End of week 23

Well yet another week has gone by. Ayden is another week older, as is Asher, Tina and myself. Ayden dressed up as a bunny rabbit for Halloween and Asher went with the ninja outfit. I like to remind people that by clicking on the photo album link to your right you will be taken to all of our pictures. There is over 200 pictures up there for your viewing enjoyment. I only put a few pictures actually in the blog, there are many, many more in the photo album so check those out. If you haven’t noticed I haven’t spoken to much on my weight loss lately. It is still going well but it has become a little redundant for me to write and probably redundant for you all to read. My original purpose for starting this blog was for support from you all in helping me reach my goals. Those goals were important because as you can see from my picture at 276 lbs it was imperative that I took action to change some really bad habits. Well you guys have helped me do that. I can say positively that my eating habits have changed and they have changed forever. I don’t look at food in the same way anymore, I still love it, but I look at it as a number value. In other words, how many points does that food cost. Sure I will have a meal or two or maybe a weekend in which I may go a little crazy, but I am always back to normal soon thereafter. I weighed in this morning at 225 lbs. So doing the math I have lost 51 lbs. This is probably one of the lowest weights I have been at in 10 years. I am 6 lbs away from my weight when Tina and I started to date. I am 20 lbs away from what I was when I got back from my mission, and I am 35 lbs away from my goal of 185/190 lbs. There is no doubt in my mind I will get there. It is just a matter of time and I am not in a hurry to get there . The weight is going to come off. We are not looking forward to the teething period Ayden will soon go thru. She is doing really well. She started eating pureed green beans about a week ago which took her back a little bit initially, but we think she likes them. She has always been an angry eater for some reason. She is still an angry eater. Sometimes when Tina is feeding her green beans or rice cereal she will do this very loud, very violent, grunt. I would compare it to the sound a weight lifter might make when he is screaming to get that last bench press up. Now I know what you are thinking, she is pooping. Nope, she just makes these loud grunts and screams between bites, it is quite comical. I am going to try to capture it on video and put it on the photo album. I will let you know when I do. Work is work, it is going fine. I am still not a company type of guy, I really don’t know how far I am going to get in corporate America. More on that topic to come at a later date. We had some of Tina’s family over a few nights ago for barbq. We wanted to try and do something nice for Amy because she was moving and she was such a big help to us. (We thank you Amy!) Tina and I will miss her being around on Wednesday and Thursday and so will Ayden. I made the barbq and a pasta salad. I have a wonderful pasta salad recipe I created. Everyone seems to really like it. The chicken was fun, I made some homemade barbq sauce and grilled them outside. That day I had a bad day at work and it was nice to come home and do something I really love and that is cook. In other news I have been called into the Elders Quorum presidency. I am now the second counselor in the Elders Quorum presidency. It was really a surprise. I have had times in my life when I have been living well, doing most of the things I should in life and would have felt relatively worthy of such a calling. At the present I don’t feel worthy of it so I am surprised it came. I joked with Tina that I have been trying to fly under the radar so I never get called to presidency positions and Bishoprics and that stuff but after now getting called into this presidency I think I need to go the opposite way. I need to be the best member in the world, then I would never get called to anything. Maybe I will give that a try. But seriously it will be an interesting learning experience. I may post some pictures of me tonight. I will put some new ones of Ayden up tonight on the photo album. Oh and one more thing. We recently heard from some old acquaintances. One of them was the Craikers who moved to Tulsa for law school I wanted to give them a shout out. The other one was Mindy Dalton (don’t know her married name). Let me say something about Mindy real quick. Mindy is one of sweetest, kindest people I have ever got to associate with. After my mission I got to spend some time with her and it was time well spent. I was glad to hear from her and her family and I wish them all well. She is the salt of the earth. I value greatly past friendships. I don’t like to make new friends. I have a limited number of friends, unfortunately all of them live far away but they are my friends none the less and they are people I come to trust and love whether they realize that or not. I miss hanging out with Phil at his old house in Lander. I miss hanging with Anson sitting on a skateboard going to his old house in Duncanville to steal some of his Dads M&M’s. I miss hanging with Josh, trying to get him to watch real TV instead of the learning channel (it paid off, he is a lawyer). And I miss hanging out with Chris in our old flat in South Africa. Later.

Our trip to Silsbee - End of week 22

Well it was quite a weekend. This past weekend Tina, Ayden and I took a trip down to Silsbee, TX. Where you say? That’s right Silsbee, TX. That is where some of Tina’s family lives. We went down there for a surprise 80th birthday party for her grandmother. It was about a 5 hour drive down there. It is pretty much right on the edge of Texas and Louisiana. The drive down there was actually kind of pretty. There are many tall trees, much taller then we get in our neck of the woods it seems. Perhaps that is because it is much older and the trees have had years to grow. Ayden got to see a lot of her family she had never met before. The first night we stayed in a hotel called the Pinewood Inn. The pictures on the website brought to vision sandy beaches and palm trees. I thought, sweet, we are staying in a nice place. …..hold that thought. So Tina and I pulled into the parking lot and I asked worriedly “is this it”? It was it. To set the scene, it looked like a two story prison without the barbwire fence. But wait, the outside seemed like the Ritz Carleton compared to what terror lurked inside. “Be right back”, I said to Tina and Ayden as I closed the door to get our room. I was greeted as I entered the bathroom size guest check in area by a woman I could only describe as the long lost grandmother of Methuselah. She proved to not only be extremely old but also completely incapable of following any train of thought. After about 15 minutes in her presence I was ready to sleep in a cardboard box on the side of the road instead of deal with her. As it turned out we got our room, for $18 more than we were quoted. I didn’t mention that they lost our reservation we made a week prior to arriving there. Or more specifically the old woman didn’t know where to find our reservation. Once we got to our “suite” we noticed the state of our room. To set the scene, we had two holes in the wall by the bathroom sink where electrical plugs should have been. Instead there were simply rectangular holes in the walls with electrical wires showing. Looking up in the bathroom afforded you the view of a large square hole in the top where a bathroom fan should have been. The paint in the bathroom wasn’t finished. A little later in the evening after one of us went to the bathroom we heard the sound of running water from the toilet. We waited…waited…waited. The sound didn’t stop, so we ended up having to lift the toilet cover and adjust the big black ball looking thing so the water would stop incessantly filling up in the toilet. The next morning as Gabi was attempting to cook her oatmeal in the microwave a fuse was blown, causing the power to go out. It was not the greatest hotel stay in my life. Other than that we had a fun time. Tina’s grandmother was surprised and I think having everyone there made it a special time for her. My health and eating continue and are going well. I will update with pictures and stuff when I have made some more progress.

End of week 21

So life continues. All is well in the Scott household these days. Tina is doing well, Ayden is doing well and I am doing well. Ayden continues to grow and develop nicely. She still can make me smile and laugh anytime she wants to by looking at me with her big eyes and beautiful smile. Perhaps I am bias but she is so cute to me. She is a little shy. She will often stare at me, then I will look over at her and smile then she will smile and then shyly turn her head the other direction. She brings me such joy. We watched the movie “Meet the Robinsons” last night. We enjoyed it, it was a nice little movie. The movie that has the child genius in it always seems to be good, for example the Asian kid in Goonies …. I can’t think of any more at this moment. My co-owned fantasy football team finally got there first win yesterday. It came against the Hitmen owned by one Travis Scott. While it is nice to get a win, it is unlikely to mean anything unless we go on a good win streak. Even then it would be tough to make the playoffs. My health and weight are doing great. I eat the way I eat and it is habit at this point, so I don’t really worry about reverting back to my former weight or eating habits. I want to lose another 40 lb’s to get down to about 190 lb’s. I am thinking about beginning a running program. Although I hate running. I always have. I would rather play racquetball, basketball, football, tennis, etc… than run. We will see, but I am going to start doing something to accelerate my weight lose. I think it will take at least another 5 months to lose these last 40 lb’s, perhaps longer, unless I start exercising regularly. The only problem is when do I do it. When I get home every day at 5:45pm I would like to sit with my wife and daughter, relax, make dinner or help with it. I don’t want to get home, change clothes and take off for another hour. So really the choices are to get up early in the morning and run, or don’t run or workout at all. So far I have chosen the latter. My boy Asher seems to be doing fine. I booked his ticket the other day. He is going to be visiting us from December 26th to January 4th. He says he is enjoying school and meeting new friends. So I have some projects Tina has given me to do around the house. One of the things she would like me to do is build a headboard for our bed. Since I was only in my first house for about a month I have not really tackled any projects yet. In addition to the headboard I need to prepare my garden area for planting this spring, extend the back porch of our house and put up a few trellises on the side of the backyard. I don’t really have all the tools I need to accomplish this stuff. I know I don’t have the stuff to make a headboard at the moment. I don’t have a wheel barrel to mix and pour concrete. I don’t even have a ladder at the moment. I have to get used to being Tim “the tool man” Taylor (Home Improvement for those not in the know) around the house. I will enjoy doing these things around the house, but I am a perfectionist, so I hope I can satisfy myself with my level of work. I am excited about the holidays. I always love the Thanksgiving/Christmas season. I love the feel of it. The change of weather, the lights/decorations, the spirit of the season. It is a special time for me.

Aydens new roll

I wanted to let everyone know that Ayden had her first verified roll over from her stomach to her back yesterday. We suspect she has done this before in her crib because Tina has seen her on her stomach and then checks on her later and she is on her back, but no one has ever seen it happen. Well I had the pleasure of seeing her do this on the floor yesterday. I don’t think she remembers how she did it, but we know she is capable of doing it now. Anyway I thought I would let everyone know.

End of week 20

The acting God in Evan Almighty, Morgan Freeman, is right. When you pray for patience he doesn’t just give you an abundance of patience, he gives you circumstances and events that can promote growth of patience. I remember the last time I prayed for patience, it was about 2 or 3 years ago. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but I woke up the next day to find that my truck had been smashed in and my nice cd player had been stolen… Advantage man upstairs. Not only did he win that point, he defeated me and I have not since prayed for patience. Quite frankly I am a little afraid to. Evan Almighty by the way is an underrated movie. I kind of enjoyed it. Things are great with us. My dear wife Tina just turned 31 yesterday. It is about time, I can’t stand her being able to act all young and stuff around me because I turned 31 five months before she did. She had a nice day I think, we went over to her parents house for a nice visit and stuff. She and Ayden are both doing well. Ayden I am sure will start teething anytime now, we aren’t really looking forward to that. Hey note to Cameron, Ayden has a very hard spot on the inside of her mouth, not where a tooth would be but on the roof/inside of her gum, any idea what that may be? Ayden is getting stronger all the time. She rolls over to her stomach all the time, much to her own dismay. She loves rolling over but hates being on her stomach for very long. So my question to her and her mother is why does she keep doing it? It is logical that if you know you don’t like being on you tummy why do you keep rolling over to it. I mean we can’t stop her. It is a constant cycle. She is happily on her back, then she rolls over to her stomach, then after a minute or two she starts whining. Then I get up and roll her back on her back. Then almost before I even sit down again she is back on her stomach. She is getting closer to rolling back over to her back but she is not quite there yet. My work is going well, I really enjoy what I do now and that is such a mental weight off of my shoulders. I am trying to decided if I should try to get a PhD in this field or if I should now pursue what I am really interested on the side and that is cooking. I wouldn’t be pursuing cooking to make a career change, it would be just to get better, it is basically my hobby. I want to make sure I have enough education to get where I want to be in training and development. I want to someday be a director or vice president of training and development or perhaps start my own training consulting company and I want to make sure my education is sufficient to accomplish those goals. I don’t know if a bachelors is enough. In weight loss news I got back on the good path and lost probably about 5 lbs or so. I weighed in this morning at 228.8 lb’s. For review I started this journey to better health 20 weeks or 5 months ago. At the time I started I weighed 276.6 lb’s and was wearing about size 43 pants. Today I am weighing 228.8 lb’s and am wearing size 36 pants. I would say I have made progress. I have lost 47.8 lb’s and 7 inches of my waist. I will have pictures tonight I think. Let me take a second to talk about my wife. She is very special and important to me. She is everything I always thought marriage would be and could be. So for my first marriage to be what is was, was really tough for me. We are taught that sometimes for us to understand the sweet we must experience the bitter. I have tasted more than enough bitter in my marriage life in the past so I can now understand and savor the sweet and forgive my language but damn is it sweet. I am going to be coming out with my top 20 movies of all time in the near future. You all are welcome to second guess my decisions and rankings all you want, but you will be wrong. Peace out.

End of Week 19

Well I missed last week as you all know. We have had a few things going on over the past couple of weeks. First let’s talk weight loss. The previous week I didn’t lose any weight and in fact gained a few pounds because I ate bad for about 2 days. It is really crazy. I can gain 4 lb’s in 2 days but it takes me 2 weeks to lose 4 lb’s typically. But that was just a mini blip on the radar and I got my eating back on track this past week. I still didn’t lose too much though. I don’t believe my weigh in this morning was accurate so I am going to weigh in again tomorrow morning. In other news, many of you have followed the saga that is my water bill. Last time I wrote about it I said we got about a $400 credit. Well let me update that number. After calibrating my water meter the county decided to not credit me $400. Instead they decided to credit me $900. So we owed nothing. Our meter is now fixed and our usage is well under average (we don’t bathe). Just kidding. But it looks like we may not have a legit irrigation leak. I am seeing moisture around some of my backyard sprinkler heads, and I haven’t watered back there for a week. Does anyone have any possible explanation as to why this would be other than a leak? In other news Ayden is doing well. We think she may be teething because her grumpy level has increased a bit lately. I have been working now as a full time Trainer for the past two weeks. I really enjoy it. I did my first client training session last week and it went pretty well all things considered. I have two more scheduled for later this week and I think I am going to be doing some onsite training at the end of this month in Pittsburg. I found out the other day that our company hit their bonus quota which is nice, we will be getting a little bonus at the end of this year. This past weekend I participate in the Richardson Corporate Challenge. My company had a basketball team that I played on. We got beat the first game 38 to 23. I scored 10 of those 23 points. That kind of tells you how bad our team was when I was the leading scorer. Actually I played pretty well. This is not breaking news, but my fantasy football team still sucks. I am not going to put up pictures of me this week because nothing has changed, but to give you some numbers on my progress thus far. When I started this eating lifestyle I weighed 276.6 lb’s and wore basically a size 43 pants. Today I weighed 234.2 lb’s and wear size 36 pants. So that is some nice progress. My weight goal is still about 185 lb’s so I still have around 50 lb’s I am going to try and loose. Anyway take care.

End of week 17

Well I weighed in at 231.6 lb's this morning. Down from 234 lb's last week. So I am down another 2.4 lb's which if my math is correct puts me at exactly 45 lb's lost in 17 weeks. I am pleased with it all. The other day I wore size 36 jeans. Granted they were a bit snug, but you couldn't count the quarters in my pocket so I didn't need to call a tailor. That was down from a very generous 42 pant size 17 weeks ago. So that is not to bad. I had my first day as a Trainer today. The training department and the company is about to explode. The opportunities for me in the training department are going to be great. I am really going to enjoy being a trainer and doing this for my career. I am really excited about it. My fantasy team is so bad and it is killing me. I hope to get the pictures up tonight for all of you.