Winner, WINNER! Turkey Dinner!

Sooooo, I feel the need to confess something today.  It's one of those things that I've been carrying around with me for a while now and I'm really feeling like I need to get it off of my chest.

Ok.  Here goes.

I'm jealous of American Thanksgiving.

Whew!  So. Much. Better.

I'm not sure if it's the parade, the getting to eat turkey and all the fixings in November, the shopping rush that happens immediately following the turkey coma or the fact that the majority of people in the States seem to make it a priority to be with their families for the entirety of the holiday weekend.  Maybe, it's a little bit of everything though.

The first year I was home on mat leave was when my love affair with American Thanksgiving began.  It was the first year that I really got to watch the parade and the dog show and the Christmas specials that usually followed the football game.  I made a turkey and a scaled down version of what we would normally do for our own Thanksgiving.  It was awesome, but it was lacking.  It was lacking the laughter and the togetherness that the holidays are supposed to be about.

Ask me if that first, not absolutely perfect experience made me stop double celebrating Thanksgiving?  Nooooooope.  It sure hasn't!  I've decided that I'm lucky enough to have the option of double celebrating (not double fisting - could you imagine double fisting Thanksgiving dinner?  YIKES!), and one of these years, maybe I'll even be lucky enough to get to celebrate American Thanksgiving IN the USA!  Until then, I'm gonna keep watching the parade and making my turkey for dinner on that blessed Thursday night when everyone else in Canada is having meatloaf!

Now, can we talk about a slightly related topic for one moment?  I need to talk about how yesterday, while I sat in my living room watching the parade with my coffee and no one else (yup, coffee is that important in my world!) what got me, right in the heart.  The commercials!  They were killing me!  I watched one Jeep commercial about families who keep coming back to the same place to keep their holiday traditions alive year after year, generation after generation and it made me tear up!  A FREAKING CAR COMMERCIAL MADE ME CRY!!  I think I might need some meds.  Or something.  It's only just the beginning of the pull at your heartstrings commercial season and if the Jeep commercial had me blowing my nose and wiping my eyes, than what's gonna happen when the dreaded Hallmark commercials start?  Oh. My. God!!  The Hallmark commercials - AND THE HALLMARK SPECIAL!!!  I'm done!

AND NOW (geeeesh, there's a whole lotta yelling going on in here today.  I think I might REALLY need those meds!) to end on a note that actually explains my posting title (I know, I know, you've been reading this entire thing muttering, 'I just don't get it! Who won what?')

A lot of you read my blog because you've heard about it through the most amazingly fantastic, cyber group MLFC (holla hookstars!)  If you're active in the group bare with me for two seconds while I give backstory here.  One of the AMAZING chicks in there (Bridgette looks gorgeous in purple btw!) decided to organize a virtual Turkey Trot 5K so that everyone could feel like they were a part of the Thanksgiving festivities!  I was already planning on doing 5K yesterday anyway because 2 of my awesome ladies in my challenge group were running in their own communities, so I was all over this opportunity!

Yesterday was a beautiful day here!  The fog burned off slowly though which meant that the sidewalks were a bit slippery - it just added to the excitement of the run!  I got out there and I was feeling a bit tired.  Not sure why.  Could have been that I was running earlier than I normally do in the day.  Could have been that I was listening to a new playlist.  Could have been lots of things!  I didn't listen to the voice in my head though.  I told that bi-otch to shut it and just kept going!  I'm glad I did too, because here's what I ended up with!

I know, it's not sub 30 minutes yet, but THAT was a PR outside for me and I will take it!!  I'm still working on getting my speed up but it's coming!  Baby steps, right?

So, if you're out shopping today, please don't get trampled!  If you're laying low, eating leftovers and hanging with the family, enjoy every second of it - Thanksgiving comes but once a year (or twice if you're me and you're got Thanksgiving envy issues!)

Happy Thanksgiving everybody!

**edit**
I cannot believe I forgot weigh-in Wednesday this week!  What the heck is wrong with this crazy girl?  Let's blame it on the holiday envy that was happening in my head!  Down another 1.6 to 157!!  That means 3 things!
1) I'm 7 lbs away from my goal!!
2) I'm 3 lbs away from having lost 40 freaking lbs!
3) I'm officially back in the normal range for my height!  Wooooooooooooooot!
4) Ya, I know, I know...The last time I weighed this much, I didn't have any kids AND I was in my 20's.  It's been a long time coming and it feels GREAT!

Hip, hop...hippity hop!

Sleigh bells ring, are you listening?  In the lane, candy glistens! 

Oops!  I mean,

Frosty the Snowman, was a jolly flabby soul…

What?  NO, NO, NO!  Not again, NOT THIS YEAR! 

Here’s an overview of the holidays in this blogging mama’s household.  Mid-November comes and I have steadfast resolve that I am NOT going to gain a pound over the holidays this year.  That I am not going to eat my way through every open house, family gathering and midnight snackfest that happens because I’m up late yet again trying to make sure that this really IS the most wonderful time of the year in my house!  Sound familiar? 

Well, not this year.  This year I’m arming myself with an arsenal of figure-friendly recipes that will ensure my LBD still fits on January 1^st! 

This year, I WILL NOT resolve to get back on track with my fitness and health goals, because this year I WILL stay on track over the holidays! 

How is this going to happen you ask?  Simple!  A whole glorious group of mighty fine bloggeritas (yup, that’s my new term, I just made it up!) are joining forces to make sure that we ALL make it through the holidays still fitting into our pre-holiday skinny jeans!  You wanna join in the fun of this mega-holiday-blog-hop?   We sure hope you do because the more the merrier! 

There’s only a few simple rules:

1)   When you stop by the featured blog of the week, please make sure that you add them to your following list – I’d rather see my following numbers grow than the number on the scale, wouldn’t you?

2)   Give the bloggerita (see, that’s twice in one post – it’s a real word now!) a little bit of comment love.  I love nothing more than to get a tiny bit of love back (especially if you try the recipe and it’s AMAZE-BALLS!)

3)   Grab the button from the right hand side of this page and plaster that sucker all over your blog – helps to get the word out and get even more people to our blogs.  It takes a village after all, right?

Now that you KNOW you want to get in on this action, all you have to do is send an email to one.small.step.for.me@gmail.com saying what recipe you want to post and when!  We’ll be posting and linking up to sites every Wednesday from now (November 14^th ) until the 2^nd of January! 

Let’s make this the skinniest, miniest holiday season EVER!

don't be a hater...

A recent post check it out here on my beloved Mama Laughlin's blog has really made quite the stir amongst her readers.  One of the things I've come to expect and love about her is that she's a no-holds-barred kinda chick.  She talks about things that we all have first hand experience with, but are often too shy to even bring up in the light of day.  I read her blog because it makes me laugh.  Sometimes, her honesty makes me cry, but mostly, I feel like she understands a little bit about what it's like to be a mom who is struggling to be the perfect wife, mother and friend.  She gets it because she's living it too.

This particular post also made me laugh.  The post itself did.  The comments she received as a result of the post though did not make me laugh.  I couldn't believe the kinds of things people were saying in response to her position on such a wide open topic.  I couldn't believe that people would post such hateful things like:

Anonymous said...

This sounds to me a post from an insecure woman that wants to be the whore that her husband's friends always want to fuck. Why are women considered witholding if they aren't in the mood or the man has been an ass?

and

Anonymous said...

Brandi
Yes this is your blog and you can write whatever you want, and yes you are tacky and yes you are trashy and yes you are uneducated and yes you are irresponsible and yes you are vain and yes you are harsh and crude and mostly yes you definitely suffer from low self esteem. It's obvious Brandi. Now that you are "famous" and people are paying you to talk about fitness and weight loss, perhaps you should stick to that subject? just a thought. From reading your blog, seems like you are drifting away from fitness and losing weight and leaning towards porn? What is it? Decide and stick with it. This way, some of your readers and followers can move on and away from your trash if you choose to write about trash and porn, and not about losing weight/fitness/health. What you have been doing lately with this blog of yours proves that you are a fraud. You really don't know much about fitness or eating healthy or staying healthy. Do you? You've run out of things to talk about in the subject because you just DON'T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT IT! I mean if you were truly a health conscious person, you wouldn't go out once a month to get drunk. What healthy person does that? I don't know of any. You wouldn't fill your mouth with greasy,trashy fast food as often as you do. Also, quit fooling your readers by saying that you advocate for women. You don't have a clue about the subject! Some of your posts prove that. I suggest you quit this facade and get into the porno industry. That's what you really want, isn't it? Quit pretending you are someone you obviously are not. That is what the real issue with this last post of yours, in particular, is. Just be yourself Brandi just like you claim you are. News flash: you are a fake.

Notice, that both of the above comment posts were done anonymously.  So these haters, who clearly felt strongly about her post, were OK saying horrible (and as in the case of the second comment above,) personal comments about her, but couldn't even man-up enough to put their own names alongside those comments.

I realize that when you start a blog, you open yourself up for interaction with people you don't know and of course that means receiving feedback and even criticism from those same people.  What I don't understand though, is why anyone would honestly feel the need to lash out at a person that they don't know personally  (although comment number two seems to be a tad personal, so perhaps that's not entirely true) when it's just a blog post!  No one is forcing them to read it!  No one is saying 'hence forth, the law of the land shall be that every night, whether you wish to or not, you will 'ess some D' as a good and obedient wife should!'  What I love about reading blogs is how frank people usually are in their entries.  I love that Mama Laughlin doesn't hold shit back - if you've read any of her posts, that shouldn't come as a surprise to you!  I am not interested in reading things where people just wanna talk about recipes and school schedules - that's boring as hell!  Thats probably why I have no followers!

That being said, I'm also not interested in a blog where it's all flowers and roses and everyone holds hands all the time and dances around in a circle!  A little controversy is a good thing.  Personal and berating comments though?  Those aren't cool!  No one is prying your eyeballs open, holding your head in front of the computer screen and screaming 'READ IT'!  Post your comments - disagree, agree, whatevs!  Don't post hate though.  That's just not cool!

PHEW!  I feel so much better now that I got that off of my chest.  Hopefully now, I can return to my regularly scheduled boringness of THE BIG WEIGH-IN!!  Monday morning is it for this lil' Dicks vs Chicks competition!  I was 165.something or other yesterday when I peaked at the scale which I'm so excited about!  I really didn't think I could do it when I first started this blog.  I thought I'd get to that horrible 180 mark and not be able to bust through it again.  Not only did I bust through that one, but I made it through a whole other decade and a half of weight and now I want to dial it back even further!  That's all I'm gonna say about that for right now though because obviously I need SOMETHING to talk about on weigh-in Monday, right?

It's Thanksgiving on Monday (yup, I'm a great white Canuck!)  That means this weekend will be filled with lots of travelling and eating.  Turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes...need I go on?  However, I made it through dinner last weekend and still lost, so I'm sure I can do the same for rounds 2 and 3!  I'm supposed to run 8.5 miles on Sunday.  There's no way in H-E-L-L that's going to happen on one day.  Instead, I think I'm going to do 5 today, tomorrow and Sunday.  That way I get my mileage in and can still be ok with maybe having a tiny piece of pie!

The Rocky theme is pounding through my head right now.  Gotta run (literally!)

Gobble Gobble!

Take that Beeeee-otch!

Ha!  Today?  Today, was a GREAT day!

First of all, yesterday was a fun-tasticly f'ing looooooong day.  We were up at 5:15 so that the husband and the big boy could be at the arena before 6:00 am for the first game of the season.  Apart from a few awkward and uncomfortable moments with some people from my past (now that's a blog post for another time) it was a really great game!  My big boy loves hockey.  He might not be the best player on the team, but he really loves being out there and to me, that's all that counts!

Came home for a bit of down time and then headed west to have pre-Thanksgiving (yup, for us Canadian folk it's only a week 'til turkey time!) with the BIL and SIL.  It was such a gorgeous day for a drive, how could it not have been perfect?  We love going to visit with BIL and SIL.  They live about 21/2 hours away from us, so we don't get to see them nearly as often as we'd like.  One of these days we'll have to do something about that, right SIL? ;)

So, with a pre-Thanksgiving dinner under my belt, literally, I was a tiny bit worried about the scale this week.  I knew after finishing my 8 miler on Saturday and behaving myself relatively well that I'd probably be ok, but, well...you just never know!  So I was pretty ecstatic when I saw 166.6 staring back at me this morning! Yup, that's 1.6 away from the goal I set back in July and only 16.6 away from my new final goal!

I actually wrote down my stats this morning (which I normally don't do because I'm too consumed with whatever is flashing back at me to concentrate on the other numbers!)  I really don't know how accurate these numbers are.  I mean, I bought the scale from Walmart, so it's not exactly the most high tech thing out there!  However, the numbers flashed as follows:

Weight - 166.6 (woooooooot)
lbs from fat - 49.2 / 29.6%
Water - 51.3%
BMI - 26.1

The lbs / % of fat is still higher than I'd like it to be, but my BMI is definitely getting closer to the 22 - 24 range that I'd like for it to be in.

So getting back to why today was a GREAT day?  Well, not only did I get my 3-miler in today, I also got my kids off to school with out WWIII, my husband was in an, ahem, fantastic mood, AND I got through level 1, day 2 of JM 30-Day Shred!  Now if I can just get through 30 more days of working out with that crazy bitch, I'll be one happy chick!

On tap for tomorrow?  3.5 miles, 30DS AND the return of haaaaaaaawwwwwwwttttttttt yoga.  Yup, yup, yup!  I cannot wait to sweat my balls off not 1, not 2 but 3 f'ing times tomorrow!  It's gonna be epic!

Go kick some butt!

Feel, feel, FEEL the frustration!

I'm a day late posting this week for weigh-in Monday - seems it's becoming a trend.  Not good.  Besides, Weigh-in Tuesday doesn't sound very good.  At. All.  Weigh-in Wednesday though, now that has a nice ring to it!

So I stepped on the scale yesterday morning and I was down, but not where I'd wanted to be.  The hope was to get to at least 170 if not 169.  I worked hard last week and even got the worst 6 mile run of  my life in!  73 f'ing minutes it took me to complete that run.  That's 1 hour and 13 minutes - to do 10 k! Craptastical, that's what that is!  I blame it on the treadmill dude for upping the torque on my treadmill last week.  I'm finding it tricky to get used to the new speed and basically have to re-work my brain to not feel like every run is taking twice as long.

I should probably also admit at this moment in time, that although my weight did still go down to 171, that I should be pretty damn happy since the evening before was dinner at the head Richard's house to celebrate his entrance into my life, aka his birthday.  I ate cake.  WOW!  That feels like a weight has suddenly lifted...oh wait!  Nope, it hasn't!  It's still on my ass!  I have a superstition though that I blame my mom for.  She always told us that it was bad luck to not eat cake on someone's birthday.  I didn't have a big piece - it was like a 30th of the cake, but man it was good and I ate every last bite.  I actually contemplated licking the icing from the plate for about a second, but thought that was a tad drastic - and probably pretty uncool!

So, what am I doing this week to make sure that my birthday weigh-in is super-fantastical-amaze-balls? Well!  First of all, I'm absolutely addicted to the Mama Laughlin Fit Camp FB group!  I'm going there for motivation on a daily basis.  Secondly, I finally downloaded a food tracking app onto my phone - Myfitnesspal.  If you are looking for one, but haven't decided what works for you, check it out!  It's the best one I've EVER downloaded, and let me tell you, I've downloaded quite a few!

Second, I'm getting all of my runs in this week and then some.  I think I'm going to take the boys on a couple of bike rides this week too just to keep everybody moving AND I'm going to go and do a hot yoga class (or two) before Thursday night when I get my hair did!

Birthday weigh-in, I'm gonna fist pump you into next week!!

T.G.I.M.!

That's right, Thank Gaaaaaaaawd It's Monday!  What a c.r.a.z.y. weekend we had!  Baseball clinics, birthday shopping, birthday party number 1, baseball trophy day, baseball team lunch and then, because we hadn't done enough yet, we had birthday party number 2!  I know, I'm certifiably crazy.  I'm absolutely, 100% convinced of it!

That being said, I'm pretty sure it was all worth it considering how absolutely over-the-moon happy my little dude was this weekend!  He had his friend party at Chuck E Cheese (the depths of hell for parents as we know it) and I'm pretty sure that even if he hadn't gotten a single present would have been thrilled with just that party.  I mean, with a cake like this one, how could he not be ecstatic about his birthday?

It was such a cool cake!  I've found the best cake artist and I love her!  She's never disappointed me yet and has made quite a few cakes for me over the last two years!  Stephanie Tennant at Cakes By Stephanie honestly is a cake genius, check her out the next time you need a cake!

So, with the coolest cake ever, we had to let him have it at the coolest place on earth (see above for my thoughts on the place), Chuck E Cheese.  But seriously, look how cute he was in the windy ticket booth!

I love how the goggles barely fit his face!  AND, I totally sent him in there with a couple of extra buttons undone, hoping that a few tickets would actually get trapped in there since I knew he was going to be too busy holding the goggles in place to actually grab anything.  Yeah, that didn't really work. Luckily, the girl doing it took pity on him and dropped some of the big tickets on the ground for him!  He was thrilled!

So, with my nightmare and his dream-come-true over with, we whirled through the rest of the events of the weekend with family, friends and eating fairly well!  I didn't, for the record, eat anything at CEC EXCEPT for the veggies from the veggie tray.  Oh wait!  I guess I did since I HAD to have a piece of cake!  It's bad luck to not have cake on someone's birthday!

I weighed myself on Saturday morning and was 173.8 (I think that's what it was!)  I did another little happy dance since I was pretty that that same number wouldn't be there come Monday morning!  Aaaaaaand I was right!  I ate really well this weekend, but didn't get my run in yesterday because of everything going on and because my treadmill is still sick so this morning the scale said 175.4 (I think?)  Still down from last Monday by a few points so I'll take it, but definitely not where I wanted to be.

I need my treadmill back!  I hate doing my long runs outside by myself!  However, if it's not fixed after dinner tonight, I guess I'm gonna have to suck it up and just go because I'm not going to miss a run!

Here's a few more cute birthday pics, just for fun!

The birthday King on his throne with all of his bounty!

Definitely one of the favourite gifts from the weekend!  Green is his favourite colour after all!

Later this week, countdown to my doctor induced weigh-in on Friday!  Gotta keep up the momentum!!