Operation Awesomepants: Look Who's Balking!

Before we begin, why don't you look at my sweet Halloween punkins?

They are luminous, no?

And now on to the less luminous of our October doings.  Dudes, I have been crazy off the resolution wagon this month.  CRAZY off the resolution wagon, I tell you, and in a remarkably predictable way.  I start all big projects just like this:

Step 1:  Huge declaration of intent.

Step 2:  Phenomenal dedication to goal.

Step 3:  Minor initial success! 

Step 4:  Arbitrary rebellion against stated intents, sought-after goals, and achieved successes (Also known as the "SCREW YOU, I DON'T HAVE TO!" stage).

Step 5:  Self-loathing hidden beneath self-deprecation, shame spiral, quitting, insane consumption of impossible amounts of sugary deliciousness.

And friends, OA reached Step 4 on October 9th, when I first began to avoid filling out my resolution chart in the evenings.  I also stopped keeping my one-sentence journal in real time and resorted to retroactively batching entries, which led to a date screw up, a mystery day I don't remember at all, and an irreparable rift in the space-time continuum.  Sorry about that, science!  

So, shithowdyduckfuckinggoddamn, it's time to saddle back up before I slide into Step 5 and start to smell constantly and strongly of fun-sized Snickers, Nutella, and humiliation.  So here's now that's going to work.

*Edit those resolutions down.

There are too many of them for me to keep them forefront in my mind without constantly checking a list, and so some of them have got to be enfolded into others or let go of entirely.

The new list of resolutions for months 1 (Energy) and 2 (Health) now consists of

1.  Use energy honestly.

2.  Exercise better.

3.  Plug leaks.

4.  Make the right effort.

5.  Plan meals and snacks.

6.  Weigh in.

*Take some time to make these habits regular.

It was ridiculously optimistic to think that jumping into a huge project like this and following new resolutions and goals every day would come easily and enthusiastically.  Then, when it inevitably became work, I stomped my bratty little foot, screamed "Don't wanna!" and sulked in a pile of Halloween candy in the corner.  Now that I know how hard these life changes are, I know that I need more time to settle into them before adding new resolutions to old.  So, this month, I'm paring things down a bit and reinforcing previous goals by making November's overarching theme and single resolution be Pay Attention.  

SLB works in a field where he's required to keep track of his time at work so that he knows to which clients he should bill his working hours and minutes.  He complains sometimes of the burden of remaining conscious of his time when he'd rather lose himself in his work, but I think it sounds like a fantastic tool for keeping worthless distractions at bay.  Continually asking "O.K., what am I doing right now, and is it what I should be prioritizing at this time?" would be irritating if you were sure to be efficiently focused on relevant tasks at all times, like my husband ALWAYS is (Have I mentioned that he's part German and part Mormon?  Now imagine the discipline and ambition of both of these cultures funneled toward good instead of National Socialism and/or Manifest Destiny, and you've got SLB.  The man GETS. SHIT. DONE.).  But, friends, I am a flibbertigibbet, and flibbertigibbets really benefit from asking "O.K., what am I doing right now?" because so often the answer is "Stalking people I don't care about on Facebook while watching bitches hoard cheap barbecue sauce on Extreme Couponing," which, I think we can all agree, is just no way to live.

So, I am going to make November my time to pay attention and remain conscious of my goals while I go through my days.  To do this right, I'm going to literally make myself uncomfortable (I almost said "take myself out of my comfort zone," but then remembered that I'd have to smack myself bloody for using such stupid and vapid cliche'd language on this esteemed platform if I did) by doing something I usually don't do: wear jewelry.  I've read in various motivation and time- and task-management books and blogs about wearing a bracelet or other piece of conspicuous jewelry to remind one of one's goals.  So, I've got a nice silver bracelet that sits closely enough to my wrist not to be a physical burden while still feeling foreign enough to keep me from getting too distracted from the day's stated goals.  

Yes, November is going to be like a do-over for September and October.  But a do-over is better than a never-done, and so I'm starting over by re-starting differently.  Besides, I've had some successes (5 lbs lost, no headaches AT ALL in October, spending better time with Livy, working out harder on higher resistance levels at the gym, reading record numbers of books, etc.), and I don't want to disrespect the effort it's taken to earn them by backsliding into old, bad habits any more than I already have.

Achtung, babies.  Let's get this done.

OA Month 2: Health

Hi, there, peeps!  We're now into month 2 of Operation Awesomepants, and I haven't yet stated or begun to track October's resolutions.  Oops!  Let's get started now and call it even, shall we?

This month's goals all relate to health - amplifying it, maintaining it, and enjoying it.  This was always going to be one of the 12 months of Operation Awesomepants, but it was launched to ASAP status after a series of tension headaches last month left me hobbled for days.  Good health is one of those things you don't really appreciate until it's compromised, and I discovered that immediately and painfully last month.  So, in the service of happiness, awesomeness, and the ability to move my head without wanting to vomit from the pain, October became Healthtober.

Part of the reason I was shirking the introduction of this month's goals is because some of them relate to losing weight, a practice that I have both personal and philosophical problems with.  Personally, losing weight and counting calories triggers the living shit out of my OCD and makes it hard for me to think about anything else besides numbers in (calories), numbers out (exercise), and numbers on the scale.  Philosophically, I question our culture's preoccupation with body size as a measure of overall health and am loath to participate in it.  But, frankly, it's time to try to remove some of this burden from my bones.  I'm slightly built, weigh more than is comfortable to carry around, and have a huge rack, all of which I think are contributing to my headaches, which reliably start in my upper back, then move up my neck and lodge firmly behind my eyeballs.  So, structurally, losing weight can possibly help improve my health and, therefore, my life.  I don't like it, but I'm going to do it and see whether I can heal myself.

In addition to the discrete goal of seeking medical help for my headaches, this month's resolutions are as follows:

1.  Keep a food journal.

I'm already doing this with The Morah via a shared Google document.  So far, so good.  If it's too embarrassing or too much hassle to write something down, then I shouldn't ingest it.  Plus, I do a lot of unconscious eating during the day (bites of Livy's snacks, eating dinner with her at 4:30 and then eating more later when SLB comes home).  The food log is useful not so much for calorie counting, which makes me crazy anyway, but rather in just keeping me conscious of what I'm stuffing in my face.  Business schools like to remind us that we can't manage what we don't measure, and, even if these aren't strict measurements, they're helping me manage my food intake already.

2.  Plan meals and snacks in advance.

If the carrots are peeled and cut the day before, I will eat them.  If I have to peel and cut them a la minute, I will eat a handful of cheddar bunnies.  A few minutes an evening will save lots of emergency snacking the following day.  Done and done.

3.  Exercise with Livy every day that we're together.

Our dance class has proven so enjoyable, that I think it's time to introduce a little purposeful activity into our everyday life together.  I usually exercise at the gym when she's in childcare, or when she's upstairs napping.  It's time to initiate her into the world of intentional movement.  While I'm not going to necessarily tell her to drop and give me 20, we can do yoga videos together, have dance parties, and go for longer and more challenging walks.  Even if she just watches me lift weights or flail about on the floor doing core work, she's learning something about how to take care of her body later in her life.  Hopefully she will be more graceful and attractive about it than I am, but either way it'll be a good experience to share with her.

4.  Daily weigh-in and documentation in my day planner.

I've been doing this already, and it keeps me aware of the goal of seeing that number go down without making me too crazy.

So, in the name of good health, happiness, and awesomepants, Salud!

Operation Awesomepants: Month 1 Results & Reflections

Hi, y'all!

Today is September 30th, which makes tomorrow October 1st, which means that the first month of Operation Awesomepants, whose theme was energy, is coming to a close.  So, did I keep my resolutions?  Did keeping them dramatically improve my life and make me a happier non-camper?  It was a mixed bag with a positive result, like when your Starburst packet contains a disproportionate number of orange ones, but then you decide that you actually really like orange ones.  Yeah.  Just like that.

Wait?  What the what is this?  Do you think it rumbles with Sunny D?  Does orange juice look down on it with disdain?  Fascinating.  Let's table this discussion and get back to business, shall we?

1.  Go to sleep earlier.  

I opted to ignore this resolution so many times that the first row in my OA log looks like it's been hit with some 90's-era crop circles.  I managed to go to sleep earlier exactly 6 nights out of the last 29, and will likely stay up tonight, too.  That's a whopping 20% completion rate, friends, not something I'm proud of.  The siren song of just a few more minutes of reading in bed, or watching TV with SLB, or surfing the stupid web in an obsessive quest for Halloween decorations was just too strong to resist.  Still, I'll persist (Did I mention that I'm an amateur rapper?) into next month and the rest of the year.  The strange thing is that, even though I didn't get more sleep than previous months, especially with big transitions in Livy's life that kept her up some nights, I seemed to have more energy during the days.  My self-exhortation to "make the effort" rang through my days loudly and really did give me the verve that I expected more sleep to impart.  But more on that later.  And, hopefully, more early nights next month.

2.  Use energy honestly.

All right, this one is a 27/29, clearly a success, but, again, unexpectedly so.  I had anticipated that this resolution would prompt more rest in my days - more naps when I'd been up the previous night with Livy, more quiet reading time - but the exact opposite was true.  I know that I have a tendency to try to quell the ants that seem to permanently reside in my pants, sometimes to the extent that I'll force myself into quiet activities simply because I think I should save energy or maintain a calm home during Livy's rest times, a habit left over from our previous house that was half the size of the new house.  So, when I examined my energy level during the past month, I found more often that I really wanted to be doing more activity, not less.  That meant less reading, napping, and screen time, and more cleaning, weeding, exercising, puttering and cooking, all of which are good things.  This is also reflected in a surprise weight loss of 3 pounds for the month, too, which is also a great unexpected blessing.  Who knew I had it in me?

3.  Exercise Better.

This one was a toughie to maintain because I'm generally leery of new physical activity, but I managed an 18/30, or 60% of my workouts consisting of more than just pounding away at an elliptical trainer.  I've also been brave about attending an evening yoga class at the gym with great results.  I'm already improving in my flexibility and strength and can do poses now that I couldn't do when I was at my peak fitness before Livy.  Liv and I have also been attending a mommy-toddler dance class, and I'm counting that as flexibility training because of all the stretches we do.  One thing I still need to confront is my reluctance to lift weights at the gym.  It smells like raw ass in the weight room, like post-Katrina flooding and old sweat mingled together, and I hate to take up valuable cardio time when at the gym is my only opportunity to really work up a sweat (Livy hates it when I run with the stroller).  But, I recognize that this is a next step in exercising better and will find a solution.

4.  Plug Leaks

22/30, or 73%.  Leak-plugging has been easy this month, mainly because we have so many to plug.  We may have moved in in March, but we've also been so busy and complacent that we never really settled in and began nesting in the new house.  There was a lot of low-hanging fruit to pick, and we picked a bushel in the last month.  And I say "we," uncharacteristically, not in the royal sense.  Once we sat down and took a room-by-room inventory of changes we want to make and things we want to do in the house, SLB got on board with feverish activity.  Livy has even begun cleaning up her toys at the end of the day - a couple of times without my having to ask.  The leak-plugging has also spread to car maintenance, self-care, parenting (Oh, hi big girl bed and potty training!) and all manner of nagging "undones" on my to-do list.  This forward motion feels great, and the sense that we're tackling these projects as a team is even better.

5.  Make the Effort.

This one is tricky.  I've got a perfect 100% here, no zeroes in any square in that row.  I should celebrate, but I feel like I sometimes make the wrong effort.  I may work and hustle all day long doing things, but often at the end of the day I feel like I've accomplished nothing of importance.  Sure, I may have cleaned the kitchen, but did I do any writing that day?  Yes, I may have run around hauling Livy from errand to errand, but did we have any meaningful floor time together?  I know this is normal for a lot of people, particularly stay-at-home parents, but I'd like to focus on not just making any old effort, but on making the RIGHT effort.  So please consider this resolution duly changed to Make the Right Effort.  The days during which I did make the right effort, particularly when doing art projects with Livy or taking her to a play at the Seattle Children's Theater (she talks about painting on her feet to make footprint art and "Hawold and da Puhple Cwayon" ALL. THE. TIME.) I consider my most successful of the month.  That kind of effort is where good memories come from, and that's the kind of work I want to do under this resolution.  So, a result, a reflection, and a revision.  That's parallelism at its best as I launch tomorrow into Month 2.

Movin' On Up

Once upon a time there was an expectant mother who looked like this:

Rock out with your bellybutton out.

And an expectant father who, seeing his wife's increasingly gargantuan belly, decided that the time was ripe to assemble a crib for his growing baby girl.  That process looked a lot like this:

He's just pretending to hammer.  Our crew of crib-building elves is just out of frame.

And this crib worked for a long, long time.  Like when that baby looked like this:

Yes, I know I was supposed to take the bib off before her nap.  I can't go back in time, so don't nag.

or like this:

Cat always was, cat always is, and cat always will be Livy's snuggly little nighttime pal.

But now that that baby has started looking more like this, it was time to think about transitioning the crib into a toddler bed.

She never climbed out, but she could have.  It just never occurred to her to do it when yelling for us to get her out was so much more efficient.

And so now she sleeps in a Big Girl Bed that looks exactly like this:

Why is it that pretending to go to bed is always more fun than actually going to bed?  Why would you play at something you apparently don't like much anyway?

The transition to a Big Girl Bed wasn't as hard as I thought it would be, but I can't say it was easy given how much sleep we've lost in the last week or so now that the crib is gone.  Livy stays in it well enough, but she has a hard time getting herself back to sleep when she wakes up in the night in her new bed.  This means, of course, that we have to help her settle down and then settle down ourselves, often to just have to get up again and calm her down again.  She loves playing in it, though, and just hanging out in her bed with her toys and books keeps her occupied for whole dozens of minutes.  That alone makes the switch worth it.

We celebrated her first day with her Big Girl Bed with another first: Mama's first attempt at making a Mickey Mouse pancake.  While I would never post a photo of what it wound up looking like, it started off looking like this:

A little misshapen, but delicious nonetheless.

And, in the spirit of "out with the old and in with the new," SLB finally replaced his old collegiate printer with one from this millennium.  The old one, an Okidata (???), looked like this:

It printed at maximum 3 pages before it would jam, and sometimes it had to be hand-fed paper.  My blood pressure is spiking just thinking about it.

We also finally man-,woman-,and childed-up and said goodbye to Livy's cardboard clubhouse, which we've had in our "formal" (HA!) living room since we bought our new range back in April.  She misses it, but it was starting to stink and collapse.  So getting rid of it was good practice for when she shoves us off onto an ice floe when we start to stink and collapse too much, too.  You know, like in the next year.  That fetid, structurally unsound hideaway looked like this:

Yes, we remembered to take the toys and daughter out before hauling it to the dump.

So, as we're upgrading and improving around these parts (this leak-plugging has become a real family affair), I'm just grateful that there's one old thing we aren't tossing out yet.  And that looks like this:

Because, DANG, I don't want to find a real job.

OA, Month 1: Resolutions

Hiya!  I'm currently sitting in the dead silent lounge of a local Honda dealer getting our car serviced.  It's dark and dismal here, and I've already disrupted my fellow patrons' desperate attempts to escape this purgatory via the internet, books, or knitting by 1) sneezing loudly, and 2) making some loud, weird, involuntary throat noise when I was recovering from the sneeze.  Oh, yeah.  I'm THAT lady - the weird one in the corner who makes strangely wet bodily noises to the discomfiture of all within earshot.  I'm tempted to start laughing loudly at random intervals or grunting and talking to my computer screen in a low, guttural voice just to keep in character. I've got 4 hours to kill here, so it may actually come to that.  I'm just planning ahead.

Anyhow, I promised explanations of this month's resolutions, and I always keep my promises [to you].  So here you go.

1.  Go to sleep earlier.
If you need explanation of this resolution, then you really are deserving of the pap I churn out on these here interwebs.  I have a great habit of starting to go to bed at a reasonable time, and then I either find piddly little tasks to complete before actually sleeping (Last night's task = joining my undergrad alumni society.  I got a 0 for yesterday's first resolution), and/or I stay up late reading in bed.  Then I wake up to the sound of my gleeful daughter's pounding footsteps and whisper-shouted "MAMA'S STILL SWEEPING!  MAMA'S TI-YUHD!" and curse myself for not just having gone to bed at a reasonable hour.  It makes me grumpy, slow, and resentful in the morning, and this is no way to begin any day.  So, early to bed because, thanks to a certain little blonde beast, I'm guaranteed to be early to rise.

2.  Use energy honestly.
This is both a tough one and an easy one to explain.  In short, if I need rest, then I should rest.  If I need to move and get things done, then I should move and get things done.  Perhaps it's a manifestation of my desperate need to control everything, but I have a tendency to try to force my body to do things it's blatantly telling me it doesn't need to do - like stay up late reading when I'm tired or avoid exercise even when I have ants in my pants and need to get the wiggles out.  So, I'm going to try to stop doing that.  If I need to have some downtime and that's available, then I'm going to take it.  If I need to be a woman of action, even during Liv's nap time or after her bed time (usually times of forced solitude on the whole house - a habit leftover from our old, teeny house), then I'm going to do something physical.  It makes so much sense that it's embarrassing to have to articulate a resolution to do this, but there it is.  Fight crazy with reason, I always say.

3.  Exercise Better.
I am a total champ of doing the same old damn thing at the gym 3-5 days a week (elliptical for 45 - 60 min at various resistances and speeds).  This works out great for improving sleep and mood, but it's not developing my strength or flexibility, something that this week's 4-day-long tension headache illustrated dramatically.  So I'm going to go to the Thursday night yoga class at the gym and incorporate strength training into my usual routine.  I'm also going to add "pockets" of exercise during the day.  There's no reason I can't do 15 - 20 minutes of strength, flexibility, and balance training into the day when Livy's napping, playing, or watching her stories.  Shoot, that biscuit loves it when I do yoga while she's playing and can already do adorable renditions of downward dog and plank, so why not put in a yoga video to do with her?  Win-win!  Bendy mama, bendy baby!  (Somewhat related thought:  Is there a Gumby yoga DVD?  If not, then there should be.  Get on that, would you?)

These are my people.

4.  Plug leaks.
No, not my own personal leaks, you perv, but rather energy leaks in my environment and circumstances.  Christine Kane calls all of the little, distracting, undone things in your life and environment "leaks", and that imagery has stuck with me over the years.  Her Uplevel Your Life program that I completed this year includes a full-on Leak List that I, uh, well, I thought about completing.  So, I'm going to finish that list this month, and since we've moved into a new house it's going to be loooooooooong.  But plugging those leaks, one at a time, will keep my energy focused rather than dispersed among dozens of tiny distractions.  It puts me in mind of a small pile of collected recipes I had meant to put into plastic sleeves and into a binder for about 2 years.  When I finally stopped thinking about it every day and putting it on my to-do list over and over and over again, it took about 15 minutes total to complete.  The amount of time I spent worrying and thinking about this task so far outstripped the actual amount of time it took to just do the damn thing that it's sadly comical.  What a waste of time and energy!  Had I just plugged the leak immediately I could have used all of that time for useful things like napping or Googling my own name.  Plug the leaks, save the time, live the life.  It'd make a great plumbing slogan in addition to a great life plan.

5.  Make the effort.
I'm a great one for making excellent plans in my head and then never executing them because one of my common and commonly false heuristics is that "I don't have time for that," whatever "that" is.  So I resolve this month to invest energy into making the effort to execute my excellent plans.  I did this last week with a bag of fresh blueberries from a friend's garden.  In the time it took Livy to watch her usual morning episode of "Yo Gabba Gabba" I was able to whip up fresh blueberry muffins for breakfast instead of poring over Facebook and then pouring cereal.  Totally worth the effort.  Next, I'm putting this huge new house to good use by hosting 2 Halloween parties for 2 different parents/kids' groups this October.  Again, seeing our old friends and their 2-year-olds in costumes will be completely worth the effort.  If the first four resolutions are about gaining, nurturing, and amplifying my energy, then the fifth is about spending it generously and wisely.

If you're wondering, yesterday's resolutions were a mixed bag.  I was getting over that damned headache, so I had to fudge on the exercise (headache + movement = nausea), and I wound up staying up late as the headache waned in the evening and I was finally able to get some things done.  But the others were all successes!  I rested when my body told me to, finally joined the alumni association so I could have library privileges (NERD!  Also, it's in service of another writing project I'm launching.), and made a healthy dinner even though every fiber of my being was calling out for the speedy delivery of a Hawaiian pizza.  Not bad for a beginning.  And now onward!

Operation Awesomepants: Inception

It's September!  Hurrah!  AYOOOOGAH!

Prior to Livy's birth, for me this time of year meant optimistic planning and detailed forethought of how I was going to improve the minds and lives of occasionally deserving young people.  Since I left my job for an extended maternity leave and subsequently was laid off, back-to-school time has been difficult around these parts.  I miss teaching less bitterly now that I've made my peace with staying home and the climate for teachers has become increasingly desperate and hostile, and I know that I'm lucky to be able to stay home with our daughter and still live a comfortable and fulfilling life.  I do intend to jump back into the classroom when Olivia's older (shoot, I still write curriculum for fun), but for now September has to mean something else.  And so I've taken my teacherly planning skills and pointed them in the direction of improving the mind and life of one occasionally deserving decreasingly-young person.

Oh, yeah.  It's ME, bitches.

Either you saw it coming, or you should have.

This summer, in addition to gobbling up dystopian young adult literature and horny vampire novels like they were Raisinets, I read Gretchen Rubin's The Happiness Project twice.  I'd followed her blog of the same name for a while when I was pregnant and teaching and then forgot all about it when I was a harried parent of a newborn.  I rediscovered the blog last year as the book shot to the top of the New York Times bestseller list.  The blog was born of the book's subject - a year of Rubin's life during which she exhaustively researched theories and practices of happiness and applied them to her own life.  The book is right up my alley: an intelligent and well-researched self-help book minus the New Age business that I'm simultaneously attracted to and repelled by (It's complicated, and it drives SLB nuts.  Go on!  Ask him about the secret caches of tarot cards and woo-woo books he pretends not to find among our intellectually prestigious artifacts!).  The Happiness Project is a smart book about personal development that's filled with hard analytical, rather than dreamily spiritual, wisdom.  It was a great read both times.

In emulation of this book and blog, and in recognition of my autumnal urge to embark on a new project, I give you my own project.  Gretchen Rubin, an accomplished woman with dignity to spare (she clerked for Sandra Day O'Connor, for goodness sake), calls hers The Happiness Project.  I, an accomplished woman with no dignity left to lose nor much inclination to develop much, call mine

OPERATION AWESOMEPANTS

That's right.  Go on, bask in it.  It's glorious, no?  The name alone is miraculous.  People talk about putting their big girl or big boy pants to do hard work.  But why would you limit yourself to size and gender when you could just put on your awesomepants?  Am I right?  Of course.  Of course I am.

Rubin broke her happiness project down into monthly themes with corresponding resolutions, and she measured her daily successes of such resolutions (Ben Franklin style!) on a chart.  If it's good enough for her, it's probably way too good for me.  Because old habits die hard and I love buying new school supplies, I created teacher-infused version of her computerized chart.

That's Lee Canter's Record Book Plus.  Plus what, you ask?  Plus MeShow!

Now plus detail shot!

Stop squinting or you'll get crows' feet.  I'll tell you what this says in a minute.  This month's theme is energy, again a copy of Rubin's first month's theme, but a smart one.  Undertaking a project of this size requires stamina, and stamina is born of energy.  So it makes sense to harness and amplify the fuel of the project as the project's first step. 

This month's resolutions, intended to boost, save, and make the best use of energy are:

1.  Go to sleep earlier.

2.  Use energy honestly.

3.  Exercise better.

4.  Plug leaks.

5.  Make the effort.

Cryptic, no?  I'll have more to write about this tomorrow, and I promise to explain the details and context of each resolution.  Until then I hope you'll make the effort to come up with enough jokes about my plugging leaks to choke a horse.  Because, you know, I freaking HATE horses.

Oh, calm yourself.  It was a joke, you stupidly literal horse.