Better than last year....

Today my little girl turned 5. FIVE, people. I have a FIVE year old!  It amazes me the road I've taken since she was born. 

• I am entirely unaware of what I weighed before I got pregnant. I was using fertility medications and had just plain old given up. 
• I was 210 lbs the night before she was born. 
• I lost weight, down to 160, and hit 160 the DAY I got my first positive pregnancy test with my son (my daughter was just shy of two years old)
• I went up to 210 lbs with that pregnancy -  And was STILL 199 when I came home from the hospital! 
• I weighed into my challenge this week at 159. 

Sometimes I just need to see those numbers are a reminder. So for the last year, I have bounced between around 150-162. I need to remember that even though I fluctuate, I haven't gone up, I haven't gone back to where I came from! My happy place seems to be around 152-154. I am hoping to get back there. We'll see if I can get lower if I start running faster and further!

I have a partner within the weight loss challenge that I am doing. It seems like the perfect match - her introduction was all about moderation.  PERFECT.  I (obviously) have a history with my "all or nothing" mentality! 

Today was one of the most hot/cold days I've had yet on my journey. If you recall, last year my daughter's birthday was an edible tragedy! Today, we started off with homemade poptarts (pie crust + cinnamon sugar or no sugar added preserves!).  

We headed out to Grant's Farm for the morning.  If you are unaware, Grant's Farm was the home of Ulysses S. Grant and (if I paid attention I would know how) but somehow it was acquired (married into the family maybe?) by the Anheuser Busch family.  They have spent 100 years accumulating animals on their 80 acre land and it is open to the public. It's a fun morning, the kids fed baby goats bottles of milk and threw corn to ducks. We saw an elephant show and our tram almost got charged by a bull.  The downside - all the food is crappy.  And they give you free beer "samples," which are truly cups of beer, probably 4-6 oz at a time.  So I had three of those over the course of our time there. I didn't want to eat the food, I couldn't bring myself to do it, so we shared a soft pretzel (2 for the 4 of us) and headed out of the park for lunch.

We went to one of our favorite local places, The Wolf Public House, for lunch. The food is amazing and the whole place is like Caribou Coffee and Panera had a baby.  Very rustic, very hip and awesome. This is from their website: . We support sustainable local family farmers raising animals kindly without the use of antibiotics or added hormones. We respect our environment and compost or recycle 95% of our waste.

So it makes me feel good about our choices to eat there.   Today I went out on a limb and tried a salmon BLT. It was ahhhhhmazing.  Absolutely amazing! And instead of potato chips, I got the veggie special of the day - a cold salad of zucchini, kalamata olives, feta in a vinaigrette. Delish! 

So, -2 for the beer, but +2 for my lunch choices, I think. Especially since I ordered an iced coffee with half and half instead of my usual Vietnamese coffee (coffee + sweetened condensed milk). 

We came home and I started making E's requested birthday dinner - Pizza. Now, I had the benefit of knowing what her birthday dessert was (which she didn't) so I wanted to balance my calories out. Instead of indulging in pizza (I make a whole wheat/corn flour pizza crust, so it's clean, but it's still carb-y and loaded with calories!) I made myself baby portobello mushroom caps with a tsp of pizza sauce, some mozzarella cheese and turkey pepperoni. BOY were they delicious! I tasted the pizza but I was quite happy with my dinner! +8 for me (the number of mushroom caps I ate! YUM!) 

What was dessert, you ask? 

Individual DQ cakes! 

I didn't finish mine. Which is another small victory. As recent as a month ago, you would have had to pry it from my clenched fist. Today, I ate half and was completely satisfied. So we put them back in the freezer to save as a treat for another day! 

All in all, even though I made some "bad" choices today, I feel like I did ok. I didn't get in a formal workout, but we did walk a lot at Grant's Farm and I did hit my 10,000 step goal, along with my 10 flights of stairs. 

So onto tomorrow. Just hoping to show SOME loss on the scale at my first weigh in on Monday, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it, I guess!