Counting Down the Days...

One of the things that keeps me going on my journey to my figure competition is knowing that there is life afterward... paticularly a baby. Sometimes I sit and get lost in the thoughts about a pregnancy, and a newborn, and all of the wonderful things that come with it. I'm so ready to get this show on the road.

We are starting to save money for the vasectomy reversal now, in hopes that we have it all together by July. But I notice that Tony keeps saying little things like "are you sure you wouldn't rather do IUI again," and "if we have the money, do you think we could pay for it and schedule it for a later time, like September or October?" It makes me wonder why he's asking these questions, and I wonder a little if he's going to take the vasectomy reversal off the table again. ::sigh::

I guess we will see as time goes on. I'm going to keep hoping though.

Hi, My Name is "Quitter"...

I don't know what it is about my personailty that makes me a quitter, but it is definitely my biggest flaw. I always get a goal in mind, and then work like a mad women to acheive it, and then, right when I'm on the precipice of finishing, I Quit. Every. Single. Time. It's like the thrill of the hunt I guess... you chase something for so long, and then when you're right there, you second guess yourself and decide maybe it's not worth it... only to backslide, and then start the chase all over again at a later time. That is me in a nutshell where my weightloss is concerned. I have gotten within 7 pounds of goal TWICE and then quit. And here I am again, standing on the edge of success and as I toe the line, I'm thinking "I don't think I want to do this any more. I'm making everyone in my life crazy, I'm going to try to get pregnant anyway, so how important is being skinny anyway?" Chrissy, the habitual quitter.

My entire life, all I could ever think about or talk about is my weight. I let it impact every single facet of my life. I go to sleep thinking about it, I dream about it, and then it's the first thing I think about when I wake up in the morning. I will talk for hours about my "goals" about my workouts and what I ate that day, but I don't really have anything else that's mine. Maybe it's subconcious? Maybe because my weight is the only thing that really belongs to me, I get scared at the end that I'm going to lose that thing that I'm always fighting for, so I stop.... I gain some back, so I can fight it back off again? I don't know what it is, but it's eating me alive. I don't know what to do about it.

Sadly, Tony is the only one I can go to about it, and I'm making him insane. He's having his own problems with work, and not sleeping, and God knows what else (God has to know, because I sure don't) but all we talk about is my next workout, or my next meal, or "did that rep count? Should I do another set?" I think I'm stressing him to death. I just wish I could find a place where I am happy to be normal. Just eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner without having to analyze everything. But I have never been normal and I don't even know where to start. I have always felt like I NEEDED to do or be something amazing, but I'm not. I keep trying to be better, to be great to make up for all of the things that I never did in my life. But all I really want is to be normal, and to be okay with that. I want to be the best mother I can be, the best wife I can be, and then I make these HUGE goals that are too big for me and they consume me. I feel like I talk such a big game that I have given everyone some expectation of me to get to these goals, to be what I said I would be. So, then I isolate myself, so no one can see what a failure I was... am. I quit. It's what I do, and then I push everyone away so no one will know that I quit. But then it wears on me, so I start again. But it's never normalcy. I never have a day that is just a day.

I just want a day.

Juggling Funds...

Right now, there's a possiblilty that we could have the money in place to get pregnant much sooner than we thought... like next month. That's way earlier than I anticipated originally and I'm excited about it. There's a way that we could have the money in hand right now, but it's financially risky, so we're going to wait.

It's really beginning to look like we're going to do the vasectomy reversal (per my friend's reccomendation of a good doctor :) and I'm excited about the whole "trying" aspect of it again. If you go through IUI like we did to conceive our last child, it works, or it doesn't. It's not much fun, and if you're not made of money, then there are only so many times that you can try and fail. So, the thought of being able to have the reversal and have an unlimited amount of times to try takes some of the pressure off. Besides... doing it the old fashioned way is way more fun ;)

I am going to go ahead and talk to my OBGYN about getting my cycles on track to make conception a little more likely, since I don't ovulate regularly. Also, as soon as the reversal is done, I'm going to cut back my diet and exercise regime to allow for my cycles to normalize a little also. Right now, my diet is too strict, and my workouts are too intense to support fertility... so that needs to change. Though, I do plan on sticking to a moderate exercise routine, and a sensible diet while I'm pregnant (sensible as in, not eating fast food every day lol... because let's face it, when you're craving something really bad, how sensible can you be?) I want to remain healthy throughout my pregnancy and after. Last time, I lost weight too quickly after the baby was born, and my milk supply suffered for it. I am going to take better care to keep that from happening this time around.

Lastly, we changed the baby girl's name... Tony wasn't crazy about Addison, so we may swap it out for Abigail Brynna. We don't plan on finding out the sex this time around, so we're going to pick 2 boy names and 2 girl names and see which name fits our newest addition when the time comes.

I hope everything manages to come together. I'm ready.

In a Perfect World....

In a perfect world, Tony would be able to get an amazing job that allows him to be home a lot, he would get a vasectomy reversal, and we would live out the rest of our lives just having as many babies as the good Lord blessed us with...

Strike that...

I said perfect world...

Let's forget the job and win the lottery.

Baby Names...

We are all over the place with baby names. We will think of one we like, then forget it, and pick a totally different one all the while thinking... "what was that one name we said?" So, in an effort to not forget the ones we're sifting through at the moment, I'm going to jot them down here so I can revisit them later.

Originally it was easy...
Ashley Ronan (boy)
Anabel Marie-Kathryn (girl)

... but lets face it. I really really hate the name Ashley for a boy, and the girl name I keep going back to, thinking it's too long. So we're coming up with some other options.

Boy names of the week...
Asher and Archer... middle names run the gamut though from Christopher, to Scott, to Gabriel, etc... But Asher Scott is by far the front runner at the moment.

Girls names for the week...

Addison Brynna and Anabel Charlotte. (I honestly hope I have twin girls so I can use both of these names lol)

So that's my baby thoughts of the day. I just want to get pregnant... like right now. There are tons of reasons, one of which being this darn body challenge. I think it may kill me. The dieting is going to drive me mad. I have dreams about food, and even in my dreams I'm having to turn down cookies and pizza. I swear I'm about to snap and clean out the nearest pizza buffet. It's seriously messing with my head. I can't quit now though. I hope that the results continue to be such that I can keep going without leaving my husband for an Italian chef with a thing for fat chicks.

It's much harder than I imagined it would be, and I knew going in that it was going to be hard. I keep seeing this finish line though. That's good when it comes to making a push to the end, but it's bad in the respect that I'm looking at this as a temporary thing and not a life long change. I am going to have to figure it out though because I'm going on with it one way or another. At least if I got pregnant, no one would blame me for gaining a little weight lol.

In the meantime, I'm off to the gym... again. Maybe I will be able to stop thinking of food for the hour and a half that I am there. 6.5 weeks left until the challenge is over and I learn how to maintain the physique I'm building right now.

Waiting, Waiting, Waiting...

Always waiting for something. So, I've decided since a pregnancy is still a possibility, I'm going to go ahead and start tracking my cycles and see how they're working out. It's been a long time since I've even given my cycles a thought, and I'm pretty sure this is only the third one I've had post partum (the fact that I'm not sure lends itself to the reality that I'm going to have to start tracking them). So, overnight Monday into Tuesday I started my new cycle. Not sure if I should call that February 14th or 15th, so I'm going to keep both dates on the books for now and see what next month brings.

In the meantime, I'm still moving ahead with the body challenge. I'm really starting to love the changes I'm seeing, and while staying away from my favorite foods is a chore (to say the least) it gets more and more worth it each passing day. Yes people, that's right, I'm getting hott! (yes the second "T" was necessary). Don't get me wrong, I'm not vain, not in the least, but I have put so much hard work into this so far that not to recognize the amazing things that my body is doing would be doing it a terrible injustice. In 6 weeks (nearly, tomorrow is Day 1 of week 6, so really it's been 5 complete weeks) I have changed a lot of things about my body, I'm thinner, I'm stronger, and I'm an all around healthier person. It feels nice to be able to pull something out of my closet and not have to do the "does this make me look fat from this angle?" dance in the mirror.

It's been a long time since I've been comfortable with my body, and it's a feeling I've long forgotten. Let me say this, it feels amazing. I think that I may just wear a bikini this summer... stetch marks and all... I'm only 25 after all. I won't be able to do that without raising eyebrows for much longer lol. I may pick a "grown up" costume for Halloween this year (assuming I'm not pregnant of course) and flaunt my hard work. You have to understand that my body has never been mine. I have been a parent for most of my life. I was a mom before I was old enough to wear a bikini... so I've never felt comfortable in one. To be in a place where I am embracing my body is a huge step for me. I'm starting to feel beautiful, something I've never felt before. I'm waiting for the day when I can look in the mirror and smile because the woman staring back at me is a peace with herself... not poking love handles and jiggling her belly around. I'm proud of the work that I have done/ am doing, and every day I get closer to being proud of my body in general.

Working it Out...

Things around here have been better than ever... save for a little tiff Tony and I had yesterday. The house has been immaculate, the kids have been awesome (with the exception of a few Aidan outbursts) and my body challenge has been going better than I expected that it would (and in a short amount of time). So, all in all no complaints.

I stopped blogging on here for a while for a lot of reasons...

1. I didn't have access to the Internet, other than my phone and honestly, who wants to try and write whole blogs from their phone?

2. I've been super busy being SuperMom, so that leaves little leisure time for things like this.

3. I have been working on my fitness like crazy, and 6am comes very early, so all of my "alone time" I used to take after the kids went to bed, I now spend sleeping lol.

4. There hasn't really been much baby stuff to speak of. Well, until now...


I started the bodybuilding.com body transformation challenge on January 17th... that was exactly one month ago. I only did it because I thought it would occupy my mind where babies were concerned and it did... for the most part. Lately though, it started coming back up and I was tired of it personally. The baby talk has been a total rollercoaster for me and as much as I thought about it, I generally kept it to myself. It would come up occasionally, sure, but for the most part it would pop into my head and I would push it right back out and refocus. However, on a long drive to a cheerleading competition, the only thing Tony and I could really do was talk and the baby subject was brought up again.

In case you missed it, the last time we discussed babies, it was adoption... period. We are set to take foster parent classes in April and then we were going to move forward when a baby came available who was more than likely not going to be placed back with his or her birth parents.

I'm not going to lie, I know that Tony has always been a little put off by adoption, not because he doesn't want to have an adopted child (he would scoop up half the kids in the world if he could) his problem lies more with the involvement of the birth parents... which I get. So, I always knew that adoption was more "my thing" and like just about anything else, if I want something he's going to try to go out of his way to give it to me. That's not news to me. I know that he loves me more than just about anything, and he just wants me to be happy. But he forgets that I want the same things for him. So I told him on our very long drive that I had made "the decision" and that decision was... he was going to have to make the decision. I said that I was going to totally drop the baby subject and when he was ready to talk about it in terms of reality that I would be there.

I think that the pregnancy conversations started less than a week later, lol.

So in 7 1/2 weeks, when my body challenge is over, we're going to figure everything out. No point in dwelling on it until then. Can't say what's going to happen... but it's nice to come back on here and vent about it again.