Survival Mode

June is apparently a very bad month for blogging for me!  How is the month already half over?  More importantly, how is the year almost half over??  I pointed out to Dan last night that 2013 is halfway done because it was blowing my mind--I feel like it was just last week that we were setting up the boys' train table for Christmas.  Where has this year gone?  June is always the craziest month for us, with two June birthdays 11 days apart, and with the crushing end-of-the-school year ridiculousness.  Here's just a peak at part of my calendar this month, and this doesn't even include everything!

Oh, June--such a fun, exhausting month

There's always lots of fun to be had in June, and this month is no exception.  We had Alex's 3rd birthday fun this past weekend (not to be confused with his party, which I always try to have the week before his real birthday, just to give myself some separation and sanity between Alex and Abby's birthdays!), along with Father's Day, which we spent down at my in-laws' house enjoying their pool.  This week includes both my mom and my sister's birthdays, as well as Abby's last day of school, Dan's last day of work at his current job, and the arrival of my grandmother from New Mexico--she just turned 90 years old, and hasn't met my boys yet!  We are all getting together for a big family dinner the middle of this week, and then my little family of 5 is relocating to my sister's house for 4 days so that we can enjoy time with my grandmother and get the kids swim lessons with my sister's daughter.  Phew.  After those 4 days are up, we've got to scurry back home so that Dan and I can have a rare date night (my favorite band in concert! woohoo!!!), and prep for Abby's birthday celebration(s)--cupcakes in the park for our neighborhood and her school friends, and then her big birthday party for family out at my parents' house.  As soon as I'm done with those festivities, my best friend Kerry arrives for a 4-day visit!  Super excited for her trip...more to come on that later.  :)  Then I have 2 days to prep for our week-long beach vacation...and we will probably do something festive for the 4th of July as well.  This schedule might do me in--I'm already exhausted, and it doesn't slow down for another month!

Now that you know what I'm up against this month (and you'll know where I've gone if I drop off the face of the earth for a few days--I'm going to try not to, but I'm having a hard time keeping up!), I'll give you the Challenge #2 update:  I weighed in at 133.2 pounds yesterday, for a loss of 0.8 pounds last week.  Last week was a challenge all by itself, simply because it was my first week without my aerobics classes scheduled.  I combated that issue by schedule two nights last week with friends to get my workout on.  I didn't really plan to be gone for two dinner/bedtimes in one week, but it just worked out that way--and Dan was surprisingly gracious about allowing me that time (thank you, honey!).  The first was Monday night--my sweet friend Brynne and I tried out a new place for Zumba, about 20 minutes from my house.  We had so much fun, it totally rocked, and it's not that expensive--they also have a kids' area, of which I'm slightly skeptical (it's literally an empty corner of the room, demarcated by a line on the floor which the children can't cross...hmmmm), so I'm going to try bringing the kids with me sometime soon to see if I can make those classes work on a regular basis.  Then Wednesday night, I attended my friend Ana's Zumba class at her gym where she teaches--her class was the very first exercise class I attended when I started this Challenge back in January, so I was curious to see if I would keep up better after 22 weeks of whipping myself into shape.  My first class with her in January almost killed me--my face was beat red, I was huffing and puffing, and I was scrambling to try to keep up...but it was my introduction to Zumba, and I was totally hooked.  Ana is an amazing instructor--she is fast, energetic, and her choreography is demanding and fun.  I stood in the front row for her class on Wednesday, and I kept up pretty well--I was still red-faced at the end, but I didn't feel shell-shocked like in my first class with her.  She worked us really hard, and I was sore on Thursday, but I was impressed at my competence with a really good instructor.  We stayed after her class to do 20 minutes of the next aerobic class, so I got even more of a workout than I usually get on Wednesday--and that evening's effort is probably the only reason I lost any weight last week!  Not bad for my first week of no classes--I was pretty proud of myself for figuring out ways to still get my exercise in, although this week, I'm totally flying blind without a plan.

I will get a blog up this week about Alex's 3rd birthday party, to include his Thomas cake!  I just got my mom's pictures from her last night--I took a few pictures with my camera, but she's always good at documenting the process for me.  :)  Wish me luck in surviving this crazy week!