Strange Changes

Me: With almost every pregnancy I've had, I've lost the taste for a specific food.  I don't mean I just couldn't eat something when I was nauseous, I mean that I don't ever want to eat it ever again.  With John-Paul it was ginger, with Andrew it was milk, with Eamon it was red meat, and with with this baby it's pork.  For some reason while I was pregnant with Maggie, I actually developed a taste for tomatoes, and I still like to eat them now.  If only I could lose my desire for sugar or salt, I would be all set!

Phil: As long as I have known Phil, he has worn a size 12 shoe.  When we were training for the half-marathon last year, he would complain that he was getting blisters on the tips of his toes.  He also went through socks like CRAZY, constantly getting holes in them.  At the beginning of this school year, he went to buy a new pair of dress shoes, and the lady at the store measured his foot and told him he was a size 13.  We were shocked, but suddenly the toe blisters made sense!  Then, just last week, he went to a specialty sports store to get his feet measured for a good pair of running sneakers.  The man at the store measured him and he tried on a couple pairs before the man decided that Phil should actually be wearing a size 14!!  And you know what they say about men with big feet, right? 

(That you have to special order big shoes) 

Heehee!

If we keep this up, I'll be a vegan and Phil will be in clown shoes in no time :)

What a Difference a Year Makes!

March 21, 2010

Running my First Half-Marathon:

March 21, 2011

Growing my Fifth Baby:

(Don't mind the face or the pose - I can not take a good picture!)

Because I Could Watch Irish Step Dancing All Day Long...

Happy St. Patrick's Day Everybody!!

We're celebrating with Steak and Guinness Pie for dinner and
  I gave the kids green milk with their breakfast :)

And remember:

If you're lucky enough to be Irish...

You're lucky enough!

Breaking a Baby Bump Sweat

A great pregnancy or beginner workout:

{not me}

Get your behind on a treadmill.  Are you there?  Good.

For every run - choose 6.0 (10 min. mile) at 1.0 incline

For every walk - choose 4.0 (15 min. mile) at 5.0 incline

(You can change these to whatever levels you want, but I feel this is an easy enough pace while still giving a great workout.)

1) Run 1 mile

2) Walk .25 mile

3) Run .75 mile (now you've completed 2 miles)

4) Walk .5 mile

5) Run .5 mile (now you've completed 3 miles)

6) Walk .75 mile

7) Run .25 mile (now you've completed 4 miles)

8) Walk 1 mile (now you've completed 5 miles)

The whole thing takes me about 1 hour (maybe 63 minutes?).

{again, not me}

This workout is something I've been doing while pregnant since I can't run as long as I used to, but still want to sweat and get my heart racing.  I like it because the longest run (1 mile) is over right away, and then you are decreasing your run times while increasing your walk times.  I'm not sure how much longer I'll be able to do this, but I'll keep trying for as long as I can.  I only do it about twice a week, and then do short elliptical workouts (5 to 6 miles) on other days during my lunch break.  I need to exercise like this because:

A) I sit at a desk for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week (plus a two hour commute), and

B) I eat way too much food.  I just love to eat, and I'd rather eat and exercise then have to diet - yuck!

What is your current exercise/diet plan?  I'd especially like to hear what you did while pregnant.  It's almost bikini season!  Hahahahaha, I can't even type that without laughing.  I've never worn a bikini in my whole life, and I certainly wouldn't start now!

March Madness

It seems that every year around this time, I go stir crazy.  I'm not sure if it's the timing of the seasons - winter seems like it's been around too long and I just.can't.wait.any.longer for Spring to come? Or maybe it's because Phil gets his Intention Letter around this time and has to decide if he plans to continue teaching or not (they are on one year contracts).  Or it could be that I look around at how much Spring Cleaning needs to happen in and outside our home.  Or maybe I am realizing how precious few weeks are left until it's beach season, and I want my body to shed the winter insulation it likes to acquire against my will. 

Whatever it is, I always feel a little blue and tend to focus too much on all the ways I wish my life were different.  I want to chop and color my hair, paint the shutters and trim on our house, build another bedroom upstairs, buy a new house (it just seems easier), change my job, move across the country, have Phil change jobs, make a whole bunch of awesome friends, cure the health ailments that run in my extended family, end abortion, fix the economy, it goes on and on.

And it seems that everything I hear on the news lately is so tragic: the farmhouse fire where a family lost 7 of their children, the eleven year old boy who hanged himself in a nearby town, the deadly earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear devastation in Japan.  It's just too much to think about.  I don't know if it's my pregnancy hormones affecting my emotions, but whenever somebody starts to say "Did you hear about..." I just want to stick my fingers in my ears and shout LA-LA-LA-LA!!!  I can't take it.

Normally, when I feel like this, I would go for a loooong run or make plans to hang out with friends or eat chocolate.  But the baby bump makes it impossible for running long distance, the limited free time I have on the weekends after working all week is usually devoted to family things, and I gave up sweets for Lent.  Sigh.

I have learned from the Veggie Tales that to be truly happy you have to be thankful for what you have.  And I have so so so much (faith, family, health).  I just need to get over myself.  I know it's the Big D (and I don't mean Dallas) just messing with my head.  I even had a dream last night that a huge snake was chasing me all over the house, and kept biting me.  I was running around like crazy trying to get away from it, but couldn't.  I woke up completely sweating, so thankful it was just a dream.  I know exactly who that snake represents, and whose help I need to crush it's ugly head.

O Mary Conceived Without Sin, Pray for Us Who Have Recourse to Thee.

Ben Stein's Final Column

For many years Ben Stein has written a biweekly column called
''Monday Night At Morton's.''  (Morton's is a famous chain of Steakhouses known to be frequented by movie stars and famous people from around the globe.)  Now, Ben is terminating the column to move on to other things in his life.  Reading his final column is worth a few minutes of your time.

Ben Stein's Last Column...

How Can Someone Who Lives in Insane Luxury Be a Star in Today's World?

As I begin to write this, I 'slug' it, as we writers say, which means I put a heading on top of the document to identify it. This heading is 'eonline FINAL,' and it gives me a shiver to write it.  I have been doing this column for so long that I cannot even  recall when I started. I loved writing this column so much for so long I came to believe it would never end.

It worked well for a long time, but gradually, my changing as a person and the world's change have overtaken it.  On a small scale, Morton's, while better than ever, no longer attracts as many stars as it used to. It still brings in the rich people in droves and definitely some stars. I saw Samuel L. Jackson there a few days ago, and we had a nice visit, and right before that, I saw and had a splendid talk with Warren Beatty in an elevator, in which we agreed that Splendor in the Grass was a super movie. But Morton's is not the star galaxy it once was, though it probably will be again.

Beyond that, a bigger change has happened..?  I no longer think Hollywood stars are terribly important. They are uniformly pleasant, friendly people, and they treat me better than I deserve to be treated. But a man or woman who makes a huge wage for memorizing lines and reciting them in front of a camera is no longer my idea of a shining star we should all look up to.

How can a man or woman who makes an eight-figure wage and lives in insane luxury really be a star in today's world, if by a 'star' we mean someone bright and powerful and attractive as a role model?  Real stars are not riding around in the backs of limousines or in Porsches or getting trained in yoga or Pilates and eating only raw fruit while they have Vietnamese girls do their nails.

They can be  interesting, nice people, but they are not heroes to me any longer.  A real star is the soldier of the 4th Infantry Division who poked  his head into a hole on a farm near Tikrit , Iraq .  He could have been met by a bomb or a hail of AK-47 bullets.  Instead, he faced an abject Saddam Hussein and the gratitude of all of the decent people of the world.

A real star is the U.S. soldier who was sent to disarm a bomb next to a road north of Baghdad .  He approached it, and the bomb went off and killed him.

A real star, the kind who haunts my memory night and day, is the U.S. soldier in Baghdad who saw a little girl playing with a piece of unexploded ordnance on a street near where he was guarding a station.  He pushed her aside and threw himself on it just as it exploded.  He left a family desolate in California and a little girl alive in Baghdad ..

The stars who deserve media attention are not the ones who have lavish weddings on TV but the ones who patrol the streets of Mosul even after two of their buddies were murdered and their bodies battered and stripped for the sin of trying to protect Iraqis from terrorists.

We put couples with incomes of $100 million a year on the covers of our magazines.  The  noncoms and officers who barely scrape by on military pay but stand on guard in Afghanistan and Iraq and on ships and in submarines and near the Arctic Circle are anonymous as they live and die.

I am no longer comfortable being a part of the system that has such poor values, and I  do not want to perpetuate those values by pretending that who is eating at Morton's is a big subject.

There are plenty of other stars in the American firmament...the policemen and women who go off on patrol in South Central and have no idea if they will return alive; the orderlies and paramedics who bring in people who have been in terrible accidents and prepare them for surgery; the teachers and nurses who throw their whole spirits into caring for autistic children; the kind men and women who work in hospices and in cancer wards.

Think of each and every fireman who was running up the stairs at the World Trade Center as the towers began to collapse. Now you have my idea of a real hero.

I came to realize that life lived to help others is the only one that matters. This is my highest and best use as a human.  I can put it another way. Years ago, I realized I could never be as great an actor as Olivier or as good a comic as Steve Martin or  Martin Mull or Fred Willard--or as good an economist as Samuelson or Friedman or as good a writer as Fitzgerald.  Or even remotely close to any of them.

But, I could be a devoted father to my son, husband to my wife and, above all, a good son to the parents who had done so much for me.  This came to be my main task in life.  I did it moderately well with my son, pretty well with my wife and well indeed with my parents (with my sister's help).  I cared for and paid attention to them in their declining years.  I stayed with my father as he got sick, went into extremis and then into a coma and then entered immortality with my sister and me reading him the Psalms.

This was the only point at which my life touched the lives of the soldiers in Iraq or the firefighters in New York ...  I came to realize that life lived to help others is the only one that matters and that it is my duty, in return for the lavish life God has devolved upon me, to help others He has placed in my path. This is my highest and best use as a human.

Faith is not believing that God can.  It is knowing that God will.

By  Ben Stein



(Thanks Mum for sending this to me!)