Health Crazed

I don't know what's come over our household lately, but fitness is all the rage here right now. Last week, a new exercise bike arrived on our doorstep, along with two Fitbits. For the record, assembling the exercise bike was almost as much of a workout as riding it...

Saturday, Mr. W and I wore our Fitbits for the first time, locked in fierce competition to see who would take more steps.

At the end of the day, Mr. W beat me by about 3,000. I've decided he must have much shorter legs than I do and for every step I take, he takes a step and a half... That can be the only answer...

The trouble with the exciting combo of Fitbit and new exercise bike is that the Fitbit doesn't count pedaling as steps. You have to stand up while you pedal for anything to register. And that's much harder than sitting on the cushy over-sized butt pad. Even when I used to mountain bike, I was never a stand-up-in-the-saddle kind of girl. I'll take the chafing over the extra work any day. Which means I guess I'll have to make peace with the fact that my Fitbit won't be counting any bike time... Sigh.

To round out the madness, we decided to do another juice fast beginning after breakfast yesterday. I probably negated any good the fast would do by making bacon, eggs, and hash browns in the morning, but whatev. Waiting to start until after breakfast made the whole thing much more tolerable than it was when we did it the first time. I barely even felt a hunger pang when I was out pulling weeds all day. (Seriously. ALL DAY.) And it was sort of nice not to have to make dinner.

(Note to anyone doing a juice fast: Do not go on Pinterest while you're fasting. That site is pretty much just a pictorial encyclopedia of every yummy dish that was ever cooked in life.)

One last health craze I decided to try out yesterday was oil pulling. Has anyone else heard about this? Erin wrote about it on Mimosa Lotus last week and then I saw a bit about it on Good Morning America, so I decided to try it for kicks as I transitioned from bacon to kale juice.

It was pretty gross at first. Taking a tablespoon of solidified coconut oil and moving it around in my mouth until it became liquid again was not the funnest thing I've ever done. Swishing it for 20 minutes after that wasn't so great either. And I'm not sure it did any of the things it's supposed to. I can't tell if my teeth look any whiter. That said, I might try it one more time before writing it off completely.

The hope behind all the new equipment and endeavors is that we'll kick our overall health up a notch. After all, Mr. W is turning 40 in a couple weeks (and I'll be 38). And being apart for the last year and a half hasn't exactly caused a decrease in my wine and chocolate consumption...or the size of my thighs...

My Ballast

This week, Mr. W and I celebrated our third wedding anniversary. Well, I shouldn't say "celebrated" because we were about 120 miles apart from one another on the day. We "reached" our three-year anniversary. That feels more accurate.

I was lucky because two of my dearest life coach buddies happened to be staying with me for the week, so they took me to dinner and we toasted my relationship. It was lovely (and delicious—if you ever find yourself at Los Olivos Cafe, order the short ribs) but there was an enormously important component missing.

Last night yet another coach friend came up to the Maris Ranch to spend the night and as we huddled around the coffee table drinking wine and gobbling quinoa salad, she asked me what was going on with my business endeavors.

"All I care about right now is being with my husband," I said.

The other day I did the math and of the three years that Mr. W and I have been locked in wed, one and a half of those have been spent living in different cities.

Half of the time we've been married, we've been apart.

"All I want to do is be with him and work on our house and start really living the life we've been dreaming about for the past few years."

I told her how I'm not my best self when he's away. He brings out something better in me, but more importantly, he keeps me grounded in a way no one and nothing else does.

The title of this post and the boat shot under it might lead you to think I know something about sailing. I do not. But I do know that when I'm away from my husband, I feel like an untethered sail, flapping wildly in the wind. When I'm reconnected to him, I can handle the gusts again.

The girls joked about how he was like my little energetic stability pillar. Which he totally is.

The conversation turned and as we poured more wine, we suddenly heard a commotion come from the kitchen.

I thought it was the cat until all three of the girls shouted, "Oh my gosh, it's him!"

He surprised me and came up a whole night early to be with me closer to our anniversary.

And then he proceeded to hang out and drink wine with my girlfriends and me.

I don't know how I got so lucky to have such a strong, steady person as my own. But I will take him and thank him again and again as he helps me weather every last gust of wind that comes our way.

We're Expecting...Chickens

An ad from Hobby Farms magazine. Yep, Mr. W has a subscription.

If you read here regularly, you already know that we're planning to get some chickens, and that we (and by we, I mostly mean Mr. Wonderful) have been building a chicken/coop greenhouse to hold them in our side yard. Mr. W has been researching chicken rearing for at least a year, and this weekend we took a humongous step toward having them: we ordered four. They should arrive at the end of April.

As soon as Mr. W clicked "submit" on the website, I felt nervous. Like we were pregnant with quadruplets. I even had a dream that night that we had a baby girl. Strangely, we had hired a surrogate to carry her, but then even more strangely, I was breastfeeding her. I know—I should probably call my old shrink. Clearly I need to work through some weird ass Freudian stuff... Anywhoo...

So now Mr. W has to try to get me up to speed on how to take care of our little feathered friends. He was reading in bed over the weekend, and shared these gems with me from one of his chicken books:

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The "Holding a Chicken Backwards" instruction is by far my fave. I'm totally going to have Mr. W take a picture of me carrying one of the girls like that. But first, we have to get through the baby stage.

Apparently the girls will be living indoors with us for about 5 weeks while they grow big enough to survive out in their coop. Of course I asked if they could sleep on our pillows and wake us up each morning with sweet little peeping sounds. Mr. W doesn't seem to think it would work quite like that...

It's a good thing we have so much time before they arrive because the coop still looks like this:

When it's finished, it should look like this:

 

The actual chicken run will be smaller, but the rest of the sketch is pretty accurate. Greenhouse on the south side, chicken coop on the east side, storage on the west side, and a roof garden on top.

In addition to counting down the days until the girls arrive, I'm counting the days until Mr. W is here fulltime. We only have about 3-ish more weeks to go. I cannot wait. I did the math recently and although we're coming up on our 3-year anniversary, we've lived apart for HALF of that time. We have a lot of newlywed shenanigans to catch up on. Let's just say the chickens won't be the only ones doing a lot of pecking around here...