Greetings and salutions on this fine Monday morn–!
Eh, who am I kidding? I’m dead on my feet today. But hopefully you’re doing better.
I’m going up on my first three months with the Wii Fit. This week is the last week for me to meet my goal, although I’m not going to make it. I had set a goal of losing 11 lbs in three months. I’m 6 lbs short of that goal. But I’m not upset about that, especially considering how high my weight shot up last week (water weight really sucks, but it can be gotten rid of, thankfully!).
While I won’t manage to meet my goal, I did lose and manage to keep off 5 lbs, which I haven’t been able to do before. My scale these days more often reads 146 than 151, and that’s a huge difference for me. My jeans fit much better (hurray!). But better than that, I’ve noticed a huge improvement in my knees. I have lousy knees, ruined by sparring injuries and hormones from two pregnancies. They’d gotten really bad this past year, but after working on Wii Fit for a few weeks, I started noticing a significant difference in my ability to hold the more demanding stances. I can get lower and hold those stances longer, and that makes me really happy.
Still, I’d like to eventually lose those last 6 lbs., and I’ve been thinking about what it will take to make that happen. Do I need to exercise more? I’d love to, but my schedule is pretty full, and I’m already having a hard time fitting everything in each day. So I started playing around with my daily schedule to see if I could squeeze in an extra half hour of Wii Fit each day. I got up most mornings at 5 AM last week to do 45 minutes of Wii Fit, and then scheduled some sort of fitness activity later in the day like swimming or karate. I definitely got results. Unfortunately, I normally get up at 5AM to work on my writing and podcast, and I couldn’t figure out how to fit in the work time I needed now that I’d given up an hour or so each morning to do the extra Wii Fit.
Bottom line, the schedule change helped me shed that water weight plus another pound or so, but it ruined my work schedule, and I can’t have that. So I’m trying a different schedule this week. I realized one of the reasons the Wii Fit early in the morning worked so well is that I was getting my cardio exercise in first thing in the morning.
Cardio in the AM has always helped me maintain my weight, so this is something I want to continue. However, I don’t have to do 45 minutes of Wii Fit to get those results (and keep in mind that 45 minutes on the Wii Fit translates to at least an hour of actual time). What I do need to do is about 20 minutes of cardio, either using the Wii Fit or the new monster elliptical machine the Hubster bought. Then I could do my body test, an extra 5 minutes or so, and move on to writing for the morning. Then later in the day, after the Pixie and I have had some time to play outside and garden, I can come back in and spend another 20-25 minutes doing the strength, yoga or balance games on the Wii Fit. Or I can head out to the Y for a swim or the dojo for an hour of karate class.
I’m hoping this compromise works and gives me the time to both workout and work. I’ll let you know next week how it goes.
Meanwhile, I’m doing okay. I spent some time working on Operation Kill A Lot Of Plants this past week. I’ve filled a total of 23 pots with soil and seedlings. Yeah, I’m nuts. But remember, this is Operation Kill A LOT Of Plants, so we’re good so far. I also have some plants that have survived previous gardening attempts, so right now my deck is pretty full. I still have some sunflowers and marigolds to plant. They’ll go in one last big pot later this week.
For Mother’s Day, the Hubster took me to Barnes & Noble, where I picked two blank journals, one for me and one for Princess. I told her we would keep journals this summer of our gardening and other activities. We also got a simple weather science kit for Princess and set that up yesterday. She spent the afternoon taking little notes about the weather and then drew our deck with all the plants on it. I’ll have to scan in her drawings later this week, but for now, here are some picks of the garden so far.
We’ve got lots of herbs on the back deck…
Plus tomatoes and corn and peppers…
Did I mention we had lots of herbs on the back deck?
Okay, that’s it for this week. Pixie’s starting to climb all over me, so you know what that means.
Mama’s got to move it!
