My Fitness Pal

In my last post, I posted about wanting to exercise at least five times a week. I'm happy to report that so far I've followed through with that resolution! I've been doing the Thirty Day Shred almost every day, AND I've started back on the Couch to 5K. I finished up Week One today :) I didn't write in my last post about wanting to lose weight because that's pretty much ongoing for me, not really a resolution.

A week or two ago a friend of mine started posting on facebook about a website she had been using to track her calories and exercise called My Fitness Pal, so I had to go check it out. I've been using it for about a week and so far I love it! I had signed up for Weight Watchers online, but I think I'm just going to let it expire and only use My Fitness Pal when it runs out because MFP is FREE and Weight Watchers is not.

A while back I used SparkPeople and it was pretty good, and MFP is set up a lot like SparkPeople, but I think I like it a little better. I don't really know why, just personal preference I guess. When you set up your account you tell them how much you weigh, what your goal weight is, and how much you want to lose per week. Once you do that it tells you how many calories you should be eating a day. You can track all your food and all your exercise on the website. I was really impressed with all the food in their database. Lots of restaurants are in there. And if you're cooking yourself, you can just enter your recipe and how many servings and it tells you how many calories are in each serving.

I LOVE that it has a free app for iphones and Android, too! Weight Watchers right now doesn't have an Android app. So when I'm at school or anywhere I'm not at my computer I can still list what I've eaten and not have to try to remember it.

I really didn't mean for this to sound like an ad for MFP, I just really like it! We'll see how long I stick to it!

2011 Resolutions

Now that we're about a third of the way through January, I thought I'd finally post some of my resolutions for the year. I usually don't like resolutions because I feel like people never keep them, but I think all of these are pretty manageable. So, in no particular order, here are my resolutions for 2011:

{One}

Keep my house clean/organized. I just want it to always be clean enough that if someone were to just show up, I wouldn't be embarrassed about the house looking messy. I got in an organizing kick the other night and cleaned out/organized both of the linen closets in the house. We cleaned out and organized the closets in the guest room and office a few months ago, so they're still in pretty good shape. Now I just need to clean out the bedroom closet and I'll be pretty happy. Once I've gotten that done I'll just have to spend a few minutes every day putting everything back in its place. Shouldn't be too hard, right?

{Two}

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Work out more. Yeah I know, that's pretty much everybody's New Year's Resolution. But I want to work out at least five days a week, even if it's just for 20 minutes. Sunny gave me Just Dance 2 for Christmas, and I feel like it's a really good workout [it definitely gets your heart rate up!] and it's fun, so I want to try to play that a lot. And I started over on the Thirty Day Shred yesterday. It's only about 25 minutes, so I feel like I should be able to make that much time to work out every day, even when school gets me really busy. I know I'll miss some days if we go out of town or anything, but every day I'm at home I'm planning on doing it. I want to get the Zumba game for the Wii, too, but I just can't make myself spend the money on it right now! Which leads me to my next resolution...

{Three}

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Get better about using coupons. This is more of a necessity than a resolution. We're trying to save as much money as we can right now, which is kinda difficult with me being back in school full-time and not having a job, so one way I'm trying to help is by getting better about using my coupons. There are tons websites that have stores' weekly ads and coupon matchups, so all I have to do is look at these websites, see what I need/might need eventually that's on sale, and cut out my coupons. My favorites are I Heart Publix, Southern Savers, and Money Saving Mom. I found another one the other day that I had not seen before, Be Centsable, that has a roundup of grocery ads by state. I haven't used this one much yet, but I think it'll be really helpful. Since I've been using coupons I've been saving about 50% on groceries. I just want to get more consistent about it this year.

{Four}

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Get a new hobby. Lee said that one of our resolutions should be something that's just fun for us. What I really want is a DSLR camera so I can learn to use it, but we just can't afford that right now. Two things I'm thinking about are getting a sewing machine and learning to sew [I've seen some basic sewing machines for really good prices] and taking a cake decorating class. I think both of those would be fun, so I'll just have to do some research and decide which one to do. I don't know if there even are any cake decorating classes around here, so that might make the decision for me :)

I'm planning on doing an update once a month on how I've done with all of them. Hopefully that will help keep me accountable :)

Ice Storm 2011

{via weheartit}

Last night I experienced the first "ice storm" of my life. First we have snow on Christmas, now we're having an ice storm?! What is going on here? It's probably about a quarter-inch of ice, but we aren't really equipped to deal with that here in Alabama. The dogs don't know what to do when I take them outside! Lee is working from home today, thank goodness!

My plans for the day are to finish the book I'm reading [Best Friends Forever by Jennifer Weiner...this is pretty much the last book I'll get to read for pleasure until this semester is over] and then pretty much just be lazy and hang out with my puppies for the rest of the day!

Ski Trip

A few days after Christmas we headed to West Virginia to go skiing. This year I actually got off the bunny slope and skied on "real" trails! I was terrified the first day but I pretty much got over it by the second day. By the last day I had made two major accomplishments: I fell down and got up all by myself, and I learned to buckle my boots all by myself! I know that's really not very impressive, but it was a big deal for me :)

Once again, I failed to take any pictures on my camera. Here's how the conversation between me and Lee went pretty much every day we went out skiing:
Lee: We forgot to get the camera
Me: That's okay, we'll get some pictures tomorrow.
Lee: I can go get it now if you want me to.
Me: No, that's okay. We'll just HAVE to remember tomorrow.

And yeah, we never remembered. Lee's brother did take a picture of us on his phone the last day and sent to me:
Pretty much everything I have on in this picture I got for Christmas this year :) I figured if I'm not a good skier I at least wanted some cute ski clothes to wear!

We spent our New Year's Eve in West Viriginia...I was asleep by 11:00...I just couldn't take it anymore! We woke up the next morning and skied for a few hours, then we came back in to watch the Tide whoop Michigan State in the Capital One Bowl.

{via al.com}

The guy bringing down the quarterback in that picture is Courtney Upshaw. He's from my hometown :) He's making us all so proud!

Christmas 2010

Just like it does every year, Christmas came and went with a quickness!

My parents came up on the 23rd and spent the night with us. Lee and I went to Firebirds that night before they got here to celebrate winning first and second place in his fantasy football league, and we've had steak on Christmas Eve the past couple of years so that's kind-of become a tradition for us. We also opened our presents from each other that night.

On Christmas Eve we just hung around with my parents that morning, then Sunny, Joey and Riley came over that afternoon. When they got here Mama and Daddy gave Riley his Christmas present, a Radio Flyer wagon, and then went for a walk to let him ride it and enjoy the nice weather [it's a good thing we did it then, because it SNOWED on Christmas Day so they didn't get to take him out in it then!]



After the walk we came back in and opened presents from each other. Riley helped :)

Ellie and Bruce Wayne were clearly excited about all the presents ;)
After that we visited a little bit more and then SANTA came through the neighborhood! I tried to get a picture but my camera wasn't fast enough. So here's a picture of me and Lee in front of the tree instead:

My parents stayed with Sunny on Christmas Eve so they could be there for Riley's first Christmas morning. We got up early Christmas morning and went by there to say hey to everybody, then we headed to Lee's grandmother's house for Christmas with his mom's side of the family.

It was cold and rainy when we left the house, and by the time we got to her house [about an hour later] the rain had turned to snow!! I've never had a White Christmas in my life, and probably never will again, so it was pretty exciting! This picture is from when we got to his grandmother's, probably around 9:30 that morning:
It snowed pretty much all day, and the yard was completely covered in snow by the time we left, but of course I didn't think to take any more pictures.

That night we went to his dad's house and had dinner with him, then later that night we met up with Lee's old roommate. I had not seen him since our wedding in May of 2008, so I was REALLY excited to see him! [But once again, I forgot to take pictures] He lives in Cincinnati now, so he was pretty amused at all of our reactions to the snow :)

The next morning we had brunch at Lee's dad's house and did presents over there. Brunch with them the day after Christmas has kind-of turned into a tradition, and it's really fun. His stepmom makes a lot of good food [and mimosas!] and it's just fun to hang out with each other. We left pretty early that day because it was still snowing and down here in Alabama we're not really equipped to deal with snow, so we didn't know what the roads would be like later.

That pretty much wrapped up Christmas 2010 for us :)