Happy Valentine's Day

Hi everyone -- I hope you're enjoying the day with your loved ones. We had a good morning and went to our favorite coffee shop where we had hot chocolate, brownies, scones and coffee (I just had the coffee). I should have known things were going to go downhill when Lizzie pushed her brownie away and said she DIDN'T LIKE CHOCOLATE. Yesterday, she ate about a pound of it, so I should have known something was up.

Then we got back in the car and she said her tummy hurt.

By the time we got home she was in full-blown stomach bug mode. I have to say though, that if you're child is going to vomit all over your house, it's not a bad idea to feed them hot chocolate ahead of time. It really wasn't that bad.

This was Lizzie's first stomach bug ever, so she's a little confused why she feels bad and wants to know why she's not better already (it's been about two hours). So, right now she is laying on a chair watching cartoons and whimpering in the Nancy Kerrigan fashion (WHY ME???)

Hopefully she'll feel better by tomorrow. And hopefully Hannah won't get it. And MOST hopefully I won't get it....

So I was unable to take faces of happy children on Valentine's Day. Luckily we went to a favorite park last weekend when the weather was in the low 50s and I took lots of pictures. Here they are:

For those who live in the area, this park is in New Holland. It's got lots of structures for the kids to run around on, and some nice pieces of equipment. There's a bathroom there, and there's also a pool, although we've never done the pool part. Here's Lizzie in the rocket.

Oh yeah, HUSBANDS like to run around the structures too. Here Rob is in the castle structure. Which looks a lot like the rocket structure, but it's not.

Hannah in the rocket. When we first started going to this park just about a year ago they didn't reach the windows. They have grown about 2 feet this year, I think. (Okay, maybe I'm exaggerating...)

Tire swing! This is a total favorite, especially when they can get adults to push them on it. Usually they meet other kids at the park and go on the swing with them, so that their strong (and younger than us) parents can push them on the tire swing. You can't see it too well, but just below the tire swing is a pool of water. That's not a feature of the park, but the remnants of the snow that melted all of a sudden when the temp went from the teens to the 50s. Both girls stepped in it, fell in it and otherwise muddied themselves in this pool and all the mud in the park.

Do not adjust your computer screens ... this is just Lizzie going so high on the swing that she almost flipped over backwards.Here's one of many slides in the park. Lizzie loves slides......but Hannah is positively ELECTRIFIED by them. Have a happy Valentine's Day everyone!!

After

Here's my big news of the week. I earned my 10 pound weight loss (actually 10.5 pounds if you're counting, which I am!) ribbon at Weight Watchers on Monday night. I took a picture of it with my "after" picture. I know most people wait until, you know, they've actually LOST the weight to show an after picture, but since this is what I hope to look like when I'm done, I'm posting it and my ribbon together.

This picture was taken (I think) just prior to my parents' 35th wedding anniversary, which makes me about 33 years old. Of course I'm not 33 anymore and will require much plastic surgery to look this way again, but STILL, it's my after picture. Why? Because it's one of only a handful of photos that actually exist of me and it's probably the only picture ever taken of me that I actually like. I even like the fact that for a photo that was supposed to be an anniversary gift for my parents, I'm wearing a tee shirt and jeans.

So that's 10 pounds gone. YAY!! Lots more to go, but I'm on my way.

If you've gotten this far, I'm going to reward you with a recipe. I made these today as a Valentine's Day treat and they are really, really good and healthy, too. This is an official Weight Watchers Recipe, but they call them something else, which I can't remember right now

Fake Rice Crispy Treats

3 Tablespoons Smart Balance Light butter

3 cups mini marshmallows

2 cups Fiber One cereal (just the regular kind, not flavored or sweetened)

5 cups Puffed Wheat cereal

Melt the butter and the marshmallows in a large pot stirring until smooth. Remove from heat and dump in the two cereals. Mix to coat everything. Then pour into a 9 x 13 pan that you've sprayed with some sort of releasing agent (like butter spray, but I used olive oil spray) and press firmly with the back of a spatula (also coated with spray). Refrigerate until cool. Cut into 24 squares. Each square has a half point in the Weight Watchers plan (roughly 25 calories.)

I just had a couple with a cup of coffee and it felt quite decadent. They're big, too, if you're like me and like volume food!

Dancing Girls

Here's a short video that I shot during observation day at the girls' dance school a week or so ago. You'll just have to trust me that this is a massive improvement over the first observation class I went to in November!!

(Here's my disclaimer that I am a much better still photographer than videographer!)

Big Girl Smiles

Two posts in two days -- told ya, you needed wheels to keep up with us these days!

The big news today is that Hannah now has a big girl smile -- you know, one of those smiles with a gaping hole in the front of it where the baby tooth is gone and the permanent tooth has yet to grow in.

In the interest of full disclosure, Hannah had help from the dentist who yesterday, during a routine cleaning (no cavities for either of them) noticed that her front tooth had abscessed. Hannah banged the tooth on something (who knows what) when she was around three years old and the tooth has slowly been discoloring over the years. Yesterday it was decided that the infection was bad enough that the tooth needed to come out.

This morning, in a procedure that took all of about five minutes, the tooth was yanked with nary a tear (Hannah did well, too) and we were back home and already wondering what the tooth fairy was going to bring her.

So here's Hannah a couple of weeks ago:

And a couple of hours ago:

Lovin' Spoonful

(This picture is from our Welcome to the Family party/baptism in 2003)

Six years ago today, we became a family.

Although I don't remember a whole lot from those early weeks of parenthood, the events of that day -- of those first moments -- are a part of me.

And while we discuss adoption in our house whenever it comes up, I do try to make special mention of it on Family Day.

Hannah and Lizzie love to hear the story of how we came to meet them; how I thought they were cute; how Hannah looked at me with one eye open; how we took them to a hotel where we lived for a week; how we changed their diapers; how we all fell in love with each other.

Tonight though, I told them one of my favorite stories from our first day as a family.

Since we had fewer than 24 hours to prepare to be the parents of twins, and since I am not the most organized person on a good day, we arrived at our hotel room with two babies, a couple of bottles, some diapers, two cans of formula and nothing with which to open the cans or to mix the formula.

I sent Rob out to get provisions for the week we were expected to stay in Delaware while paperwork was filed. He came back with a measuring cup, a can opener, a spoon and a couple of cartons of Chinese food.

We fed the girls and then, as they slept, I opened the Chinese food only to discover that Rob had not gotten anything to eat the Chinese food with. I was starving, so we spent that first meal sharing not only the chicken lo mein, but also our one lonely spoon.

To me, this was clear evidence that we were simply too dumb to be parents. And when I tell this story I use it to illustrate just that fact.

Tonight though, as I was telling this story, I dramatically opened the dishwasher and pulled out the serving spoon that we had used to mix the girls' formula and eat that first meal together.

"This is that very spoon," I said to them, holding up the freshly washed spoon.

But instead of laughing, Lizzie took the spoon and looked at it very closely and said, "This spoon has love on it."

I looked at her as if I hadn't heard her correctly and she clarified: "Because you passed it back and forth when we were babies ... it has love on it. It's got our family on it."

Which is really a much better way to end the story -- and to celebrate our family day together.

(This picture was taken in late 2008.)

Our Weekend

I tell you, you need wheels to keep up with all the exciting doings at Casa Rasmussen (I was going to put house in Norwegian instead of Spanish because Rasmussen IS Norwegian and NOT Spanish, but the Norwegian word for house is "hus." Uninspired at the very least and looking like a typo, too. I find that Spanish is an important language for adding spice to your vocabulary... for instance in my childhood we had a cat that we named El Gato. Of course El Gato is 'cat' in Spanish, but if you go around calling your cat, Cat, then people think you have no imagination, but El Gato shows not only creativity, but BILINGUAL creativity... wait, what was I saying...

Oh yeah, exciting weekend. Grandma, Uncle Dude and Aunt Linda decided to visit. We ate pizza. I made a low fat trifle that was nothing at all like a trifle but tasted good anyway. And it snowed.

The end.

Here are the pictures - except for Uncle Dude -- he and Rob went to Circuit City to take advantage of sales and came home empty-handed leaving some of us (and by some of us, I mean me) to believe that they just drove around to avoid all the girl-talk going on around the house.

Here's Grandma and the girls. My house is freezing which is why she's wearing a jacket. To explain how cold it sometimes gets in my house let me just tell you that I wear socks most of the time.

Here's Aunt Linda. I like this picture of her, although I know that if she were writing this she'd tell you that her hair looks awful. I know that because when she looked at it she said, "My hair looks awful." Don'tcha just love Hannah's goofy smile?Okay, on to the SNOW pictures. We have been waiting and waiting for some sort of measurable snow and we FINALLY got our wish. Here, Lizzie is making a snowstorm of her own:Hannah's just happy to be outside (and I was happy they were outside, too!) Although much snow came in with them, too.Making more snow squalls by blowing the powdery snow off the post on the deck:Too bad (actually NOT since I was the target) this snow was not good for snowballs or snow people. Lizzie was ready:This is Hannah making a wish on snowflakes. I think she wished for more snow because we got more on Monday and it wasn't supposed to snow that day. Today we went sledding and there are no pictures of that because I was actually ON th sled with them. Which wasn't the brightest idea I've ever had, but it sure was fun.

Weight Watchers and Me

If you just want to see cute pictures of Hannah and Liz, please skip to the bottom of this post. If you're at all interested in my recently begun weight loss journey, please read on.

First some good news to share: I lost FIVE pounds this week. As nearly all of you know, I have more than 100 pounds to lose so while this is just a drop in the proverbial bucket of lard, it's weight that I hope will be gone forever and ever. Amen.

Losing weight this week certainly helped the cause, but really something else happened this week that has given me more hope than I've had in a long time that this can be done and that I can do it. It's all because of a Weight Watchers cookbook.

For those who don't know -- when I was a senior in high school I was significantly overweight. I had been fat my entire life to that point. I believe I was almost 9 lbs when I was born! When I was nine years old and starting a new school I remember the school nurse yelling out my weight to her assistant: 100.5 pounds. I was mortified because the weights of my classmates were something like 75 or 80 pounds. And my brand new classmates didn't waste anytime reminding me that my weight was a lot higher than theirs.

I'd tried Weight Watchers a few times in my early teens. My mother had much success with it, and she'd take me along, and I'd lose a few pounds here and there. The Weight Watchers leader was our dentist so he knew me and my mom. And he didn't seem to care that my first three or four attempts at weight loss were completely unsuccessful. Until that day -- November 13, 1975 -- that I decided to give it one more try. My plan was to lose enough weight so that I could have the lead in the high school musical, but really I was just tired of being fat. So, my mom drove me to the church where meetings were held and dropped me off. I ate a Cadbury Carmello bar in the car. It was the last candy I would eat for the next 9 months. Because, for the next nine months I did not veer from the Weight Watchers plan. Not once. I followed it religiously, as if my life depended on it.

I remember when I had lost 50 pounds my chemistry teacher called me into his office and wanted to know if I was on a diet because he noticed that I had gotten thinner. When I told him I had lost 50 and a half pounds, he was dumbfounded. Then he announced it to the whole AP chemistry class. I was a little mortified and a lot proud of myself. I graduated high school thin. So thin, in fact, that my parents had my senior pictures redone for me because the original picture (and the one that appears in my yearbook) is me weighing well over 200 pounds. Every yearbook picture that was taken was taken in October, so every single picture in that yearbook shows me fat. But I didn't care because I knew what I had accomplished. And my dentist knew what I had accomplished too. He cried when I left the meeting for college, after making a speech about my success and my tenacity and my general wonderfulness in ways beyond dieting. Dr. Forbes and I were often the last two people at the meeting, waiting for my mom to come pick me up, so we had time to talk about things like college and life and weight loss.

Eventually I lost a total of 73.5 pounds before leaving for college in the fall of 1976, weight that I kept off for the better part of 20 years (I'd gain 20 pounds and then go back on Weight Watchers - or have a major anxiety episode and lose it again) until I got married and somehow thought that marriage meant that I could eat everything my husband-with-the-metabolism-of-a-hummingbird could eat.

So, fast forward to this past weekend. I hate being on a diet. I really do. I like food and food likes me so much that it wants to stick with me FOREVER. But, you know, I'm facing this surgery and I have two six year olds who would probably be kind of bummed if I succumbed to any of the myriad diseases that afflict fat people and run in my family even amongst those who are not fat. So I decided that I just had to gut through it, even if I thought I couldn't. And even in that first week I had moments of hopelessness, where it just seems like so much weight and so much sacrifice and really, why couldn't it just be easy the way it was when I was a senior in high school?

And then I found my weight watchers cookbook. The one I used when I was 17 years old. When I remember those days, I remember losing weight as being relatively easy. I remember that my mom was enormously helpful because she made me a soft-boiled egg with a piece of toast every single morning and even made me a lunch to bring to school every day. It was usually 2/3 a cup of cottage cheese, a slice of bread and a piece of fruit. I'd buy milk at the school or else I'd bring a diet soda. (No one drank water back in the 1970s!) Since high school seniors were allowed to skip study hall and hang out in the cafeteria, I sat with my friends while they ate soft pretzels and I'd have a coffee with a sucaryl tablet or two in it.

Every time I went on a diet after that, it was NOT easy. And I always thought that meant I couldn't do it, or that my metabolism had changed or that the program had changed (which it has -- drastically -- over the years.) But this weekend, as I looked through that cookbook and saw the meals and recipes that I checked off I started to remember how hard it really was back then. Sure, my mom made me my lunch, but my friends were more than willing to share their sweets with me. As treasurer of the student council I ran a lot of bake sales and carwashes and there was always food. Always. But I never touched it. I had a steady babysitting gig for a little girl for whom I had to prepare dinner and more often than not her mom would leave cold pizza to be heated up. I heated it up for Dana, but never touched it. Once, when I had lost nearly all the weight I took a bite, but then spit it out.

My family regularly had pizza on Saturday nights and I never had any. My father would watch television at night with a bag of doritos. I didn't eat them. There were always at least three flavors of ice cream in my family's freezer. There was also a steady stash of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, cadbury bars and frozen hostess twinkies and cupcakes. I was tempted every single one of those 73 and a half pounds.

And somehow remembering how I'd make my special tuna sandwich with almost no mayo (light mayo didn't exist in 1976) but a mix of mustard, onions and a tiny tiny tiny bit of mayo made me feel better. So did remembering how I'd take a slice of bread and slice it horizontally to make two slices because light bread hadn't been invented. Being reunited with my recipe for Vanilla Cream and fake pizza and baked fruit made me remember how while my family ate their pizza I'd have a glass of skim milked mixed with orange or raspberry soda. It made me see that even back then I didn't want to do it and it was hard, but I did it anyway.

And remembering that made me feel in a way that I can't remember ever feeling in all my past attempts at dieting, that I really can do this. And that I can do it, just by doing it. By not accepting anything less than success. That I am stronger than a Big Mac; that I don't have to succumb to cakes and cookies and ice cream (oh my!)

So it is with a zealous hope that I haven't felt in more than 30 years that I go into my second week on Weight Watchers. (If you've made it this far, thanks ... I promise I won't spend too much time talking about weight loss!!)

And now for the promised cute kid pictures!!

The girls' kindergarten assigns family projects where the whole family can pitch in and help. This assignment was to make snow people or animals. Rob helped the girls cut out their snowballs and then I helped with dressing them. The girls designed them. Hannah's is a snowdaddy holding a lunchpail, and Lizzie's is a snowmommy with a necklace on. They were very proud of them!

Pretending to be cats has STILL not gone out of fashion in our house. Hannah and Liz spent the better part of Saturday in their cat outfits. They got these outfits when they were three years old and they were very big. Now they are very very small. But luckily for these kitties, they stretch!!