A little bit of this, a little bit of that.

Sorry, no big, exciting post from me after taking a week off. I had good intentions, every night, I swear I was going to write a post, and then I just... well... didn't. That's the way it goes, though, huh?

I had the same good intentions when I started the SETS training last Monday. And then... oh who cares what really happened... let's just say life intervened. Something about getting a beastly cold, something about doing a huge amount of work all of a sudden, something about trying to get on top of my pig-styish house. Blah blah blah.

So anyway, Sunday night I finally got back on track. I did my Couch to 5k run at about 8:40 at night. I actually felt great, even while I was doing it. That's a motivator for sure!

Then I also joined SparkPeople

"What is SparkPeople?" you ask? (And yes, I know the question mark inside the quotation marks is wrong, but it just never looks right to me with a comma there). Well, SparkPeople is a really cool website that lets you track your eating and exercising. It has a handy meal-planner, that will plan out all your meals for you, including giving you a weekly grocery list. Or you can just eat all the same foods you always eat and track them by entering them yourself. And then it will set up an exercise program for you, or you can enter your own, and track the whole thing.

You earn points for doing various things on the SparkPeople website. I don't really know what you get to do with the points yet. I'm still getting to know the site. But I have been tracking what I eat and it's really helping me to see what my ratio of protein/fat/carbs is, how many total calories I eat in a day. And if I enter my breakfast and lunch and it looks like I'm overdoing it, I can see that and just have a light dinner. Or vice versa, if I eat light for breakfast or lunch, I know that and can have an extra glass of wine.

For someone who's never tracked calories before, it's pretty cool. Even the Stouffers frozen chicken enchiladas that I made for dinner tonight were already in the SparkPeople database, so all I did was enter that I had one for dinner and it took care of the rest. Nice!

So why am I doing this? Well, I just want to get back into "fighting" shape. Since I had the kids, I haven't done much for exercise or eating right, so this is my "me" thing right now.

This post is titled a little bit of this, a little bit of that. So what else? Well, today I hired a new nanny/housekeeper. Her name is Carmen, and she's from Colombia. She will be coming on Monday and Wednesday afternoons, to watch the kids while I hide in my office and work, and also to help me keep up with the housework that seems to suck so much of my time every day. She's a really neat lady. She was a lawyer in Colombia. Her two daughters live right here in Silver Creek, so my house isn't too far out of the way for her.

She's also going to be speaking Spanish with the kids, so that should supplement the Spanish that they're learning at school. Miss D already had to show off to Carmen that she could count to 11 in Spanish. I think Carmen was actually a little impressed.

And while Carmen works on her English... she's been in the US five years now... I'll get to brush up my Spanish. We had a lovely afternoon cleaning out the twins' closets while we practiced the different vocabulary words having to do with clothes.

What else? I've started a new book, called The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon. I think Grandma Libby gave it to me a while ago, but I never started it. My BookSwim shipment hasn't come yet (I read all three books before I remembered to send any back, so I've been without new BookSwim books for a while now), so I grabbed this off my shelf last night and have been enjoying reading it. It does have a lot of foul language in it (even for me, and that's saying something), but the narrator's voice is very interesting.

No pictures this week, really. No, wait:

Daddy J did take a couple with his phone while he and the girls were out hiking this weekend:.

Don't Hudson and Miss D look so cute hiking together?

Oh and then there's this, from Soccer:

We should be getting the "real" team pictures sometime soon. But this is pretty much what it's going to look like!