I’ve writ­ten a lit­tle about my hus­band, Jason, and how he’s very ded­i­cated to his run­ning. In fact, I am jeal­ous. I’m not really jeal­ous of the time he spends run­ning (although catch me on a crabby day and that might be true, too), but I’m more jeal­ous of the fact that he really sticks to things. He says he’s going to achieve a goal, and he does. There’s really no ques­tion about if. We just wait to see when it will hap­pen. In May of this year, he ran the 5K at the Fargo Marathon. He decided next year that he’d like to run the half marathon. Yikes! So, in a step along the way, he is reg­is­tered to run the 10K at our University’s home­com­ing cel­e­bra­tion this week­end. Yay, Jason!

This leads me to a lit­tle bit of an admis­sion. I have actu­ally been run­ning also for a while. We have a tread­mill, and I started doing the Couch to 5K plan in June. I didn’t tell any­one though. I didn’t want to have any pres­sure put on me if I didn’t like it or if I decided to stop. Then, I real­ized some­thing. I real­ized that if I really wanted to keep up with run­ning I needed a goal. I also needed to tell peo­ple so they could put pres­sure on me and keep me account­able! So, I’m going to do it. I’m mak­ing a goal (gulp) and telling peo­ple about it. My goal is to run the half marathon in Fargo in May of 2009 with Jason. (My heart is beat­ing faster as I’m typ­ing this…not a good sign for my phys­i­cal fit­ness.) I’m cur­rently run­ning 2.5 miles at a time with a goal of run­ning 3 times a week.

Since I have a Nike+iPod Sport Kit, I can track my progress pretty closely. AND, since you now know that this is my goal, I guess I’m going to be telling you about how my run­ning is going every week.

I think over the course of the next sev­eral months, I will prob­a­bly be chang­ing my blog top­ics up a lit­tle. When I was breast­feed­ing K fre­quently or when A was born and I was feed­ing both boys fre­quently, I felt like I had a lot more to say about nurs­ing specif­i­cally. Now that they’re get­ting older, it’s just some­thing that’s an every day part of our lives. It just is. I don’t think or worry about it too much. We’ve got­ten over most of the hur­dles and pit­falls. A is sleep­ing bet­ter, and K has kept up his 2 a day nurs­ing rou­tine for the past few weeks.

Some of the top­ics that I have become more inter­ested in lately are healthy eat­ing, green liv­ing, cook­ing, exer­cise, and expand­ing my read­ing reper­toire. Maybe I’ll fin­ish a book (with­out read­ing the end­ing ahead of time) and do a review of it. Who knows?

A while ago, I wrote about our new com­post bin that Jason and his dad had made. I was a lit­tle skep­ti­cal that we would be able to fill it all up. Who throws that much food? Well, it’s pretty much full. We have some of our lawn clip­pings in there and some food with it, too. Jason goes out once in a while, and he moves it around and turns it. I guess he waters it, too.

When we first started the project, I thought it was just some­thing fun to do. I also thought it would be nice to even­tu­ally have the com­post for our gar­den. I didn’t real­ize until today when I was read­ing on 5 Min­utes for Going Green (a fab­u­lous blog, by the way), that com­post­ing has another ben­e­fit. Food that is thrown away is the largest com­po­nent of land­fill waste. When food is thrown away, it does not become com­post. The con­di­tions in the land­fill are anaer­o­bic (oxygen-free), and instead of becom­ing fab­u­lous fer­til­izer, it breaks down to become methane gas. Methane gas is a green­house gas, and it is three times more potent than car­bon diox­ide. In an era where global warm­ing has become an every­day con­ver­sa­tion, it seems like com­post­ing is one small thing that the aver­age per­son can do with lit­tle extra effort and expense.

The other day I received an e-mail telling me that my blog was listed along with 99 oth­ers as one of the top 100 women’s health blogs. I haven’t had a chance to look through the entire list yet, but I know that I’m always look­ing for new blogs to read. The list is divided into sev­eral sec­tions: Nutri­tion and Spe­cial Diets, Exer­cise, Infer­til­ity, Preg­nancy, Child­birth and Breast­feed­ing, Weight­loss, Health Chal­lenges, Fit and Healthy Over 40, Phys­i­cal Well­be­ing, and Men­tal Well­be­ing. Thanks for choos­ing me to be on this list!

For some time now, I’ve been look­ing for a fab­u­lous recipe for hum­mus. I’ve found a few that are fine. I found one that was decent. I also found one that was not good at all. I just haven’t found one that is great, though.

I really like the hum­mus from the store. It’s so expen­sive though for such a lit­tle con­tainer. I should be able to make my own for a frac­tion of the price, right? Well, I can make my own, but it’s missing…something. Mine seems to have a bland taste and not be rich and deep like the fla­vor of the store bought hummus.

My recipes are all pretty sim­i­lar. They all con­tain chickpeas/garbanzo beans, olive oil, lemon juice, tahini, gar­lic, and salt. I just vary the pro­por­tions of each ingre­di­ent, but I just can’t get it right! Heather! Do you have any gourmet magic? Any­one else? Even sit­ting here, I’m get­ting a crav­ing now for some really good hum­mus. Too bad the stuff I made on Sun­day is just okay.

It’s always nice for us when the 4th of July falls near the begin­ning or end of the week. We don’t have any fam­ily in town, so if it is near a week­end, either we or they can make a 3 day week­end out of it and take a trip. This week­end, Jason’s mom and dad came to visit us.

They drove up yes­ter­day, and brought A a sand­box as a gift for his first birth­day. It is very nice. They even bought sand that feels like beach sand! WOW! I want to go play in there once the kids are in bed. K seems to have made more use of it than A has so far. A sat in it yes­ter­day for a while and then started eat­ing the sand. Once he got tired of that, he was tired of the sand­box. K, how­ever, was happy to play in there all after­noon and again this morn­ing for almost the entire morning.

Part of the rea­son that they stayed overnight is that we are still try­ing to do a few odds and ends jobs around our house, and some­times those jobs are eas­ier with a sec­ond set of hands. This morn­ing, Jason and his dad worked on installing a fan in our main bath­room. This after­noon, they worked on build­ing a com­post bin. Jason found the plans for the bin on Lowe’s web­site, and I have to say it is much big­ger, nicer, and stur­dier than I antic­i­pated. We will have to do some seri­ous com­post­ing though with this thing.

Jason and his dad were only able to fin­ish about half of the com­post bin project. It said that it was a five hour project on the plans, but I think if I were help­ing, I could eas­ily help them turn it into a ten or twenty hour project. Just think of the fam­ily togeth­er­ness that could result from that help! So, now the bin is in our garage with the rest of the lum­ber wait­ing to be fin­ished. In fact, those things are right next to and on the cement pavers that we will be using in our next big project of re-landscaping the front of the house. That project may have to wait for our next long weekend…Labor Day!

Happy 4th of July!

Over the past, oh, six months or so, Jason and I have been try­ing to take steps to be a bit greener and more envi­ron­men­tally friendly. For a long time, I prac­ti­cally ran away from any­one or any­thing that was “green” or “crunchy.” Slowly, since hav­ing kids, I have made a turn around. More on this to come in a future blog. Right now, we’re try­ing to do a lit­tle more and a lit­tle more to take care of the world around us. I’ve also found myself read­ing blogs about organic liv­ing and green choices. One blog that I read is the Crunchy Domes­tic God­dess. She’s hav­ing a give­away for Mother’s Day. Check it out!

When I was in col­lege and for the years after before I was preg­nant with K, I was a semi-regular blood dona­tor (is that a word?). In fact, Jason’s cousin tried to con­vince Jason that one time when Jason and I went to donate blood together was actu­ally our first date. It wasn’t by the way. I just didn’t want to go alone.

Any­way, after I had K, I was inter­ested in donat­ing blood again, but I had a hard time find­ing any infor­ma­tion on the sub­ject. Most of the infor­ma­tion I found said that it was allowed but it was a mom’s choice whether or not it would work for her. Well, that didn’t help me much. I checked on the La Leche League web­site and the Amer­i­can Red Cross web­site although it seems they have changed their lay­out and that infor­ma­tion is no longer avail­able. I found a few specifics, but I didn’t find a hard yes or no answer.

When I had A, I had a fairly sig­nif­i­cant over­sup­ply of milk after he was born and had to (and still have to) take steps to con­trol my sup­ply to allow him to be able to nurse with­out get­ting over­whelmed by the milk. Because of this, I felt more con­fi­dent in choos­ing to donate. I thought I would wait until he was 6 months old and tak­ing some solids just in case I did have a dip in sup­ply. Well, he’s now almost 8 months and not tak­ing solids. I just couldn’t wait any longer. In my absence from donat­ing, Jason has caught up to my dona­tions and sur­passed me! I need to get donat­ing again.

I made my appoint­ment, and the day I was sup­posed to go was –38 degrees with a –54 degree wind­chill. Need­less to say, I did not go that day. I just couldn’t jus­tify tak­ing my 2 boys out in that weather for any­thing other than an emer­gency. I resched­uled my appoint­ment and went the next week. I really didn’t do much to pre­pare ahead of time. I made sure that I was drink­ing extra water and eat­ing well the days before. My appoint­ment went well. When the woman put the nee­dle in to draw blood, she had a lit­tle trou­ble find­ing the vein. That resulted in me being a bit sore that night and the next day, but it wasn’t any­thing terrible.

I know that one person’s anec­do­tal expe­ri­ence doesn’t replace the advice of a doc­tor or lac­ta­tion con­sul­tant, but I hope it helps at least a lit­tle bit if this is a deci­sion you’ve been try­ing to make for yourself.

When I started NaBloPoMo, I was a spo­radic blog­ger at best. At worst, I some­times let my blog go for *cough* months *cough cough* with­out writ­ing any­thing. After NaBloPoMo, I was pretty ener­gized as far as blog­ging goes. I saw how quickly and eas­ily I could put some­thing up. I liked the feed­back I got from com­ments and friends and fam­ily. What could stop me from blog­ging 20+ times a month, right?

My son.

I’m not try­ing to say that in a mean way. He is sim­ply a high needs baby, and he takes a lot of time and energy to par­ent. If you’ve read my pre­vi­ous blogs, you know that I’ve been deal­ing with a dairy sen­si­tiv­ity and some sleep issues. Well, we are still deal­ing with the dairy sen­si­tiv­ity and sleep issues. I have tried a few times to intro­duce dairy back into my diet with the same results each time. A cries and screams while arch­ing his back for 30–45 min­utes. Not worth it. The sleep issues have changed a bit though. When A was younger, I was often up with him for 30, 45, 60, or 90 min­utes while he was fig­ur­ing out that night just isn’t the time to be up and play. Thank­fully he seems to have real­ized that night isn’t a good time to play and be up. He has, how­ever, gone from wak­ing 2–4 times a night to wak­ing 7 times or more.

In talk­ing with some other mom friends of mine, they sug­gested that since he has a dairy sen­si­tiv­ity, he may also have other sen­si­tiv­i­ties that affect his sleep. For a few months now, I’ve con­sid­ered this and ignored the pos­si­bil­ity. I finally decided to do some­thing about it. Unfor­tu­nately for me, that some­thing is the Elim­i­na­tion Diet. So, for the past 2 days, I’ve eaten noth­ing but chicken and jas­mine rice. I’ve had noth­ing but water to drink. My mom friends told me that if this was going to be some­thing that worked for A, I would notice results in 1–3 days. Well, last night, we did not notice any results. I’m hop­ing for some sort of change tonight.

In all the infor­ma­tion that I read about the elim­i­na­tion diet, I have read that it takes up to two weeks for it to work. To be hon­est, I don’t know if I can do chicken and rice only for two weeks. I don’t love chicken, and I’m start­ing to hate rice (well, not hate). I am not really sure what to do, though. I can’t keep get­ting up with him five or more times a night (Jason usu­ally gets up the other 2–3) and par­ent­ing both him and K dur­ing the day, but I also don’t know if I can sur­vive while tan­dem nurs­ing if all I’m eat­ing is rice and chicken. It doesn’t seem healthy for long term nutrition.

So, that’s mostly why I haven’t been all that active on my blog. Hope­fully, I will be able to increase my post­ing fre­quency as A gets older, starts solids in the next month or two, and gives me some cute funny sto­ries to post.

A few days ago, I wrote a lit­tle about our attempts to live a health­ier lifestyle. We went gro­cery shop­ping, and it was eas­ier than I thought to find meals that were in line with our new goals. We’ve had healthy, dairy-free sup­pers for the week. They are actu­ally tast­ing bet­ter than I thought.

My prob­lem though is the crav­ings! Oh, the crav­ings… Last night, I was oh, so close to beg­ging Jason to drive into town to buy me a bak­ery cake. I couldn’t stop think­ing about the frost­ing and the yummy sug­ary feel­ing on my teeth. If I was able to eat dairy, I would put a scoop of cool, creamy ice cream right next to it and let it melt into the cake. Could it get any better?

For­tu­nately, I was able to resist and I did not order my hus­band out in the 40 mile an hour wind to get me a craving-satisfying cake. I am feel­ing a lit­tle less des­per­ate for the sug­ary foods today. I’m hop­ing that what peo­ple tell me is true, and after I’ve eaten healtheir for a cou­ple weeks, I won’t want that stuff nearly as much. Keep your fin­gers crossed!