Valentine's Day and adoption update

Our not so big plans of Wii Fit contests and chinese food on Valentine's day were postponed by my being sick all last week. I think I got all of the colds that I avoided getting from the kids all winter, all in one week.

I broke vegetarian month once again because all that sounded good the whole week were chicken nuggets and Lipton extra noodle soup. I also drank a lot of tea, but that stopped sounding good on Monday, and the rest of the week was just a necessity. Eric was so good, he was able to take over most of the household chores on top of working and making soup for me. He even looked at the Hiller's and Busch's circulars and made a shopping list! 

Eric felt bad that our plans were ruined and that I was spending the week laying in bed, so he bought Mario Kart for the wii, which is really fun, and a great way to keep my mind off of being sick. It took me awhile to learn, but I was beating Eric in no time! Unfortunately, after our daily evening tournaments these past few days, I have been stricken with 'Mario Thumb' (from pushing down on the 'go' button too hard in the stress of the last lap in too many races)

In other news, we FINALLY received our adoption homestudy on Friday. That means that we are officially approved to adopt, and are now waiting for a match. We think we've decided on a paint color for the soon to be nursery too, if you're curious, you can look up Behr Topiary Tint. (We're actually using Benjamin Moore, but the Home Depot Color Matcher uses Behr colors)

Eric has been asking me to make homemade baked macaroni and cheese for awhile, and I'm finally feeling well enough to cook again, so I'm going to try that tonight. If it turns out, I'll put it on my recipe blog! We made the garlic broccoli pasta again, this time with a smaller pasta, and no tomatoes since we didn't have any. Its such a quick and tasty meal! Definitely one we'll be making more often.

I think thats all the update there is for now, off to finish catching up on the laundry (its amazing how much builds up when you don't do it for a week!)

Zoe loves Joan Rivers

Joan Rivers was on the view last week, and something about her attracted Zoe...it could have been her big shiny necklace, or her dangly earrings that waved around because she moved her head a lot...I don't know, but she jumped up to the entertainment center and sat and stared, and even chirped at her, while she was on.

6 A.M. Success

I'm finally starting to get over this cold (if you ask Jasmine she'll tell you I was better days ago though) so I was able to get up at 6 and get in a workout on the Wii Fit!

Yes, it does feel a little silly to do the running in place game, but it gets me moving. Plus, it tracks bounces in the wireless remote so I was able to run circles around the living/dining room, and I even did a few sets of going up and down our stairs. Good thing we still don't have a downstairs neighbor =)

We'll find out tomorrow if I can make it two days in a row...

Hey, I am still one step closer to keeping my New Years resolution this time!

Exercise

I slacked off a little bit on my exercise program, but since we go ourselves a Wii Fit I have been pretty good about getting at least some exercise in each day.

My favorite exercise is the push up and side plank. I am up to 20 reps, it is much harder than it seems.

You do a slow push up, staying down for 1-2 seconds, then shift your left leg to the right of your right leg and turn your body 90 degrees and point your left arm straight at the ceiling and hold for 2-3 seconds. It alternates push up, right side plank, push up, left side plank.

It looks like this


I like how the Fit Tracks your BMI and Body Weight and graphs it out for you. It has you do a 'Body Test' which is the weight and center of balance test, then you do two little mini balance games and it gives you a 'Wii Fit' Age, Jasmine and I usually get a 20 (I think this is the best because we have never gotten lower).

You can definitely spot the day on my Weight graph that we went out to the new Chinese Buffet in Farmington Hills...

Take my class survey please

Please take some time to complete the survey my BIT 511 class put together. We are studying how technology has affected peoples lives in the last 10 years and how they think they will be affected in the next 10 years.

Thank you!

http://ericcharnesky.blogspot.com/2009/02/take-bit-511-survey.html

Eric's Blog

I've been pretty active on my personal tech blog lately. Professor Ciaramitaro put me up to the challenge of posting the interesting news I find instead of just emailing her about. I am doing pretty good so far I think =)

http://ericcharnesky.blogspot.com/

I used to send stuff to the Walsh BIT Department chair to post on his blog, he has published a few things for me - https://www-secure.walshcollege.edu/Walsh_Blogs/BlogsCategory.aspx?CatID=1 but now I just publish it myself.

Is it spring yet?

Its snowing here. Again. January has been a much less busy month, which has been nice since we were pretty much non-stop from Thanksgiving to New Year's Eve.  

On Friday, we celebrated our 5th anniversary since we started 'officially' dating. We celebrated it on our anniversary eve by going to the Honey Tree, which is where we were the night we were officially a 'couple'. I know, we're so lame. But they did have a really good tzatziki that I was able to copy. 

We share our special day with Joey, who was born that same day 5 years ago. We were invited to their house for a yummy birthday dinner and to play games. Mario Kart on the Wii is fun, and we had a lot of fun trying out the Wii fit that Belinda got for Christmas. It was really fun! So fun in fact, that we decided to make it our Valentine's Day gift to each other.

Since Valentine's Day is on a Saturday this year, the restaurants are going to be even more crazy packed, so we had decided to buy ourselves a new game (we haven't gotten any new ones since Christmas '07) and get take out and just spend the day together playing games. Ron told us that he had to get in line really early in the morning to get Belinda's, so we were a little worried about finding one, so on Saturday we woke up and started calling around. None of the 6 Gamestops in the area had them, but on a whim, we called Target, and they had them! We  rushed to Target, and they had about 10 of them. The guy said we came in on a good day. I called my parents to see if they were interested, since my mom had said she wanted one, and my dad met us up there and bought one for them too. They haven't opened theirs yet, they're waiting for Valentine's Day, but we couldn't resist!

I'm glad we started using it now though because I am SO sore! I wasn't too bad after the first day, but its day 3 and my arms and legs are both sore. It uses muscles I'm not used to using for some of the activities. I really like it though, it has a lot of fun activities for each of us. My favorites are the yoga poses and the step activity, and the ski jump, while Eric likes the strength exercises, the boxing, and the balance game where you have to get all the balls in the hole. We both enjoy the running, I like the scenery that they give you and that I don't have to leave the house, and they have a 2 player running that we like to do, although it doesn't count towards both people. We have begun battles in the different games, competing for the 1st place position.

And for the question you're all asking, nothing much has happened on the adoption front. We do know that our homestudy is about done, but we are changing agencies after it is done, because of some decisions the agency made. We really love our case worker, but some of the choices the director made seemed a little shady, so we'll be switching to the other agency we had been considering. They are glad to take us on, and things look pretty good for us with them. We'll keep you posted!