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Jun252017

Moving North & Revisiting Adoption

Hello!

Thought I’d pop back in and share an updated photo. I’ve now lost over 165lbs. Also, this handsome little nugget is my amazing 16 month old nephew. The photo on the right was taken at his mama’s baby shower for baby brother due in 2 months.

Also ready for a crazy life update… Ready?
* I ran my first 10K in Disney World for the Princess Weekend. It was amazingly fun except that I got violently ill and spent 2 days seemingly on death’s door..
* We ran the Star Wars 10K also in Disney World for my 2nd 10K and his 1st. I shaved 10 minutes off my time from Princess and he finished about 40 minutes before me.
* We are moving! Getting out of Miami and heading about 80 miles north to Boynton Beach as I have accepted a position in Boca Raton.
* We have been trying (unsuccessfully) to get pregnant for a few months now since my body seems to be working for the first time in.. ever? This was definitely a result of my losing so much weight. Apparently my RE knew what he was talking about with weight and PCOS.
* There’s a lot more, but at this point, does it matter?
* As an offshoot of our moving away from Miami, we will be attempting to adopt again. We are both hoping that Palm Beach County has their shit together unlike Miami.
*Tonight I contacted the lead agency in Palm Beach and started looking again at the available children on AdoptFlorida.org. I am beyond disgusted that I recognized several children with updated photos from 3-4 years ago still listed and still looking for families. Children that we requested information about.

I’m not entirely certain if we are ready for this heartbreak again, but we want a family. We want a child or 2. We don’t know if I will be able to get pregnant and don’t want to miss out on being parents. We agree we’d love any child we bring into our family by any means. I always said if we didn’t get pregnant in X years, we would revisit adoption. Apparently it was more of, “if we get out of Miami, we will revisit adoption.”

So here we go again… adoption.

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Sep122016

Hi

My life has taken a major change and blogging is the last thing on my mind. I don’t foresee many more posts on here, but please keep me in your feeds bc you never know when I’ll feel like writing. =)

I am on a major health journey and have lost 80lbs since February and feel like a whole new person! I have more to lose, but am thoroughly enjoying how I feel these days. A huge plus to losing so much weight is the possibility of getting pregnant without drugs. So we’ll see how that works out. I bought running shoes and an awesome bike and signed up for 2 Disney 10K races in February and April plus some local 5K races. I may have an obsession with virtual races and complete all my miles on the treadmill at the gym.

My handsome nephew is now 7 months old. I don’t get to see him very much, but cherish every moment when I do and love all the photos I get of him. He is such a sweet baby!

We (yes, collectively) have given up on the foster system in Miami. I have zero faith in it and have quit the Board of the association effective September 30th. We aren’t even getting into this anymore. I’m so fed up. Just am thankful for the amazing handful of friends we met along our 3+ year journey with nothing to show for it.

We spent a week in San Diego for Comic Con and it was the single greatest week I’ve had in a long time. Our wedding week in Vegas is the only thing to compete.

I got a new job! And I freakin love it. I still work on Miami Beach, but in a position of considerable power in an organization that will help me with my future political career.

Still in MPA classes – 4th semester. Graduation is next summer. I will then be able to rule the world.

My 40th birthday is on Friday.

Forty and Fabulous 40

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Apr292013

The Last Two Weeks

In the last 2 weeks since deciding to move forward with the foster-adoption process, I have. . .

  • Been in touch several times with the adoption advocate at Our Kids of Miami-Dade County
  • Scheduled our Orientation class at which we will schedule our 10-weeks of PRIDE classes (PDF link)
  • Joined a gym to ensure I will be around for a very long time for my child(ren)
  • Committed to work on my personal problems
  • Had breakfast with Steve that turned into brunch as we sat for 3 hours talking to a realtor about buying a home, her connections for jobs at UM and FIU, our lives, her schedule, real estate classes and so much more
  • And subsequently, spent hours looking up homes between South Miami and Cutler Bay
  • Talked about the process and foster-adoption to loads of people
  • Discovered that my 20th high school reunion is next year – ugh!
  • Gathered a ton of information about my amazing friends on the kind of parents they are (or want to be) and began forming the picture in my mind about my parenting style
  • Got lost in Target in the children’s bedroom aisles – so much pink!
  • Met another couple for dinner that I can’t wait to hang out with a lot more
  • And. . . just submitted my information to take classes to become a CASA volunteer with the Guardian Ad Litem program

More to come! I’m sort of playing catch up and trying not to spew out so much information at once. I hope all my knowledge – and trust me, I learn more about foster-adoption every day – will be helpful for other folks as well. It will be interesting to see how many folks I’ve educated and that also adopt from foster care.  If you’re thinking about it, let me know, OK?

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Sep132012

12 Pounds of Fat

For lack of being able to find a picture of 12 pounds of fat, I give you this one of 1 and 5 pounds.

Image source
I have lost 2 of each of the above piles of fat… or 12 pounds!

Today marks the beginning of my 6th week of the Body By Vi 90 Day Challenge – or technically the 5th as I had to wait a week for my second shipment – and I have lost 12 pounds as of this morning.

During my in-between week, I ate horribly as we hadn’t gone grocery shopping in weeks and thought I gained back 3 of the pounds I lost. However, after my first full day back on the shakes, I was down 0.4 from the week prior. Steve says it’s water weight and I’m going to go with that to ease my mind. 😉

My intention when beginning Body By Vi was to keep track of all the meals I ate on here as a sign of accountability. Instead, I re-activated my MyFitnessPal account and started tracking in there. I also track my weight in there, but only the losses! I think putting the gains would detract from the pretty downward line.

When I get down to a reasonable number, I might post how big I got, but it still freaks me out that it got that high.

But for now, I will drink my spinach-vanilla-peanut butter breakfast shake (hey don’t knock it! It’s amazing and creamy!) and look forward to my strawberry-banana (with a whole banana and 6 strawberries) shake for lunch. And Chili’s grilled chicken sandwich and fries for dinner. And about a million glasses of water.

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Sep112012

Twins? Triplets? Oh my!

No, I’m not pregnant… Don’t get your imaginations rolling…

I’ve never truly contemplated having twins or even triplets. Sure, I thought about it but it was totally fleeting. I had my first visit with a Reproductive Endocrinologist last month and a follow up this afternoon. After reviewing the 12 VIALS of blood and the Glucose test results, he informed that that even though I have extreme excess weight (yeah he doesn’t sugar coat it), I am quite healthy. I totally got a double thumbs up when I said I’d lost 10 pounds in the last month. I didn’t mention the overall 10” but it might’ve gotten me a full on dance. He was actually shocked that all my bloodwork was perfect and that my sugars were on the low side.

According to a blog by 2 R.N.’s on The Mayo Clinic website…

A normal fasting blood glucose target range for an individual without diabetes is 70-100 mg/dL (3.9-5.6 mmol/L). The American Diabetes Association recommends a fasting plasma glucose level of 70–130 mg/dL (3.9-7.2 mmol/L) and after meals less than 180 mg/dL (10 mmol/L).

My fasting number was 76. My number after the 2 hour glucose test was 116.

In other words, HELL YEAH!

But back to the twins thing, my RE wants me to sign a waiver before he puts me on Clomid as the risk for multiples increases from 1-2% to 5-12% per pregnancy.  He also gave me a bunch of literature to read and said to look up whatever information I can find to educate myself so I know what we’re getting into.

Adoption is by no means off the table. With Steve starting law school hopefully in the Fall of 2013, babies are on the back burner for the next 3-4 years. There is so much to do during that time including moving to a still unknown state, getting a kick ass job enough to support us both for the bulk of our bills (no pressure there!), supporting him emotionally, financially and everything else while he stresses and freaks over law school and much more. It’ll be a bumpy ride but I know we can get through it. Hell, we got though my MBA during the first 2+ years of our relationship. The major difference is he’s not allowed to work the first year for pretty much any law school.

So yeah.. that’s just a teeny tiny smidge of what’s in my brain.

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PS- Hi lovelies. If you’re reading this then I greatly appreciate you sticking around in my maaany months of not blogging. Here’s hoping that I will be blogging again on a somewhat regular basis. There’s quite a lot going on and that has been going on to catch you up on.

While I am writing this for myself, if you still read, can you comment so I know who’s out there?

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Nov022011

Working Out.. And Taking Control

On Saturday, we joined a gym. I haven’t belonged to a gym since.. umm… maybe 2008 or so. I mean, I worked for the YMCA, but I only worked out a handful of times in the almost 2 years I was there.

We had gone into our local Planet Fitness a little over a week ago and toured the facility. It’s pretty bare bones as far as gyms go with no pool, classes or steam room/ sauna. However it has TONS of machines running the entire length of the (huge) wall in 2 rows. They also have free wrights and those machines that all gyms have. Clearly I’ve spent very little time in gyms. But I do know this place is huge. And open during the times I want to work out. Oh, and is $10 a month for the cancel at anytime with no penalties plan. The other plan was $20 a month which included tanning beds, massage chairs, some funky infrared light machine thingy and some other perks. We opted not to do that one as there is a minimum of 3 months at the current club before transferring to another club. And since we have no idea how long we will be living here..

Monday was our first day working out. We’re definitely going to have to rearrange our gym times as by the time Steve got home, changed and we got there, it was 9:35am. In order for me to make it to Home Depot to meet my dad to drive into Coral Gables for work, I need to be in the shower by 10:15am at the latest. So, basically, we walked on the treadmills for 20 minutes with a 5 minute cool down.

This morning I am aiming to get there by 9am so I have a full hour to workout. Hopefully I can keep it up for 3-4 days a week. I know for a fact that when I actually work out (which I’m not a fan of), I lose weight pretty quickly. My biggest problem with weight is that I don’t eat properly. That is, I don’t snack, emotionally eat or randomly eat all day, I just don’t eat. Well, no, I eat when I am hungry and stop when I get full. I also don’t eat balanced meals, or at least rarely eat them.

Yeah yeah, it’s terrible. Trust me, I know. That whole bought of “anorexia” (umm, my diet pretty much consisted of diet pills and alcohol) in college and the forced Weight Watchers diet when I was 12 has done a real number on me.

Working out will hopefully kick my metabolism into normalcy and make me hungry so I start eating on a regular schedule.

27 years old | BeccaBlogs.com

My “physical” goal for my 35th year is to get in shape, feel better about myself and look awesome in the bridesmaids dress in Felice and Chris’ wedding. More specifically, I want to be in shape enough to actually have my body work properly again even though we are planning on adopting siblings from foster care. This also means that I will be able to run and play with our children and not get winded. And be able to strengthen my seriously weak ankles that keep spraining. Yeah, they’re holding up quite a bit of weight and never healed properly from all the sprains.

I have absolutely how much I weighed in this picture, but it was taken 8 years ago and I think it’s a good goal to have. I remember the size I wore (based on the job uniforms hanging in the closet) and that would be a pretty drastic change from where I am now. Man, I sure do wish I could go back and dye my hair and brush it better…

So now I’m off to the gym… Cheers, my friends!

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Feb262011

[Re-]Defining Motherhood

Several conversations with both friends and Steve over the last few days have got me thinking about motherhood. I used to think that I couldn’t be a mom unless I got pregnant and gave birth. Now I, of course, know that there are other options like adoption, foster-adoption, IVF, and surrogacy. Becca of younger years would never have dreamed having children any way other than by giving birth herself.

Over the past few months, I have come to not only accept adoption as how our children will join our family, but embrace it. I’m sure a huge part of this is my [suspected] broken reproductive system, but more on that later. As mentioned in the last non-new-blog post, we are heavily leaning towards foster-adoption. This hasn’t changed and our friend is helping gather the info we’ll need for this to happen. We are certainly no experts on this topic and have a lot to learn, but feel it might be our best option.

It’s starting to dawn on me that I don’t need to give birth to be a mother. Yes, I’m a bit slow, but pregnancy was always a part of my future when I was a child. I already mother all the little ones in my life and I obviously didn’t give birth to them, so why put constraints on my own children?

It’s tough for me, and my ridiculous reproductive health is making it worse. In short, I haven’t had a period in over 90 days. Yes, I’ve taken a bunch of pregnancy tests both at home, the clinic place, and the ER and every one of them has read a resounding not pregnant. If I actually was pregnant, then this kid would be made of steel or something seeing as I’ve been X-ray’d and taken hard core drugs for both the flu and pneumonia over the last month. Oh, and before I get all the advice to lose weight, I am working on it. However, I’m fairly certain that it’s not a weight thing. For the first 11 years of having a period, it was never ever regular. We’re talking at most 5 times a years and lasting for weeks at a time. Talk about hell for a junior high and high schooler!

Anyhow, not much else to talk about. Right now it’s just a lot of adoption research. Also, we’re taking a database class together which is a little time consuming. And of course, this new blog design which had sucked up my entire life the last few weeks. Not to mention writing thank you notes, sleeping, working, and little bits of knitting here and there when I’m tired of doing everything else.

Hope everyone has a great weekend!

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