New year… new start, right?

New Year… new start, right?! We’re all at it now, how can we be better people in 2015? How long can we stop drinking/smoking/eating chocolate for? How much weight can we lose?

On our honeymoon in 2012, only 3 months before getting preggers, and at my smallest in years!

I’m definitely in the last camp.  For years I have maintained a reasonably healthy weight after I gain and then lost a significant amount at university. When I was pregnant, I didn’t go silly but equally I did enjoy the odd bit of cake, the extra helping of desert at family meals, or the chicken drumsticks WITH the skin left on!

After Sprog arrived, I lost 65% of the weight gained fairly easily and last Christmas I rejoined Slimming World to help to lose the remainder.  And I’ll start this post with a great big positive –I did it.  I lost just over a stone and I reached pre-Sprog weight! However, that did mainly happen in the first 6 months of the year and since then I’ve been faffing around loosing and gaining the same 3 lbs continuously and I am bored of this now.  At the bottom of this weight range I am happy, at the top, I am not as that’s where my clothes are all too tight.  I’m still not close to being back into my pre-Sprog ‘normal’ clothes as the weight is distributed a little differently now.

So, New Year… new start right?! I’m determined that it is time for real change now.

A new approach is needed I feel.  I have previously tried to hold myself accountable on here but failed miserably…I obviously wasn’t mentally ready and Friday’s weren’t a good day for me. I’m going to try a new plan.  Tuesday is my weigh in day and unfortunately, because work is so busy, I’ve been unable to stay for the group after the weigh in a lot of the time since September. So my pledge to myself is to stay for group for at least the whole of January to kick me kick start my journey. It may well have a negative impact on my work and marking load but I have to begin to draw a line and make sure that I am important too, I bit fed up of feeling like the fat friend, in my mind, having had a child is really not a good enough excuse to still look and feel this uncomfortable in my own skin.

2015 is the year of one of my best friends’ wedding, and hen do, and as a bridesmaid I have no way of avoiding pictures of myself being taken. After that, I will be starting a new job in September so I want to feel confident for that. It may also be a funny logic but I don’t intend to have another baby yet so my body is not going to be put through that change again for a while and I don’t want to look back on my life feeling that my late twenties were a time where I forgot about myself and put everyone else first, I want Sprog to see a healthy lifestyle from both of us and at the moment, my eating habits are probably not ones that I want to be passing to him.

So as I’ve written this, I munched through the last of the Christmas chocolates and any biscuits left at the end of the day will be going somewhere far away from me. It’s weigh in tomorrow evening and a completely fresh start, I think I’m going to set a new and lower target, and a non-food related reward for when I get there.  I’ll decide on that treat in time for next week’s post. Weekly weigh in posts will now happen and be completely honest… because it’s a new year, so a new start right?!

To laugh or to cry

Today was delightful, I got to be full time mama again and we had a great day.

After the wonderful sailor themed baby sensory, which was awesome, sprog went to the peaceful land of nod in the car. Now, he normally goes for a good couple of hours after sensory as he’s worked so hard developing different so many new ideas at sensory so I sat myself quietly down, returned a phone call, had my lunch and went to it to start putting the washing out and doing a bit of planning but sprog had other plans. He woke after only an hour and was of course in fine spirits to begin with.

I love the smiles when he first wakes up, daytime naps are not as good as first thing but it’s such a beam of happiness. After a little play upstairs, we headed down for lunch. And what a lunchtime it was! I think you can probably only truly appreciate this if you’ve ever been in a similar situation. Until today I would have said that I’d seen him get very messy with his food but this was something new!

The menu was ratatouille leftover from our delicious dinner last night. As always with baby led weaning, I take my lead from him, so we had spoons out, we had the bowl etc and he quickly established that today he wanted to take the food off the spoon and eat with his hands. He was loving it and eating so well. And then came the fatal move… The eye rub!

This may sound like the most simple and insignificant of movements… How can one rubbing ones eyes really be so disastrous?! The answer is when ones hands are covered in food. And not any old food, oh no… Yummy tomato food which has that delightful orange stain to it.

It was game over then. He spent mere seconds rubbing his face and the clean up operation when from baby wipe to stripping him down for a bath! I would have cried but he enjoyed the food so much and giggled his way through it so that I could only laugh at him!

Cue 30 minutes of trying to avoid getting the tomato sauce on anything else, covering the bathroom in tomato sauce and cleaning my mini monster and we were finally ready for the afternoon (it was only about 3.30!!)

Off we popped to tesco, I did remember the money off voucher this time – win for me! I was naughty and bought a couple of little bits for his birthday (not yet, I know, but some of it was reduced and some of it was just cool). We dashed back to the car as the rain drizzled down and made it home. As I pulled the handbrake up, the heavens opened. We had no waterproofs, no coats, not even hoodies on! Laugh or cry?!?! Laugh!! We sat and played on the car for a couple of minutes with fingers crossed and thankfully it eased off. I didn’t really have a plan for how long we were going to sit there!

One final laugh or cry moment… As I tried to write a card from sprog to his godmother, he continuously grabbed the pencils from me and crawled across the card. This isn’t the bad bit! We’d also bought her a cactus complete with funky tash (later to be compared to sprog’s godfather!). Fear not, the cactus was within a plastic container so I wasn’t hugely anxious when sprog nabbed it and started waving it around until I saw the problem… There was soil inside that Mexican painted pot, soil that isn’t magic and gravity defying! As the soil flew out of the packet and across the lounge… Laugh or cry?! It’s got to be laugh right!!

I had a blast with the little man today… Luckily I have tomorrow where he’s at nursery to help the house recover from today and prepare for Friday!!

Mama’s Reflection

The week whizzed passed and before I knew it, I should have written a review! I have been very busy reflecting though … if you’ve been keeping up with me this week, that won’t come as a shock!

I’ll keep my reflection short and sweet this week.  I have never felt as contented, chilled and whole as I do at the moment.  The weather has been perfect, everyone’s mood is up, sprog is in a wonderful mood (despite a tooth coming through – odd child!) and life is good.

N.B. Yes I’m avoiding thinking about going back to work at all costs! It’ll be fine…

International Day of Happiness 2014

I thought I should really write a blog today, after all, isn’t happiness what we are all striving for and in particular that’s why I started this blog – to help me find a balance and therefore find that happiness.

I struck me that my version of “happiness” has changed. Pre-sprog, “happiness” was finishing work early enough to watch some trashy telly with a big bar of chocolate, a glass of wine and an early night. It was spending time messing around with my girls or the hubby. It was just chilling out.

Post-sprog “happiness” can take many forms.

On a daily basis, it’s the small things that can make me happy. Less of a battle with the Weetabix, enough time to clean the highchair properly, a hot cup of coffee, a smile from sprog… The list goes on.

On a big scale, it’s so much harder to balance time for me (when he was born I still had time for swimming, now between preparing and cleaning up for everything in the day, there’s not time for that) with time for me and hubby (he gets in from work, I cook whilst he plays, sprog goes to sleep, we eat, he studies and I’ve started planning lessons for work) and the most important, quality play time for sprog.

You see I’m one of those mama’s… one of the crazy ones who likes to do stuff with her sprog so housework and all the boring things in life wait for when he’s asleep leaving very little time for me to chill out.

I read an article which said the average mum has 17 minutes to herself every week… I thought that sounded mad but I’m starting to feel myself head that way.

So on International Happiness Day, a day when I woke up feeling far from happy (I wanted to sleep!), my mission is to enjoy all the little things more and more. I laughed at the smear of Weetabix across his face this morning, revelled in the small victory of wiping it before it got stuck up and therefore avoiding his cross face, and finished the day with a yummy desert, in bed, in my PJs, at 8.30…Bliss!