september mama

i think i mentioned i started watching some workout videos on netflix..? well, the one i'm going with for the long haul is awesome, if gimmicky. "10-minute solutions" carb killer or something like that; it's 50-minutes broken into super-intense 10-min segments with tons of jumping around and squats. she does a quick warm up, then right into fast and furious burn, then another 30-sec cool down. on to the next segment.

i thought it would be worth a try just because my time is often short and i hate the drawn-out blabbing in most videos, but as it turns out, i totally love it for the intensity and the amount of energy i have afterwards. she doesn't chat it up or waste time with long warm-ups and stretching, and by the time one segment is over i am so hyped up i want to do another. my energy level is staying high consistently too, which is awesome because i've been really tired in general most of the time. not so anymore.

i had heard that in order to truly make any metabolic difference, one has to work out for at least 20 minutes, but it turns out that's not true at all.

research shows (forgive the source):

While most experts keep telling us we need to exercise longer if we want to lose weight—we're supposed to exercise 60 to 90 minutes a day just to maintain weight loss—a fast-growing body of research indicates that intensity, not duration, is really the missing piece in our fitness puzzle:

• Last December, Canadian researchers reported that just two weeks of interval training boosted women's ability to burn fat during exercise by 36 percent.
  
  
• Levels of human growth hormone—which assists in building muscle and eliminating fat—skyrocketed 530 percent in subjects after just 30 seconds of sprinting as fast as they could on a stationary bike, according to a British study.
  
  
• Australian fitness researchers had 18 women perform 20 minutes of interval training on a stationary bike—eight-second sprints followed by 12 seconds of recovery throughout the workout, three days a week. The women lost an average of five and a half pounds over 15 weeks without dieting, while a similar group performing 40 minutes of moderate cycling three days a week actually gained a pound of fat over the same period. Two of the heavier women who did intervals dropped 18 pounds.

interval training is my new best friend.

in other news, we are converting back to farmer's market shopping for fruits and veggies as of this week. we were growing so much of our own, then when the garden was finished last season we sort of fell back to the usual (and loathesome) winn-dixie... but i've been going to publix again because it is a MILLION TIMES BETTER... but still not necessarily local. and given that i eat 90% of my diet in fresh fruit and vegetables, we need to get those things from our community, if not from our backyard. it's cheaper, fresher, and all the good things about giving back to the local economy and farms. i'm pretty excited to take the kids out - apparently there is a bounce house on location, haha.

my batch of chicks is fully grown now; the "babies" officially started laying just the other day. so we should be swimming in eggs sometime over the next month, which is both awesome and worrying (because i have to find uses for them). i am crossing my fingers that at least one of the hens goes broody so we can get a production cycle going and actually "harvest" some chickens every few months, but we'll see. our ducks are sitting on a nest right now, due to hatch around feb 22 or so. that should be fun again! :)

i love having a little farmette...

it's been a long time since posting! i'm always, always busy at work... but i like it here, so it's ok. i'm stealing time right now...

the kids are ridiculously grown-up. liam walks/runs/climbs everything, and he loves to dance. and play dress up. anything he can wear around his neck, his arm, or his head makes him literally prance around (it's so cute). i caught him a few weeks ago standing in front of their play kitchen with a shiny pink necklace on, holding a baby against his ear, stirring a pot on the "stove." he's going to make some woman verrrry happy one day, lol.

he's still not talking very well, but he is trying. he manages a few words clearly, but the rest is either garbled nonsense or "eh, EH." oh, and i gave him his first haircut last week... i've been torn because his pretty little curls were very girly, and i felt like he is too boyish for that. so i cut it into a sort of longish mo/faux-hawk with a tail at the end, because i just couldn't bear to cut off ALL the curls. so he looks a little bit like a redneck boy from the mid-eighties :). infant innocence has fully given way to mischievous BOY. alas, all with a few snips... i almost cried the whole next day over it.

rowan is little-miss-not-a-little-girl. i swear that kid is a grown up in a munchkin body 90% of the time. she's just so smart, and so with it, and she comes up with the craziest things. her imagination is a little bit out of control, in fact, but she got that honestly. she's counting objects these days, which is neat, and she can sound out many letters and recognize a couple of words. we went to her first movie a few weeks ago (beauty and the beast 3D), which was exciting for her. she didn't wear the glasses for most of it, but she stuck through the entire showing.

i have been making very good progress on my attempts at reducing the size of my ass (and thighs, and waist, and arms...). right around jan 1--by coincidence ONLY--i reformed my eating habits basically back to eating raw, without being too strict about that aspect of it. i'm counting calories extremely closely, however, and just this last week have started doing some silly online workout videos a few nights a week. sunday, i ran 2 miles. it feels great, and today i am ecstatic to say that i am comfortably wearing pants that were too tight 3 weeks ago. *happy sigh* i've lost several inches, overall, from various parts of my body. now i just need to work on toning and upping the metabolism. desk jobs are hard :P.

i managed to write a paper on the topic of unassisted birth for a forestry class i am taking... i thought that was a pretty big achievement, haha. something about behavior changes adopted in the past 5 years. it fit, so i used it.

i have to do work now, but i need to post some pics of the kids, especially liam's new haircut.

my days of being a pixie girl are numbered, it seems. last night matt officially requested that i stop cutting my hair because i'm "starting to look like a boy." (he's such a jerk sometimes, lol.)

while i strongly disagree with him--in fact, i feel quite a bit more feminine b/c i'm paying more attention to my face and accessories--i also want him to think i look cute so i will most likely comply with his request. as much as i love having super-short hair.

in a way, though, this opens new possibilities... i have never been an in-between-length kinda girl; i tend towards extremes; but now i think i will play around with style in the neck to shoulder length area for a while. all sorts of funky cuts. and colors. *mischievous grin*

anyway: another stupid hair post. whatever.

nonetheless, i wish that i had a little elf to sit in my ear canal and play a tiny banjo or mandolin so that i could listen to it all the time and no one else would know.

every year, just when the weather starts to change from summer to fall--those first days where you can feel the autumn in the air--i begin to lose myself.

i feel sad. not on the level of "oh, hey, i'm sad about [x]." i just have a deep, vague, unassociated sense of loss... of nostalgia for something i can't put my finger on... it's an apparently natural emotional reaction to the season that is out of my control, but somehow my behavior serves to exacerbate it despite my discomfort with the feelings. i find myself listening to music that makes me feel things long gone, dwelling on things or people i miss, etc. vicious cycle.

the odd thing is that along with the sorrow, i find myself extremely sensitive and vulnerable to affection. fall is the danger-time in terms of attraction to people (even fleetingly and superficially). of course, i will never act on it, but i am aware that i'm weak when this time of year rolls around.

so today, on a beautiful, warm, but autumn-tinged 30th birthday, i am just a thin veil away from a flood of tears. not bawling or justifiable tears; more like a persistent wateryness of longing for who-knows-what. something i don't have, or can't have, or lost somewhere along the way. (but what????)

no, i know what. don't i? but my sense is that i had this feeling even before then, and it has simply been amplified since and now reflects itself back upon that time period...

whatthefuckever, i'm just trying to say i feel kind of depressed, but with a sweet-memory sense lingering inside it. sigh. i wanted a happy birthday.

there are something like 15 birthdays in my close friend/family circle during september. it's nuts.

...and tomorrow liam will be a year old! friday, i will be 30. t h i r t y . whew.

but back to liam. it's been a while since i updated on his shenanigans:
- he has 9 or 10 teeth
- he tries to repeat just about everything he hears an adult say, but he's slow with actual words; he can say "cat," "dog" (more on that later), "mama," "dad," "nap," "nightnight," and he kinda says "brush" and "flower"
- he has mastered balancing on his own feet, as long as he has help getting there. he pulls up, then lets go of his support and gets really proud of himself before he plops onto his bum. it's cute.
- he's learning to eat with a fork all by himself and is really great with a regular cup (though i don't let him have one because he WILL throw it after 2 minutes)
- he tries to feed rowan's baby dolls with toy bottles/spoons and loves to give them hugs and say 'ahhhh'
- he lets me brush his teeth without any argument
- he still goes to bed like an angel without any fuss, and if he does have trouble falling asleep, i hold him for 3 minutes, he puts his head on my shoulder to cuddle, and then squirms to get back in bed. he's so awesome.
- he's very coordinated and manually dexterous, he can work fussy toys and do small stacking tasks and things like that. he's also capable of climbing/hoisting himself up on things that i would not expect him to tackle, which is slightly alarming.
- he's starting to get really into books and will yell for me to read and point to the pictures
- he loves wearing hats/crowns and putting them on and off other people's heads.

so that's liam most of the time. rowan is the size of a 3-4 year old and she's not quite 2.5 - no one believes her age. her speech is better than most 3 year olds i have encountered, too, which is interesting. they're both doing great with the new nanny though for various reasons i will not get into, she may not end up staying with us.

we are planning a very small, no big deal party for liam this weekend. i knitted him a totally awesome monster (will post pics after i sew his arms and legs on). i am hoping that in the bustle my own birthday will not be completely overlooked...

i'm actually pretty depressed about it. matt has to work, his mom will be in town (therefore no crazy late-night marital fun when he gets off work), and even if i manage to round up a few friends to go dancing with, it would be disappointing for matt not to be there to have fun with me. call me crazy for wanting him to be a part of my officially-a-grownup-birthday-milestone.

what's worse, i have been really explicit about wanting to make a big deal of it, but somehow i don't think my point was got. i fully expect to have the most unacknowledged, crappy, non-event birthday of this decade. i'm not excited. in fact, i'm feeling really lame and miserable about it in anticipation of the huge let down that i know it will be. :(

i'm already bitter. if matt doesn't at least make me feel really loved/special/yay, even if we don't do anything fun, he's going to be on my shit list for the foreseeable future. i really don't want that.

in other news, we got a puppy. a cute, sweet, super young little stray who ended up in my parents' driveway one morning last week. she's some kind of cur/boxer/shepherd mutt and we named her juno. pics soon. she's going to be a big dog, i think. the problem right now is that she really, really likes to be in the house but i refuse to have an indoor dog... thankfully she's young and impressionable. but matt may turn out to be an obstacle in training her to live outside.

ducklings should be hatching under their mamas any day now, and my 26ish little chickies are growing up. they are officially allowed out of their enclosure and a couple of them were literally trying to eat my ankles last night - never been so painfully pecked before! little crapheads. they like me, which is why they were bold enough to get so close, but for some reason the veins on the top of my feet must have looked really tasty because on of the hens pinched me hard (more than once). anyway, they're cute. my little ameraucaunas are adorable with their fluffy cheeks... i love them.

blah. i just keep thinking about how much my birthday is going to suck. i guess i will get back to work.