5 things

My 5 things from this past weekend are.....

1. I made stir fry for the whole family this weekend. I had to make it in two separate pans and then combine it into one so I could cook enough. I fed 8 people! It was delicious!

2. One For The Money was a great movie! Katherine Heigl did a wonderful job! Go check out the books by Janet Evonovich!

3. I love game night with my family! Rook is my favorite game!

4. I love that movie! Technically I watched it Monday evening but it's so good I couldn't not mention it!

5. Finally, #5 is homemade bread. Mom got a bread machine for Christmas so now we make our sandwiches on homemade bread! Can't wait to try some other recipes too!

If you noticed, I did my list a bit differently. I actually wrote my "5 things" on a dry erase board, took a picture, emailed it to myself, then edited it in Paint. I think, considering I did it pretty quickly and on Paint, that it looks pretty good but my standards are pretty low lol. Let me know what you think! What were your 5 things from this weekend?

That's my Southern Soapbox! See you tomorrow!

Tired..

Forgive me... but I am going to complain. I woke up yesterday morning after getting six and a half hours of sleep (which is a lot for me) and I was tired. No surprise there. I'm always tired. So, I got up, got dressed, and went to work. I was still tired at work but that's nothing new either. When I came home from work I was SO excited to take a nap... at noon. Do twenty year olds normally look forward to taking naps? Or is it just me? Just as I laid down my phone rang. It was my sister. She needed me to go babysit my nephew because she had to stay at work late. Of course, I said yes, because I had nothing better to do and I almost never pass up a chance to babysit my AJ. So I got to my sister's house, expecting AJ to be down for his nap. He wasn't. He was VERY awake and very loud cute. I took him outside to play then FINALLY he was ready for a nap. And so was I. I put him down, then got another call from my sister. She needed me to make brownies for a friend of ours. So I made the brownies, then my mom called. She needed me to take the brownies and the food she cooked over to our friends house (our friend just had surgery so my mom offered to cook her and her family a meal). I took the roast, mashed potatoes, veggies and brownies over to their house and headed home to eat our own roast. Needless to say, I never did get to take my nap and by the end of the day I was dead tired. I think I went to sleep around 12:30am (a record for me. i usually go to sleep between 2 and 3am). 

What was the point in this post you ask? The point is... that is pretty much my life every day. Although, some day I do get my nap, others I don't. I'm really tired of being tired. It's probably the worst part of having fibromyalgia, for me anyways. I woke up this morning with 8 hours of sleep {EIGHT} and I almost slept through my alarm because I was so tired. UGH just once I would like to wake up and feel rested. I don't remember the last time that happened.

Ok, that's my Southern Soapbox. Thanks for listening reading. I will be doing my "5 Things" post soon. Sorry I didn't get it up last night!

Mississippi Came to town...

I must say, I love my family. I also must say, my family is INSANE, especially when we are all together. We're a little odd separately, but when we all get together.... well, let's just say Dallas will never be the same again :P.

AJ was so proud of himself for climbing, literally,
in the middle of our game of Rook.

One of the great things about my family is, when we get together we don't necessarily do anything special. As a matter of fact, we usually stay at home and play games. How can that be insane, you ask? One year we were all sitting around the table playing Apples To Apples. The adjective, or green card, was "playful" and my mom put down "my body" (if you haven't played Apples to Apples or don't know how you play, this probably isn't very funny, or in my case disturbing, to you). So now whenever we play Apples to Apples and someone doesn't know how to play, that is the example we use to explain. Great, huh? I think I need therapy. We also have a game called Rook that the whole family LOVES. We only play with 4 people. Supposedly you can do it with more but in order to do that we would have to read the directions and I don't think anyone has ever read the rules to the game, we have all been taught by someone in the family. I LOVE Rook! It's a card game that some what resembles Spades, or so I've been told. I've never actually played Spades. Simple things like hanging around the house and playing games all day are the highlight of my time spent with my family.

Thursday night me, my mom, my sister, AJ, Aunt Kathy and Mammaw all went to Tooties Pie Co. It's an adorable little pie place over in Frisco. It was FANTASTIC! AND they were having a sale. If you bought one pie, you got another one free! So I got a piece of Heavenly Chocolate and got Ryan a Cherry pie. They also have amazing sandwiches and paninis. I had a turkey and bacon panini. It was fantastic! They make this apple pie that uses 10 {Ten!!} apples! TEN! ANNNDDD it weighs SIX POUNDS! Holy crap! I think they should call Man VS Food to see if he can eat that pie!



To conclude Aunt Kathy and Mammaw's visit to Texas we went and saw One For The Money, but we didn't just go to any ol' theater. No! We went to Studio Movie Grill and ate lunch while we watched our movie! Whoever invented Studio Movie Grill is a genius by the way. The movie was AMAZING! If you haven't read the books, you should! There are eighteen total, starting with One For The Money by Janet Evonovich, get to readin'! They are hilarious. After we finished our movie and lunch we had to do something "different", and believe me, it was different. Right next to the theater is the neighborhood where Troy Aikman lives, and we decided to go look at the houses in that neighborhood since it wasn't gated (Hey, if they didn't want us to look, they would have stuck a gate there. So this is really their fault!). These houses are GIANT! What the heck do they put in those things? My entire family, aunts, uncles, cousins, great aunts etc. could all live in one of those "houses" and never see each other! It was amazing. Seriously, how many rooms can one person have?

Well we are off to play some more games, so that is my Southern Soapbox for the day! Have a good night and don't forget to read One For the Money by Janet Evonovich.

Wonky and Woot-tastic Wednesday

Wonky:
    - I went to the bathroom the other day after having been gone ALL day and poor Rebel followed me back there INTO the bathroom. He stood in their while I went potty and then later on he laid in the bathroom while I took a shower. I don't know if this is just me but, any time I change clothes in front of Rebel, he seems to stare at me. Am I crazy? (don't answer that)
    - I saw on Twitter the other day that "Khloe Kardashian is a flawless role model". Seriously? First of all.... flawless?... really? No. Second, all the Kardashians are crazy and drama queens, not role models.
    - Our internet and cable has been driving me NUTS! Our cable will just randomly stop working and so will our internet. It's driving me NUTS

Woot:

    - Friday and Sunday we had the most AMAZING weather! It was 75-80 degrees outside, and it's almost February!

- I babysat AJ last Friday morning. He's getting so big! Maegan and I also had girls night Friday night :).

From left to right: My mom Sandra, Aunt Emily and Aunt Kathy

     - Mammaw and Aunt Kathy are in town!! We had so much fun Monday! The sisters ( my mom, Aunt Emily and Aunt Kathy) are crazy when they are together. Monday we went to Charming Charlies where we tried on some interesting hats (note the picture on the left where Mammaw is trying on a lovely (note sarcasm) hat. Mammaw also bought a purse AND I got 3 pairs of earrings for $8 and some brown boots for $10! So excited!

     - Ryan and I went on a date Thursday (I think it was Thursday) night to Carrabbas, then we went to Petsmart. He looked really nice in slacks and a button down shirt. By the way, if you've never been to Carrabbas, you should go! They have AMAZING Tomato Basil soup! We had fun talking and eating good food.

Well, that's my Southern Soapbox for the day! Have a good night y'all!

5 things

I am going to try to start doing something new on Mondays. I am going to list 5 things that I did or that happened this weekend. Hopefully most of them will be good things, but on occasion I may feel the need to vent about something, sorry but it happens. Also, I would like to point out that I have a HORRIBLE memory... so a lot of my "memories" will come from Facebook lol. I put almost everything important or exciting on Facebook. I know, that's horrible but if I don't then I wouldn't know what the heck I did every day.

Let's get started!

Five

This weather! Well at least Friday and Sunday's weather. It was 75 degrees outside! I was wearing capris and a tank top! It was amazing. The kind of weather where I read a book OUTSIDE, just because I can. WOOT!

Four

Saturday Maegan and I killed ourselves at the gym. That was FUN! Haha... ya...

Three

After Maegan and I got home from the gym I took a FAST shower and went on a DATE (like a real one where we both look pretty and go eat and talk and WOW) with Ryan. Crazy right?!After our date we went back to Ryan's apartment and watched White Collar. Is it weird that going to Boomer Jacks and watching White Collar was a perfect date night? We had fun and laughed and snuggled... and Jixer licked me until I thought I was going to drown. Does it get any better?

Two

Sunday I went shooting with my dad and brother in law. I sucked, they didn't.. yay them, boo me. I hit maybe 8-10ish out of 25 clays (granted this is the 3rd time I've gone shooting but still.. I suck). They hit all but like 2 of theirs. Yes, I'm pouting as I write this.

One

The best part of my weekend! Friday morning Andrew (my brother-in-law) had to go to work early so I got to babysit AJ! He's getting SO BIG! He wasn't awake when I got there at 8:30am so I took a nap on the couch. The joys of "working" for relatives, you don't have to be professional (I have only done that in one other house, and that's because I was recovering from mono). Anywho, after he woke I had to feed him breakfast, and after he ate breakfast I had to rent a fork lift to pick him up. He ate one WHOLE banana, a WHOLE blueberry muffin, a handful of Cheerios AND TWO cups of milk! Little Piggy! I love my Stinky Monkey. Then later that night Maegan and I had girls night! We watched The Vampire Diaries (which meant swooning over Ian Somerhalder.. YUM) and we watched Friends while eating raw cookie dough. Friday was a pretty good day :). 

I hope you've enjoyed my  edition of "5 Things" and hopefully I will do enough entertaining things to keep this up lol. That's all for my Southern Soapbox! have a good night!

Progress at the gym!

So, Maegan and I have been going to the gym 3 times a week for about 2 weeks now! The scheduling isn't perfect but we always get in three work outs every week. We went shopping at Old Navy to get some new work out clothes because we both only had one pair of pants to wear and that was getting difficult with working out three times, but I stayed caught up on laundry. Now I have 2 pants and 2 capris and now I look all snazzy when we go work out.

On our first day we were doing 20 mins on the elliptical, now we are just doing 10. My goal is to go a mile in 10 minutes, which so far I have been doing. After the elliptical, which sometimes I think might kill me, we go do weights, starting out with leg extensions. We do two sets of  15, then we go around the corner and work on our arm flab. We are only lifting 5lb free weights. We want to tone, not look like The Hulk. We do bicep curls, arm raises, where we raise them from our sides up to shoulder length, keeping our arms parallel to the floor (I hope that makes sense...) and lastly, we raise the weights above our heads. We do two sets of 15 for each arm work out. Sometimes, because we're wienies, we will do our arm routine once, then go do the rest of our work out, and come back and do our last set of arms. So after we finish our set for our arms we stretch our legs, arms and back, which is my favorite part of working out. It feels SO GOOD! After we stretch we get one of those big exercise balls, and I resist the urge to dribble it across the gym, and do some crunches. We do 30 crunches, leave our balls, and go do some leg machines. The leg machines that we do put you in VERY compromised positions, but at this point we just want to not die and finish our work out. I'll have to look and see what the name of the machines are when we go work out today but, on both of them you sit down and put your legs on these little cushions. One of the machines you push your legs out into a spread eagle (again, awkward, especially since it's mostly guys in this gym) and the other one you start in a spread eagle and you bring your legs in. It works your "saddle bags" really well! Each of us start on one of the machines, do 15, and switch. Once we have both 2 sets of 15 on each machine, we go back to our exercise ball for 30 more crunches. We repeat that process 2-3 times. After we finish our legs and crunches we go down our last set for our arms and walk over to the treadmills. We hadn't done the treadmill to begin with but decided to add  it in for some more cardio and it serves as our cool down. We walk at about 3.5 MPH for 18 minutes. Why 18, why not 20 you ask? Well, I'm glad you did! Some where in the middle of our 20 minute treadmilling we jog for 2 minutes. Yes, we only jog for two. We are wienies, remember? If we did it for any longer we would fall on the treadmill, and then we would look like a cartoon character that goes flying off the back of the treadmill. As fun as that sounds, we rather not. After 20 minutes has passed we walk a VERY slow pace of 2 mph. I can crawl faster than that, but we do that for about 3 minutes in the hopes that our heart will no longer be trying to jump out of chest. Our whole work out takes between an hour and an hour and a half, depending on how slow we're moving.

I haven't really been getting THAT sore after workouts. It might hurt a little, but not so much that I can't move or anything. I am still able to go do stuff, pick up my nephew, clean the house etc. My advice if you are wanting to start working out: build yourself up to things. I know everyone goes in there and is all gung ho and that's great, but remember that you DO have limits and unless you want to bed ridden for a few days because you can't move after your work out, I strongly suggest you pace yourself. Remember, no matter how little you are doing, you are still lapping all the people that are sitting on their couches. My other advice is to take music to listen to. Music is a HUGE motivator for me!

So, that's my Work out, Southern Soapbox. I hope this helps some of y'all get started. I'm off to get ready to go to the gym!

Wonky and Woot-tastic Wednesday!

It's Wednesday! You know what that means (and if you don't, well... read the title of this post.. duh)!

Wonky:
   - Every night.. well morning.. I lay down in my bed with my sweet giant horse of a dog and my neurotic cat. Well, really... they're both a bit nuts, but anywho. Every night George, my sweet little neurotic kitty feels the need to knead my boobs. I have NO IDEA why but I really wish he would stop. I push him to the side and then he just snuggles with me. Can't we just skip the boob kneading step and just cuddle? No?
   - I have a very... wonky... guilty pleasure. It's called extra crunchies from Long John Silvers. I will drive through LJS and just order a Dr. Pepper with a side of crunchies. YUM. I swear I'm a fat person stuck in a little persons body.
   - Ryan walked into work the other day to see that his desk was no longer there and his position no longer existed. Thankfully, he still has a job... but basically got demoted in title but has to do more work, with no raise of course. His wonky, not mine.. but I'm still going to complain about it.
   - Creepy stalker guy. We have a creepy stalker guy in The Colony, Tx. He walks in to people's unlocked houses and strokes the ladies hair while they're sleeping. He did it to this little girl and she thought it was her daddy. When she realized it wasn't her daddy, she screamed. Needless to say, I am being retaught how to use the 12 gauge pump shotgun and tomorrow am going to buy pepper spray to keep on my key chain. Even more wonky.. my sister told me about this and then my mom went to a bible study, leaving me in the house alone, I didn't go back to sleep for a while.

Woot-tastic:
   - This past weekend Ryan and I hung out at Meagan, Chris and Brett's apartment. The boys played video games and Meagan and I oogled stuff on Pinterest.
   - Considering the fact that it is almost February and we are still having 60 degree weather on occasion... WOOT!
   - NEW SCHOOL! I will be enrolling in a new school for the fall semester! I'm really excited. It's further away but I'll get to ride horses and they have a program specifically for teachers! I'm really excited!
   - The kids I babysit... all of them are awesome and all of their parents are awesome! The kids are sweet as pie and the parents aren't crazy.. well at least not in the bad way. Can I just babysit for forever? It's starting to look like I can't :(.
   - We have been going to the gym three times a week for the last two weeks! That's the longest I've stuck with any work out "program". I love spending that time with my Saster! And I am starting to feel the difference already! Goes to show you that spending 90 minutes in the gym three times a week and working your butt off (literally) is how you get it done! I'll be posting another "gym" post soon to let y'all know what all we're doing!

Well that's my Wonky and Woot-tastic Soapbox for the week! See you all soon!