Challenges, successes, and...sleep?

I knew last week would be a challenging week, and it certainly was!

Physically

Emotionally

Spiritually

I feel like I got a good wallop!  Not many people have seen this picture, but you're all my friends, right?  There is the small fact that this is a public blog, but oh well, what do I have to hide?!  LOL!  This is a picture of me at about 6am Sunday morning after a string of long difficult days!

See!!??  I'm just as normal as the rest of you :)  I can look normal...sometimes...but often it's just an act! So when you meet me in person, I will probably look more like this:

This is me (in the black and blue, second from the left!) with some other 22q moms during a pre-conference social the night before the 22q conference at Nationwide Children's Hospital kicked off.  This was one of the long nights of the past week, this particular night I didn't get home until 11pm, yet I had to leave the house a little after 6am the next day to get to the conference!

The conference was a wonderful opportunity to get the latest research on 22q, but since I attended the Cincinnati conference just last month, I had heard much of the information already.  Thank goodness I had, because it had been such an exhausting week!

Earlier in the week consisted of some difficult overnight babysitting for a friend's medically complicated son, a very long and emotionally taxing Neurology appointment for Connor, a school picnic for Ian, a newspaper interview and photo session, some volunteer time with A Kid Again (a local group for children with life threatening illnesses), gymnastics for Connor, and then--just for fun--Gavin started throwing up on Thursday.  Ack!!  Then the conference social Friday, the conference itself on Saturday, and then Sunday.  Oh Sunday...usually my day of rest, but not this week!!  Sunday we spent the entire day at Kings Island, an amusement park near us that was hosting a fundraising event for A Kid Again.

Here are my 3 boys and Connor's best friend at the fundraising event this weekend!

So, how did I do with all of that and my weight loss journey?  I did okay.  Not great, but okay.  I have been gaining and losing the same 2lbs for the past 10 days, it's been very frustrating to see the scale go down then back up then back down again.

I'm ending this week at X-6lbs.

Considering this is week 3, that's not bad!  But considering I was as low as X-7.2, I won't lie, I'm frustrated!  But at the same time, I know that I can't expect weight to just drop off without me having to work for it.  Overall I'm doing better with diet than I was previously (especially this summer!) but I'm not getting as many workouts in as I'd like to.  I also have been tracking my sleep and realizing that it's way too variable.  The best way to get a body to adjust to a new metabolism to encourage weight loss is to get stabilize everything possible.  That means as close as possible to the same number of calories, the same nutrients, the same calories burned, and the same hours slept.  Yeah...that's not happening!

So my plan this week is to do my best to get myself onto a better sleep schedule while continuing my focus on healthy eating and getting in a workout whenever I can.  I'm trying to remind myself that a workout doesn't have to be running 3 miles, it can be crunches in bed right after my alarm goes off, arm circles while cooking dinner, lunges while putting away laundry.

How are the rest of you doing?  Is anyone else experiencing the same up and down fluctuations I am?  Does anyone have any thoughts on how to counter this?  I'm looking forward to hearing from the rest of you!  Report in everyone!!!