Mama was down for the count

Mom's can't be sick. If they get sick who takes care of the dishes, the laundry, the homework, supper, breakfast, etc. When a mom is sick, it's total chaos.

So that mystery illness made it's rounds. Kaylee became the second victim and it hit her at her fathers house in the middle of the night on Saturday. She ended up coming home a bit earlier on Sunday afternoon so that she could rest. Later that night it hit Emmett again and while I was doing 1am laundry and cleanup, my stomach really started to hurt. I too had got the mystery illness. What were we to do? Mom and 2 kids sick, puking. Rob had to call in sick and help to hold down the fort. This is turn, made him victim number 4, and put his job at risk.

So clearly this is some sort of "gastroenterological " illness possibly Norovirus. I only suspect it's that as it seems impossible to kill. Yesterday during the day I disinfected everything that I could think of. But I clearly missed something. Emmett woke up again last night and vomited everywhere. I have a sneaky feeling it was a bottle of water that I missed beside his bed and he chugged it. So again today, I've disinfected everything that I can think of and I took all of our comforters to the laundry mat and did a super wash of them. I'm crossing my fingers for a good night. If it happens again though, we're going to have to get this looked at a bit more. From what I've read it's not a long illness. Have a read here.

I've felt completely useless these past couple of days so I really hope last night was the end of it. I have so many other fellow mommy bloggers to catch up on. Not to mention dishes, laundry, etc.

Sacrifices

As a mother is there a limit? I bet for some there is. Is there a wrong answer to how many limits? I don't think so.

We live in a vast world that allows us to parent in many ways. You may parent the way you were brought up. Either by habit, love for the way you were parented or maybe you're doing the complete opposite of what your parents did with you.

As long as your children are first safe and second happy, I think you're doing the right thing!

Our family (my husband, our children and I) live a very old school lifestyle. We've adopted the "stereotypical" rolls of dad goes off to work and mom stays home with the children. Some days are tough, but it works for us. We don't judge other families that require both parents to work and we hope that we're not judge either. You have to do what makes your heart happy while at the same time making sure everyone is taken care of. Life (financially) could be easier with us both working but we'd rather struggle a bit to always have someone home with the kids. That's one of our sacrifices.

This past weekend  we traveled to a neighboring city about 100km away to attend a karate seminar. My husband and my daughter were both taking this seminar. Emmett was going to stay with my mom for the night as it takes a bit of the stress off of us to travel tantrum free. But, when Emmett woke up on Friday he was unable to keep anything down. Not even water. I'm calling it the "mystery illness" as he had zero symptoms of anything. Between the vomiting he was in high spirits and bouncing off of the walls. We made the decision to bring him with us, in case he continued to be sick into the night. Added stress on us is better than him being stressed and sick with us away. But of course, he was perfectly fine once we go there.

It is very rare that we leave our children with anyone, and really it's only my parents. We don't go out much without them. We have many good reasons for this. We're older and our social life now revolves around our children. I'd rather spend time with them making sure they are happy and mostly safe. I hate that we now have access to read all about teenagers drinking and partying status' that they post onto Facebook. This shows me that there's really no one good enough in my books to watch my children. I do hope that one day I can find that responsible youth. I have my eyes on a few, but time will tell and we're certainly not hurting by staying in. Another sacrifice?

After writing this, now maybe they aren't really sacrifices and just duties of being a parent. What have you sacrificed? Does sanity count?

Weekend Recap

This weekend was great indeed!

Friday started off with Kaylee bringing home a surprisingly good report card. It was A's and B's. Now I'm not surprised because I don't think she's smart. She is very smart, but she's stubborn and easily distracted. She'd much rather play and socialize, than to sit and learn.

Saturday was Kaylee's karate grading. She just received her Advanced Orange Belt in Kenpo Karate.  My husband is her instructor and while most people might think she gets special attention or would advance faster than other children, that is the farthest thing from the truth. She's progressing slowly and that's ok. Karate is clearly not her first choice in an after school program, but it's giving her some of the life skills that she'll need in the future. She did dance last year and wants to do it again, so in September I'm going to enroll her again. She's high energy and loves to dance. She did tap last year, but is interested in Jazz or Hip Hop.


Sunday morning started with a bit of a morning rush to get the kids off to church with my parents and to be sure we were ready to hit the gym as soon as they were gone to get as much time as we could at the gym. I've done something that I've never done before and I'm so proud of myself. I ran 5mi/8+km in 60 minutes, non stop. I know others can do it much faster, but I'm just starting and I'm ecstatic. We wanted to run outside on Sunday morning but we got dumped with snow again on Saturday night. Running on pavement is next on the list of goals and hopefully will happen soon.  And hopefully I'll be able to pick up the pace a bit.

Goals! Everyone needs them! Hope everyone else had a great weekend.

4 week weigh in

I'm happy with my results, but haven't shared them really with friends. Why? Because if I tell everyone I feel like they are probably thinking "ya ya, you're just going to gain it back." It's a possibility yes, but I think with the other changes that I'm applying to my life, better results should be lasting.

I've also lost a total of 12 inches in the areas that I'm measuring. I haven't measured my arms and legs for some reason and I think I'm going to add that in for next month.

I'm at the gym consistently about 5 days per week with at least 50 minutes of cardio. I'm running again on the treadmill and slowly preparing myself to run on pavement. On Thursday of this week I ran 6.4km in 50 minutes, killing over 760 calories according my heart rate monitor. My heart rate gets quite high, around 85% of my max but cardiovascular, I feel pretty good.

Food is also going well. I'm finding a nice balance with consumption and then burning off any extra I may have consumed. I'm having cheat days guilt free which is huge. Cheat days used to completely destroy my diet. Also, I feel like the little cheats that I have are keeping me sane and keeping this journey real!  Most days I have a shake in the morning from It Works, which I add coconut milk to as well as mango's.

Goals over the next 2-3 months are to lose about 19 more lbs and run as much as I can outside on pavement so that I can successfully do a real 5k in Detroit in May.

How is everyone else doing with their goals to obtain better health?

The ripple effect

Have you ever noticed how really anything can have a ripple effect.

You know, wake up and stub your toe, drop your tooth brush on the floor and then can't find our keys. Thus in turn making you late for work and having zero time to get your coffee. Get to work only to realize you're not the only one having a bad day and everyone is just rubbing each other the wrong way.

Do you think that ripple effect is just because you were doomed to have a bad day or, did your mind set create all that negativity for you?

I truly think its a mind set. When we wake up and stub our toe we have 2 choices. Get over it or don't. It's that simple. I've had those days where it seems like everything can go wrong and only wishing for night to fall so that I can go to bed and wake up the next day with a fresh start. That fresh start can honestly start when you say. You don't need the night to come.

That being said, my laundry room purge seems to have created a small sense of calm over the house. I can wake up in the morning, walk in there (and be wowed) and find what I need in seconds. No more digging through the dryer trying to find that one missing sock. And anything that can take away a bit of the morning stress is a plus in my books. Everyone has a bit of a bounce to their step these passed 2 days. Even my husband.

Other areas of the house need to be purged as well, but that will come in time. We have a 3rd floor that would make a killer games room, yet it's filled with stuff that would normally go in a basement. Totes and boxes of things that we think we can't let go of, but we need to. A yard sale this summer would do us some good!

One day I will have a fully organized house. One day. :)

My laundry room had a hoarding problem

Until this weekend. :)

I tackled the mess!

We are a family of four with a enough clothes to clothe a small village. Seriously.

Now when it comes to clothes we (or I really) run into two issues. The first and most obvious for most families is the rapid rate that children out grown their clothing. It's truly nuts. I'm not very tall, I stand only 5'3", but daughter who is only 7, is 3/4's of height already. If she keeps growing like this, she's going to outgrow my by the age of 12. The second problem, and this is almost like a true hoarder (or so I've seen on TV) is that I have trouble parting with outgrown clothes of my children because they hold a sentimental value to me. A memory. Something fabulous happened when they wore something. These clothes trigger a happy memory. Surely I can't be the only crazy mom out there like that right?

Sadly though, I mustered up the courage to donate 3 garbage bags full of clothes to Goodwill. I just have to know in my heart that other families can enjoy some of these outfits and have their own memories with them.

Now the true task is to try and keep it organized longer than a week. We're lacking a dresser in Kay's rooms and I think that might be a great purchase to help me with keeping it looking like the rest of the house.

This past weekend involved a lot of cleaning, organizing and purging. Still more purging needs to be done (kids toys next) but its a start and having an entire weekend to tackle such things don't happen very often.

I hope everyone else had a fabulous weekend.

We Unleashed the Power Within

I've told this story a few times and shared it with team mates on Facebook, and I had every intention of copying and pasting what I had shared, but for the life of me I can't locate the posts.

My husband has been a huge Tony Robbins fan since his early 20's. Me, not a fan, only knew he was some sort of life coach. I had seen his picture before and seen him in the movie Shallow Hal.

My husband had caught wind that there was going to be an Unleash the Power Within in Toronto, just 3 hours from us. He was excited, but at the same time, questioned being able to go. He had just been called back to work a month or so prior after being laid off for those 18/19 months. So we were in some heaving repayment of late bills. Out of curiosity, he called to find out ticket prices. General admission was $999/person. That's more than a months mortgage payment. But stupidly, my husband was optimistic.

We always got "junk mail" from Tony's organization and really, it just sat around and never got opened. Always some class or seminar in Fiji that we couldn't afford.

So weeks were passing and its getting closer to the date. Agents are calling us now offering a lower price so they can fill the final seats left. The offer was $750. Still couldn't afford it. Another offer was called to us days later. We could both go for $499, not each, for both. Wow. Maybe this IS something we could afford.

The fun part now! I'm sitting on the couch one night thinking I really need to clean up the junk mail. There sat a Tony envelope. I figured, I'm going to open before I toss it. You'll never guess what was in it. Actually I didn't even know what they were at first. Two VIP tickets to Unleash the Power Within. $1299 tickets. I showed them to my husband so he could confirm if they really were tickets as he's been to an Unleash the Power Within once prior. They were tickets. Real tickets, that sat there for weeks, through all the phone calls, the hope, the questioning where we were going to come up with the money to go. We somehow knew we'd get there. But instead of sitting behind 1000's of people in the back, we were in the VIP section sitting 12 rows back.

Now the big question is, how did we get these tickets sent to us? We have no idea. No one has ever said they helped us. But someone did. And it was life changing. That was in the summer of 2009 and we have always looked back at the MANY wonderful things that have happened to us in that year and into 2012. Tony lit the fire! Our fire has fizzled a bit, but we have the tools and we just need to take a moment to apply them again.

It was an amazing experience that I got to share with my husband. I got to walk on fire. I got to meet some great people. An experience I will never forget!

3 years ago.....

I walked down the isle and said I do.

At the end of October 2009, Rob asked me to marry him. Life was going good. He had been called back to work months prior after being laid off for 18 months and I was back in college.

A little over one month later, we found out we were pregnant. How exciting! So instead of putting off the wedding until after baby came, we got into to some heavy planning and had a small ceremony with a few friends and family in Niagara Falls. It was quick and fun. I know it's hard to tell in the pictures but I was 16 weeks pregnant when we got married.

Looking back, I'm not sure we would have had a bigger wedding or not had I not been pregnant. It just turned out so perfectly that I have no regrets about it.

It was a very cold Canadian day, so we were limited with getting photo's taken outside.

I met Rob over 13 years ago at work. We had a hate for each other that was like a grade 5 crush that no one wanted to admit. He was so annoying, yet on days we'd stand around at work and literally talk for hours, getting little work done. We were both in relationships with other people and although I thought it was only a crush that I had on him, it would later prove it was more than that. I had a daughter with my ex and went off on maternity, never to see Rob again. I quit that job when my maternity was up. We were able to reconnect via Facebook in 2007 and my relationship with my daughters father was rocky and was ending.
In 2008 Rob and I began dating and I knew this was it. This was the man that I would be spending the rest of my life with. I couldn't ask for anything better.

I look forward to the rest of our lives together!
I love you Rob!

I ran today

I sure did. I'm quite proud of myself. I ran over 5km. But it was on a treadmill and I do know the pavement is a whole new ball game. I'm getting there.

I ran a steady pace of 4.7mi/hour for 45 minutes.  Not fast, but it's something that I will slowly get better at. I'm short and so is my stride.

Tomorrow I either want to shave my time a bit or run longer. Wednesdays at the gym are really busy so it might not be best for me to hog a treadmill for an entire hour when there's really only 10 of them.

Now as for hitting the pavement, just need the snow to be gone. I don't care about the cold, but I certainly don't want to be that newby runner that slips on ice and puts herself out of commission before the race even begins.

Running goals - 5km in May and look for a 10 k for September or October.

I'm feeling good!

List! I'm ready to tackle you! RECOVERED

EDIT: I posted this yesterday and accidentally deleted it and with some help from here I was able to recover it. PHEW!!

In my previous entry I made my list of 2013 goals.  After some posting on Facebook today and in talking with some friends, we've found a somewhat more exciting 5k run. I'm so excited about it that I could scream! Detroit, May 11.

It is an event called Color Me Rad.  You start the race all nice and clean and cross the finish line looking like Rainbow Brite. How exciting! It's going to be a fabulous day for sure. Registration hasn't opened yet, but once it does, I'm all in!

We do have to cross the border to attend this as there's nothing around my area like this as of yet, but I can see it coming around here soon.

Watch this video and tell me it doesn't look like a ton of fun:

More event information here and other cities hosting: Color Me Rad

The list - Body, Mind and Soul Makeover

You can't overcome things if you don't face them.
Deal with them.
This is my year. This is my list.

1. Get a grip on the yoyo dieting. 
2. Instead of focusing on losing a set number of pounds, I need to focus on when I get to a better weight, I do something I've never done before. There's a 5k coming up on May 18th. That gives me over 3 months to prepare and I have no excuse why I won't be able to do it.
3. Be accountable for what I put in my mouth. So what I ate a Whopper Combo. Just have to kill it at the gym the next day. Easy!
4. Stop focusing on things I don't like about myself and put the focus on the things I do like.
5. Be around people that have traits that I have or want in myself. No self doubting people. 
6. Let go of things from the past. I've moved on from a very negative subject, but it still lurks in the back ground. I need to discover what is truly going to push me beyond and forgive.
7. Adopt a more open mind. I will admit I can be very close minded. 
8. Learn about and teach my children empathy. Yes I'm empathetic, but my insecurities stop me from doing good things out of empathy. Does that make sense?
9. Break out of my shell and be crazy. A good crazy.
10. Walk with my head held high. I always walk with my head down and avoid eye contact.
11. Be a better mom. One that is not so easily irritated. 
12. Enjoy my children more. 
13. Relax.

I'm sure I'll be making revisions to this and adding more, but I'm happy to finally have some of these goals written down.

Self Improvement and MLM

As I've stated in a few previous entries, this is the year of a new me. Body, mind and soul makeover.

I've (for a few years now) been a big fan of a lot of self help topics, articles and the guru's who speak on these very topics.

Where I've failed in the past (as with diet) is getting to the bottom of my real issues and over coming them. Figuring out my why's before I can fix them needs the most focus. Why am I insecure? Why do I still yoyo diet? Why do I feel that I need to be in charge? What are my real fears of letting someone else take the reins?

Last week I was seeing some things repeat on Facebook through the time line. I was intrigued so I opened up Google and started my search. The buzz around a new company/product/app is huge right now. It's an app that is going to be loaded with topics that include goal setting, time managment, personal developement, business development, leadership developement, financial management, personal motivation and more. The neat thing about this is they've made into an MLM opportunity. Those who are in MLM would understand the excitement around this as its brand new and it's got a matrix like no other. I encourage you to watch the compensation video.  Now before I  lose the non MLM people, please understand this app is for everyone! It has a monthly fee of $9.95. What's great is, after time, this app can become free. It became from for me literally 23 hours after signing. How? Well I met the requirements needed to earn enough to pay for it. And how did that happen? I signed on under the #2 recruiter of iLA right now. So because it's a forced matrix, I get his "overflow" under me. In just a little over 1 week, I have 64 people under me.

Unlike most companies, there's no claims that you're going to make this much money in this much time. That was huge for me. What I also like is the app/product. It's something I would use anyway plus $9.95 is a small investment in myself I believe. As stated above, I have 64 people under me, and you might think WOW, you're going to get a lot of money, but I'm not going to lie. I'm probably only making about $14. But again, the app for me is now free and slowly my matrix is going to fill up.

With that being said, I installed the app last night (it was just released) and began to read some of the articles in it.  The one that really caught my attention is titled "Seven Life Lessons I Learned from an Evergreen". Now I'd love to share what these 7 lessons are, but I really suggest you get the app and have a read for your self.  I will share my favourite however:  "It shares its peace and beauty with all who come near it, no matter what they look like or what they believe."  This screams at me. In the world that we live in today, we don't have time to just slow down and share peace. One of my "mind makeover" topics.

Sorry to bombarded you with that. I hope I explained it well enough. This app, Inspired Living Application is really going to spark some great things in me. I'm excited! I need to make my "to do" list soon! 

http://www.ilivingapp.com/shannonstjean