out now. I’ll wait right here.
• I got to daydream a bit about having my blog discovered and turned into a book. Hey…it could happen!
• The community keynote made me laugh like crazy and cry, too.
• PepsiCo was kind enough to supply Quaker Oatmeal for breakfast on Saturday morning. So warm and tasty…and I was CRAVING my whole grains!
• In the hallway between sessions, I ran into a girlfriend from high school who I hadn’t seen since graduation! April blogs at Wicked Tasty Harvest, and we share an affinity dating back about eighteen years for a certain caramel brownie recipe.
• I got to meet @feelslikehome finally! And even better, she dragged me along to see Paula Deen. Even though we waited over an hour and a half to see her (Tara had to duck out early for liveblogging duties), it was so worth it. She is SO sweet, y’all! (Both Tara and Paula, that is!) I had her autograph two business cards and my pork bloggers (don’t ask) tee shirt.
• While I was waiting in line to meet Paula, who should I find in line behind me but Dawn from Because I Said So, the very first blogger I ever read. When I saw her nametag, I froze for a second, and then gushed that shewastheveryfirstblogIeverreadandoneofthereasonsIgotintoblogging. She was very sweet about it, and when I bumped into her again, she autographed a copy of her book for me.
• I called home to check in. Mr. Hoagie reported that my mom had called three times. She knows I’m out of town. “What did she want?” “I don’t know; I didn’t answer.” Grrrr. So under the pretense of gushing about Paula Deen (my mom is a huge fan and watches Food Network almost as much as Fox News), I called to make sure she was okay. Turns out, she was just calling to make sure Big Sis was okay.
• The last session I attended was Blogging as Storytelling hosted by @neilochka and @dooblehvay. Good people, great session, and very inspiring.
• Dinner that night was a Hackneyburger, the likes of which I haven’t had in ten years. We used to eat there regularly when I was a kid: so long ago that my parents still liked each other, and they’ve been divorced for 15 years. Just walking in the place gave me waves of nostalgia, and the kind proprietor managed to rustle up an individual-sized order of onion rings just for me. Best. dinner. evah!

You may have heard a lot of drama about swag and possible blackmail, but for the most part, I avoided the drama (but not the swag; I was in need of a chiropractor by the time I left!). BlogHer was good times and good people…and maybe next time, I won’t be so much of a wallflower!

I miss them already!

I haven’t even left for the airport yet, and I miss my family. We’ve been running so much the past few months that I feel like I haven’t seen them enough as it is! I feel it’s almost irresponsible to go to BlogHer.

Add to that Big Sis’ experience at the dentist this morning. She needed to have her tooth pulled. It had a deep cavity, which was filled about a month ago. A couple weeks ago, it was still bothering her. After another x-ray, it seemed they didn’t get all of the cavity. They gave us antibiotics and told her to wiggle it.

Over the last week, a large lump on her gum has been developing. I took her in to the dentist’s office, and sure enough, it’s an infection. “It’s gotta come out,” she told me.

An hour later, the tooth was still in.

Big Sis, 1. Dentist, 0.

Wiggle and take more antibiotics…

Off to BlogHer…I’ll post more later!

Busy, busy, busy…

I haven’t posted much recently. Last week was crazy. I worked the kids’ vacation bible school at our church every morning, and then tried to cram everything ELSE into the rest of the day.

Over the weekend, I shut down to try to catch up on rest. Long naps on both Saturday and Sunday.

Then this week, I’m trying on a job for size. I won’t go into details, but I was “at work” yesterday morning and will go again today. Big Sis is at Vacation Bible School with a friend, and I’m leaving Little Sis with Grandma Chiquita for the morning.

This afternoon, Little Sis has swimming lessons (weather permitting), then we’ll take Grandma Chiquita to her kidney doctor. After we drop her off, we’ll come home and host a sleepover for 5 little girls.

Tomorrow, I’ll take Mom to the kidney clinic, then get my hair done for BlogHer. I fly out to Chicago on Thursday night, you know.

After a couple of weeks like these, I could USE the break!

VBS This Week!

Haven’t had any time to post tis week because I’m volunteering at my kids’ Vacation Bible School this week.

Big Sis makes a reverse-tie-dye tee shirt.

Little Sis poses for the Crocodile Dock "Spotlight Drama."

Happy summer!

We love you, MJ.

Look, Ma…No Training Wheels!

Well, my baby did it. Mr. Hoagie took her training wheels off tonight, and Little Sis rode her two-wheeler for the first time tonight. I managed to get a couple of photos:

Little Sis and Big Sis

Little Sis is proud.

Mr. Hoagie is proud, too!

She had a great time showing off for the neighbors, too!

Big Sis was a little dejected that her little sister had managed to ride a two-wheeler two months younger than she had, but I took a moment to explain that it was because Big Sis had been such a great teacher. She perked up after hearing that.

I love these lazy summer evenings….

Should I get “a little more work done?”

Remember that stress-related acne scar I had fixed a while back?

I had a follow-up appointment today with the plastic surgeon about my nose. I was planning to discuss dermabrasion with him; when he entered the room and took a good look at my scar, he also mentioned fillers.

To make a long story short, dermabrasion will cost $400 and be permanent, but it may only improve the appearance of the scar by 20%. A filler will cost $300 per half-syringe and last 6 months to one year, and combined with the dermabrasion should improve the appearance of the scar 50-100%. Using my own fat as filler will cost $1500-2000 and will last anywhere from a few months to forever.

I dunno. I’m not really up for all this. We haven’t even discussed the risks yet (infection, unwanted lumpiness, etc.).

And it’s my own darn fault I’m scarred, anyway.

On the other hand, it’s my FACE!

What do you think, faithful readers?

(For reference, the first pic was taken with a camera; the rest with the webcam. The scar is actually on the right side of my nose; left as you’re looking at me.)

Before

"Nose job:" one day after

Look, ma...no stitches!

After: July 7, 2009

UPDATE: Lynn C suggested I help y’all along, so here are a couple of the pics with red pen:

Before (see red pen)

After (see red pen)