Making Exercise Fun (aka. losing the baby weight... again.)

Well I was hoping the last 15lbs of baby weight would just magically disappear all on their own but alas they have decided to hang around and throw a "make Amy feel fat" party.  Unfortunately I have never been one of "those people" who is able to eat whatever they want and not gain a pound, so the time has come to buckle down and start being more proactive in the battle of the bulge.  I've been having a hard time wanting to exercise regularly so I decided that I would change my thought process on working out.  Instead of saying I "have to" work out I now say I "get to"... silly I know but it's actually working.  I've also decided that I'm going to have fun doing it no matter what.  So many times my work out will consist of hula hooping, jumping rope, jumping on the re bounder with Joanna, running on the treadmill with Chase, playing tag with both of those monkeys, running sideways, backwards and forwards on the treadmill, etc. 

 the kids are having much more fun with my workouts too :)

last night after dinner I spent half an hour running laps with them around the living room. 

Last Saturday, Ricky had gone hunting for the weekend and I went with Chase to a "getting ready to read" program that a local private school was offering for free.  Chase really liked it and they gave us a gift bag to take home with educational games and toys.  One thing that was in the bag was play do, who knew that could provide so many hours of entertainment?! Chase did really well at the program and I'm sure he'll be ready for school in the fall.  I was also given lots of great ideas on how to work with him on stuff.

Sunday, we had my parents for dinner and it was so nice.  The kids were really wound up but they didn't seem to mind :) 

Tuesday I had a Kitchen day, you know, spent the whole day in the kitchen.  In the morning I organized a whole bunch of snack baggies for myself so I can stay on track with my eating.

(pay no attention to the hot and spicy cheese curls)

from left to right there are cashews, peanuts, dried apricots, dried green beans (which are really delicious and satisfy my salt cravings), pepitas (aka. pumpkin seeds), trail mix and sunflower seeds.  I also made a quadruple batch of my energy bars.

and cut up and prepacked some fruit.

I really like the grab and go things, it makes life a lot easier.  One of my issues has been that I keep forgetting to eat and then when I would eat I'd be so hungry and just eat a lot of junk.  So now I have no excuse to be bad and not eat healthy :)  And I've been trying really hard to resist the chocolate peanut butter fudge that I made for no good reason.

Trying and failing I should say, mmmm, its so good!

For Christmas, my mom had gotten me two books all about preparing and freezing meals in bulk, so in the afternoon I decided to make a couple of the recipes to freeze.  Taco soup was first, super easy and really delicious!

after dinner I made a hearty corn chowder that was pretty time consuming and I must have messed up the recipe because it didn't taste good at all and I'm going to have to dump all my hard work :(

well I don't think I can have a blog post lately without puppy pictures.  They are just so cute and I can't help it, I'll only put two on this time :)

whoops, I lied, 3 pictures :P

and because you endured the puppy pictures so well here are some super cute ones of Katypie

 starting to roll over...

and over...

Katy had a bit of a growth spurt the last couple days but ever since then she's becoming much more vocal and interactive.  Here's what we do instead of nap time (she gets kinda loud at one point- you were warned):