Catching Up

I realized after my last post I skipped over a few days and actually had a lot going on so I thought maybe I'd catch up on that and my appointments I had as well!!

On Friday night we took our Girl Scout troop on a "Formal Fast Food Progressive Dinner". It was a blast for them!! We took them to 9 (yes, I said 9) different restaurants. We went for the following:

- 1st Course: Appetizers at Sonic, Menu: Cheese Curds, Onion Rings and Sweet Potato Tots, oh and a small drink to go!! Mind you we had one order of each thing per car (not per kid). So, they were sharing and not eating a BUNCH of junk!!!! No one liked the sweet potato tots.

- 2nd Course: Soup at Panera Bread, Menu: A cup of soup of their choice and a half a piece of French baguette. I believe most choices were Broccoli Cheese, Chicken Noodle, French Onion, Chicken and Rice and a couple of others I cannot remember right now.

- 3rd Course: Poultry at Popeye's, Menu: a half of a chicken tender (after all we had a lot of places to go and we realize they were eating a lot of junk food, but we were still limiting the amount of junk food they were eating).

- 4th Course: Fish at Long John Silver's, Menu: a half of a piece of fish and a hushpuppy.

- 5th Course: Roast at Arby's, Menu: half of a Junior Roast Beef Sandwich

- 6th Course: Impromptu - stop for drinks - whatever they wanted to drink from McDonald's

- 7th Course: Salad at Wendy's, Menu: half of a side Garden Salad or a side Caesar Salad with their choice of dressing.

- 8th Course: Dessert at a local cupcake bakery in our area, Menu: their choice of cupcake. Big choices of the night were cookies and cream cupcakes and samoa cupcakes.

- 9th Course: After Dessert Coffee at Starbucks, Menu: Demi-Tasse, crackers, strawberries and cheesecake (instead of cheese). Formally this course would have a dessert coffee, crackers, fresh fruit and cheese. NO WAY were we going to give a bunch of kids coffee, but we let them have a choice of hot chocolate, white chocolate or spiced apple cider and changed up the rest of the menu :)

Before we took the kids out we did research on this website. Obviously you can see we veered a bit to fit our needs, but we wanted to do "courses" with them.

The kids had a blast, we did too. I made the mistake of showing the 4 girls in my vehicle an AFV video of a guy whose wife kept locking him out of the car and making him dance to get back in, so guess what happened to me at the Long John Silver stop? Yep, they locked me out and made me dance and yes, someone got it on video!! Stinkers :)

Oh and how did this new bandster do on this trip?? Crazy right? Oh, I did great! No sarcasm at all in my voice by the way! I had broth from chicken noodle soup at Panera Bread and I brought my own apple sauce and ate that at Wendy's. I had a short skinny mocha which I had them add sugar free caramel and not so sugar free coconut (I love the summer time at Starbucks), which when I threw the cup away, I realized I didn't even drink half of it.

This is a long blog today whew.

Saturday we had our niece's 16th birthday party! We were all worried about rain. It was windy, which made it a tad more chilly than what we would have liked, but hey it was better than rain. Everything was tore down and brought in just in time for rain clouds to start coming down! A great time was had by all!!

Fast forward to yesterday my first post op appointment! Yippee, my NP is thrilled with my recovery and I am so happy to see her too! She's been out on maternity leave since before my surgery. I like her so much and I think we are going to make a great team in getting this weight off of me. At my office they have what's called the global period. It's the 90 days after surgery in which anything that happens at the office is covered by insurance through the surgery. So, she wants to be as aggresive as possible with my fills (or band adjustments) as she knows my clinic payments are not covered and I am a self pay in that regard. My surgery was covered but my clinic visits are not. Fills are but office visits are not. Crazy insurance. Anyway, it's good to know she has my back. I have a feeling we are going to be talking a lot and back and forth a lot to find that green zone for me as quick as possible. As of yesterday, I am officially down from my highest since starting with them 35.5 lbs! I am also starting on the pureed stage. Which will give me more food to eat. I had some refried beans yesterday and am looking to eat some scrambled eggs today and maybe some mashed potatoes as well.

I am also working on making sure I get more water in. This is hard because you can't drink a half an hour before or after eating so you really need to schedule meals. I think I am actually going to have to write stuff down for myself. If I have it in black and white (including when to drink water) it might actually help me more.

Some of you noticed, I include a lot of links in my blog. Some are silly like all the fast food places, but the other things related to the band is because I have some readers (i.e., family and friends) that are not familiar with band terms and this will help them understand what I am going through a bit easier :) You all that have the band already are familiar and can TOTALLY relate!!!!!!!

Ok, I have bored you long enough!! Bye all!