Sammy and Ian's Stats at 2 and 4

I took Sammy and Ian to their well-baby doctor's visits today.  They are both doing great.  Here are their stats:

Sammy (2 years old)
Height:  36 inches (94.17%)
Weight:  25 pounds 6.4 ounces (32.69%)

I know her teachers said she was tall but I didn't realize she was this tall!  According to my mom, at 2 years old, I was 35 inches and 24 pounds 2 ounces.  So she's roughly 1 inch taller and 1 pound heavier than I was at her age.  I wonder if this means she will be taller than me.  We'll see!

Ian (4 years old)
Height:  42.5 inches (87.59%)
Weight:  39 pounds, 3.2 ounces (72.79%)

I now know why I can't lift Ian easily!  He's a big boy now!  According to my mom, at 4 years old, my brother David was 40.5 inches and 34 pounds.  It's an interesting comparison and I think it's so cool that my mom kept her little book of stats.

Sammy still had the tubes in her ears, which I was extremely thankful for.  We went an entire year without an ear infection.  Ian passed his sight and hearing test with flying colors.   So far so good on his eyes - I'm expecting him to need glasses at some point, since my vision is so absolutely terrible.  But my husband has almost perfect vision, so who knows.

I have more to say about Ian's behavior, but that will be for another post.  For now, I'm very thankful to have such healthy and robust children.

Sammy is 2!

Two years ago, my little Sammy entered this world. Happy Birthday to my sweet, beautiful and happy little girl!  

Ian is 4!

My baby boy turned 4 today.  We had a really fun birthday party for him at Kids.Street in Need.ham.  I think that he (and Sammy) and all of his friends had a blast.

Here's the video evidence:

And some pictures:

Starting to line up for a group photo:

The silly face picture:

Spiderman cake!

We got this from BJs and not only was it wonderfully decorated but it tasted awesome!  

Check out the cool Spiderman candles I found on the Internet.

I Need a F**k!

I couldn't restrain myself from laughing while recording.  I love this girl!

Verbal Diarrhea

Sammy woke this morning at 5:45 am.  Too early for a weekend but not atypical for her.  So I brought her into our bed (like usual on a weekend) to snuggle.  Normally, she lies there quietly, sucking on her binkie and squeezing/pinching/massaging my thumb (something she LOVES to do).  But this morning she was just full of energy.  She wouldn't stop talking!  She was pointing to all of the body parts of her teddy bear and repeating them over and over until I acknowledged that she said the right body part.  And then when she lost my thumb, she yelled, "I need thumb!" which is more like "Anithumb!"  She said a lot more but I can't remember what it was in my early morning sleep haze.

Yesterday, I offered to put her slippers on her and she said, "No thanks Momma."  Where did that come from?!  It was hysterical.  She's definitely speaking more and more in sentences now - I love listening to the new words she comes up with.  Banana is still "nani" though.  I wonder when she'll outgrow that one.

On the weight loss front, I'm down to 144.4 pounds, which is much better than the 148.2 I started with.  But I seem to have stalled out.  I've been this weight for a couple of weeks now and can't seem to get it lower.  I'll just keep plugging along and see if I can make a few more changes to get rid of the last 4 or so pounds.

We're getting prepared for Ian's birthday party next week.  I can't believe my oldest child is going to be 4!!!

Weight Loss

I'm trying to lose weight.  I never lost the last 5 pounds after having Sammy and I started that pregnancy a bit higher than I would have liked.  I'm wearing a size 10 instead of a size 8 and I want to get back to a size 8.  After my trip to Florida, I saw how I looked in pictures and I wasn't happy.  And I'm getting older and I know that losing weight will be even more difficult the older I got.  So I decided to act.  Here's my diet plan:

• Eat smaller portions (except for breakfast, where I continue to eat my must-have huge bowl of cereal and fruit).  Sometimes that means eating just a salad for dinner instead of the meal that we've cooked.  This has been working out great - I'm definitely full after eating less.  I was clearly overeating before.  If I'm slightly hungry before going to bed, I will have a handful of nuts.
• I make a big pot of soup on Sunday and I've been eating that for lunch at work.  This means that I don't have to ingest ridiculous amounts of salt from the canned soups.
• I've been exercising again.  I don't want to sacrifice on sleep and so I've been doing 30 minutes on the elliptical at night after dinner and after the kids go to bed.  So generally, I exercise from about 8 to 8:30 pm.  It's long enough after dinner that I'm not overly full when I'm exercising and it's enough time before bed that I'm still able to fall asleep easily.  The only thing I was doing with this time before was sitting on the couch watching TV.
• Eat no or very little dessert (like one square of dark chocolate).

It's been 2 weeks since I started and I went from 148.2 to 145.8 pounds.  I'm pretty happy with that weight loss and am encouraged that my plan is working.  I'd absolutely love to get to 140 pounds (as I don't think it's realistic to maintain a weight lower than that).

2013 Blizzard

We got roughly 26 inches of snow in the past 24 hours.  It started Friday, around 11 am and stopped this morning, around 11 am.  We also had really high wind gusts, which created ridiculously deep snow drifts.  Thank god we did not lose power, but I know many other communities did.

My husband cleared the driveway last night, around 10 pm, and got rid of roughly 14 inches.  But it was still tough to dig ourselves out this morning.  It took me 45 minutes just to clear a little bit of the driveway near the garage,  our front steps and walkway.  And my husband struggled to clear the driveway with the snow blower because it kept stalling on him.  Eventually, after shoveling a bit, he borrowed our neighbor's snow blower and got the driveway clear.  Of course, the plow kept coming by, sending more snow into our driveway, but I helped out to clear that.

Ian had a blast playing outside this afternoon.  We had an impromptu play date with one family and the boys had a good time together.  Here are some pics.