Fat Friday #2: First Week Success!

I have wonderful news!  I lost 2.1kg in the past week :-) I now weigh 129.9kg, which is still a pretty steep tip of the scale, but it's movement in the right direction ;-)

What I've been doing this week:

We happen to have a dog named Jimmy.  Up until March, we had a back yard we could let him out into in order to do his business.  Now that we've moved house, however, he needs to be walked regularly.  Because of my schedule with the baby, I find it difficult to fit in walking him in the afternoon and evening, so over the course of the last week I have walked him in the morning (630am) six out of the past seven days.  Sure, that's only 10-12 minutes each day, but that's still more locomotion than I had previously committed to.

Also, I have altered my eating habits to ensure I am attaining several food-habit goals.  One is to drink a minimum of 8 glasses of water a day, which I have been very successful at achieving daily, largely due to the fact that I am carrying my pink 1 Litre water bottle around with me practically everywhere.  I have also committed to eating a minimum of 5 servings of fruit or veggies each day, and am hoping to hit 8.

I'm following a slightly modified version of the way I was advised to eat while I was pregnant (my dietician gave me a little whiteboard sheet with boxes to check off for how many servings of each food group.)  It's been modified in that I'm spacing my meals every two-to-three hours, and limiting my servings to approximately one-cup of food per "meal," as per the recommendations of the eating plan provided by a specialty clinic to my mother.  I started it partly to support her, so that she knew she wasn't alone, but mostly because when I first read about it, the entire idea horrified me.  "One cup?!" I exclaimed, "Is that even possible?"  And then I realized that that was my North American portion-miseducated consumer-brainwashed knee-jerk response, and I was resolved to re-educate myself.

So far, things are going well.  I really am quite surprised at how satisfying one-cup meals are.  It helps a lot to know that the next meal is only two or three hours away ;-)

More next week!

Fat Friday #1: Baseline Measurements

My older sister sent me on a mission this morning: she insisted that I acquire a copy of The Spark: The 28-Day Breakthrough Plan for Losing Weight, Getting Fit, and Transforming Your Life.
I first attempted to purchase it in electronic format, but failing that (due to an odd inability to use my gift card,) I bundled LittleJohn into the car and we trekked down to the local bookstore to pick up a hard copy of the actual book.  Well, the trade paperback size, anyway ;-)

I had created a SparkPeople.com profile months ago, but had neglected it for just as long, so I logged back in, reset my counters, and took new measurements.

Today I weigh 132.1 kg (aak!)
My waist is a shocking 106 cm around, and my hips a horrifying 150cm!

I'm aiming at bringing my weight down to 58kg.  Part of me wonders if it's even possible to weigh that little (even though it's above my recommended BMI range for my height) because even at my fittest (which was, admittedly, overweight) in high school, I still weighed 81.5 kg.

My plan is to drink lots of water (at least 8 cups a day, which I will achieve with the aid of a 1 litre water bottle I intend to carry with me at all times,) eat my recommended daily number of servings (according to the Canada food guide,) and do a minimum 90 minutes of physical activity a week.  Those are all the "introductory" steps recommended by SparkPeople.

I also intend to read my brand new book, and flesh out my plan further as I go ;-)

New Crib Does Not Equal Instant Success

LittleJohn is 10 months old now, and he has been co-sleeping with us since, well, gee, the night that they handed him to me in the hospital.  Since we have a king-sized bed, I really didn't have any trouble with making the space for him, and it was ultra-convenient while we were still breastfeeding.

Last week, we acquired (mostly by chance) a 2nd hand, really quite lovely converting crib.  It's the sort that changes to a day bed, and even a full-sized, eventually, if you buy the extra parts.  The original owner's parents picked it up for her from Sears.  LittleJohn's Daddy has been prowling for a crib for a while now.  He, apparently, was on the brink of picking up whatever cheap model they had at Wal-Mart (the thought of which horrified me, to be honest.)  So, if I was going to be forced to move my bouncing baby boy into a crib, I wanted it to be a nice one, and I'm quite pleased with this model.  In fact, it's the Safety 1st 'Carlisle' 3-in-1 Convertible Crib - Sears | Sears Canada, which is totally cool (though wouldn't have been my first pick, if I had been buying new.  I would have wanted the one that had the toddler-bed-with-rails option in between "crib" and "day-bed.")  However, since we were (apparently!) in a rush, I'm happy to have this one.

After calling every single furniture store in the city and discovering no one carried crib-sized mattresses, my hubby reminded me that they carry them at Wal-Mart, so we ended up there, after all.  They only had two models (which is better than zero, right?) and I was pleased to find that one of them was the fancy-dancy "flip-able infant-to-toddler" sort.  Once that item had been secured, it was just a matter of some banging around in the bedroom and some fancy work with an alan key, and wow! A lovely crib stood at the foot of our king bed, taking up nearly the length of an entire side!

We wrapped our exactly-the-right-size snugglewool crib pad around the mattress, transplanted LittleJohn's favourite stuffies and his blankie onto the spacious pad, and introduced him to his newest environment.

He was pretty impressed!  He laughed and smiled and cruised all the way around the railing.  Then he discovered he could bounce!

Oh yes!  He enjoyed his "new" crib immensely.  And then he got tired, and decided he wanted out of the crib so he could go to sleep.  Two bottles and an hour and a half later, he was still struggling against sleeping in the crib, and he eventually launched into a crying jag, so I pulled him out to calm him down.

Even his Dad, who is insistent that this crib is the natural next step in both LittleJohn's and my life, agreed at that point that I should lay him on the bed with me to get him to go to sleep, and then he'd lift him into the crib later.  Later came and went, and there was another crying jag (that ended in puking.)  Daddy said to set ourselves up for bed like usual, and we'd make another run on the crib another night.

Now, in all fairness, our stunning lack of success can be blamed largely on poor timing.  Last night was the first night of a new cold, and LittleJohn was cranky and having trouble breathing, so he wasn't really in the mood for anything out of his usual routine.

So, we have a really lovely crib standing at the foot of our bed, and it will stand there empty until this cold passes, and then we'll try again.  Yes, I let LittleJohn play in it a while today, though sick-and-cranky baby did not want to be left in it even long enough for me to step across the room and change my clothes!  I am sure he will eventually transition to it without too much trouble, once he's well.  Because it runs almost the whole length of the bed, I'll be able to lie "next" to him, still, which should make the change over easier, once he's not hyper-sensitive due to being sick.

And, for what it's worth, it'll make the transition easier for me, too, to have him so nearby still.  Our only problem at this juncture is that I'm too short to pull him out of the crib if he's lying down!  DH promised to try adjusting the heights to see if it can be set to a more comfortable spot while still being safe for LittleJohn, and I'll be reporting back next time we try!

EC Success Story!

We had a great EC success last night, and I absolutely had to share.

Due to moving house and some other inconveniences, we've had to scale our part-time EC back a bit.  Still, we've been enjoying enormous success with 100% catches first thing in the morning right after we wake up, and just before we go to lie down for the night.  We have also been practicing for a few hours during the day on days that we aren't out doing errands.

Last night I was running behind schedule, and arrived home more than an hour after LittleJohn's usual bedtime.  I knew we'd missed his usual potty time, and in the car I heard him grunting, and making a "pbthbth" noise that he makes (we think it's his approximation of the "tsss" hissing noise we use to signal peeing) when he sits on his potty.  I was certain that he'd gone in his diaper (and I didn't blame him), and told his Daddy so when he unbuckled him from the car seat.  But when Daddy got him upstairs, the diaper was clear, so he put him on his potty.  He went!  I had no idea he could (or would) be able to wait for that long for his potty-tunity.  We're both so pleased and proud of him!

Morning Business

I'm so incredibly proud of my bouncing baby boy!  He has completely grasped what the purpose of his little plastic potty is.  Every morning, right after we wake up, and every evening before we brush our teeth and go mellow out to go to sleep, we head into the bathroom and have a sit-down on our little potty.  He knows just what it's for, and even though he may have been wearing a diaper immediately before being sat down, he does his business in his potty instead of in that diaper!

He's super happy about it, too.  Potty time is all about smiles and giggling!

So, we're catching almost 100% of his morning poops and pees, and same for the pre-bedtime business.  (The only time we've missed in the morning since we started really focussing on this catch was one morning when LittleJohn woke up earlier than normal, and I tried to convince him to go back to sleep instead of taking him straight to the potty.)  It's a real confidence-booster for me, and I know it's good for him, too.

This is one of the things The Diaper-Free Baby: The Natural Toilet Training Alternative mentioned, as did Diaper Free: The Gentle Wisdom of Natural Infant Hygiene : focus on catching the easy ones to boost your confidence in the process.  Though Daddy has been resistant since the outset to the ECing and cloth diapering, he is coming around largely due to the success we're having with the morning business.  When I trotted the baby out in his new cloth "Eca-Pants" diapers, Daddy looked at me sideways, but when I demonstrated for him how they're designed to be used in conjunction with potty use (they un-velcro at the waist and fold back so baby can easily be sat down on the potty, and then they easily fold back up when you're done,) he just nodded and complimented LittleJohn on his stylish new pants.

Now what I have to focus on is to figure out how to tell when he needs to use the potty through the daytime.  I'm great at knowing right away when he needs to be changed, but I need to refine my observation skills and figure out what his signals are before he needs to go.