Sheep Guarding Llama

Today is my first full day in the office since Luciana arrived.  I went in this morning but came home for a long lunch to spend time with the family and to help Dominica out around the house since there is still a lot that she can’t do on her own – or shouldn’t be doing at least.  So I hung out for a while before going back to the office to do the evening deployments.

For lunch today Dominica made me an egg beater omelet, well it was supposed to be an omelet, it turned into a scramble.  It was a nice change for my lean and green meal.

I was at work fairly late tonight, but that is to be expected.  It is a Friday.

Once I got home we spent the evening just hanging out at the house.

Today is my third day on Medifast and my first day going back in to the office since Luciana was born.  I am not going in this morning, just this afternoon.  This morning we took Luciana to her checkup at the pediatrician.  That went very well.  She is making excellent progress both in her food consumption and in her jaundice.

After “lunch” was over I drove down to Las Colinas to go to the office.  Dominica is feeling pretty good and while she cannot drive for at least a week yet she did feel that she would be alright staying home with Liesl and Luciana for a few hours.  So I went in around two and worked until five thirty or six.

I got home about an hour before the Kimberlins arrived to come visit.  They had actually come to see us at the hospital but I was at home taking care of Liesl when they visited so they only got to see Dominica and Luciana.  They are the only non-family who got to see Luciana in the hospital.

We had a good time hanging out this evening.  We haven’t really seen the Kimberlins since shortly after having moved to Texas.  We live much closer to them than we did when we lived down in Irving.  This was their first time seeing our new house as well.

Today is my second day on Medifast.  I am already in to the routine for the most part.  It’s not that bad and I feel pretty good.  I don’t have any problems cutting back to fewer calories, in fact I usually feel better when doing that.  It feels like I am making progress but hard to say.  It is only the second day.  I weighed in on Monday but haven’t yet since then.  I’m going to give it a few days in the hopes of seeing visible progress by the time that I first weigh in.  I’d be awfully upset if I found out that I was actually fluctuating up or something in the interim.

This evening, Watson and I went and spent several hours down in Las Colinas doing some datacenter work.  It was a long night, probably three hours, but we were productive.  I took some of my Medifast with me to mix and “eat” while working.

While we were there, Dominica found a cricket in our bedroom.  She was not happy about that at all.  She did manage to kill it before I got home, though.

Today I am starting my first day on Medifast.  I am still working from home which makes it a lot easier to get used to the new routine.  I’ll be working from home for the next three days and then transitioning back in to being in the office at the end of the week.

My morning started off with a Medifast caramel bar.  Not very exciting.  It is going to be a long twenty seven weeks of eating this stuff.  And that is just the beginning.  The full program lasts for a year and a half!  This diet is a very, very large commitment.  This is really going to change our lifestyles.  Dominica is hoping to try out the diet once she is cleared to do so.

I had my shakes and my other bar throughout the day.  They aren’t the best shakes but they are very healthy and filling.  We didn’t have any food in the house to use for my lean and green meal today or in the future.  That is going to be a challenge.

So after work was done, we loaded up the girls and went to Kroger to do some shopping.  That turned into quite the excursion.  It took several hours to get the shopping done and it was nine thirty before we even got back home!  That was very late considering that I needed to cook and deal with food yet after that point.

I had a snack of two dill pickle spears, one of the few snacks that I am allowed to have, this is going to be rough.  Then, around ten thirty, I was finally able to eat my lean and green meal which was steamed tilapia on an arugula salad that I made for myself with just a little raspberry vinaigrette dressing.  It was pretty tasty, especially after a full day of not having any real food.

Today is Luciana’s one week “birthday.”  She is doing well as is Dominica at this point.

My day started off busy and just escalated from there.  I was on the phone early on and doing one project after another all day.  It wasn’t long before we had to load the girls up in to the car and drive down to Irving for Dominica’s first checkup post baby.  This will be the first outing for Luciana other than going to her won pediatrician.

The checkup went well but took forever.  Liesl is always happy to go to the doctor’s office and play with the foam blocks and wooden puzzles. She just loves “other people’s toys.”  This time there were several small children (all older than Liesl) there and they were very rambunctious.  They were throwing the foam blocks, screaming, hiding under furniture and even throwing a foam ottoman at each other.  It was crazy.  No one was watching them at all.

Liesl thought that all of this was great fun but she was very good and just stood in the middle of the mayhem laughing and laughing but did not scream or throw things herself, which I would have had to have stopped.    Luciana slept through the whole thing – the benefit of being Liesl’s little sister.

After the doctor’s appointment we had a little time to kill before an appointment at Coldwell where we are signing yet more paperwork about the house next door to ours – we are putting in yet another lower offer than our last one.  Since we had a little bit of time to kill we stopped in to Medifast in Las Colinas and got some information about how the plan works.  Dominica has been wanting me to try it for several weeks now as her aunt and uncle have been doing it for a while and have been very happy with it and have been having great success.  Since we are so busy now with Luciana and there is no time for cooking or food prep of any kind, it seemed like the perfect time to move to a packaged food plan.

We got the information and pricing but that was all of the time that we had.  Then it was over to the real estate office to sign the paperwork.  Once that was done we decided that we had a little more time so we returned to Medifast and I had my first session.  That took some time, I did an initial weight in, got my materials, got my initial training and picked up my first week’s worth of food – which really was just shakes and food bars.  I don’t get any of the real food until next week.  This is the super healthy stuff to help jump start the process.

The plan is pretty simple.  I eat five of the Medifast packaged meals per day, spreading them out and attempting to eat every two to three hours.  Then once per day I also eat a “lean and green” meal that is very lean, low carb, low sodium and has three servings of veggies.  So a large salad with six ounces of grilled fish is a good example.  Not too hard to do.  Good thing that I love fish or this would be really hard.  There are other options but without fish it would be that much harder.

Since it is already afternoon, I am going to be starting the plan in the morning.  So tomorrow is my first day on the diet. The main diet portion is to last for twenty seven weeks.  A long, long twenty seven weeks.  I suppose that that should encourage me to begin exercising a lot in the hopes of losing the weight more quickly so that it would be over sooner.