Emerging From the Mists, and Other Undertakings...

Well, it's been quite some time since my last post - 8 months to be exact, and hopefully I won't have to begin every post with the start of this sentence!  Once again, so very much has happened in our family.

We have a new member!  Little Esther was born back in January (she's nearly 4 months old!) and after a fairly wild ride, I think things are starting to feel a bit more normal.  Well, as normal as they can be with a small baby who only ever wants to be awake for no longer than an hour at a time!  Despite feeling like a bit of a shut-in, we're evolving as a family, and we all love her bright chubby smiles and the giggles that are beginning to come.

Another big change has been Hannah beginning school, and Davey heading off to day care 2 days a week (it worked out to be just a bit more expensive than 2x 2 hour blocks of 3 year old kinder a week!).  Life feels a lot busier, when the kids are home, trying to make sure that I still have some quality and a decent quantity of time with each of them.  It's tough trying to figure out when to get housework done, in order to still be able to spend time with the kids!  It feels like there are a lot of competing priorities and methods of procrastination, and I know I don't always make the right choices, but I feel like I am finally starting to head into a brain space where I can consider things more clearly.

It's so sad how quickly spending time in God's word can be pushed aside.  I finally began meeting one-to-one with a friend from church this week, and I can actually remember feeling a bit grumpy about it, in the hours leading up to our meeting, because this was going to eat into my relaxing/tv watching/weaving (yes, stress apparently also leads to impulse purchases, as well as comfort eating, and I bought a vintage loom!) time!  How rude!  I'm so glad that we got to meet though!  What a relief to spend some time immersed in Ezra, and realising how quickly and disappointingly the Israelites slipped back into intermarrying with the nations around them, and disobedience, after God had intervened so obviously to bring them back to their land, and rebuild the temple!  What a reminder to me, not to tune God out with the soundtrack of the world!

I'm also trying to work my way through the "I Quit Sugar" program at the moment.  I'm 4 days into cutting out pretty much all fructose, and I have to say, it hasn't been as bad as I thought it might be!  I really miss fruit though, and am toying with the idea of adding it back in a bit earlier, but I guess I'll just stick to the plan for the moment.  Despite finding some of the recipes in the book pretty foul (you can add some egg to some quinoa and call it a macaroon, but it just isn't!!!), I'm quite interested in the research presented, and plan on looking into some other books on the sugar/fat issue too.  If what they're presenting is true, it's got some pretty scary implications for family health!  Bring on the whole foods.

Anyway, sadly this isn't particularly insight or inspiring, but more of a catch-up, and hopefully some motivation for myself to start putting together some of the posts that I've been thinking about for such a long time.  I hope that you're having a great year so far, and that we can spend some more time together!!

Sugar-Free Since 18/03 ... and then not..

As a follow-up to my No Added Sugar post, I thought I should probably tell you how that actually went.  My goal was to go for one week without eating anything with added sugar.

It all started fairly well - will power was high, to the point of even turning down freshly baked blueberry crumble muffins that everybody was raving about in Bible study.  The first couple of days weren't too bad, although getting used to tea and coffee sans sugar was interesting (it added a tinge of sadness to my morning tea coffee ).  About two days in I started feeling quite awful.  I'm still not 100% convinced it was the lack of sugar, but perhaps it was.  After a day or two, I was feeling better again, but nothing significantly better than normal.

It was all going so well, I was six days in with one more to go, when we went out for our Friday night take away.  There we were, sitting in McDonalds (we're very classy) watching Hannah drinking water from her little happy meal bottle.  I raised my cup and took a long draught through my straw, and thought to myselfm "Hmm, Hannah's drinking water.  My water tastes quite sweet ... Hang on a minute!"  It was lemonade.  I was 24 hours from reaching my goal when I found myself accidentally quaffing down a medium sized cup of sprite.  Oh well, close enough.  It turns out that I would have had to break it the next day anyway, because the only morning tea that was served at the Equip conference were little 'sweetie treaties', as we have come to call them in our house.

So, at the end of all that I have nothing particularly remarkable to report.  I went without sugar for a while. Now I'm eating it again.  I have noticed though, I do tend to feel a mild sense of rising panic when I watch my child each chocolate or lollies, while I'm happy enough to eat them myself.  I'm not quite sure what is with that.

Photograph by Uwe Hermann on Flickr

No Added Sugar

Today I am beginning a little experiment.  I'm not sure how it will go or even why I'm really doing it, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.  Deep breath and here goes: I am going to try to cut out all (or as much as I can) sugar for one week.  Phew. I think that still scares me a little...

I would be more scared, but since John and I started doing the 1 Million Kilo Challenge I've cut back to 1 teaspoon of sugar in my coffee (oh, how I love our espresso machine... But that's a story for another day) and half sugars in tea and Ecco (it's a weird drink, I know, but I like it).  I think the hardest thing will be resisting Bible study morning teas and collecting a sweetie treatie from our weekly Baker's Delight leftover's collection.  I'm not sure if I will get withdrawals, but I've recently been reassured from another friend that whenever she goes off sugar for a while she feels "heaps better".  Plus it surely it can only help with weight loss. We shall see how it goes.

I'm glad that Easter isn't in the next week.  Now I just wish I hadn't had a pre-experiment top-up to make up for all the sugar I won't be eating...

Photo from Flickr by Sidereal.