Weight Loss

My weight loss journey seems like it's taken forever to get to the point where it's actually working. My backstory; Being 6'1" I haven't really had much of a weight problem, that was very noticeable anyways. I was sitting pretty evenly about 15 lbs above what my ideal weight was. Wasn't to unhappy about it, had some nice curves. Got married and then had my first kid. Afterwards as soon as I got the ok from my Dr. at my 6 week check up I started weight watchers and exercising. Lost all my baby weight fairly easily, plus some. Just in time to get pregnant a second time. (Well that was one of my rules, had to lose all the baby fat first before another kid).
After kid #2 I was looking for a different b/c, I was never one to remember taking my pill on time and I wanted something that would last longer. So got what I thought was the holy grail of b/c; The mirena IUD, which was in fact the devil and full of pure evil. I had A LOT and I mean a FREAKING LOT of nasty side effects. Just ask Dave, it was not a fun time. One of the horrible side effects was a massive weight gain of about 45 pounds. The other one that went a long with that was all my hormone levels were royally screwed.
Took a while to figure out the iud was the problem. Got rid of it, started to feel a bit better. Started exercising and following all my weight watcher stuff from home. Did not work one bit. Needless to say I was rather perturbed, it had worked so well only 4 years before. Then I tried the Fat Flush plan, that worked all right. Lost like 10 lbs the first week and then a few more the next. Then nothing, did their maintenance and it all came back even though I was eating really healthily and getting some exercise in.
At this point it was just a struggle to keep any more weight off. Finally though my sister in law started this awesome diet and lifestyle change. After seeing her amazing results I signed myself up too! I started my Omnitrition journey on Jan 27th, 2012. So far I have lost 36 pounds and 36 inches and 3 sizes. I feel amazing, which is really saying something because after the mirena I woke up in pain every single day, not any more. And I'm not even on all the products that I want to be yet! I loved it so much that I signed up to sell the products too. My new website is www.omnitrition.com/lizt


So the first picture on the left is January 27th, 2012. The second is a month in on Fabruary 27th and the last is from today March 19th.
I am just happily amazed. I am currently doing the maintenance phase and I get to start my next round of drops Easter weekend!

Christmas

Last year we made the connection that Brenin gets sick every December for pretty much the whole month, and by Christmas he's just miserable- hmmm turns out he's allergic to the christmas tree. I of course totally forgot and didn't set aside the $$ for a nice fake tree for this year. And the tree I wanted was pretty spendy (so I'll be picking it up next year with the employee sale Dave's work has in the beginning of december). This is what I found on Pinterest (of course) Christmas bulb tree. I should have made my strings longer or added more to compensate for the fact that I had it on an 11 foot ceiling instead of whatever the original was made for. Live and learn. It's still up because I burnt my fingers too many times with the hot glue (instead of crimps) to take it down right away. I had everything on hand except the wire rack so it cost me $15 and the rack is still usable as a cooling/steaming rack, score!

Crayon art

Oh crayon art, what fun. And thanks to Fred Meyers for clearance-ing out all of their 24 packs after school started! So first up, Melty crayon art. If you've been on pinterest at all you've seen a ton of these. It was really easy, glued all the crayons on in ROY G BIV then blasted my hot air dryer on them. Although if I were to do it again I would hold the dryer on the back so none of the air was actually on the wax creating splotches.
But I like it and it's a good addition to the play room. Oh and since this pic was taken I went back and melted it a bunch more so there wasn't as much white space.





More from pinterest! Crayon initials, for the boy's teachers for Christmas. Easy peasy. Printed out a letter, traced it on the paper then laid out crayons and cut them to size and glued them on. And put them in a shadow box frame. Didn't take too long and turned out decent.

Thanksgiving

For Thanksgiving we went over to Dave's Aunt's house since they live just a mile away. We've vowed to never drive more than an hour for turkey day. We went to Utah once after he got home late from a trip to Mexico, driving late at night in the icy wind is NOT FUN, will never do it again!
Two of the specialty things that I made this year Strawberry cheesecake bites Oh my goodness, these things are SO addictive! We could eat them all day! and they are super easy! I will be making them again soon!



And Apple pie in apples. These were alright. I ended up using store crust because I ran out of time. I may make them again, dunno. I'm not a really big pie person anyways. But they're cute!

Happy Halloween 2011

We did another family costume this year. TMNT! SO much fun! Brenin was Raphael and Logan was Donatello, picked only for their eye mask colors (we face painted since masks aren't allowed at church parties, although with painting the whole face I don't see MUCH of a difference). I made Dave's Shredder cape and tunic. Ken was kind enough to make the chest plate arm bracers and awesome helmet (from a darth vadar he got at good will) I dyed my shirt bright yellow, spray painted my boots white and HAD to do a bright red on my hair to really bring home April O'neal. The boys had a blast!! And I totally can't wait for next year I need to start making them now!!!

Sunshine

After getting a new phone I was having a hard time getting my pictures saved to the computer. My last phone had a usb cable, this one doesn't. So I've had to up load everything to facebook and then save it to the computer. We'll try and upload some to here and see if the picture quality works otherwise I'll go look for a usb cable again, because no matter how many times or ways I try and email myself a picture file to myself from my phone it won't go through.


So I saw a lot of 'You are my sunshine' stuff on pinterest and I thought 'Hey that would be cool in french.'. I painted my sun on the canvas and then traced all the letters and painted them in gray. I could have just printed it out with my silhouette but I wanted paint, I didn't even think to make a stencil (doh). But I like how it turned out and I eventually want to do my bedroom in gray and yellow for a nice cool relaxing look.

PIPA & SOPA

This is important -- Congress is considering two bills ("Protect IP" and "SOPA") that would let the government or any corporation censor the internet, using the same DNS-blocking techniques as Iran or China.

More here: http://americancensorship.org/

The bills are ostensibly to stop copyright and trademark infringement, but they won't. Instead-- they'll let the government shut down almost any social media website, since any site can be shut down just for audio, video, text, or even *links* posted by its users. Any corporations will have the power to bankrupt any website or organization by cutting it off from payments, advertising and donations-- without so much as a court order.

The law is being pushed by some of the strongest lobbies in Washington, it has broad bipartisan support, and it's likely to pass in some form. I've been active against it: next week I'll be participating in a nationwide call-in day. Can you join me, and help me spread the word by forwarding this email?

Join me here: http://americancensorship.org/

Thanks!

Here are two great op-eds about the bills, followed by links to the bill text:

1. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/innovations/post/sopas-ugly-message-to-the-world-about-america-and-internet-innovation/2010/12/20/gIQATlhEYN_blog.html


2. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/16/opinion/firewall-law-could-infringe-on-free-speech.html?_r=2

3. http://www.opencongress.org/bill/112-s968/text

4. http://www.opencongress.org/bill/112-h3261/text

To get involved, the link is: http://americancensorship.org/