Week Five Summary

This week it has become obvious to me that I know nothing about how to lose weight. In my week four summary I was still working out pretty solid and eating pretty good as well and I lost no weight. This week however I gave in many more times on my eating and snacking. Then pretty much gave up on my evening workouts. I think I only did one maybe two this week.

I was scared to get on the scale this morning for my weigh in but as it turns out I was still the same weight. This makes three weeks in a row my weight hasn’t moved but I’ve been doing worse with my eating and working out, so it is very strange to me.

Running however has still been going well. I had five runs in this week for an almost 30km total distance. My 10k run this week was under an hour. Not as fast as my last years Valley Harvest run, but it is getting closer.

Results:

Last week: 201lbs
Now: 201lbs
Lost: 0lbs

Starting this week I’m going to start tracking my eating more. I hate counting calories but I think I need to for at least a bit so I can bet back into the swing of things.

running

Noah’s Birthday Party

Today we had Noah’s birthday party with all his friends. We rented the local community centre which has rooms you can have the part itself in and then access to the gym as well.

The party had a Skylanders theme. The plates, treat bags, some presents, and one of the games all related around Skylanders. The game is one that Jen created and it was a big hit.

The kids all sat in a circle in the middle of the gym and played pass the present. The idea is music gets played and you pass the present around the circle, when the music stops if you’re holding the present you’re out. If you were the last one you get to keep the present. This time there was a twist though. If you were out you came up to the big Punch Out Kaos board and punched out a space and inside was a piece of paper with a task to perform. When you perform your task you received a small prize.

Some of the tasks were easy like sing a nursery rhyme, do 10 jumping jacks, and lead a conga line through the gym. Last night I was helping Jen come up with some more tasks so I added ones like score a soccer goal on Sandy, and hit Sandy with a dodge ball. The kids seems to get a big kick out of them all and I got a bit of exercise in the process.

Happy Birthday Noah

Today is the first of three of my kids birthdays that fall in September. Noah, my youngest, turns six today!

He’ll have his actual birthday party with friends this weekend, but there is only a half day of school today so he’ll also have lots of friends here after school to celebrate and have cake today too.

Cutie little Noah
Gets to eat a special birthday breakfast that I had to go buy at 11:00pm last night. Froot Loops
Noah’s First Birthday
New Born Noah

First Halifax WordPress Meetup

Tonight I attended my first ever WordPress meetup. When I found out that Alison and Tara were organizing a meetup in Halifax I was very excited. Seeing co-workers going to meetups and WordCamps talking with others who are either passionate about, or wanting to know more and learn about WordPress had me a bit envious.

It was a really great evening, the first talk was about the differences between WordPress.com and WordPress.org. This is a complicated topic that has a fair amount of confusion around it and they did a great job at laying things out.

Over the years I’ve helped people in person to use WordPress but it was really neat tonight to get to engineer some happiness in person and I look forward to doing more of it in the future as well. I’m far from an outgoing person, but I found it really easy to talk to everyone tonight and can even see myself doing a talk at some point.

One of the highlights of the evening for me was when I introduced myself and my job title someone said, “that sounds made up.”

Thanks again to the organizers and everyone who came out. I’m looking forward to seeing you all again.

Thoughts on Fatherhood

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about families, and in particular Fathers. Previously I wrote about my own Father, I never really had a role model around except for some old memories and stories about things I specifically would not do as a Father myself.

Having just finished Scott Berkun’s book The Ghost of My Father it has given me even more to think about. Scott is becoming quite an influential author in my life pretty quickly. I had first read his book The Year Without Pants while looking at applying at Automattic. It certainly confirmed many of the things I had read elsewhere and gave me great insight into the company. It helped assure me I was making the right move working at becoming an Automattician. His other books will now be ordered soon.

Reading his latest book, a memoir about his own family and relationship with his Father, it really hit home with me personally. It has me thinking even more about all my relationships with my children and the things I need to really work at to make sure I have the kind of connection with them that I truly want.

Having the career I do gives me the opportunity and flexibility with my work life to really be a part of my kids lives. For the most part I do believe I have a strong bond with my children, but I really do need to be more present and active in their lives. While I do take them t,o and love watching, their extra curricular activities, my wonderful wife is usually the one that does a lot of the day to day things.

It’s not enough to just be present in the home with them I need to make a greater effort to talk with them about things, about their lives. More one on one time where I can show them individually how much they mean to me and how much I value them. This happens sometimes, but it is usually just something that occurs, I need to make more effort to purposely plan these things.

The one relationship that I need to work on the most is that of me and my oldest Alexandria. It seems we’ve struggled for a long time, and while I could make millions of excuses why that might be, they don’t really matter. What matters is I need to work to fix it.

Alexandria is turning 16 this month. When I was only a year older than that I left home and not on great terms. I wasn’t happy with my family and thought living with friends while I still wasn’t done high school, or have a job was a better alternative than living there in my mind. This put a huge strain on my relationship with my family that has taken a long time to overcome. Even still there are wounds there as well. My relationship with my youngest sister is almost non existent as she was so young when I left. This is a pattern I desperately don’t want to repeat with Alexandria and I need to fix it before it’s too late.

We have different personalities and different interests. She struggles with school a great deal which has always been a barrier between us. She will never be the strongest in some subjects in school and I need to learn to accept that, yet be willing to be there and help her without letting the historical battles frame how I approach it.

While reading and writing might not be strengths for her she certainly has the potential to be a great artist. She is taking her first real art class now in school and some of the sketches she has been doing are very impressive. Helping her develop these skills even more while improving in the areas she struggles in is going to be a balancing act I need to help her achieve.

While I don’t think I’m a horrible Father, there are certainly many areas that I can use work. It won’t be easy, especially in the case with Alexandria, there is already a lot of repair that needs to be done. The other night I took the first tiny step, I sat down and had a real conversation with her. Pretty casual, but I let her know that I’m proud of her and the hard work she is already putting in this school year. A small start but I’m going to build from there.

Change of Plans

Today Jen had a rare day off during the week. When we found out about this we decided to take advantage and I made arrangements to be off work today and work another day instead. Our plan was to hike Cape Split for the first time together. Jen has never made the hike before and I did it many years ago probably when I was around 12. I don’t really remember it at all, and I’m not sure I even made it to the top.

This plan had me very excited for a couple reasons. I’ve wanted to do the hike for some time but just never seem to get around to it, but the main reason is because Jen and I never seem to get time alone together besides at night when the kids are in bed. Even that with an almost 16 year old means we aren’t really alone because she stays up almost as late as we do and there have been times I go to bed before her.

We’ve been getting a fair amount of rain the past few days so I knew there was a possibility that today wouldn’t happen. But today itself was supposed to be overcast but no real rain. We ended up getting rain this morning coming down fairly heavy for a bit early so everything was soaked. Anecdotal stories from friends and family suggested that the hike wouldn’t be real enjoyable with a wet, muddy trail. Wet roots and fallen leaves would make things slippery and not the easy hike we were both looking for today. Therefore we decided to put it off until another time.

We were disappointed but really spending time together is what we really looking forward to and we were still able to do that. As I wasn’t going to get the exercise from the hike though I started the day with a run. I intended to just go for a short one at a decent pace but decided to keep pushing and go for 10k at the same pace I’ve been doing 5k runs. To my surprise I was able to do it!

We did have some errands to run but before that we dropped off some books to our local Wee Library and then went for a walk around the marsh where it is located as well. Once the errands were done we decided to go out and have lunch together. Quick calculations while we were there have us guessing that it was about two years since we shared a meal out just the two of us.

It wasn’t the day we initially planned but we made the most of it and had a fun day, even while running errands.

Reading, Setting an Example

Reading is important to me. It’s something we’ve tried to instill in our children from early on. We’ve always read to our kids since they were very little. Before they could even fully comprehend what was happening. Jen still reads all the time to the young kids she cares for.

One thing I’m bad for though is not setting the example. For a long time my kids would never have seen me sitting down to read for myself. Lots of the reading I did was either in my office, on the computer, or when they were in bed. Reading more has been a goal of mine for some time now, but haven’t done a great job at working at it. In the past couple of years though I have read more books than I had in years, but that’s still not a big number.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about Fatherhood and Parenting in general but I’ll write more about that soon. Yesterday morning though I had just a small simple experience that helped remind me the effect we can have as parents on our children. Caile and I were home along for a bit of time. We were all ready, chores done and she was playing on her iPod in the living room. After making myself a coffee I came and joined her on the couch with my book I’ve been reading.

We talked a little bit, but for the most part we were each involved with our own task, or so I thought. Not long after I sat down with my book Caile got up and put her iPod away. She went to the kitchen and then came back with her book she’s been reading and we sat and read together until it was time for us to go meet everyone else.

On our drive I took the opportunity to talk about reading in general, it’s importance / benefits, and about the book she was reading. This wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t seen me showing by example that reading was enjoyable and something worth me using my time to do.

Week Four Summary

This has been a rough week. Typically I check in on the scales to see how I’m doing throughout the week to make sure I’m on the right track. This week when I checked in I was actually up a considerable amount. This had me feeling very down and unmotivated.

Up until that point in the week I was still doing great with my eating and exercise and yet somehow the scale had me up over 3lbs from what I weighed in at last week. I let this get the better of me. I let me eating slip a bit. Not much but I did give in and have a few treats that normally I would have stayed away from. I also skipped two of my evening workouts as my desire and drive were way down, and especially at night all I wanted to do was lie on the couch.

Luckily I was able to keep going with my running and even had a great win yesterday and was able to go the full 10k I wanted to. When I was back from that run the scale actually showed me at 200lbs which would have been down 1lb on the week. That is far from what I was looking for but still better than where I was mid week. To bad my weigh in day wasn’t yesterday morning because today I was at the same spot I was last week.

Results:

Last week: 201lbs
Now: 201lbs
Lost: 0lbs

It’s obviously better than going up but still makes me feel really crappy. Starting at 216lbs and being four weeks in I’m now officially behind on my goal of 3.8lbs per week. Realistically I know I need to look at the big picture and the fact that since mid July I’m down 25lbs and 15lbs in the last four weeks, but it’s hard especially when I can’t point to something that I know I did wrong the beginning of this week.

run

Needed a Win

I’ve been struggling this week and today I just needed a win. About a month ago I set a goal on Runkeeper to be able to run 10k again by October 1st. That would give me almost two weeks to better my time. Today was my planned day to go for a long run and I picked my route hoping I could make it 10k. The route had a bail point at about 7k where I could stop or take another route and make it shorter or continue on for the 10k.

There are a couple hills on this route with one major one that is quite long and steep. This is a route I used last year when I was getting ready for the Valley Harvest 10k and the hill was always painful. The first number of times I ended up walking it or at least parts of it. Not today though!

The hill was certainly the slowest part of my run but I did it without stopping and was able to do the full 10k. In fact I was feeling so good at the last bit that I really pushed it for the last 1.5k and had by far my fastest times then.

I’m very happy with this and hoping it was the win I needed to get me back focused on my goals. Now that I know I can do 10k again I have almost a month to work on my pace.

10k-run-goal

Street Fighter II Turbo

I’ve never been much of a gamer. Nintendo has always been my console for their easy games like Super Mario Bros, Mario Kart, and one of my favourites Street Fighter II Turbo.

We’ve had a Nintendo Wii for a while and it seems to go in and out of favour with the kids. They’ll play it for a while and then it will sit and not do anything for a long time. Every once in a while I’ll sit down and play some of my favourites. I still really like some of the old versions like Super Mario Bros. 3. I like to put that on and rip through it and beat Bowser.

Recently though I heard reference to Street Fighter and I wanted to play. So I got a copy on the Wii but realized I needed the classic controllers to play it. Thanks to Amazon I had a set ordered pretty quickly. When they arrived I showed Noah and he liked the game too.

It wasn’t until tonight though that I took some time to sit down and really play it. Things started to come back to me and the after a bit and a lot of continues I ended up beating M. Bison in the end. I did it all with Ken as he was one of my go to characters back in the day. The next time I’ll play with someone else and try to learn their moves all over again too.

It’s fun to shut off the mind every once in a while and go back to those early days sitting around with friends where we would have tournaments in our living rooms.

Photo 2015-09-11, 6 35 39 PM