The Little Peanut Weeks 1-17

Before The Little Peanut was born, I came across this blog where they took weekly photos of their baby as she grew. I knew immediately I wanted to do the same with Cameron because that would be something wonderful to look back on and to be able to watch him grow before your eyes kind of like those flip cards only a modern day version! We are now on Week 36! I have a private blog for Cameron where I write him letters (starting from the moment I discovered I was pregnant) and post pictures from just about everything. It's kind of a modern day baby book only BETTER! My friends on Facebook have been enjoying these weekly shots for a while, but I thought it would be neat to share them with you guys too. Look at my Little Peanut grow! He went from 7 lbs, 7 oz to 25 lbs!

The first 3 weeks weren't inline with the rest, but I did my best before I found my groove with what I wanted to try to keep consistent, then there was a switch in camera and then a lens switch so they are certainly not perfect by any means, but still fun nonetheless :-)

(These photos wouldn't all fit on one post, so Weeks 18-36 are on the post below this one...keep scrolling!)

The Little Peanut Weeks 18-36

...Continued from post above















Missed Week 33 :-/

My original intention was to keep up with these until his first birthday, but it is getting increasingly harder to do! He's at the "busy body" age so we'll see how far we can go. I may also have to switch to a short sleeve onesie because the weather is going to get pretty warm before his birthday August 13th!

The Maiden Voyage

It turned out to be a beautiful Easter Sunday here in Halifax. Today was weigh in day for me and I am happy to say that I am down another 1.4 lbs :-). For an instant I was slightly unimpressed by the result because I have been working REALLY hard in the exercise department and was at or under my calorie goal almost every day and was not far off on the days that I wasn't. But I only let it bother me for a second because it's down in the right direction and I'm just going to keep going until I get there! I'm not just saying that. I'm 100% committed to getting back to my goal and down is the only way to go!

I took my Garmin 305 on it's Maiden Voyage on Friday. You may recall that my husband got me fully equipped for my half marathon training the Christmas before last (2009) and a Garmin was the coveted gadget I was hoping for! Of course, two days later was when I discovered my suspected "ulcer" was actually my Little Peanut baking in the oven and the half marathon training or any kind of running at all never happened! So sadly, my perfectly awesome running gadget stayed in the box! I have been starting to incorporate more running intervals on the treadmill during my workouts and I was curious how I would fair out on the pavement. I wasn't going to go for distance or pace and my goal was just to get running again so I set up my garmin to do an interval workout of 2:2 (two minutes of running, then two minutes of walking) and repeat that 12 times. Oh and then I remembered that the word "hill" is in the name of our neighbourhood for a reason!

I decided I was leaving the little one home with Daddy and it was just going to be me. It wasn't until I got going that I realized what it was like to be alone with myself. I didn't even have music because my iPhone was dead. I was thrilled to be out in the nice weather and spending some time with myself. After becoming a Mom, I now understand the whole "me time" concept and how important it becomes. A lot of planning and effort goes into making room in my life for ME! It felt great. I even diverted off track down into a path to the lake nearby my house and just sat there staring out into the water and listening to the waves made by the wind. I am a Maritimer to the absolute core and I could have inhaled every wave and splash around me. It was the best medicine I've had in a long, long time. I can't wait to take the little one to the beach this summer and introduce the sand and the ocean to him. He has it coursing through this veins too :-)

The run went great. I was slowwwwwww and my heart rate reminded me just how far I have fallen from where I was before pregnancy. But I'll get back there again eventually. Actually, carrying the extra weight and hitting the hard pavement really did take its toll on me. My knees and legs are REALLY sore to the point that I've taken the last 2 days off as "rest days" from exercise completely. I hope tomorrow I'll be ready for a good sweat session. I'll end up doing something else if my knees bother me too much, probably some strength or try out the Jillian Michaels Yoga Meltdown DVD that I've got waiting. I know better than to think that it's an "easy" alternative with the name "Jillian Michaels" in the title, but it should be ok in the impact department.

Early this afternoon we headed on over to Cameron's Nan's house for Easter dinner. He enjoyed himself and the attention from his Nan and our friend Amy once again!

Apparently the Easter Bunny wanted to contribute to his piggy bank and for some reason the Easter Bunny left it for him at Amy's house ;-)

The little guy and I went to an Easter Party play date a week or so ago and the Mom hosting the play date had a fun craft for the babies to do, but C was having too much fun just sitting and playing so I didn't want to interrupt him. I thought it would be a fun thing to do as a momento for his Nan today though!

In retrospect, his footprints should have been imprinted upside down, but still cute nonetheless and Nan gets C's first piece of art work!

I hope you all had a wonderful long weekend with your families! :-)

The MarsEdit Switch?

Back with my husband convinced me to switch over to a MacBook Pro from always being a PC user, I was leery but excited to try it out. It took some adjustment to get used to the slightly different ways things are navigated, but all in all I love my MacBook Pro! However, when I realized that for whatever reason, there wasn't really any blogging tools out there for Macs that could hold a candle to Windows Live Writer, I was very disappointed! I ended up using a virtual machine to run Windows so I could still use WLW! But I've decided that I don't like how the Photo Gallery reduces the quality of my pictures because they are always seemingly out of focus. So here I am back to testing out MarsEdit 3 to see if I can deal. I even tried going back to creating posts right from Blogger but for some reason Blogger won't let me add images! Anyone else have this problem? Truthfully the only reason I felt attached to WLW was because it remembers your links once you hyperlink something once. It's a pain to have to look up the URL to something that you would like linked in your text every.single.time and it's really nice to have it link as you go! So basically this post is all just about testing out MarsEdit to see how the photo of my little boy ends up coming out on the blog. If the image appears of comparitive clarity to the original, then I'm switching! Do any of you blog using a Mac? What tools do you use to blog? So here we go, Test 1, 2, 3!

The Green is Peeking Through…

the grass that is…

(this is not our grass here, just a random internet photo snag)

While most people sigh and cringe at the thought of “lawn mowing” season (at least my husband does), I’m REALLY looking forward to it! Last summer I was very pregnant and lawn mowing was out of the question. I did try using a weed puller to pull out some weeds in the yard, but I ended up with some pretty painful sciatica so that ended up being a no go.

Confession: Up until 2 summers ago, I had never laid a hand on a lawn mower in my life! We never really owned one because we didn’t really have a yard to mow when we moved to town when I was 15.  Plus my Dad is also a fan of yard work so it was never something I ever needed to do.  I guess like father like daughter, because once we moved into our new house (two years this June already) and when we got a new mower and The Husband showed me how to use it, I strapped on the good ol’ Polar heart rate monitor and off I went and sweat up a storm to the tune of about 600 calories I do believe!  I love getting exercise that doesn’t feel like you’re on a hamster wheel. I love the fresh air and the smell of fresh cut grass.  While The Husband is very much kicking ass and taking names in the exercise and weight loss department, he’s also very happy that I’ll be taking over the lawn mowing duties this year.

Speaking of our friendly little weight loss competition, The Husband and I are neck in neck! Come his weigh in on Monday, he’s expecting a total loss to the tune of around 15 lbs lost since the beginning of our challenge! I only step on the scale ONCE per week and that is on Sunday, so we shall see where I will be then. We have both been putting in an hour’s exercise nearly every day, but at a minimum of 5 days per week on average and we’re feeling really great about it and staying within our calorie goal or under on My Fitness Pal and we couldn’t be happier with the results.  We started our little challenge after I was already down around 4 lbs so FOUR of those pounds on the sidebar there don’t count toward our challenge, but I told him I’m not worried and I plan on taking down his rookie a** with or without those 4 pounds! :-D  But between you and me, he might be tough to beat! And secretly I wouldn’t be at ALL disappointed if he won. I kind of hope he does :-)

On an unrelated (but cute) note, someone just woke up from his nap and has discovered he likes to sleep on his belly with his forehead on his hand and I have proof:

“Seriously Mom, I just woke up…gimme time to compose myself!”

“Are we done?”

“Like, do I have something on my face or something?'”