Week 34: Day 3 ~ I'm so thankful!

I was just thinking this morning that I am so thankful for my life. There are so many things that I think "ideally" I should be, or should be doing, but in reality it seems like so often it is my nature to look ahead in life and not enjoy the moment I'm in. I think that's all of our nature for the most part. I'm always thinking about how I need to work harder so that I don't gain too much weight but yet, I don't appreciate the fact that I haven't gained 40lbs by now and that I honestly am happy with how I look. I'm so happy with the way the pregnancy has gone and that I feel good in my clothes.

I think about how I need to do this or that job today and am always behind on my housework - yet I don't appreciate the fact that my house actually IS not that messy and it is a very pleasant place to be most of the time! It's got a few things I need to tidy up, and yes the bathrooms are needing a good cleaning but overall, I love my home the way it is RIGHT NOW. In this moment.

I'm thankful for choices and that I can choose RIGHT NOW to eat avocaco chocolate raw pudding instead of the animal cookies w/chocolate that I was tempted to eat this morning. =) I'm thankful for the choices I can make right now instead of thinking about later today, or tomorrow, or whatever.

I found this really neat website called The Prudent Wife - I love being encouraged in the ways of the Proverbs 31 woman. It is so inspiring for me to read about other wives who are really putting their hands to the plow and DOING their work with joy and gladness in their heart. Because I am SO lazy by nature and SUCH a procrastinator, yet I am so happy when I put those tendencies on the cross and don't give in.

Lately it's been easy for me to just do the maintainance jobs around the house - you know how it is, the main living area looks great including the kitchen, yet if you took a peek into the bedrooms......oh, my. And the laundry is discretely placed around the house so as to not look messy, yet there are many baskets to be folded as well as almost overflowing dirty hampers. So the past two days I have done alot of work around the house - things that are sort of behind the scenes but really need to be done.

I've been going through all the children's clothes and switching out the winter things for the summer - each one is going to have 2 long pairs of pants and 3 long sleeve shirts. We have a wonderful retreat center for our church that is in the country and at night it tends to get pretty cold, and also trips to the beach require warmer clothes. But it felt really good to organize the bins in my garage and now they look so nice, all stacked and neatly labeled. I never realized what an enormous task it is to keep up with clothes for these guys!! No wonder there's always so much laundry to do, lol! I feel very lucky to have two sets of same-sex children ... in other words, two boys close together and two girls close together. They're able to wear each other's clothes the next year which is a huge blessing.

Yesterday I also cleaned the boys room thoroughly including vacuuming and organizing their closet & clothes - they were soooo excited and spent almost all day in there playing with their new legos. (I found a HUGE tub full of very cool sets at a garage sale on Saturday for $5!) It was so cute, my DS 6 went with me to a few garage sales and found these brown & orange 70's colored stacking organizers - 4 of them, almost as tall as he is. He had $5 to spend and happily paid $1 for all of them - and promptly organized all his transformers and stuffed animals in them. I was quite dubious about this (ugly!) purchase and warned him that he really doesn't have a good place to put them where the little ones won't get into his things (he normally keeps everything treasure-worthy on his top bunk). But so far he's done really well, carefully closing his door every time he leaves. So cute!

I've decided to retire from my career of couponing for the next 4 months. It has become really stressful for me thinking about the deals I'm missing....and I would spend so much time researching the good deals, cutting coupons, and then of course there's the actual shopping. While I DO seem to have enough + more energy .... it seems that God has given me that for my family and not for shopping. Whenever I incorporate multiple store shopping + lots of coupon transactions into my day, I seem to get so completely exhausted. So - while I will still keep my eye out for some killer stockup deals (free or almost free), I'm going to focus on buying things in bulk at Costco & WinCo (which, incidentally, works out GREAT because that way DH can buy them instead when I'm out of commission after the baby is born). I will be trying my hardest to plan out my weekly meals ahead of time and focusing on frugal, simple meals especially involving lots of beans & rice which our family loves.

I'm excited for this "new" sort of faze in my life - and am actually quite amazed at all the free time this gives me!! Normally I wouldn't have time for this type of really long post including pictures, but now I do + enough time to cook, clean, play with the kiddos, lay in the sun.....! Hurray!

Regarding eating raw & my weight - my tooth is about 95% better due to the medicine now, thank GOD!! I am so happy to be done with that pain. It really threw me off of my 30-day challenge including all of my "to do's" (oil pulling, skin brushing, etc) and I lapsed into eating SAD for the past couple of days. I weighed 159 this morning but that is my "SAD" weight and I expect that to go down probably 3-4lbs quite quickly if I can stay raw today & tomorrow. So that's my plan, then I'll continue on with my 30-day raw challenge.

Pre-pregnancy starting weight: 127
Weeks 8-15: 130/140
Weeks 16-20: 144/150
Weeks 21-25: 152/153
Week 26: 153
Week 27: 152
Week 28: 151
Week 29: 153
Week 30: 156
Week 31: 161 (started 30-day raw challenge)
Week 32: 156
Week 33: 154