49 Fun Things I'm GOING to Do This Fall

Thanks to Pinterest I found a really neat blog that featured a list called "101 Things to Do This Fall!" After I read it I immediately thought I needed to make my own list. Her list included a lot of things to do with your own children. I modified a couple of them to do with other people's kids (We live on campus with all the other students and their families... lots of kids!), but I removed most of them. Plus, 101 things is a lot to do! ONE day AJ and I will have children and I'll have a whole NEW list. :) Fall officially starts on Saturday, September 22! Make your list and get going!
(My list has many of the same things listed as the original because a lot of fall activities are very generic. i.e. visit a pumpkin patch)
49 fun things I'm GOING to do this fall...
49? Are you thinking why not 50? Well, I couldn't think of a 50th, but I might later. For right now its 49.

1. Go on a hike and take in the beautiful colors of Fall.
2. Watch a high school football game.
3.Create a new door wreath with fall flowers and ribbons. (Actually already did this one!)



4. Invite friends over for chili night and have a chili bar like this one.
5. Carve/decorate a pumpkin.
6. Go on a hayride.
7. Make cards for special friends and send in the mail.
8. Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Latte!! This will not be a one time thing...
9. Go to an apple orchard and pick apples!
10. Make homemade apple butter :)
12. Start a family gratitude journal.
13. Surprise someone you love with a mum. My mom actually surprised me with one! Now I need to pay it forward. :)
14. Tailgate before a football game with friends.
15. Visit the pumpkin patch.
16. Collect pine cones and create a beautiful garland or centerpiece.
17. Go to local elementary school and read fall-themed books to children. (I have a friend who is an elemntary teacher who might could help me with this!)
18. Prepare a nature scavenger hunt for the kids at school and help them make art out of their findings.
19. Roast pumpkin seeds. I think I over cooked them! OOPS! I'll know better next time. 
20. Make pumpkin pies, mini ones!
21. Visit a corn maze. I went with my mom, dad, and nephew Sam. It was fun just because we were together. Missed AJ.
22. Have a night time singing (camp songs) and eat s'mores!
23. Participate in trunk or treat and decorate our car all spookey! 
24. Refashion a fall outfit/dress.
25. Make crockpot apple cider, YUM!
26. Purge my closet (and AJ's) of old clothes and donate.
27. Provide dinner for a family (or 2) in my community.
28. Jump in leaf piles and take lots of photos! (Does that mean I have to rake?)
29. Plan a day at the park just lying in the grass, take picnic snacks of course!
30. Invite friends over to watch a football game and serve game day snacks.
31. Enjoy a bonfire with friends and family.
32. Slow down… after the craziness of summer, enjoy the brisk autumn air, the smell of the leaves, the coolness of evening, and savor each moment…
33. Bake pumpkin bread!
34. Pull out the sweaters, wash them up, and anticipate the coziness to come!
35. Make caramel corn.
36. Watch "A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving" and "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown".
37. Go for an early morning walk and watch the sun rise on a cool, crisp day
38. Go on a “day trip” with my hubby.
39. Make a huge pot of homemade soup and enjoy our cozy home!
40. Visit a craft show with friends (great way to get ideas for Christmas!)
41. Bake pumpkin spice cookies.
42.Stay up late and watch the harvest moon. (Sept 29!) It was over cast :/ and after the fact I read that this years HM was supposed to appear smaller than usual.
43. Decorate home and front porch for fall. Decorated the front door thanks to a good friend providing an adorable pmpkin door hanger!
44. Make homemade applesauce.
45. Enter a race! (An excellent gaol to include in my weight loss journey.)
46. Read through the New Testament. (I'm in Luke already!)
47. Eat a delicious Thanksgiving meal with family.
48. Make sweet potato casserole for the first time ever using my Aunt's famous family recipe!
49. Save my pennies to buy a new camera! (I'm reaching here.)
And there you have it! This is my list. I'll be updating the list periodically to cross thing off! Watch for posts about me and AJ doing all of our fun Fall stuff :)
What are you most looking forward to this fall?

So what's up?

Just so you know, trying to lose weight and gain my health back is not the ONLY thing I am doing lately. (It is a major part, however, because I don't want to get diabetes or heart disease!) But since you're here and I just got back from my work out I'll tell you what I did. Today was a weigh-in day, as you know from my last post. It went just how I thought it would go, well, worse.... I GAINED four pounds in August. In July I LOST eleven pounds. It truly is a science. Put the right things in your body and build muscle and burn calories... VIOLA! Weight goes down. Here's my work out today, pretty short but effective.

Concentration: Chest, shoulders and triceps

Dumbbell chest press on exercise ball, 15 reps.
Dumbbell shoulder press on ball, 15 reps.
Lap around indoor track holding weights.
Repeat three times.

Seated dips on bench, 5 reps. (I know, I'm a weakling!)
[Girl] push-ups, 5 reps.
Repeat three times.

Chest press on band machine, 15 reps, 3 sets.

Shoulder press on band machine, 15 reps.
Seated dips (I think that is what its called. Its the same motion) on band machine, 15 reps.
Repeat three times.

10 minutes on Stair Master (death) at 55 steps per minute.

It was about a 40 min work out. I usually try to work out for an hour to an hour and a half, but part of my time was taken up with the weigh-in and then after the SM I was ready to go.

So besides trying to exercise 5 days a week and boring my husband with chicken and veggies I am super excited to say things at MSOP have gone back to exciting! The students' wives meet every Monday night for a chapel service and ladies Bible class. Usually afterwards we go to Starbucks, because we just can't get enough of each other. I have refused to in the past... but I suppose I should start ordering the "skinny" version of anything I order.
Its just not right to skip the whipped cream!!!!

Several other activities have commenced as well including FH ladies class on Tuesdays and Game Day Wednesdays. :) Also, I've been doing a good job about keeping up with the Digging Deep Bible study by Cindy Colley! Are you following along as well?

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

On the eve of a weigh-in.

Tonight is the eve of another weigh-in for me. This will be the third one. I thought this would be a good time to write about the beginning of my weightloss journey.
A short background... All my life I was active. I took ballet and tap from the time I was three years old and continued dancing until my college years. The reason I stopped dancing is a whole other story its self. I'm 5'11" and have always been a bigger person. There were about two glorious years, while I was marching with the band in college, that I was totally fit.




Here I am in my best physical condition... about five years ago when I was 21. Two years later I met my husband. I had not been dancing for almost two years, but I was still pretty fit. Here is a picture of AJ, me and our parents a month before we got married in 2009. I was also working out almost every day to prepare for our wedding day.




Still looking and feeling great as far as I was concerned. Coincidentally, my parents (on the left side) have both dropped a ton of weight now and look great. I'm so proud of them. The first six months AJ and I were married I was able to maintain a healthy weight for my height. Close to our one year anniversary I started to slowly gain weight. Mainly, I thought, due to my inactivity and just being happy. I've heard that a person gains weight when they are happy!




At first the weight gain was slow. Then between September 2010 and September 2011 I gained 30 to 40 pounds. Mixed in that year AJ and I completely uprooted our lives and moved to Memphis for him to go to school. (So glad we did!) In September 2011, I stopped taking birth control. (TMI? So sorry!) A couple of months passed and NO CYCLE. I've always had irregular cycles so it was no big deal... at first. Fast forward to May 2012 and still NO cycle. Also, I've only continued to gain weight. Tipping the scale at almost 250 pounds! I made an appointment to see a doctor. After blood work and an ultra sound it is determined that I have PCOS. Poly-cystic Ovary Syndrome involves and can mess up so many things with your body. I won't bore you with all the details. I'll just mention that PCOS is why I wasn't having monthly cycles... because it totally messes with a persons hormones which can totally mess up a persons metabolism which can cause a person to gain a ton of weight if gone undetected. ::sigh::




(This is me shortly after we arrived in Memphis. Getting bigger...)
So after I was given the diagnoses and immediately began thinking of fertility... or infertility. I began reading and reading. It is possible for a woman to become pregnant with PCOS with the help of different medications. Well, at the time AJ and I weren't interested in becoming pregnant so I determined within myself that I was going to correct my PCOS symptoms with weight loss. I've read that sometimes just losing 5 to 7% of you body weight can correct some of the symptoms.




(Here I am, tallest in the middle, at my heaviest back in June 2012. I had actually already started training but not showing a change yet.)
That week I signed up with a personal trainer at the local gym and began changing my diet. I started training at 237 pounds. At my first weigh-in, almost 6 weeks later, I was still at 237. However, my body fat % had gone down and my muscle mass % had gone up. I was showing some promise. At my second weigh-in I was at 226!! I had lost 11 pounds!! I couldn't believe it. I had also shed 4 inches off of my waist alone. I had my trainer measure twice because I just couldn't believe it. I was ecstatic. Losing 11 pounds gave me the boost of confidence and belief that I needed. Just two days after that weigh-in, AJ had a long break from school, two weeks. Thats two weeks away from home, away from the gym, eating out and little to no control over what I was eating.
That brings me to right now. August has been a bust for sure. I am just hoping I am at the same weight I was at when I weighed in at the beginning of August. I think I gained back two or three pounds though. There isn't another break from school until the middle of December. That's over three months of continuous hard core exercise and eating the right foods! I've set a huge goal of thirty pound by January 1st. I can totally do it.
So that's [part] of my story and I'm sticking to it. Thanks for reading, if you made it this far, ha ha! I'll be back with an update after I weigh-in tomorrow.

**Update** Just as I suspected. My weigh-in results are only a minor set back, though. Ready to hit the gym hard.

Four months later...

I'm back! For some reason I cannot explain I just fell off the blogging wagon for a little while. I was still putting in the same amount of time READING other people's blogs of course. Now, I have so many blogs bookmarked that there is no way I could possibly follow them all... it overwhelms me if I try so I just don't. I have bookmarked blogs about sewing and crafting/DIY; pregnancy, childbirth and parenting; cooking, baking and gardening; fitness, dieting, and clean eating. Then I have several blogs that I follow through the blogger reader tool. Although I don't read each one every day they are there if I need an idea for a project or a recipe or to see what the latest is on the "best" style of parenting out there.

There is a blog that I recently found, don't remember how, called She Learns as She Goes. The author posts resolutions for each month and then grades her self at the end of that month to see how she did in keeping those resolutions. This is something that I would really like to start doing for my self. When SLASG does it she opens the post to a "link party". I don't want to do that though. I'm not SO interested in other people reading my resolutions. If its something you might like to do though you can follow the link to her blog. If you are subscribed to "BlimeyCow" on youTube you might recognize the author of this blog.

So, that is how I want to get back into blogging. I am going to start doing "monthly resolutions". At the beginning of each month I will list 3-5 resolutions that I want to keep. At the end of the month I will grade myself to see how well, or bad, I did. Guess what, its the first of September. Perfect timing, huh?

September Resolutions:

Hit the gym at least five days every week. I recently joined a new gym and have started working with a trainer every week. I'll post more about that later.

Start and keep up with the Digging Deep Bible study, "Sanctified". You can find more information about that here. It looks like it's going to be a really awesome study. You should follow along, too! The study starts today :)

Stick to our budget Dave Ramsey style, envelopes and all. Aaron and I really need to attack our school debt so we can start saving like we want.

Continue the Light for Your Path Sunday blog series!


Do you have a favorite blog that you read almost every day?