this morning i woke up and my whole body ached from the jumproping. So, I doubled the amount of jumps tonight.

Success.....

2 days of eating at home.
100 jumps in jumprope.
small steps.....

once again I have lost all motivation.....................all i want to do is lay in bed and read or watch seinfeld.
please motivation fairy, sprinkle some dust over me tonight as I sleep.

Our guilty pleasures/addictions....What's yours?

Have you ever wanted something/someone so bad that you couldn't shake the thought from your head? Yet if the opportunity presented itself you would turn your back on it and run screaming away.

So today is my 35th birthday and here are my exciting plans for the day.
-pay bills
-jump on bed with Sela
-laundry
-packing misc boxes for moving
-packing for trip to MS - Sela and I leave Tuesday
-listening to a mix cd I made when I went to Scotland -3 or 4 years ago
-attending a celebration of life for one of M's school teachers
-buying paint for house
-renting a paint sprayer since we could not locate a painter to get the work done when we needed it.
-regretting selling our paint sprayer 2 years ago
-updating this site as well as my other one
-going to birthday dinner at dad's to celebrate me and Mark (Mark bday was May 1)
-prepping house for paint
-being thankful I am alive!!!!

Today I spent several hours at our new house stripping the contact paper from the kitchen cabinet shelves. I love doing that type of thing because I can see immediate progress and it is mindless work that allows me to become lost with my thoughts. Today I spent a lot of time thinking about taking a trip to MS. Mark and I both have been talking about it but I am always hesitant. I am hesitant because I want to go and spend time with only a few people. I don't want to go and spend most of the time trying to see all the folks that want to see me. I enjoy visiting with family and friends but I like to focus on 2 homes - my parents. My parents live about 15 minutes away from one another so I do spend a bit of time on the road going back and forth to see them. My even being on the road lets other know I am home which leads to phone calls and pleas to come see them. What I never will understand is this - I have traveled 2,000+ miles to see my family and people always want me to come to their houses - When to me, it only makes sense for them to come to me so that I can spend time with them and my family. My cousins tend to do this too....Last time I was home,my aunt had a party at her place so that all my cousins and such could be at one place at one time to visit with me.....My cousins that I am closest to didn't bother showing up. I didn't make any additional effort to see them and honestly I don't want to on my next visit. Anyway.......living so far away from family and where you grew can be so difficult at times. Especially when it is time to visit there. I am off to look at plane tickets.........

I am wavering on what I want to talk about today - friendship, moving or just general life stuff. So let's just see what comes up shall we...........For the past two days, I have met glass estimators out at our newly purchased home to get estimates on replacing all the windows in the house. Every time I am in the house I am reminded of certain things that make me claustrophobic. We are getting new windows in the house because all but 2 tiny ones that only vent are picture windows. Yep, pretty picture windows that do not open. I cannot imagine living in a house and not being able to open the windows - It makes me feel locked in. I need to be able to open the windows and let fresh air in, hear the wind blow, smell the rain, listen to nature. For 4 years I worked in a three story building that only had picture windows and I worked in a cubicle so I was always sick and unhappy. I couldn't even stand looking out the windows and seeing the beautiful Mt. Rainier because I felt trapped and seeing the beautiful mountain only compounded my feelings of claustrophobia. I left that building and job nearly 2 years ago and I still cannot deal with even driving by it without feeling ill. I allowed it to suck the life out of me and since we got home from China I have been working on finding life outside again. Walking on the Great Wall of China was one of the most amazing experiences of my life and one I will never forget. So I am making another promise to myself again today - I will get outside and enjoy life outside these walls more.

So last year today, Thursday that is, we rec'd the phone call that we had been waiting on for over a year. We got the call with the announcement that we were parents and our little one was in Jiangxi Province China waiting on us.

We were told we would get the packet on Saturday with her photos but that she had rosy cheeks, a bell shaped mouth, lots of hair and was gorgeous. I remember that day so well.....I spent most of the day outside playing with our pups and laying in the sun reading. It was a warm day and all the windows in the house were open. I monitored the DHL site in the morning to see when the package was delivered to our agency and then I watched our yahoo group for announcements from others that they had rec'd the call. Once I got the call, I joined the orphanage yahoo group and tried to learn as much as I could about where our little one was living. Luckily, she had been in foster care and only visited the orphanage for checkups and meds. We felt so relieved that she had been in foster care because it made us think she would have had lots of affection and one on one time with a family. Since Sela has been home 9 months I am confident that her foster family loved her and gave her lots of attention. She has been the sweetest, healthiest and most well-adjusted child I have ever been around or heard of within the adoption community. I have been saying for months that I was going to write her foster mother and send her some photos but have yet to get around to it. Today, I am making a promise to myself that I will do that very soon. I want her to know how much we appreciate her and let her know how Sela is. She has been a foster mother for over 10 years so I am sure she wonders about the babies she raised for the first 9-12 months of their lives only for them to leave one day to go to another country.

For 10 years I needed approval from my ex when buying household goods. Mainly I remember wanting to buy sheets, curtains, dishes, any type of home decor but needing him to approve those type of items before they were purchased. It wasn't the money, it was he never thought my taste was good enough so he had to see such items before I could purchase them. It was very frustrating for me. It made me feel inferior. It made me ashamed of my family because obviously their taste wasn't up to par with him or his family. It made me ashamed of where I came from. It made me lonely. It made me fat and continues to do so. Because I was so lonely, I turned to food for comfort. I ate fast food because how dare I cook at home and have the food not taste like he wanted it to or if it smelled up the house. It would be little comments and jabs at me about my poor attempts at cooking. I stopped trying to cook. Granted I had never been taught how to cook but it was something I wanted to learn how to do. I gave it up for fast food or pre-packaged food. Two things I grew up not eating except maybe on a Saturday night as a family at a nice restauraunt. Well actually my love for McDonalds did start when I was 16 when my parents got a divorce but other than an occasional
cheeseburger from there after school, fast food was not in my vocabulary. After years of abusing my body with fast food, I am still addicted to it. It is a battle I struggle with. It is something I have to work on. This addiction really sucks. I have to learn self-control and be smart about what I place into my body.

Ok, so I went off on a tangent there but really being fat sucks and it is something that I am obsessed with. It keeps me from visiting friends, wearing shorts/skirts and especially from swimming which is my all-time favorite activity. It keeps me from even considering getting pregnant because there is no way in hell, my frame and my arthritis ridden joints could handle pregnancy weight when I am so heavy now. Yes, I have some body issues...This journal is going to help me with them.

Back to the ex - I do not blame him at all for my issues. I am thankful for my time with him. Our relationship helped me in many positive ways and my life is so much more fulfilled now because of the mistakes he and I made in our marriage. We always knew we were not soulmates. Our time together formed who we are today and now that we are both married to our soulmates I can only recall the memories of that relationship as an education.