Seven weeks out from my daughter’s birth, I seemed to have hit a bit of a rut. While I am still feeling great, my sweets intake has increased due to recent celebrations and my motivation to exercise seems to be dwindling a little bit too. My diet started veered off course when I put together a party for my daughter’s baptism. I made the famous red velvet cupcakes. They were both tasty and calorie heavy especially with the cream cheese frosting. After that I made my thanksgiving pumpkin pie and pumpkin bread, using the sweet pumpkins I had processed and … Continue reading →

On the day of my daughter’s birth, the six week visit seemed rather far away. Yet, here we are six weeks later and we, mommy and baby, are going for the last visit with our midwife. We have been looking forward to seeing our midwife again and after such a successful pregnancy and birth experience we are excited to bring our amazing pre and post natal journey to a close. We arrived early and parked on the street in front of the midwife’s house (like we had done numerous times before). This time our wonderful midwife greeted us from her … Continue reading →

Burning calories is some what intangible. I really have no idea how many calories I am burning each day by breast feeding my daughter. I would like to give credit to a healthier diet and a commitment to long term exercise for my seemingly quicker come back from having my daughter. Having these habits in the beginning really do make a difference. At almost five weeks post-partum I have not actively worked at loosing the excess weight for very long. My efforts have just begun and I am determined to get closer to my pre-pre pregnancy weight (what I weighted … Continue reading →

I won the competition which was both exciting and sad. I was ecstatic that I won, I put in lots of hard work, but there were lots of other teachers who had more weight to lose and they could have easily beat me and should have. Either way the “biggest loser” competition was the motivation I needed to jump start my weight loss and get me in the habit of regular exercise. I did not stop exercising after the competition … I still had about ten more pounds to lose to get back to my pre-pregnancy weight. Instead, I continued … Continue reading →

Losing the baby weight can be and often is a rather difficult challenge. With my first pregnancy, I did not have the long established habit of regular exercise; I was well within the normal and healthy body mass index but I had very little muscle tone; I was not in shape. I began exercising with my first pregnancy (talk about a real motivating reason to exercise). Even though I exercised regularly throughout my first pregnancy, my workouts were really tame. The biggest challenge came after my son was born. I had gained about twenty pounds more than I had wanted … Continue reading →

While I was downstairs making things ready for Christmas morning (Christmas presents under the tree and stockings filled and re-hung), my husband (who was supposed to be helping me get things ready) fell asleep while trying to get our son to fall asleep. The last present to bring up was a child size table and chair (the table needed to be assembled), with my fairly new post-partum body, I was not even going to attempt to carry the large cumbersome box containing the table up the stairs to the living room. Luckily, my husband awoke from his hour nap just … Continue reading →