While I figure out this gluten-free world, here’s something for the locals who are looking to make a few new memories this year in Nashville.

Yesterday was the last day of week three of our “dieting” game. And I finally made weight! Yay. It’s a lot more fun eat particular foods, exercise at the end of the night when I don’t want to, and give up most of my lovely chocolate when it actually shows results.

What I have learned this week though may be an even bigger game-changer than just dropping a few pounds. I have tip-toed into the land of the gluten-free. I never said “I’m not eating gluten anymore,” but I have consistently avoided it for about five days now. (Right after eating some to-die-for bread and Havarti cheese.) And hello! My pants fit again. My stomach is the same size when I go to bed as it is in the morning. I am not completely bloated and inflamed.

Whoa.

The difference is HUGE.

HUGE, I tell you.

Gluten (for those of you, who like me, have heard of it, but kinda wondered “what the heck is it?”) is a protein found in foods made from wheat, barley, and rye.

I’m reading a book my friend loaned me called Wheat Belly. <– that link goes to the website that PROMISES YOU EVERLASTING HEALTH! This link —> goes to Amazon for the book, plain and simple. (I get the same thing if you click through and buy or not, which is nothing.) Do I agree with everything he says 100% of the time? No. But I do think there he talks about a lot of interesting things. Like how much wheat has changed in the recent past. We are not eating our grandparents’ wheat. Wheat used to have 24 chromosomes, and then we (people, not actually, ya know, you and me) turned it into a 48 chromosome man-made product so it could be manipulated and genetically engineered to be bigger, faster, stronger… But less, you know, healthy.

So, I am trying a gluten-free/low gluten life. I’m not checking my toothpaste or my chapstick or my shampoo (all items that are likely to contain gluten) but I am avoiding gluten whenever I can. And I feel so much better. So much. And it’s been less than a week.

Dessert is of major importance to me. The idea of giving up brownies and pastries and soda bread… I could go on, brought tears to my eyes. But I have found some gluten free bakeries like FiddleCakes, and decided I could do this. A lot of things can be made with alternative flour mixtures to keep them gluten-free.

Of course, I ran out to the store and stocked up on some cookies, cereals, and pancake mixes before I got to the part in the book about not just substituting other products for gluten. Sure, it is doable, but the best way is to eat a diet that doesn’t include gluten and gluten-like products and occasionally allow the gluten-free substitute as a treat.

I am weaning Nick off gluten as well. That’s a whole other story and one that I will be sharing soon, but for now I’m just happy to feel more like myself again. Since Nick is a kid and doesn’t have to worry about the belly bulge, he will likely get more treats than I do, and I’m OK with that.

Now if I can just get my knee back in shape, I will be unstoppable.

I carry a torch for softball and my softball playing days.

Many, many, many, years ago I started playing “C’ league baseball. It was for the young kids to get started. I was the only girl on the team. And I wasn’t very good. But I went, and I practiced, and I played. Well, I played as much as any of the boys or even coaches would let me, which is to say, not much.

When it was time to pair up for catch, I often didn’t get a partner. And the coaches never did anything about it. Finally after a few weeks of this, I got in the car, slammed my mitt of the floor and said I wasn’t going back. Turns out my mom was thankful. She has been mad for weeks, but wasn’t going to tell me to quit.

So, my baseball career ended. And I found a girls softball team.

Let’s be clear. I was still pretty bad. But I loved it. And I wanted to learn. I suffered through a year of playing a combination of right field and the bench.

My legs were barely bigger than the bat. No really.

The next year, I caught on. I moved to the infield and found my niche. That year I won Most Improved.

The next year, I won Most Valuable Player. I had found my groove. Third base was my home.

Fast forward a few more years and I found myself playing fast pitch my Freshman year in high school. I only played third base for one year, but still have great memories of traveling to away games, not so great memories of playing third base and having to come way in during possible bunt situations, and having to wear full catchers gear to warm a pitcher up if coach though you’d been out too late the night before.

A few years later, I found myself playing co-ed softball in college. Love. That’s all I can say. Love.

I loved being the girl who could really play, not just a placeholder. I moved to second base and stayed there for the duration. More often than not, another team that was short a girl would “scout” the games being played and I would be “drafted” to play the game after ours. I loved every minute of it.

After college when I moved to Nashville, I found a restaurant league and happily played there until I got pregnant with Maggie.

During one game, I took a line drive hit to the thigh. It was the hardest hit ball I’ve ever been in front of. I almost got my glove there, but it was just too hard and too fast. The ball hit my leg and flew about 15 feet into the air and into the outfield. The guy who hit it ran directly to me instead of to first base. He kept saying he was so, so sorry. I was running to the outfield to get the ball, trying to get him out. Heh.

I ended up having the impression of the ball, complete with stitching marks on my thigh. For the next few weeks, the bruise grew and most of my leg from knee to hip turned black and blue. I was stopped by a woman at the mall who thought I was in an abusive relationship and wouldn’t believe that it was a softball injury. I finally took the card she was trying to give me so she would stop following me.

Another time I jammed my toe and had to play the rest of the game while it throbbed because we had just enough people to play. When I finally took my sock off, the toenail came off with it. (I’m still suffering ill effects from that damn toenail.)

So all this is to say, I love softball. I loooove softball. I wish I could find a league to play on.

…And Maggie starts playing softball in two months. I am not saying anything out loud, but in my head “Please let her like softball. Please let her like softball” is on a constant loop.

The call came last night at 9:45. I was watching TV upstairs and didn’t get up to get the phone. I saw that it was our county calling (the TV showing me who is calling = one of my most favorite inventions ever.) I had my cell phone, and the email usually comes simultaneously, so I waited for that. Nothing. Then I saw a FB post about the call.

I asked if it was a 2-hour delay.

See, I had been out around 5:30 during the snow. It actually was snowing. Big pretty flakes. Enough to cover the grass, well, some of the grass anyway. I was looking at the wet pavement. I saw that it was 30 degrees. Uh oh. Wet pavement, 30 degrees, temps dropping, and no salt means…       …black ice. I’m a Yankee. I know about such things. (Well, I didn’t really know about the no salt thing until I moved south. But I’ve been here for 17 years *gasp* *blink, blink* so now I know a little about the no salt thing.)

Imagine my surprise a few minutes later when I got the response that school was closed. For the whole day. For this:

It’s really for the ice, not for the snow. I get that. But still…

So I turned off Maggie’s alarm clock.

Nick and Mike woke at the crack of dawn (just like every other day.) Maggie slept a little later than when her alarm would have woken her. I slept (I use the word loosely, since I was able to hear a lot of the conversations going on, but stayed in bed with my eyes closed) until 7:30 when Nick came woke me for his breakfast. I assumed Mike had told Maggie she didn’t have school, but apparently he was gone before she woke up.

So I snuggled up with Maggie on the couch as we looked out the window and told her she didn’t have school.

“I knew it! I knew it was going to be a snow day! As soon as I looked out my window and saw the snow, I knew it!”

(note: look up at that photo again. She looked out the window and saw that and assumed school would be cancelled. That’s what happens when you grow up in the south.)

And here’s the kicker. She thought she had slept through her alarm. She thought I had slept through my alarm, and she was doing nothing to wake me or to begin getting ready for school. She was playing dumb about what time it was and I guess thought going in late would be all my fault. Heh.

The other thing that struck me? She was thrilled to have this much snow. I know the first snow every year is magical. I remember that from my own childhood. She got dressed and bundled up, you know, in her coat and rain boots, and went out to play in the snow.

She was thrilled. And a little confused. It wasn’t really enough snow to do anything. She marched around a bit and made a snowball. She was very proud of her snowball. It was the size of her fist. It’s on our porch now, waiting to melt.

Something I’m concerned about – how do children who grow up in the south manage when they move to another part of the world where snow is but more than a nuisance? Three feet, so what? Get to work.

Also, she asked me to put my coat on to help her make a snowman. Umm, no. I’m not getting cold a wet for 1/16 of an inch of snow. How does a southern kid ever learn to make a real snowperson?

I’m a sucker for my cats. So I got them a water fountain because they really like to drink running water.

And I’m pretty sure they hate it.

Lulu kind of stared at it for a while. Then walked away. Finnegan stared at it. Then tried to attack it. That was my first clue that it might not have been my best idea.

The second clue came the other night when in the middle of the night a strange sound came from the kitchen.  By middle of the night, I mean 3:30am. At first I thought it was the refrigerator again, but luckily it was just the fountain.

See, Finnegan had attacked the fountain again. This time he knocked the whole thing over. He managed to pry the lid off, which I can only get on when I’m trying really, really hard. How he got it off, I’ll never know. With no water, the fountain motor began running. And running. And making the horrible noise that awoke us.

As my friend said, shouldn’t a cat fountain be, you know, cat proof?

You would think. But you know how some animals just have their own way of doing things? Yep, that’s Finnegan. He wants his little blue water dish back and he’s going to keep attacking the fountain until he gets what he wants.

So fine. Lesson learned. Keep it simple. Got it.

I made it through the first week on the Game On! Diet. Sadly, I am only down .5 pounds which means I did not get any bonus points.

However, I learned a lot.

I started the diet two days early to make sure I could do it and to help plan my meals and drink enough water. If those days would have counted, I would have made weight and gotten my bonus points. I’m actually pretty bummed about not making weight. According to the game, I’m down .5, but counting the two days prior to the game, I’m down 4.5 pounds.

But, like I said, I learned a lot about myself just in this one week.

My good habit that I did every day is flossing, using a mouthwash my dentist recommends, brushing my teeth, washing my face, and using moisturizer every morning. Sounds easy, no? It actually is, but I’m a lazy pants who usually forgets the mouthwash and hates to wash my face. So this week I feel like a success story.

My bad habit that I’m quitting? Cell phone in the car. I’m one of those morons who looks at my phone while I’m at stop lights. And looks to see who that text just came from. Or, I should say, I was that moron. Now my phone stays in my purse or on the passenger seat out of my reach. On one trip, I even let Maggie navigate using the map on my phone. My full attention was on the road, and she got real-life practice with an interactive map. Win. Win.

Water consumption – 3 liters a day. I did it for 5 days before my endocrinologist put the kabosh on it. Now I’m hovering between 2 and 2.5 liters a day. I actually really, really like water. I know. I’m weird. Did you know 75% of our bodies are made up of water? And when your body isn’t getting enough water, it holds onto water to avoid dehydration? Anyway, just about the time I was feeling sorry for myself that I wasn’t able to fully play by the rules, an article popped into my inbox that explained the adrenals better than I have heard in the 17 years that I’ve been paying attention. So I drink less than my teammates and my opponents, but I don’t die of a sodium imbalance. I can live with that.

Food – I actually was never hungry all week. Once I snacked on celery (the allowed snacks are celery and cucumber). The rest of the time, I was trying to fit in all five meals. I got to go out for fried pickles and a cheeseburger one day and the next day taste some homemade churros. I actually made a special trip to the store when I ran out of spinach. Oh, and Nick had been eating a ton of spinach too. He saw me eating a spinach salad, asked for one and ate the whole thing. Now he asks for them every day.

Exercise – Wouldn’t you know? This was the chapter I skipped over in the book. I mean, I’ve been exercising forever. I know what to do. Twenty minutes a day? No problem.  … and it wasn’t a problem. I did 20 minutes every day. Here’s the kicker. I need to do more than 20 minutes a day. So that’s the plan for this week. I’m doubling down on my exercise and changing it up a little bit so I get strength training as well as cardio.

If I hadn’t known every single meal was what it was supposed to be, I would never have put together the exercise part of the puzzle.

Random public service announcement of the day: get your Vitamin D levels tested. Especially during the winter months when we aren’t out in the sun getting it naturally. I take anywhere from 5,000-10,000 IU a day and my levels just came back at 37. (I know everyone is different, that’s why you all have to go get tested.) While 37 is in the normal range, the optimal range is more like 55-80. So I’m bumping up my D. if you don’t take any vit D or have never had yours tested, I highly recommend you do.

Oh and the best part? Each day, after dinner, before I put the kids to bed, I go into my office, close the door and mindfully eat one amazing, scrumptious, little piece of chocolate. Ahhhhh.

Today has been a mind-bending kind of day. My head is in a whirl with a few too many all-encompassing ideas trying to grab hold. And then I open my own email to find a post I wrote just 2 weeks ago.

Time to take some of my own advice and relax a little.

I posted on Facebook yesterday that I was plowing my way through all the candy in our house (a lot) before starting my diet on Tuesday. A friend mentioned an article that says the most successful dieters don’t tell others that they are on a diet.

The funny thing is I typed out that status and paused. I wasn’t sure I wanted to “announce” a diet. I hate dieting and truthfully, have only had to think about dieting for the last 10 years of my life.

So why, you ask, are you writing a whole post about dieting? Well, I reply, I may have found my dieting niche. I certainly hope so.

The Game On! Diet  has a lot of what other diets have – being aware of calories (not necessarily counting them unless you want to), adding exercise, cutting out sugar, yada, yada.

But it also has a 4 week time frame. I like that. A lot.

It also is a competition. I like that too. A lot.

You basically team up with a friend or two and take on another couple of friends. You keep score of a lot of things – it looks scary at first, but then it really does begin to make sense. And you get to talk trash to the other team. Ha. I might be good at this. And of course, encourage your own teammates.

The book was written by Krista Vernoff (executive producer of Grey’s Anatomy) and Az Ferguson. Krista is f-u-n-n-y. I laughed out loud many times reading the book. Did you catch that? I laughed out loud reading a diet book.

In addition to the good foods in, bad foods gone, no soda (not a biggie for me), no alcohol, you also get points for 7 hours of sleep a night, implementing a good habit (of your choice) and quitting a bad habit (of your choice), and drinking a ton of water (3 liters a day – even for a water drinker like me, that’s a LOT of water.)

It’s really a lifestyle change more that a diet but if I said I was eating all the candy in my house before my life style change on Tuesday, well, it just doesn’t sound the same. Besides, it’s a four-week lifestyle change. After that I get to re-evaluate.

The best part? Are you still with me? (Or did I lose you at no soda and no alcohol?) You get a cheat day. One day a week of eating and drinking whatever you want (except soda. There’s a whole chapter on why soda is the devil.) And one extra meal not on your cheat day to eat whatever you want. Plus 100 calories a day of whatever you want. So I still get to have one lovely piece of chocolate every day.

See? See! A diet that includes competition, trash talk, chocolate and sleep. YeeeeHawww!

I’ll let you know how I do. And hopefully I didn’t just jinx myself even more by talking about it.

Oh, and if anyone is interested in joining – let me know!

(P.S. I received squat for writing this. I sound like an ad, but it’s just me, drinking the kool-aid. Well, not kool-aid, because that has a lot of sugar in it, but you know what I mean. The lovely people of Game On! have never heard of me.)

I have the best intentions of playing that game right after dinner, and kicking the ball in the backyard right after laundry, and reading an extra story when we wake up, and practicing handwriting in a fun way.

I have the best intentions.

“Let me finish this work on the computer and then we can do that.”

“This will only take me ten more minutes and then I can play with you.”

I believe children need a lot of unstructured play. They need to dig in the mud and create secret forts with rules only known to them. They need to figure out how to entertain themselves. They need to create games and use their imaginations.

But they also need to know how valued they are.

Of all the gifts the children received from friends and family for Christmas and Nick’s birthday, the gift they wanted most was time. Our time. Time spent with both of the them and time spent one on one.

I ran across a quote in a post by Vodkamom talking about resolutions with her kindergarten class. They were talking about resolutions as being promises and one child said “I know. It’s like when you go to bed, and someone promises they will play with you in the morning, but then the morning comes and they don’t, it’s like breaking a promise!”

Ouch.

I have the best intentions.

I seem to bump whatever my best intention is because there is no apparent deadline, no thing to cross off my to do list. But their needs are just as important as whatever is on my to-do list. Spending the first part of the morning together, being together, starts us off in the right mindset. Then they can wander off to be children doing their children things while I occupy myself as mom/writer/business owner with a clear mind because the most important thing I needed to do that morning is already done.

It’s pretty bad when you can’t even remember your password to write a post. Ahem. That’s all I’m going to say about that.

Nick is now 5. Five. Wow. In a way it seems like he’s been 5 for a while, but in other ways, it can still sneak up on you. If he’s five, then Maggie is 7 1/2. Seven and a half is almost 8. I’m not sure I like where this is heading. I am trying to not worry about the teenage years until they are, you know, teenagers. (So my boy turns 5 and I’m talking about teenagers. I know… I know…)

Nick also is now tonsil and adenoid free. He’s breathing better, sleeping better, eating better and this week I can say for sure it was the right call. Actually as soon as the surgeon described the adenoids I knew it was the right call, but there’s that moment when your child wakes up from anesthesia that makes you wonder why you let these monsters touch your sweet baby, let alone carve part of their bodies out. He’s beyond all that, and was actually a pretty easy going patient. I could tell the day he felt better when he started messing with the cats again.

(P.S. for anyone who is having a tonsillectomy – 10 day recovery period. No lie. Ten days.)

And now we sit on the precipice of a new year – I’m a resolution maker. I am. Although I make resolutions just about every day, so it’s not really anything different for me. In late December, I usually write them down in a note on my phone and some years I look at the last year’s note and go with those. Other years, it’s a whole new list.

Some things I’m going to do this year (not resolutions, more goals):

take up knitting again, successfully this time.

launch a new website, with two redesigns on my current sites

pay off my super-duper new commercial embroidery machine (don’t worry, you’ll be hearing plenty about that soon.)

get back to more personal writing and documenting of our lives.

What about you? Do you make resolutions? Goals? Anything new you want to tackle in 2012?