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I’ve been trying to get back into logging my food with My Fitness Pal, though it hasn’t really been working.  I forget all day, and then I eat terribly and think, “What’s the point in knowing how many calories I consumed when I clearly ate too many?”  And so nothing changes.

I finally realized that there were actually four things I wanted to do to make myself feel better: (1) Do yoga daily, (2) Drink 8 cups of water, (3) Get closer to 8 hours of sleep, (4) Balance and limit my caloric intake.  The problem was that I was trying to do all of them at once and it wasn’t working.  So I decided to only do one at a time and see if that worked out better.

So the first thing I did was start doing yoga daily.  I’ve pretty much stuck with this for years, but not in a mindful way.  So now I committed to doing it every morning, and of course nailed this goal since I was already doing it.  Sidenote: it helps to start with something you know you can accomplish.

Next I decided to add in the water thing.  This is huge because I still wasn’t eating well, but I had to say to myself, “Food isn’t your concern right now.  Water is.”  So I’ve been drinking 9 cups of water.  It’s easier than 8 because my water container holds 3 cups of water, and I just fill it 3 times during the day.

And even though there are two things I’m still not doing, I’m focusing on the fact that there are two things I am doing.

And here’s the thing: I have been eating better because the water fills me up so I’m less likely to go in the kitchen and grab a handful of crackers.  (Oh, crackers, I love you so damn much.)  Without trying, I’m actually getting closer to a place where it isn’t going to be a big deal to start counting calories again and looking at the nutritional breakdown of my food to make sure I’m getting enough protein and not too much sugar.  So that is pretty cool.

I’m currently between step 2 and step 3, feeling like I’ve got a good grasp on the water consumption thing and starting to set a bedtime for myself.  I need to begin by not playing video games up until the second I go to bed because that clearly hasn’t been working for me.  I’m feeling like 11:15 is a good time for lights out, so maybe I should read during that 15 minute appendix of time dangling off the evening.

And once I stick to that for a while, it will be time to limit my beloved sugar.

I recently read a good post on Lifehacker about setting negative incentives, which sounds like it would work well for me.  (Of course, it may not motivate you at all.)  The idea is to set a negative consequence that you want to avoid rather than setting a positive consequence for reaching your goal.

I decided to set $20 in a jar.  Every day that I don’t stick to recording my food on My Fitness Pal and staying within the caloric goal, I am going to remove $1.  At the end of the month, I get to take the remaining money and buy myself a new section of the PS4 game that I’m playing.  Each part is about $15, so if I stick to the plan, I will have enough money.  And if I don’t, I know that I have no one to blame but myself*.

In fact, I may make it worse and tell myself that the lost money needs to go toward buying Josh one of his annoying albums that he’ll play in the car, subjecting me to his musical noise.  So not only will I be unhealthy and unable to play more of my game, but I will have to listen to Josh’s music.

So that is how I’m turning it all around.

* I’m pretty certain I’ll only need to do this for one month.  Once I get into a routine, I’m pretty good about keeping it going.  I’m just terrible at starting the routine.

I spent the morning about a week ago dropping very obvious hints that I wanted the Superman LEGO Dimensions action figure.  As Josh made the ChickieNob’s lunch, I loudly told her all about how much I loved Superman.  She kept saying, “I know.”  Which only made me say it more emphatically.  Did she know that the Superman can swim AND fly in the game?  And melt gold and ice with his eyes?  And see through green walls?  And fixed cracked walls?

Did she know all these things PLUS how much I love Superman?

(Aside: I love Superman.  Josh and I like to play a game called “You Can Only Save One” where two items are on fire and you can only save… well… one of them. (I’m fairly certain you were able to get there on your own based on the title of the game, but just in case.)  One old favourite is DC Comics vs. Marvel.  As much as we both love X-Men, we both save DC.  Josh saves DC for historical reasons, but I save DC because Superman is such a great character.  And he’s cute.

Did I mention that Josh is a good person and I am shallow?)

Anyway, one of the reasons I felt that Josh should get me Superman is that I could keep Superman on my desk when not in use with the game, and he would keep me company.

That’s a lot of pressure to put on molded plastic, but I don’t have co-workers.  Or, I do, but they don’t work in my office.  It’s just me and Truman, and Truman likes to nap.  When he’s awake, he’s attacking the water bottle or begging for cookies.  Whereas LEGO figures are really good at keeping people company and being very quiet and respectful of my work time.

Like there are days when I work with Harry, Ron and Hermione.

They make me feel good.  They make me think about happy things (like Harry Potter!) while I’m plugging away at work.  I ask them their opinion when Truman is too busy fighting his water bottle to listen.  Yes, they may be inanimate plastic, but when I put on my Ravenclaw robes, it looks like we’re all in uniform.  And that is important, too.

Anyway, Josh bought me Superman.  And he is so freakin’ awesome.  Except that he swims really slowly in the game, so I have to use Aquaman to get wherever I’m going and then switch to Superman to solve the puzzle.  But moreover, during the day, Superman gives me his opinion on comma placement as he hangs out on my desk.  Best co-worker ever.

P.S. I’ve now set my sights on Wonder Woman.  If Josh won’t let me bring stray cats into the house, the least he can do is buy me plastic toys.

I was once sitting with a senior staffer at the White House before an event, and she admitted that despite seeing the President every day for her job, it still took her breath away every single time she saw him in the hallway or he walked into a meeting. She said the day that doesn’t happen is the day when you know there is something wrong with you. That it means you’re taking it for granted that you are in this amazing place with amazing people, taking part in making history.

I think about that every time I’m in the White House.

I do a self-check and make sure that I appreciate how lucky I am to be inside that building, interacting with the people who work within its walls.

I got to go to the White House for the Let’s Move event on Tuesday morning. It was a magical day. Hanging out with super smart women, listening to other super smart women speak: Seriously, so lucky.

Every single person speaking not only inspired me to make a big salad for dinner but to continue doing the work of making sure that healthy options are the easy, go-to options for the next generation. When you hear the statistics on kids and obesity, there isn’t another sane decision.  (1 in 3 kids!)

As Dominique Dawes pointed out, we don’t wait until kids are 13 to start teaching them to brush their teeth or wash their face, but for some reason, we think it’s okay to have kids eat overly processed junk food when they’re young and think that we can teach them differently when they’re older.

Probably my favourite part of the day was learning about FNV. Have you heard about this yet? It hasn’t officially been rolled out, but Partnership for a Healthier America put together a brand campaign for… fruits and veggies. Get it?  They’re combatting advertising for junk food on its own terms, making equally enticing, celebrity-hawked, a little cheeky ads for broccoli and carrots. My favourite so far has been for Wolverbean.

Okay, and my other favourite part of the day was the First Lady. She rocks so hard. I will forever be grateful that she took on healthy living and making sure that kids find the same message (instead of conflicting messages) in as many places as possible as her cause at the White House. Thank you for your work in getting better food in schools. Thank you for your work in getting rid of food deserts. Thank you for getting spaces built and programs in place that get kids moving. Thank you, FLOTUS. Please know how much your efforts are appreciated.

The day ended in the White House garden, squatting in the aisles, photographing kale and lettuce. And yes, I took a moment to check in and make sure that I appreciated where I was and what I was doing. I did. I appreciate it so much.

A few more pictures from the day:

Can you find the Arnebya?  It was so good to get to sit with her vs just talk via email.

Flowers under Nancy Reagan’s portrait

The magnolia trees were in bloom.  It was so pretty.

The White House garden makes you want a big salad.

Squinting on the White House lawn.  Is that the… sun?

Thank you, BlogHer and SheKnows (especially Jenny Lauck), for making this day possible.

I got archery certified this past weekend.  It involved an 8 hour course where I learned things like bow safety and correcting a student’s stance and bow safety.  And did I mention bow safety?  There was a lot of talk of bow safety.

I got certified because our Girl Scout troop did some fancy pants math and realized that it was less expensive to have an adult get trained and lead the activity than it would be to hire someone every time we wanted to do archery.  So off I went to learn about bow safety and more bow safety.  And then I took a hands on test, a teaching test, and a written test, and went home a newly-certified archery instructor.

But this is the thing.  Prior to this point, I had not given a lot of thought to archery.  I did it at camp and enjoyed it, but I’ve never felt a desire to pick up a bow again.  But the moment I picked up that orange compound genesis bow that fit in my hand as if it was made for my palm… I fell in love.

Like deeply in love.  Like I could have stood there in the field shooting arrows all afternoon.

Which sort of bothered me because as I was sliding my arrows out of the target, pretending that I was Legolas about to fight the orcs, I asked myself what was different between a bow and a gun?  Clearly they’re both weapons.  Clearly they’re both potentially lethal.  Maybe all I was doing was shooting at a paper target, but there are others who use the bow and arrow to go hunting.  So it’s a tool that is meant to kill other things.

And yet in my brain, I saw them as different or I wouldn’t have gone and taken the course.

I don’t know.  I’m still chewing on this.  I’m going to teach the girls archery. (As well as bow safety!  Always bow safety!)  But it does make me think.

Our family went on a retreat recently with our shul.  I had been looking forward to this retreat for a long time, beginning with the fact that I have fond memories of retreats from when I was a kid to the time to get to know some of the other families better to the fact that it was all preparation for the twins’ B’nai Mitzvah.

Yes, the little monkeys that were still drinking from bottles when this blog started are now going to have their Bar and Bat Mitzvahs.

But that’s not what this post is about.

The retreat was at my old sleepaway camp.  It’s not that far from DC, but I hadn’t been back in 20 years, and I was so excited to see the space again.  I knew we were staying at a new building they had constructed on the other end of the campus, but surely it wouldn’t be a big deal to slip over to the older side of campus and see my old cabin.

I loved sleepaway camp; like passionately, with every cell in my body, loved it.  I loved everything about it, even the enormous hill that we had to walk up and down several times each day.  I loved being in my cabin and dances in the big all-purpose room and art in the little shack at the top of the hill.  I was the type of person who came home at the end of the summer and cried for a full week because I couldn’t handle the idea that I wasn’t at camp anymore.  At school I was struggling to fit in, but for 4 weeks in the summer, I had a crew, I belonged.

So during the first break, we tried to find the old campus.  We trekked through the woods, confused, because nothing was where I remembered it.  We found one building that I recognized from a different part of the campus, and we went inside, marveling that it still smelled exactly like itself.  This old, musty cold smell like wood and metal and dust.

We returned from break confused about where the old camp would be.  Compounding the problem was that they had built a new set of cabins in a new section of the camp and named it the old camp section’s name.  So when we got directions, we had been sent to the new location of the old camp.  I had pretty much given up on the idea of finding it when the rabbi asked if we wanted to go on a walk to the lake.  There was only one lake, so if he could get me to the lake, I could orient myself and find the old site.

After a long walk through very unfamiliar woods, we came to a memorial that had been at the lake when I was a kid.  The boathouse was gone and the tennis courts were overrun with weeds (not to mention the fact that the pool was now a tomato garden), but the snake path still stretched out towards the top of the hill.  Everyone else went ahead, but the twins and one of their friends and her dad climbed up to the old site.

I was so strange and wonderful and sad and overwhelming to be in that space again.  The campus has been closed for years, and the buildings that hadn’t yet been torn down were damaged beyond repair.  The dining hall was missing as well as the little camp store where we would buy Goldenberg’s Peanut Chews.  But both my cabins were still there.  We couldn’t go inside because they weren’t safe anymore, but the little screened in porch where we liked to sit when it rained was still there.

The theater was still partially standing, though all the benches in the amphitheater had been removed.  And the all-purpose room (we called it the Ulam) where I was banned from attending one of the camp dances because we were caught with (gasp!) boys in our cabin one night.

The twins and their friend were so excited to hear about camp back then.  I was grateful that they were with me because it was a chance to talk about the space, plus it was somewhat creepy to be up in that abandoned camp.  But also because I don’t know if I could have left if they hadn’t been reminding me that we had to return to the program.  I felt so sad standing there in the mud, staring at what was left of one of the most important places in the world to me.

I really could have stood there for hours, trying to remember everything.

Is your old camp (or school — I’m aware that lots of people never went to camp) still standing?  Have you ever been back?