Over the past few months, we’ve been struggling with NHL on a little matter. He keeps putting his fingers in his mouth. Sometimes he’s biting his nails, sometimes he’s sucking on his fingers. A few times, he’ll even put toys (or other objects) in his mouth. Considering that he’s 6 years old, he’s way too old to be doing this. We keep telling him to stop, that he’ll get sick by doing this, but he persists. I’ve even wondered if putting hot sauce on his fingers might stop him. I wouldn’t seriously do this, but when I’m really frustrated it sounds like a good option.

My Aloha Friday question to you is: How would stop your child from doing this or some other annoying habit?

Thanks to Kailani at An Island Life for starting this fun for Friday. Please be sure to head over to her blog to say hello and sign the MckLinky there if you are participating.

Aloha #27

We woke up on Sunday ready to go to have a "super day." Yes, today was Super Bowl Sunday, but we had other plans.

We weren’t going to down wings while watching the big game. Instead, we were going to see some animals and have some fun in Disney’s Animal Kingdom. We hopped on the bus and made our way there, arriving before the park opened. Read more of this article »

Ok, maybe this isn’t “wordless”, but it was still too cute not to share!

When we went to Disney World last year, we travelled with B’s parents. This meant we had backup. It was four adults, two children. That’s enough coverage to pull suitcases, wrangle little ones and still have an adult hand or two free. This year, there was no such luxury. It was B and me toting suitcases and two kids.

From the start, it was “fun.” B’d father dropped us off at the airport and we tried to figure out how two adults with four hands total would carry five carry-on bags and four suitcases while looking after two children. We opted for the “crossing the river slowly” approach. That is to say, B stood with the bags while I brought some inside some glass doors. Then I left NHL with the bags, positioned myself so I could see both him and B and signaled B to proceed. She brought more bags to NHL until they were all by him.

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Weight: 193 lbs (down 4.5 pounds)

Average Hours of Sleep: 6.8 hours

Total Workout Time: 0

Total Calories Burned: 0

On my first week back from Disney World, I didn’t expect much weight loss. I found myself hungry and snacking all too often as my body adjusted from “Eating Lots Of Wonderful Disney Food” back to “Eating My Normal Lighter Fare.” Still, I must have done a good job because my weigh-in showed a loss of 4.5 pounds. I’m now a mere 6 pounds to my goal!

Still, roadblocks still are in my way. The first roadblock will be this weekend. My new nephew was born last weekend and we’ll be attending the bris this coming weekend. (Weather and child health permitting.) At the bris, there will be a lot of good foods to eat. In addition, that whole weekend, we’ll likely be eating out which means higher calories.

The next roadblock comes in five weeks. At that point, we’ll have the eight day long matzoh-fest known as Passover. During Passover, foods that are normally allowed aren’t permitted. These include not just breads, rice and other grains, but corn, beans/legumes (including soy and peanuts), and a few others. You wind up subsisting on a lot of Matzoh which isn’t conducive to weight loss at all. I plan on treating Passover weight-loss like I treated Disney weight-loss. I will try to make healthy choices, but won’t sweat it at all. I’m definitely not going to try counting points at all. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a few pounds packed on during Passover.

To mitigate Passover’s effect, I’m going to set a mini-goal of reaching 189 by the Sunday before Passover. This means losing 4 pounds in 5 weeks which is completely doable (especially considering that I’ve averaged 2 1/3 pounds per week so far). I also won’t count my goal as being achieved until Passover is over. (As I could hit 187 before Passover and then gain 5 pounds during Passover.)

Here’s hoping your #NewMe goals are going as well as mine are.

Yesterday, I talked about re-evaluating my religious beliefs. Today, I was wondering how common this is for everyone else. Do people take a good long look at their beliefs and practices every year, every five years, or pretty much never?

My Aloha Friday question to you is: How often do you re-evaluate what your religious beliefs are?

Thanks to Kailani at An Island Life for starting this fun for Friday. Please be sure to head over to her blog to say hello and sign the MckLinky there if you are participating.

Aloha #26

NOTE: I wanted to write about our Disney Trip today, but this post was bubbling beneath the surface and demanded to be written. I’ll get back to Disney last week. (Well, get back to blogging about it… I can only dream about going back to Disney World sometimes soon!)

I’ve written before about my “divided self.” Part of me is very scientific and wants to explain everything via the scientific method. Part of me is religious and wants to cling to the traditions that I adopted as I grew up. The two sides often war with each other. My scientific side arguing that there is no need for doing a particular thing due to Scientific facts A, B and C and my religious side arguing that there are valid reasons for doing things such a way due to laws X, Y and Z in the Torah.

As I mentioned in Shackles of Habit, though, the mere fact that you’ve done something a certain way for awhile can lead to you not wanting to change how you do things. Even if your reasoning behind the action becomes moot, is proven wrong, or if circumstances change, it can still be tough to alter your habits from what you have been doing.

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I’m a big believer in giving bad news before good news. Whenever anyone tells me "I’ve got good news and bad news", I always ask to hear the bad news first. My reasoning is that you should get the bad news out of the way so that you can better focus on the good news. With that in mind, I’m going to tell a few "bad news" stories about our Disney World trip. Once these are out of the way, I’ll better be able to focus on all of the fun times we had. Please don’t take the following stories to indicate that our trip was horrible. These are just the four "bad news" stories that I need to get out of the way so I can tell the "good news" stories later on.

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JSL has always been a funny kid. He likes pretending that he’s a puppy, even so far as calling himself “JSL Pup-Pup.” He’ll walk around on all fours and lick us. The licking might get annoying, but then he looks at us and says “pup-pup kiss!” in this sweet little voice that makes it impossible to feel annoyed.

Recently, however, it’s gotten a little out of hand. It began with him insisting on being called “JSL Pup-Pup.” I couldn’t just call him JSL. That would lead to a tantrum. Then he decided that he was “Baby JSL Pup-Pup.” Then, considering that he wasn’t exactly a baby, but not wanting to drop that part of his title, expanded to “Baby JSL Pup-Pup, Big JSL Pup-Pup.” During Disney, he added “happy” to the list. No, not just “Happy Baby etc”, but “Baby JSL Pup-Pup, Happy Big JSL Pup-Pup, Big JSL Pup-Pup.” (Not sure why the “big” label needed to be repeated.) This seems to have been temporary, though, because he’s dropped it. Unfortunately, he’s replaced it with a “robot.” Don’t ask me where he heard about robots, but now he’s “Baby JSL Pup-Pup, Big JSL Pup-Pup, Robot JSL Pup-Pup.” Oh yes, and the other day, during a piggy back ride, he declared himself a cowboy also. Luckily here he combined titles.

His full title nowadays seems to be “Baby JSL Pup-Pup, Big JSL Pup-Pup, Robot Cowboy JSL Pup-Pup.” No abbreviations or nicknames (short of his brother calling him “babes”) will do. We must refer to him using the full phrase lest he remind us: “No! Me Baby JSL Pup-Pup. Me Big JSL Pup-Pup. Me Robot Cowboy JSL Pup-Pup!”

Ah, the joys of a two-and-a-half year old!

Weight: 197.5 lbs (up 0.5 pounds)

Average Hours of Sleep: N/A

Total Workout Time: N/A (though I walked a TON at Disney World)

Total Calories Burned: N/A (again, though, I walked a ton at Disney World)

As other posts of mine said, we spent the past week at Disney World. The food there is so good that I decided from the start that I wouldn’t count calories at all. I gave myself a week off from thinking about weight loss and freely ate cheesecakes, pizzas, ice cream, Tonga Toast* and other things that should have packed on the pounds. And yet, the scale only rose by the smallest of amounts (half a pound). Why? Well, when one sees Disney World, one walks. A lot! B had a pedometer on and I believe she said it was something in the order of 15,000 steps a day on average. Since 2,000 steps roughly equals a mile (this can vary based on stride length but let’s rely on this figure for the moment), this means we walked about 7.5 miles per day. No wonder my feet were so tired at the end of each day! Also, no wonder that I was able to burn off all of that fattening food. If you’re walking 7 or more miles every single day, you probably can eat whatever you want without packing on the pounds. Let’s call this the “Disney Diet.”

Of course, I couldn’t stay on the Disney Diet forever. For one thing, I need to earn money. Until I figure out a way to get Disney to pay me to wander around their parks riding rides, taking photos, and blogging about it all, I need to go to my 9-5 (ok, 8 – 4:30) job. Now, if anyone at Disney is willing to pay me my current salary to be a “professional Disney guest”, I’d be more than willing to take them up on the offer!

Getting back to my weight loss, I actually expected to gain up to 5 pounds so I’m in a very good position. I have 15 weeks to go and just over 10 pounds to lose. I’m not going to rest on my laurels** but I’m feeling pretty confident right now.

* To everyone who’s never heard of or tried Tonga Toast, boy are you missing a treat! It’s a thick piece of sourdough bread stuffed with bananas, dipped in a milk/egg/vanilla mixture, fried and topped with cinnamon and sugar. Not healthy by any stretch but oh-so-good. I plan on attempting a healthy version at one point.

** I was going to make a Laurel and Hardy gag here, but “resting on my hardy” just sounded too risque. Of course, now I’ve gone and made the gag anyway!