One Hundred and Thirty Five Days

Good morning and Happy First Monday of 2011. For those of you who are followers of Allan over at AGP, lets get going on Phase 4! Everybody ready?!?

I know I am. I've hit a slow spot despite behaving myself over the holidays. I had no cookies, cakes, pastries, pop, candy....none of it. I drank lots of fluids.....LOTS of water and coffee, to keep me going during the home project business, and many days, I had very little to eat. Yet nothing budged. I'm stuck. No gain, no loss.

But this week we step things up a bit and add some exercise. I started doing the C25K back in October, and then fell on my face. Well, figuratively anyway. We went out of town for 4 days, and I never picked it back up after we returned. Dumb.....But the exercises in Phase 4 start off pretty easy, so I'm sure I can keep up with these.

I am so dragging butt this morning, so I thought I'd jump on here and check in with everyone. I got a whopping 2 hours of sleep last night, and will have to keep moving today just to keep from passing out. I got to bed later than I wanted to, but even when I finally did put my head on the pillow, I tossed and turned for hours. Last time I looked at the clock, it was almost 4:30am. I think some of you are just getting up at that time...yuck!

While on the holiday break, I let myself stay up later and later, and have completely screwed up my sleep schedule. I'm going to get back into the "melatonin at 9pm" routine to remedy that.

Christmas dinner at my house was interesting to say the least. My mom and her two sisters came for dinner, as well as hubby's parents. That made 5 people between the ages of 68 and 80. Plus me, hubby and two of our three kids.

Dinner itself went well, but I was nervous about how the relatives would get along. It was the "visiting" afterward that was a bit "sticky". Hubby's folks rarely ever come to our house. Something about his dad's stroke a few years ago, and having to navigate steps. Steps never seem to hinder his ability to get out to other places.....but that's another story.(Plus we installed a second handrail just for this event, so he'd have one on each side going up and down the steps). Additionally, my mom has been going through a particularly "cranky" period lately....for like the last couple years. Getting her and hubby's folks in the same room hasn't always turned out very well. I think they just don't like each other. Having my aunts there provided a bit of a buffer, in any event. And they were probably the most congenial of the bunch. After dinner, we played a game called Scattergories. It can be fun, except that my mom is rather cut-throat in any game she plays, so the minute we started playing, she was all about critiquing everyone else's answers. Hubby's mom quit playing half-way through the game, stating that her eyes were bothering her. At one point, she rolled her eyes at something my mom said, which did not go unnoticed with my mom....I had to hear about that later. Hubby's mom griped at his dad the rest of the evening. And then everybody left.....and I was relieved. No major issues, just some minor ones.

And I missed my dad so very much.

I sometimes envy people that have really big families. It seems like the more people you have at a get-together, the less problems you have...or at least you have more people to choose from to talk to. I'm any only kid, and hubby only has one sister (she spends all her holidays at her hubby's family). I have this tiny little family of aging adults and they are pretty much all cranky and sickly and set in their ways. oh joy.

Well, on that depressing note, maybe I need to refocus my energy.

Back to business.....