Stephanie stops by…

While I’m on vacation, I’ve asked several people to do some guests posts.  They were all asked the same question:

Since hindsight is 20/20, what is the best “mistake” you’ve ever made?

First up, we have Stephanie.  Stephanie posts at Jason. For the love of God. She also recently published her first book,  Meeting Mr. Wrong: The Romantic Misadventures of a Southern Belle, and is in the process of writing her second.

Thank you, Stephanie, for playing along!!

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My Favorite Mistake

In 1996, at the age of 20, I married my first husband. He was a mean, angry, sullen, and overall horrible individual and by the time I was twenty-two? He was totally out of my life.

We had a house, which I gave all my savings to purchase. He got that in the divorce. We had a lot of debt when we divorced. I got that. All of it. Oh, the judge told him he’d half to be responsible for half, but the moment we walked out of the courthouse? He laughed in my face and told me he didn’t care if his credit was ruined. He wasn’t paying a dime. And he didn’t.

He met someone else. A mullet-headed woman who had two kids and a husband of her own. The day after I moved out, she moved in. Into the home I paid for. She ate off the dishes I got for my wedding. She sat on my couch and slept in my bed. She happily left her husband and children behind and took over my life.

It took years of therapy to get over what happened to me. I still get angry sometimes. I still get sad sometimes. It changed my life in ways I cannot explain…don’t even want to explain.

It was the most horrible mistake I’ve ever made in my life.

It was the best mistake I’ve ever made in my life.

When my husband left me I was pregnant with twins. I had all the debt from their birth. He never paid a dime. I got a new house. New dishes. A new couch and a new bed.

I got a new life.

The results of my best mistake are now eleven years old. They are hysterically funny, kind, bright, and overall awesome in every way.

I don’t think about their father and neither do they. He was a blip on the radar of our lives. A donor.

A mistake.

I would do it all again. In a minute. In a heartbeat.

Road Trip! Road Trip! Road Trip!

Tomorrow, we are leaving for Virginia Beach.  While we are taking a computer (gotta love free wireless), I’m not going to make a real big effort to post next week.

Which is why I lined up guest posters!  Yay!!

All next week, you’ll see posts from some of my favorite bloggers (and my non-blogging brother).  I asked them all the same question and I’m pretty excited about the answers they came back with.  I love getting different points of view from people, don’t you?

Have a great weekend everyone!  I’ll see ya’ll when I get back…after I get all the sand out of our unmentionables…

Photo Courtesy of Destination 360

Fitness Friday

I have become very goal oriented.  I mean, I’ve been making a lot of goals.

Achieving them?  That’s a whole nother post.

Anyway…here’s what I have coming up:

1. Along with Denise and others, I’m participating in the Pushing the Limits 2009 challenge.  That’s 100 pushups by July 31st.  We’re using the 100 Pushups program.  I just did Week 2, Day 2, Level 2 today.  Ow. Once I reach that goal, that’s one more thing off my Bucket List.
2. I’m signing up for another 5k.  I think I’ve lost my mind.  Once registration becomes available, I’ll have my choice of runs in mid to late September.  Dave’s running a half-marathon (over achiever) in September, too, so we’ll have to figure that one out. I’ll start on the C25k week 3 when I get back from vacation.
3. I’m going to do Wii Active 3 days a week.  Because it’s fun.  And Jake loves to watch me do it, which takes away the “I can’t do it because of the kids” excuse.
4. Did I mention I’m going on vacation?  I’ve committed myself to 20-30 minutes of cardio every day of vacation.  Dave and I just need to work out (no pun intended) when we will each get time to work out.  I see long, early(ish) morning walks on the beach in my future…

Oh, I’ve got plans all right.  BIG PLANS!  Did you do something active today?

You Capture – My Choice

Road Trip. That’s what I chose for the challenge this week. I think there are so many interesting things to see when you are stuck in the car for 7 hours.

All of these pictures were taken from I-70 East between Ohio and Maryland. The majority of them were taken when Dave was driving around 70 mph. They’ve only been edited for color.

The little white church down in the valley is by far my favorite part of the drive. It pops out of nowhere…you don’t even know how far above you are until the trees break and you are looking out over this beautiful valley. I love it.

You Capture is hosted by Beth at I Should Be Folding Laundry.

Sisters Weigh In

Despite consuming 3/4 of a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos earlier this week (that was a fun dinner!) I still managed to lose a pound this week.

Unfortunately, that brings me back to my starting weight of 157.

5 weeks and nothing to show for it.  Go me!

Aside from the unfortunate Doritos incident, I really have been making good choices lately.

What I haven’t been doing lately is exercising.  I finished the 5k on June 13th, and I haven’t really done a lot since then.  I did purchase the EA Active Sports for the Wii, but I’ve only used it 3 times.  3 workouts in 2.5 weeks.  That’s just sad.

So, taking Heather’s lead, I am going to sign up for another 5k in September.  Which means that the training will start again.  3 days of running, 3 days of Wii (which is just too much fun to even count as a workout) and a day of rest.  That’s my plan.

And because I’m an all or nothing kind of girl (usually it’s nothing), I am going to jump on Denise’s challenge for 100 pushups by the end of July.  I am going to start on Week 3 of the 100 Pushups plan.  That’s another 3 day a week plan so I’ll just throw those in somewhere.

Oh, and I leave for vacation on Sunday.  Wish me luck with that!!

This weeks goals:

1. Lose 1 lb by next Wednesday
2. 5 fruits and vegetables a day (even on vacation)
3. 20-30 minutes of exercise, 6 days a week (even on vacation)

Wordless Wednesday – ‘Nuff Said

For more pics, check out Wordless Wednesday or 5 Minutes for Mom!

Stop! Random Time!

• We went to Ohio over the weekend to attend a friend’s funeral.  41 is much too young to die.
• I’ve never laughed so much at a funeral.  You know you are saying goodbye to a special person when she arranges a cardboard cutout of herself for pictures, insists on having her picture put on a stick for people to hold in the air, and wants people to sing karaoke…








• Apparently, I have no idea how to NOT be tired. I’m tired all the time. And not just a little tired, but lay my head down on the table during lunch tired. I can’t sit on the couch without taking a nap and have fallen asleep 3 times over the past week with a computer on my lap.
• This is an insanely long post.  But if you can make it to the end, it’ll be worth it.  I promise.
• Jacob went to bed last night at 7pm and had an hour or two nap this morning from 11am-1pm.  Evidently I’ve passed my sleepiness on.
• I haven’t been away from the kids at all in 2 weeks.  Wait, I take that back.  I did get to go to a funeral and a botched dental implant appointment.
• We leave for Virginia Beach in 5 days.  I feel like I’m forgetting something…
• Dave and I leave for Prague in about 3 weeks.  I’ve done nothing for that trip.  Wait, I take that back.  I have a plane ticket and my passport is good so I guess that’s something.
• I should really shave my legs before I go to the beach.  But not before then.
• Heat and I don’t get along.  It totally, TOTALLY wipes me out.  And when I say heat, I mean anything over 78 degrees.  Which is why sitting in the sun for 2 hours during swim lessons has been especially fun in the upper 80s…
• Considering getting a person to clean the house so that I can have more time to sleep and complain and blog and not exercise.
• I should really exercise.  Maybe even today!
• For dinner last night, I had 3/4 bag of Cool Ranch Doritos and some chocolate ice cream straight from the carton.  I added some peanuts to the carton for some extra protein.
• Considering restarting the Couch to 5k program again with Heather.  She started yesterday.  I’m already behind.
• I’m feeling fairly bumpish and loggish.
• After talking to my dad over the weekend, I decided I really need to get in for a physical.  I have a history of diabetes on both sides of the family, my dad is on cholesterol meds, and I found out that one of my sisters and one of my brothers have a problem with their triglycerides.
• I had an elevated triglyceride reading when I was pregnant with Emma, but they said that pregnancy can skew the results.  They said to come back 6 months after Emma was born.  I didn’t.  Now I wish I had.
• I wish I could sit down with a bag of grapes the way I can sit down with a bag of chips.
• I should read listen to more music and watch less TV.
• There’s a lot of things I “should” do.
• Your turn!  If you made it this far, congratulations!  Tell me something random about yourself and I’ll enter you for a $25 gift certificate to anywhere you want.  If I can get it, I’ll get it for you!
• I’ll close the comments at noon 2pm EST on Thursday.  That gives you 2 days to tell me something about yourself.  And if you should happen to tell your friends about this, that’d  be cool.
• One extra entry each for Tweeting this, Subscribing to me, and answering this question: How old are my kids? Leave a comment for each additional entry.
• Don’t tell anyone there’s a contest!  Why ruin the surprise??
• I know.  I need help.

You Capture – Summer

For us, summer definitely means time at the pool.

The kids have swim lessons before the pool actually opens so it’s nice and quiet there…

The water is a little bit cold when you first get in.

But Emma must be having fun because she certainly doesn’t like me telling her when it’s time to go.

You Capture is hosted by Beth at I Should Be Folding Laundry!

Tentacle-y

First there was the blog.

Then there was Facebook.

Then I tired of people poking me and throwing snowballs at me.

So I joined Twitter.

But I didn’t delete Facebook.

Then I made it so my Twitter updates showed up as my Facebook updates.

Then I coveted that other people’s blogs posted to their Facebook updates.

So I asked how to do that.

And Stephanie helped me.

So now I have it so my blog updates show up as Facebook updates.

And I am happy.

And another one gone…another one gone…

Jake’s teeth are dropping like flies.

The latest casualty? His other front tooth. He “lost” (lost it…had it extracted…whatever) his first front tooth when he was 3 years old.

To be honest, I’m surprised this tooth lasted as long as it did.  I thought sure it was going to come out when he fell in preschool, but that little tooth was tough.  It made it 2 years past it’s life expectancy!

It’s kind of fun to watch him eat pizza now, though.  And unfortunately, he seems to be going through a growth spurt at the same time.

Good thing he likes yogurt…