Apparently this is a post about hats

Okay, so now I really ought to start writing again.  Recording the memorable/everyday events of our family.  So I'm starting today.  Here goes!!

Yesterday was my mom's birthday.  I used to always tell people she was turning 21 again, but now that I'm 25, it's getting harder and harder to convince people of that. ;)

The important thing isn't that yesterday was Mom's birthday - it was that she flew to Austin to come visit us!!  She was going to come on Halloween and stay for a week, but at the last minute she decided she'd rather come later in the month.  It actually turned out really well, because Mace started crawling a few weeks ago. :)  I'm pretty sure that makes Mom's trip so much more exciting and fun, to have a crawling grandbaby. <3

We picked up Mom from the airport, then went to Mark's new job downtown, then ate dinner at the taco food truck by Mark's work (SO SO GOOD), then went over to 6th Street to look at hats at The Hat Box.  Mark has been asking me for weeks about getting a new hat from that place.  He has a coworker who, apparently, wears *amazing hats* and he got them all from The Hat Box.  Mark had a famous hat for a few years, but then we last it at Disneyland last year.  Funny coincidence: It was a hat we bought from the Indiana Jones store, and we lost it 3 years later on the Indiana Jones ride. :(

Old hat:

Carmen wearing Mark's hat!

New hat:

Mace wearing Mark's hat!  ... why do I not have any pictures of Mark in his own hats?!

We actually bought two new hats for Mark, but I only have a picture of this one.  The other one looks a bit more like the old hat.  Now I'm going to go on a hat tangent ... hats are big in Mark's family.  Sort of.  His brother, James, tends to wear hats and looks good in them.  We might get him a hat for Christmas (I doubt James will read this. phew.)  Mark's dad tends to wear fisherman hats.  But I don't have a picture of it.  Maybe some day!

I guess Mark looks really good in hats.  I'm just ... not used to them.  I don't wear hats.  Dang.  He's right.  He looks good in hats.  I should stop encouraging him to dress like a bum.  I'm such a boring t-shirt and jeans-type girl.

Jorgen's wedding, February 2011

Okay, maybe he doesn't always look great in hats.  But that doesn't stop him from always trying them on.

From our Mexico cruise in February 2010.  He tried on my cousin Emery's hat.

Taken some time in ... 2007?  One of our poor newlywed dates to DI where we bought a $35 couch.

Hm, somehow this turned into an entry about hats!  Okay!  So anyway, Mark got some nice new expensive hats last night as his Christmas present.

Today, I went to the gym in the morning to let Mom have some quiet time to get ready for the day.  All week long, Mace has been clingy and has cried (loudly!) the whole time I've been gone ... Usually the people in the gym day care try to let me work out for at least an hour if my baby is fussy, but this week has been so bad they've called me back after 20 minutes. Monday. Tuesday. Wednesday.  I had an appointment with a personal trainer last week who gave me a list of things to do, and this week I learned to immediately hit the machines fast and hard, because I'd probably only have 20 minutes to work out.  Hah! But then today, he was pretty cheerful and I got a whole hour in!  I was able to do all of the lifting I wanted to do, and I even got some time on the elliptical to read my Book Club book (The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks).  When I came back to the day care to pick my kids up (I wanted to go home and keep my mom company), Mace had just fallen asleep in the swing.  Aww~ <3

Mace took a ridiculously long nap in the afternoon, and when he finally woke up we went shopping with Mom on a Christmas quest to find an elf to do the "elf on a shelf" thing.  I hadn't really heard of this until a few years ago, when a friend of a friend posted pictures on her Livejournal of this weird cute little Christmas elf.  Apparently it's like a little gnome you hide around the house at Christmas time, and the kids get excited trying to figure out where the elf is hiding.  We couldn't find an elf, so Carmen picked out a Christmas puppy.  Close enough. ;)

Then we went to the mall to ride on the carousel and walk around.  There's a little kids' play area by the carousel and Carmen likes to go play with the little kids.  Since Mace is crawling, I set him out on the floor and let him watch the bigger kids play.  He is kind of a road block, and other moms are constantly telling their kids to watch out for the baby and be careful.  I'm not sure if I'm being helpful (now they are more aware of other people when they are playing!) or if I'm being annoying (why the eff is that weirdo mom letting her baby potentially get run over by packs of 3-year-olds?!) but I don't care if a little kid runs over Mace.  It will make up for the fact that he doesn't have a whole bunch of older siblings to maul him!  He only has Carmen!

It was really funny to watch the kids play at the mall.  They ran around in circles screaming, "AAAAUUUGGGHH IT'S THE BABY MONSTER!  HE IS GOING TO GET US!" and they would run away, as Mace smiled at them and got up on his hands and knees and rocked back and forth.  He didn't really want to go anywhere, so he just spun around in circles, watching kids and smiling, then occasionally coming over to Mom or me to gnaw on our shoes.  Oh, baby Mace, how I love you.

So .... that was our day.

And here's a picture of my mom ... she and Mace were matching today!  It was not intentional!

Don't you think she looks 21?

Wow.  Writing this was fun.  I think I'll do this more often.

Facebook as a Pseudo-Journal

I have been such a slacker as far as blogging goes for the past few years.  In high school, I kept a LiveJournal (friends-only) and updated several times a week.  I'd come home from school and write.  My friends would read it and we'd interact online.  Then I went to college and I still wrote, but not as much.  Then I got married and I wrote sometimes.  Then I had kids and basically stopped writing.  I think I need to start writing again, but I don't really know where to start.  Ha ha!  Isn't that life! =p

Also, Facebook has kind of ruined my journal-writing.  I can just post something about Carmen or my life and I feel like, "Oh, that's the recording of my life for the day!" .... So I think I end up updating Facebook too much (some people post a million times a day, some people only check Facebook a few times a year, I generally post something daily and put pictures up for my family ... so I'm sure I drive the less-active Facebook people crazy) and never write in a journal/blog.  It's probably because I feel like it's easier to spend a few seconds updating Facebook than it is to spend several minutes writing up a blog post, constantly being interrupted by small children.  I have a hard time stringing coherent thoughts together these days.  It seemed to get better after Carmen was a year or two old.

ANYWAY, LIFE!

So we moved into a house in September.  It's amazing how much breathing room we have now that we've doubled our living space!  Mace is no longer sleeping in the closet, the piano is no longer behind the dining room table and I actually sit down and randomly play it for fun, etc. ;)

Upstairs, there's a loft.  We've dubbed it "Carmen's playroom" and have put all of our games and the kids' toys up there.  We also set up a bed in the back of the play room.  The mattresses we bought for the bunk bed way back when came with box springs, which we've kept for the last 3 years, so when we moved into the house we bought a third mattress and set it up on top of the box springs.  Sweet!!

The nice thing about Carmen having her own play area is that now we can keep the main living areas clean.  Or at least cleaner ... unless I'm doing laundry.  Then it sits all over the floor.

We also now have a two-car garage and two cars!  But only my car fits in the garage because Mark bought a big weight set and set it up in the garage so he can work out in the mornings and give up his gym membership.  I won't give up my membership because I love going to the gym and being able to drop my kids off at the day care.  I go to this super-fancy-schmancy gym (LifeTime Fitness) and if I'm too tired to work out, I can nap/read books/etc on the couch in the fancy-schmancy locker room.  Most gyms are kind of grimy and sweaty and you just go there for a class or whatever and can't wait to leave.  The day care might be kind of sketchy.  But LifeTime's day care is awesome - they have several different sections for the kids (there's a baby area, a place for toddlers and young kids, a computer lab, a covered outdoor play area, a playland-type area with a slide, tables for coloring and crafts, and a basketball court-type place in back with those multicolored padded walls for playing) and I loooooooove all the people in the day care.  It is so worth paying 2-3x what I would pay for a Gold's Gym membership.  I just feel good every time I go, and I WANT to go.

Another thing that has happened since we've moved is Mark has a new job!  He was kind of unhappy with his old job ... he was kind of isolated from his coworkers with the projects he was working on, and his managers didn't communicate with him often and basically had no idea what he was doing.  Mark discovered his values were different from his company's values ... to me, it sounds like he didn't like updating/debugging/working with super-crappy code that was thrown together just to "work" but was impossible to work with/update/add functionality/etc.  Better coding practices would be good in the long term, and if they *didn't* implement good coding practices, they'd be ahead in the field now but far behind in the future because another company could easily enter the market and catch up to and overtake them. ... but ... you know ... I'm not an expert on the software-aided engineering market. ;)

Anyway.  Mark found a job with a small company called DataStax and ended up on a Quality Assurance team ... which ... well ... basically sounds like Mark to a T. ;)  He'd do a better job describing his job than I would.  He gets to work from home, since most of his associations with his coworkers are done through chat.  He goes in to work on Wednesdays because they get free lunch (apparently) and the office is downtown, near 6th street, so the food options are pretty awesome. ;)  He also adores his coworkers because they are nerdy in all the same ways he is.  While he was interviewing, I believe they talked about Dungeons and Dragons characters/campaigns they've done in the past.  OH YES THEY DID.  And they get together and have game nights every so often at the office.

PS. Austin is awesome.  Great food, great music, great people, great culture ... I love it here!!

We spent Thanksgiving in Austin this year, and we are going to spend Christmas alone here, too.  We are kind of remote from our families (my family's in Seattle; Mark's parents moved to Orem last year) but you know what's great about here?  We don't have to deal with the misery of snow!  We'll go to Utah and Washington in the summer when the weather is nicer there, but I think we are going to spend every year trying to pressure our families into coming down here for the holidays. ;)

Why I'm obsessed with political stuff

Everyone on Facebook has been complaining this year about how everyone else seems to be posting political stuff, and they can't wait for November 6 to pass so everyone will just shut up and go home.  It's not going to happen with me.  I'm political ALL the time.

Why?

A few years ago, one of my best friends came to me in tears because she couldn't get a job.  She was doing okay health-wise on her medication (she has epilepsy and bipolar, which cause her to be disabled when she doesn't have her meds) but here's the kicker - she could only afford her meds if she was on MEDICAID.  If she got a job (she wanted to be a phlebotomist) it would pay her just enough to lose her Medicaid benefits, but she wouldn't get good enough health insurance benefits for her to be able to afford her own medication.

Um, so I pretty much hate the Democratic party for this.  (And don't get me started on why I hate the Republican party, too!)  Keep everyone dependent on the government and spend lots of money so you can keep your power and control over the people?  It seems to me that this follows that the goal of the Democratic party would be to make everyone poor and make everyone slaves to the party/government.  YES, I understand the actual goal is social liberalism and to make sure everyone has equal rights and life is "fair" ... but ... reality?  You tend to make people poor, sick, and dependent on the government.  And you don't treat people equally - you pick and choose favorites.  Your favorites are the poor and disadvantaged and people who make bad decisions and you want everyone else to pay for it.  Great.  Thanks for forcing charity on me because obviously without your mandates I wouldn't be charitable.

It makes me see how vital a role religion and charity play in society, and why although regimes fall, religion carries on.  There is a sense of choice with charity, and you understand why you have the desire to help those who are struggling.  When you start attaching numbers to things, that sense of charity and personal responsibility and intrinsic motivation disappears.

Ugh.

Health Insurance

So Mace had his 6-month well-check at the doctor's office this morning, and as I walked into the clinic, I thought about the other patients there.

I thought about how some people who have the most expensive medical needs are those least able to pay for it.  Medical conditions can be debilitating and expensive.  It made me think about how ... I don't know ... if we want our country to thrive, if we want healthy, productive people in our society, we really need to find a way to make health care affordable and accessible for all.

How could we do that?  I hate Obamacare.  It looks like it's set to make costs skyrocket, while attempting to get everyone equal access to health care.  The free market WOULD do a great job with health care if they didn't discirminate against sick people (which they should, if they want to minimize costs and maximize profits.)  But how does it make sense to PUNISH the sick people by making them pay higher premiums?

This isn't like life insurance, where they are weighing out your probability of death in the next X number of years.  If you are a smoker or if your sister is bipolar or if your father died of a heart attack at 40, you DO have some kind of risk of dying.  But as far as health is concerned, we're ALL at risk of SOMETHING expensive catastrophic happening to us (ie. Mace's $20k fever in May. He just had a virus, but we spent 3 days in the hospital as they pumped him full of antibiotics to make sure he didn't have meningitis or something.  That sort of thing, you know, KILLS 1-month-olds.)

And with auto insurance, which everyone has to have because car accidents are EXPENSIVE (just like medical issues!), people can CHOOSE whether or not they have a car, and whether or not they drive.  With health insurance, it's like, "Hm, do I want to be alive, or not?"



I've always had really good health insurance.  Mark and I got married right after my freshman year at BYU and we had BYU health insurance, which was WAY WAY CHEAP (I thought it was expensive because we had no money.)

After Mark graduated and got a job, we had pretty decent health insurance through his employer.  His employer's health insurance was REALLY REALLY EXPENSIVE, though, because the company was small and I think someone had cancer and his daughter had some other medical issue.  So the insurance companies saw that, and saw that the company was small enough that they could charge an arm and a leg for the group's health insurance.  Or something.

Then we moved to Austin, and Mark had *amazing* health insurance.  Like, we-had-no-deductible health insurance.  I had Mace in a hospital with an epidural and it cost us $500, but if I had done it in a birthing center it would have been FREE.

Then last month, Mark got a new job (and we moved into a house, thus I haven't written in this blog AT ALL) and I had a new experience.  I got to pick out MY OWN INSURANCE PLAN.  First of all, it kind of made my brain explode ... but at the same time, it was kind of neat.

Our employer would pay up to a certain amount (say, $400) of the premium, and if the plan we chose cost more than that, we'd pay the difference and it would come out of our paycheck (before taxes, woohoo!)  I had about a dozen options to choose from, and then I found three plans that were similar but had different copays, deductibles, and %-after-deductible paid by the insurance companies.

I chose the one I thought would fit best for our family for the next year.  Next summer, we get to pick out a health insurance plan again for the next year.  Let's just say I hope not to get pregnant and have a baby this year. ;)


It got me thinking, wouldn't it be great if everyone had the opportunity to do the same thing with THEIR health insurance plans?  Wouldn't it be great if everyone could be a part of some kind of "group" plan (that, as far as I know, can't really discriminate against individuals) and everyone could choose what's right for them?

It kind of sounds like a voucher system.  EVERYONE would have the government pay the first $X00 of people's insurance policies (would it have to be a little more for families than for individuals?) and then we go out and pick an insurance plan we like.

The insurance companies have to charge everyone the same price for the same plan, so they better figure out how to balance their budgets and quick!!!  That way, everyone has access to health insurance and health care just like Mark has through his work, only it's through the government, but the government is still letting the free market take care of individuals.  Then, NOBODY needs Medicare/Medicaid because everyone has their basic insurance through the government.  The very basic plan (the plan that is completely paid for by the government's subsidy) would cover basic wellness/preventative and emergency/catastrophic and prescriptions.  But, seriously, let the insurance companies design the plans themselves and offer them to people.  They'll find a way to do it effectively.  The people will make sure of that (by not buying the crappy plans and switching the next year when they get to pick a new plan!)

This plan is about 1000x smaller than the behemoth they pushed through Congress, and encroaches on WAY fewer rights.  Because people need health care to be healthy and productive, and frankly, not everyone can afford it, although our nation can afford it for them.  The key is that everyone is treated equally, though ... rich and poor receive the same subsidy, but the rich can buy the fancy insurance if they want and pay the extra $1000 for it.

I love Canda!

Okay, I don't know everything about Canada or how their government works, or how their taxes work, or how their healthcare system works, but there are a few things I think I really like about them.

There are people on both sides of the fence when it comes to Canada's healthcare system.  I admit I'm not familiar enough with it to feel strongly one way or another ("Obviously Natasha Richardson died because her skiing accident was in Canada!" ... um, sure?)  But I think I personally would prefer a universal healthcare system (a single-payer system) to this behemoth Obamacare we've recently passed.  It's full of great ideas, but dang, it's messy and complicated and inefficient and looks like it just sells us all out to the insurance companies who have always been able to do whatever they want with us, and will continue to be able to do so. O_o BUT THAT IS A DISCUSSION FOR ANOTHER DAY.

BACK TO THE TOPIC AT HAND: WHAT I LIKE ABOUT CANADA.

Parental leave.
It's not maternity leave, which is a special cool luxury American working moms have that makes me jealous.  Granted, not all Americans get paid maternity leave, but dang.  Sometimes I wish I had waited a bit longer to have kids so I could have a job, take some paid maternity leave, then quit.  (Yes, my selfish inner desires are why employers hate pregnant women and are suspicious of them.)  But the idea is that in Canada, you get a year off with 55% pay.  Then you get to go back to your job.  A year, people.  Paid.  And either parent could take it off.  So if both spouses are working, each could take 6 months off, or Mom could take a full year off, or whatever.  But if one spouse is working, then the working spouse could take the whole year off.  That seems a lot less discriminatory than saying we want to give working moms all these benefits to make their lives easier.  Hey, look over here, I've made sacrifices, too!  Whatever happened to "all men are created equal" - why do they get special treatment and protection?

Canada's version of the "Child Tax Credit"
In the United States, we get something like a $1000 tax credit for each child.  That's great and all, but Canadians get a $100 check every month for each child they have (something like that.)  That adds up to $1200, by the way. ;)  Anyway, like I said, I don't know how their tax system works, but that seems more straightforward than our "$1000 tax credit plus a bunch of random deductions like the child care tax credit that ONLY WORKS FOR CHILD CARE AND NOT PRESCHOOL."  Again, one of those things that discriminates against stay-at-home parents.  Why is it that working parents need all this help?  If they need all this help, isn't that a sign that there's something wrong with what they're doing?  If *parents* need help, help *all* *parents* and not just a certain subset of them that exhibit certain behaviors the government wants.  It seems they want to pressure everybody into working and only having a few children.  Isn't Europe kind of having a problem with its aging population...?  How are MY kids supposed to support the Social Security needs of all the aging people if you're trying to stop middle-class people from having kids?
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/301108/empty-playground-and-welfare-state-ramesh-ponnuru << a great blog entry

Universal healthcare.
I could never write enough about this in a single entry.  I don't think I could get it out in a bunch of entries.  But here's the quick version: we already practically have "free" universal health care.  Hospitals and doctors are required to treat their patients regardless of their ability to pay.  A friend of a friend said, "Health care is totally free, as long as you don't need a good credit score and don't mind dodging a few phone calls!"  Seriously, it's awful!  My aunt works (worked?) for a hospital's billing department!  It sounds like a nightmare job!

We have the ability to treat people and morally we should (something to do with the Hippocratic oath? or something?) and we DO and we bill people for it even if they can't afford it.  It makes no sense.  I got my hospital bill from having Mace and the bill made no sense.  They charged the insurance company some amount, the insurance company paid them some other amount (like, 1/5 of what the hospital billed them), I paid my teensy hospital copay (I love my health insurance ... they cover 100% and I have no deductible!), and somehow we all called it good?  Someone explain to me how this has ANYTHING to do with the free market.  And when I came in, they asked me if I was insured or if I was paying out of pocket.  Do they bill us differently?  I bet they do.  This makes NO SENSE.

The fact is, we don't understand anything about what healthcare costs.  And there are emergencies.  That's why we all have insurance, I think.  And we all have copays because the insurance companies don't want us going to the doctor for FREE because then we'd go to the doctor for every little thing and A) the doctors would be overwhelmed and B) it would be freaking expensive.  But it makes sense for preventative visits to be free (because insurance companies would probably rather catch something earlier than later because it would be cheaper to treat) and blah blah blah I don't think you find this interesting.

I think healthcare should be a common good because education is a common good.  We want our society to be educated because that makes them more productive.  We ALSO want our society to be HEALTHY because that will ALSO make us more productive.  I have a friend who was "disabled" because she has bipolar and epilepsy - and without medication she is unable to function.  But if she got a job, Medicaid would no longer be able to help her with her medical costs, but her job wouldn't be good enough to either A) provide medical benefits or B) pay her enough that she can care for her own health issues.  THAT IS JUST WRONG.

I could go more in-depth about this, but that would probably best be left to someone who is actually an expert in the field and knows about healthcare and knows about insurance.  Me?  I just read stuff.



PS. I'm in love with this woman and her blog.  Apparently she wrote about most of my issues years ago.
http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/category/women/

And gosh dang I wish I kept links to all of the blog entries that made me think about everything I wrote about in this entry.  Oh, well.  I will find more later, but the point is I need to get my thoughts out, y'know?

Coming up some day: if I ruled the world, what would it be like?

Personal family things

Now I'd like to take the opportunity to share a few things that have been going on in my life lately.

Mace is 4 months old.  I love him so much!

• He's a super-huge flirt who loves to talk.  He loves attention, and I love looking into his eyes.  He looks back at me, as if searching for some kind of reassurance, and when I smile, he beams at me.
• He loves it when people sing to him - one of the ladies at the gym day care even told me about it. :)
• He loves sucking on his Binky, and when it's not around, he sticks his entire hand into his mouth and sucks on it madly.  It's hilarious.  And for a kid who loves his Binky so much, he sure stinks at keeping it in his mouth!
• He loves to grab and pull at his toys.
• He understands when I'm promising him milk.  If he's fussing and I say, "Wait just a minute, I'll get you some milk, let me sit down..." he stops and looks at me for a while.  And if I get distracted and do something other than start nursing him, he furrows his brow and starts crying at me again. ;)
• He started rolling over about a week ago, and now he can roll from front to back and back to front!  But I think he only rolls over in one direction - when he's on his back, he'll roll over his left arm onto his stomach, then he'll roll over again and be farther away from where he started.
• He loves his big sister.  She is very good at comforting him, and when she got him to stop crying at the end of her swimming lessons a few weeks ago, one of the other parents was like, "Wow, she is the baby whisperer!!"
• Carmen loves him to death, too.  She helps stick his Binky in, she plays with him, she helps him roll over, she brings him toys, she talks to him in the high-pitched loving Mommy voice adults use with babies (apparently it's a natural thing for parents to do - babies are better at picking up the high-pitched sounds and we recognize that they respond to it.  We're not just being super-annoying with our baby talk.)  I love walking into a room and hearing her singing to him, or going, "Baby Mace, you're a cutie, you're a cutie!  Let's keep you forever!  I love you!  You are the cutest and sweetest baby!"  And when he's crying, she caresses his face and goes, "Shh, shh, shh, oh, sweetheart, you're okay, shh~"
• For some reason, I like to call Mace "Stinkerfish."  Sometimes Carmen gets upset when I call him that, and she goes, "He's not a stinkerfish!  He's a sweetheart!"

Carmen loves being a big sister.  I think she's hilarious, too.  I love having a creative 3-year-old!!

Carmen Dewey: Dinosaur Hunter

• For some reason, she is obsessed with death.  I've probably been watching too much Burn Notice with her. ;)  I hear her playing in her room, and she's like, "Hey, everypony, Pinkie Pie is dead."  And a few weeks ago in Nursery, she told her Nursery leaders that one of her friends died, and they were a bit worried about that ... I asked her about it in the hall, and she told me that it was one of her pretend friends that died.  "Yeah, she went out into the street without looking and got hit by a car and she DIED."  O.o;  I don't teach her that she'll die if she gets hit by a car.  I say she needs to be careful because the car might not see her, and if it hit her she'd get "big ouchies".  Apparently big ouchies = death.
• The best part of my day is when Carmen comes up to me and gives me a big hug and says, "Mommy, I just love you!"
• Sometimes, she says, "Ugh, Mommy, if you [do thing I don't like], I will not love you any more!"  (What?!  I don't threaten her with taking away love!  Where does she get this from?!) and other times, when we get frustrated with each other, she glares at me and goes, "But Mommy, I still love you!!"  Hehehe.
• I haven't quite figured out what this means, but sometimes she says, "I am the MADDEST Carmen!"  Usually this is when she's going to go out and kill dinosaurs or something.  I think she also says it when she's recently been scared by a bug (usually a spider/ant/fly).
• We're kind of working on our fear of bugs.  When bugs are inside, it's okay to freak out and get Mommy and Daddy to kill them.  When we're outside, I try to tell her, "This is their home; they're not scary and I won't kill them for you."
• Carmen is very thoughtful and obedient.  While we were on vacation in Utah, my dad and I were both taking naps downstairs on the couch.  I heard Carmen come down the stairs, calling out, "Mommy?  Grandpa Brad??" and when she saw both of us asleep, she sighed exasperatedly (it sounded a bit like Napoleon Dynamite) ... then turned around and went back upstairs, instead of waking us up and bothering us.  Seriously?  Seriously!!  I was so happy!!!!
• My favorite made-up word by Carmen?  "Yestertime."
• She is super-upbeat and optimistic and sweet.  "That sounds super-delicious!" "That is WONDERFUL, mommy!" "Mom, everything in this grocery store is SO PERFECT!" and our favorite descriptor for tasty fruit is, "It's super-juicy!"  Super-juicy strawberries, super-juicy apples, super-juicy pears ... Also, whenever we go to a place that will have kids there she can play with, she calls them, "All of my very best friends!" (I think she gets it from the My Little Pony theme song?)
• Everything exciting that she is looking forward to doing is happening TOMORROW.  I can't wait to go to my swim lessons TOMORROW.  I can't wait to start my dance lessons TOMORROW and wear my tap-tap-tap shoes.  I want to move into our new big house RIGHT NOW.  (or tomorrow. ;)  )
• Carmen reminds me of the little girl from Toy Story 3.  She runs around with her toys and everything that happens to them is SO DRAMATIC.  I love it!!

I want to write more in here about family happenings.  I've been distracting myself too much for the past year or so to write, but I really need to do it!!  (Facebook status updates are enough, right?  Right???)

In other news ... we are moving into a house next Saturday (yaaaaayyyyyy!!!!) so this week should be crazy full of packing and whatnot.  Being OCD and all, I started packing boxes last week to take downstairs to the garage (I don't want to ask my friends to carry all of our stuff down two flights of stairs) ... then Carmen decided she wanted to help and she put all of her ponies and other favorite toys into her backpack.  Ahahaha.  I love her.

Spoilers!!

A few days ago, Mark came home from work super-giddy and told me what he weighed when he got on the scale when he got to the gym that morning.  I really wish I could remember how much he weighed when we got married ... I think he's close!  So far (in just a month) he has lost 20 pounds.  That's even more than our cats!!  (Our cats are fat.)  I want to take a picture of Mark holding Tiber, with the caption of, "This is how much Mark weighed a month ago!"

I, on the other hand, lost 7 pounds in a week (how is it possible? I don't know. Going off carbs is crazy!) and then realized I shouldn't be losing weight that fast because I'm nursing.  I was supposed to be eating fruit, too.  And if you've got sugar in your body, it has energy it can access before your body starts shedding fat so even eating fruit will slow your weight loss.  At least that's what I suspect.  So now I'm down just over 10 pounds.  So between the two of us, we've almost lost a Carmen.  In a month.

I've been pretty bad the past few days, though.  I've been craving chocolate so I had several pieces of chocolate cake at a friend's house last night, and today I've been sneaking a bunch of Girl Scout Thin Mint cookies.  I promise I'll get back on track tomorrow!

One thing that was really fun about that first week was stepping on the scale in the evening and weighing less than I weighed in the morning, even though I had been eating all day long and never felt hungry.  Gee, funny, you eat foods that keep you full and you don't get hungry as often.  Hm!!

It makes me think that maybe that, instead of simply writing up how many calories are in a food item, if they wrote it in something like calories per hour.  You digest carbs faster than whole grains/proteins/fats, so although fat has more calories per weight, I bet if you ate more fat during the day you'd eat fewer calories overall.  Carbs last, like, three hours, then you're hungry again.  They also spike your blood sugar and make you even hungrier.  I noticed I could be not-very-hungry, then I'll have something with sugar in it, and suddenly my body will start craving more sugar.

Yup, here's a little something describing cravings vs. hunger.  This is why you have to do Phase I of the South Beach Diet.  It's what kicks the carb cravings.  The first 3 days are the hardest.
http://www.southbeachdiet.com/diet/hunger-versus-cravings


I've decided I also need to come up with some sort of official "goal" for my weight loss, instead of, "The doctor told Mark he needs to lose weight, so what the heck I'll do it with him because I'm fat."

Here goes, once it's public and people know they've got something to hold you to ... right?

Starting weight: 179
Current weight: 169
Pre-Mace weight: 165
Pre-Carmen weight: 160

In my wildest, wildest dreams I'd like to be down to 140 lbs (how much I weighed when I was 16) and have a 30-inch waist or smaller.  Actually, I'd just like to have a 30-inch waist, period.  (I'm already one inch down!)  Realistically, I'd like to get down to 150 lbs, which is what I weighed when I graduated from high school.  I have clothes I've been holding onto since I got married, hoping I'll be able to fit into them comfortably again.  (Problem is, many of them aren't nursing-friendly so I've hardly worn them since 2008.  BUT I LOVE THOSE SHIRTS SO MUCH I CAN NOT GET RID OF THEM BECAUSE I SWEAR I WILL WEAR THEM AGAIN SOME DAY! **stubborn**)

It's kind of embarrassing thinking those are my weight goals, because I have friends who are like 140 or 145 and want to get down to 120 and I'm thinking, "How is that even POSSIBLE?!  I haven't weighed that I was 13!  And I was not fat then!"  (Back then, I'm pretty sure was pure muscle, and I could probably beat the crap out of you, and I rode my bike everywhere.)

And there's your way too much personal information about Kamis for the day.  Now I will be super-embarrassed if Christmas comes around and I'm still 160something. "You did so great in August, then you gave up?!"