School, Challenge and Juicing

Wow...I have been a real slacker with the blog this week.  It's been a long and stressful week at school.  We had 2 simulations, a mom hemorrhaging and a baby going into respiratory distress.  We have the simulators, which is a mom and baby who have all of the vital signs and we need to find out what is wrong with them, and play it out like it is happening in real life.  We assess, call the doctor, administer medications and then we’re graded on how we handled the situation. The teacher sits behind the one-way mirror and is the voice of mom. The entire time the simulation is recorded and then afterwards we watch the video and critique what we did and how we handled it and what we should have done differently.  The entire thing is very stressful, and now that it’s the end of the year there are quite a few more that we need to do. 

Disclaimer: No mannequins were hurt or killed in the simulations mentioned above, Yay me!  

We have a pediatric fracture on Monday, neuro on Tuesday and a code blue on Wednesday.   I also have to take my Med-Surg ATI on Thursday, which I need to get an 80%.  Talk about a stressful week, so I may not be around much.  We'll see how I do with stress and avoiding the junk food.  Now that's the real test for the week.  All I have to say is I'm so thankful that Friday is a holiday.

WARNING: The next paragraph is me unloading and complaining about a certain teacher.  It's my own therapy to keep me away from the box of Oreos in the kitchen.

This last week I’ve been an emotional mess. We received our grade for our mental health rotation, which started after the first of the year and ended at Spring break.  Now, I have no problems with my grade.  I have a problem with the way our mental health teacher handled everything.  This is her first year teaching the subject. She handed us our guidelines on what we needed to do for each clinical rotation, and talked about how we should pick one person and do a SimChart, which is basically doing an assessment and care plan on an individual.  Most teachers tell us exactly what we need to do, like how many care plans, or do a psychosocial evaluation, but this teacher did not.  I spoke with an individual for a short time and got just enough information to do my charting.  I got it back with a 92% and she wrote a note that said, “I know you were only with this person a short time and you did excellent charting, but you could of included more information like a care plan, nursing diagnosis, and objectives.”  Now this confused me, because I had all of the above, so I emailed her.  She replied, basically saying that other students had 3-4 care plans and other assessments and I didn’t have as many as them.  This ticked me off!  Their experience was different then mine.  One of those students sat and talked with an individual for 4 hours, I talked to my guy for maybe 20 minutes and his answers were “yes” and “no” to all of my questions.  How can you compare my experience with anyone else. If you wanted us to do certain assessments or a certain amount of care plans, she should of told us and I would have done it, but because someone did more than I did? So, if I did 2 and someone else did 3 does that mean they get a better grade?  This was just one thing.   

Then she grades my journal entry and gives me an 80% because I wrote about my experience, but didn’t go into what I brought away from the experience and putting myself in their shoes.  If I would have known that’s what she wanted me to do I would have wrote about that.  She put write about your experience at …….!  I know this seems petty, but it’s just dealing with this person the last 3 months and the way she handles things have just irritated me.   

Okay, she gave me a 90% over all for my Mental Health Clinical and I couldn’t figure out how she came up with that grade.  All of my journal entries were 100%, one was 80% and my two Sim Charts were 92% and 98%.  How did she come up with an overall grade of 90%?  I emailed her about this also and she said that each assignment carries different weights and that’s why it doesn’t even out.  She never did give us the breakdown because she was afraid that we may do more work on the assignments with the higher points and blow off the lower point papers.  I’m so glad she has so much faith in us. For all I know she pulled that grade out of the air.  I’m sorry to be writing all of this, but I just need to unload and get it off of my chest.  The rotation is done, the grades are in and I just need to move on.  Okay I feel better now.  **stepping down from my soap box.**

As far as how my week went with the challenge. I started out strong with keeping track of my calories, but by the end of the week I started to slack. I exercised and it helped me to stay away from the junk food while I was stressed.  It’s amazing how wonderful walking feels and how it relieves the stress so much more than eating the junk food. 

I started following the calendar on running and walking and it was so hard to keep looking at my timer, because I don’t have an alarm.  I had a stopwatch and would run a minute and walk a minute and it was really stressful, and I couldn’t really enjoy the run.  My friend, who has been an absolute life saver this week with everything that has been going on, told me that what she always did was set landmarks and would say that she was going to run to a light pole or a bush and run and walk until she was eventually running the entire way.   

The route I run/walk is a country road that is never really traveled much, but is really beautiful. You can see pictures and read about it here. It’s a 2-mile route. The way country roads work is that each road is 1-mile long, so if you go around the square section it is about 4-miles.  I go down and back this 1-mile road, which ends up being 2-miles.  I figured that from now on I will walk ½ a mile, run/walk 1-mile and then walk again the last ½ mile, until I’m eventually running the entire thing.  It just seems less stressful. 

 

I found on a blog I read an interesting film, which is free to watch until midnight tonight.  If you haven’t seen it I would really urge you to watch it.  There is some great information and I’m even thinking about purchasing the film. It also has convinced me to buy a juicer and start juicing.  Here is the link to the film.

The friend that I talked about above, her husband grows lots of different veggies and I may join the CSA coop and start purchasing fresh vegetables, meat and eggs.  Do any of you juice?  If so I would love to hear your favorite recipes.  Also, do you have any opinions about a good juicer?  I have $100 at Amazon from selling books and I’m thinking about using it to purchase a juicer.  Let me know what you think.  I know this is long and hopefully I can eventually post more during the week so it's not all in one post. Thanks for putting up with my rant!  

RFSC ~ Week 1 Goals

Day 1: Weight 272.4

Today is the first official day of the challenge.  We were asked to take our ultimate goals and break them down to small bite-sized goals. So this week:

Weight Loss:  My ultimate goal is to lose 20 pounds, which would mean that I need to lose at least 2 pounds this week.

My Non-scale Victory (NSV): My ultimate goal is to fit into my size 18 jeans. The best way to meet this weekly goal is to follow the exercise and nutrition weekly goals.  I did see some other challengers put in some Spring Cleaning on their weekly challenge and I thought that was brilliant….so I’m going to put that I will clean out and organize my hall closet. That’s if I can get the door open, it’s stuffed full of junk.

Exercise:  I’m training for a 5k, which I signed up for on July 1. I need to start training for this, and plan on following the Women’s Health Magazine Running Calendar.  I plan on doing week 1 of the calendar, which is clickable here or is under my workout tab above.

Nutrition:  I was figuring last night, which I did see some of my fellow challengers doing the same thing, how many calories I would need to consume, and how many calories I would need to burn in order to lose 2lbs for the week.  I figured if I ate 1300 calories a day and burned 330, which is 2310 calories in a week that I should lose 2 pounds.  I plan on keeping track of this on Myfitnesspal.com.  I also said that I would drink 120 ounces of water a day, what was I thinking? Right now I’m going to concentrate on drinking 96 ounces a day.

We also have a mini challenge to try a new vegetable, fruit or other healthy dish that we have never had before.  This should be fun. I'll have to go and look through some recipes or scout out the grocery store for something interesting to try.

Well, those are my weekly goals for the Ready for Summer Challenge.  I look forward to checking in with everyone to see how you are doing.  Right now I better get out and do Day 1 of my exercises.  I’ll be back tonight with my daily update.  Good Luck everyone and we’re going to Rock this challenge!
 

Sticker of Approval

I was getting ready for the Ready for Summer Challenge and was cleaning out the fridge and pantry, when my daughter saw a container of strawberry yogurt sitting on the counter top.  She got really excited and yelled, “mom! I know what we can do with that container of yogurt.”  She ran into her room and came back with a calendar. She brought it home from school and for every month it had a healthy recipe to try.   She flipped to the month of May and said, “See mom.  It’s a strawberry smoothie.” It just so happened that I had all of the ingredients on hand, considering it only called for three ingredients.

Bug and Stinker (these are my girls’ nicknames since they were babies…..I blame their father) came into the kitchen so excited to help mommy make a smoothie.  They both got out the ingredients, measuring cups and the scale.  According to Bug we have to be exact on the ingredients otherwise it might not taste right.

Bug started dumping ingredients into her cup.

I tried to help Stinker, but she’s a big girl and didn’t need my help.

I gave their smoothies a mix on the bullet, and it was time to see if they would pass the taste test for two very picky eaters.

The suspense is killing me.....

 

Yay!!  Four thumbs up.  We’ve decided we’re going to try each recipe on the calendar for that month and if it passes the taste test than it will get the sticker of approval.

It looks like the Smoothie recipe gets a very special princess sticker!

Both of my girls are hopping on the bandwagon of eating healthy and exercising.  I figured that if they start learning at this age then they will not have the same problems as their mommy.  Bug is going to go running with me in the evening, she ran a 10 minute mile at school so she's already way ahead of her mom.  I just know that she will help keep me on track, because both of them want to see me succeed.  I have to say that I'm really lucky to have some pretty special cheerleaders on my team. 

New Beginnings

I can’t believe it’s been close to a year since I’ve posted on this blog.  Wow, how time flies! I have to admit that I haven’t lost any weight since my last post, and I know that I’m even more out of shape.  What have I been up to, you ask?

Let’s see.  I passed my state boards and I’m currently an LPN working at the local hospital. I’m going to school to finish my nursing degree and plan on graduating in May, then it’s one more big test (RN state boards) and then I’ll be done with school for awhile.  So the past year I’ve been spending a majority of my time doing this….

Now that Spring is here and Summer is right around the corner I figured what a great time to concentrate on getting healthy.  I still want to learn to run a 5k and I’m the first to admit that I’m a huge procrastinator and I need something to motivate me to keep up the training.  A friend of mine told me about a 5k run that is coming up July 1 and it peaked my interest.  It’s the Color Run and you can walk or run.  Every Kilometer they throw some sort of colored powder substance at you as you run by.  It’s a different color for each Kilometer you run.  It sounds like a lot of fun, so I signed up.  I figured this will be enough time to lose some weight and eventually run my first 5k.  I have my work cut out for me, but plan on using this blog to keep me accountable in meeting my goals.  Here’s the website for the Color Run if anyone else is interested.

While losing weight you need that accountability and there's no better way to get it then by joining a challenge.  I found the Ready for Summer Challenge while surfing the web and knew this was exactly what I needed. It's 10 weeks long and starts March 26.  It's a challenge where you set your own goals....How cool is that?  Check it out below and join with me so we can keep each other accountable.

Challenge Goals:

Weight Loss~  I would love to lose at least 20 Pounds by the end of the challenge.

NSV~ My non-scale victory would have to be to fit in my size 18 jeans.

Exercise~ Be able to run a 5k, which is scheduled for July 1.

Nutrition~ Keep my calories between 1200-1500 calories and drink 120 oz of water daily.

I'm so happy to be blogging again and looking forward to catching up with all of my fellow bloggers. Good luck and let's make the rest of this year count!