Caution: inappropriate pregnant lady behavior

If I said I loved being a pregnant lady I would be lying. Pregnancy has been kicking my ass left and right for the majority of the past 8 1/2 months. One of the hardest part for me is learning how to scale back, how to slow down. I really only know two speeds; full speed or dead stop. I don't know anything in between. It's a 'all in' or 'no thanks' for me. And so I have found myself in this situation over and over again during my pregnancy...

I extend myself way too far on the days I feel good doing inappropriate pregnant lady things like:

 Pull-ups at 8 months

Remodeling work:

...and end up in bed recovering for days after. In my defense, I am also balancing out my inappropriate behavior with some very obvious pregnant lady activities like:

Filling up an entire room (and garage) with baby supplies....when do you stop?

Eating turkey sandwiches for breakfast, lunch and dinner

In preparation for Baby T I have found an obsession with garage sales and craigslist. I think I have enough clothes for him for the first year of his life, but I can't stop. It's like hunting for women. Like a sport and I can't get enough. I also am back to having meat aversion and weird cravings, like the first trimester, making strict paleo almost impossible. I'm still okay with it. I do my best and eat what I can when I can. Again, I am so thankful for AdvoCare, because I know that Baby is getting all the nutrition he needs even when I'm not being the best role model for food choices. That's very evident in his development pace, he has been a solid 2 weeks ahead in growth and development the entire pregnancy. The more research I do, the more I discover how important pre-pregnancy behavior is to baby development too. Chris Kresser, has an amazing program called The Healthy Baby Code that goes into all the specifics on how to raise a healthy baby, before, during and after pregnancy. Of course, it's paleo and natural. And of course we are planning on raising our son paleo following his guidelines. It's very amusing to hear reactions when I inform people that we won't be feeding our child grains, dairy or sugar. My favorite reactions and my responses:

Them: "hahaha good luck with that"
Me: "I'm pretty sure I'll be the one doing the grocery shopping"

Them: "Kids need milk for their bones to grow strong"
Me: "Really? who told you that? The dairy industry?"

Them: "What are you going to do when he doesn't eat what you want him to?"
Me: "He's not going to starve himself, he'll eat what I give him eventually when he's hungry"

Now once he is older and bombarded with ads for junk food, surrounded with his friends that eat crap and tastes sugar, I'm sure it will be a different story. However, I'm preparing myself as a parent and doing as much research as I can now to collect ideas on how to educate and empower my children to make the right choices when it comes to food. Everyday Paleo, is my all time favorite blog on how to raise children paleo, how to get them involved with meal time and hundreds of kid friendly recipes. Her podcast is fantastic.

Baby delivery news.... like I said, he's going to be a big one and we're doing it all natural. With the disapproval of most of my family and friends we are choosing to do a holistic water birth. Which means no drugs or medical intervention unless absolutely necessary. Next post I'll go into depth about what it means and why we choose to do it that way. Like everything controversial, it's about education, ask questions and learn. Never settle for the answer "that's the way we've always done it".  Ha! Thinking about it...that's the reason I got fired from lululemon, still great advise to live by.

House news...with 5 weeks to go before Baby arrives we are currently a week past our move in goal date. New goal is to be moving in by October 15th. I don't want to ruin the surprise but I'm making a 80s montage video of our remodeling fun. Here's a sneak peak of the work we've been doing and when I say "we" I mean mostly Jeremie.

June 31st 2011

October 5th 2011

My family has been so amazing helping us out with the house too. We are truly blessed to have such awesome people in our lives.

Enjoying the whole journey

"I've had a rough month," would be an understatement. Surely I'm not this big of a baby, but I have had at least 15 days where I wanted to stay in bed and cry all day. I'm learning a lot though. Things I didn't know about pregnancy and that no one could explain to me 4 months ago:

1. You lose your mind. Seriously feel like an idiot, brain stops working.
2. You will say the most ridiculous things. This came out of my mouth last week, "I can smell your shampoo from over here, it's making me sick." Poor Jeremie.
3. You constantly have to remind yourself that you aren't getting fat your growing a baby.
4. There is no cure for morning sickness, heart burn, exhaustion or weird food aversions. Suck it up and enjoy the ride.

So that's where I'm at. I'm finding the calm in the storm. Learning how to enjoy every second of this amazing journey, even if that means loving crying in bed all day.  Know what's funny? I've been here before. I already know how to handle this. I don't want to call this a setback but if I was choosing my  pregnancy I would be that woman that never had nausea and was glowing radiantly with beautiful skin, hair and nails. Oh and a perfect little baby bump under a cute sundress. When I look like death, I'm breaking out like a teenager and I'm feeling like I have the worse hangover ever......it feels similar to a setback. Here's the positives:

1. I don't feel guilty ever about eating. If I can eat something and keep it down, it's a good thing.
2. I don't feel guilty about sleeping all day. ahhhh
3. I love watching my husband transform into a father.
4. I have a new found respect for all mothers, especially working women that go through pregnancy with full-time careers. 
5. And most importantly, as my good friend Christina reminded me of, my body is doing an amazing amazing thing and this little baby is going to change my life forever.

How can I complain about this experience? I can't. I'm appreciating it, the amazing, the weird and the bad. I'm loving the moments.

When we first moved to Ohio, we had goals and a plan:

1. New flip house
2. Babies
3. Crossfit Gym (starting in our garage). 

As usual our plans were a little off, we went backwards: CrossFit Gym, Baby, .....still working on the house.  Wow that's another journey that is full of emotions. We have spent hours looking at houses, have put bids in on 3, walked away from one and were out bid on the other 2. We fell in love, had our hearts broken and are back to the drawing board. The right one will come. We own our house by June 30th 2011. Putting it out there.

For those of you demanding baby bump pics....

Up next.... the creative task of financing a house when you don't have a regular J-O-B and an inside look at the gym. : )

Freezer Burn

Adjusting to the cold Ohio weather has been a lot easier than we had thought. We already did an outside running WOD in the snow....it was awesome! Growing up we hated the snow, the reason we left Ohio in the first place was the weather, now the snow has a calming, welcoming affect on us. We spent 3 years traveling around looking for a place to call "home" a place where the grass was greener. Think we were really looking for ourselves. We had to break out of our comfort zones to discover who we were. We had to leave to get a different perspective. Funny how perspective can change everything. The lessons that we learn on our 3 year excursion gave us the perspective we needed to truly appreciate everything we have in Ohio. We are loving every minute of the freezing state that we call home.

Our new CrossFit home, The BOX, lots of cool people that share a sick obsession with CrossFit. : )

Coolest free handstand pic yet!

Love Trader Joe's for Meat and Fish

and Buffalo Jerky with no MSG!

While we were making dog food, we were eating some of the celery with almond butter, found this one at Sam's Club for $5.99 an there is no sugar added.

Had this at Fresh Market while we were in FL, we recreated it at home, cucumbers, tomatoes, onions and a little Garlic Expressions to add flavor

Not 100% paleo so use sparingly

Not a huge fan of processed lunch meat, so we bought full turkey breast and cut our own. If you are buying lunch meat read the ingredient list. If you can't pronounce the words and/or don't know what it is don't buy it.

Absolute favorite snack on a cold afternoon, mix chocolate muscle gain with coffee. Love AdvoCare Muscle Gain.....its predigested so you don't get bloated and its ran through a program called informed choice so there isn't anything shady in it.

Asparagus, turkey and sweat potato

My sister got me the Paleo Diet Cookbook for my birthday! Can't wait to try some new recipes!

Paleo is great for Dogs too

About 6 months ago my sister in a last resort effort to reverse her 2 dogs ongoing health problems started making her own dog food. Her older (7yrs old) pug, Bailey was overweight and having seizures on a weekly bases, her puppy Chloe, was having major stomach issues, lots of gross diarrhea. The vet put them on expensive medicines and fancy food but nothing seemed to really help.

My sister, Britta, her boyfriend, Tommy and Chloe and Bailey(aka Santa)

One of our family friends learned about a making your own raw dog food in California and was having amazing results with her great dane. So my sister decided to try it out. Within a day Chloe had no stomach issues, with in a month Bailey lost 10lbs and was not have seizures at all. Hum....have you ever read whats in dog food? Its mostly corn filler, the exact same corn that makes up most of our processed food. Corn by the way is a grain, not a vegetable. Seriously do you know that everything in the middle of the grocery store (processed) foods contain some form of corn. Watch Food Inc if you don't believe me. Its cheap, it keeps you full, you can turn it into anything and its subsidized by the government. As a profit driven organization its a no brainier to use corn in food production.  But its obviously not what our bodies or our four legged bffs are designed to eat. I was attracted to the paleo diet because it was founded by asking the question, "what is the optimal human diet". Had nothing to do with making money on a fad diet, or losing vanity pounds or even figuring out how to eat the right combination of our adulterated modern food,  it was about finding the diet that was most suitable to our bodies. It scrapped everything we knew about food and started from the beginning notion that everything we needed to thrive as a species was provided to us via the Earth. Love that simple theory. And it makes sense....our human ancestors diet would consist of lots of lean meats and seafood, some veggies, some berries and nuts when they could find them. Before farming they would not have had access to the quantity and variety of fruits and vegetables that they would have needed to survive. Sorry vegans, I know its hip to be a herbivore these days but back in the day that wouldn't have been a survival option. And I love The China Study, I took out of it that we should be eating the raw food that nature provides for us, that nature is still the best doctor and that getting off of processed foods will do miracles.  I will point out too, that there is a huge difference in being paleo (eating free range lean meats) and eating tons of fatty store bought meats. Don't be a bad example for the paleo peeps. Do your research, lean meats, game meats and seafood not fatty steaks and processed meats.  Our bodies are made to eat meat we evolved for millions of years that way. I'm not picking on your lifestyle decision if you are vegan or vegetarian, I respect your decision to live a meatless life and to take a stand for your health, it just doesn't make sense to me. So if being meatless make sense to you, go for it! I support you. I love you but I'm not in love with you.

Wait I got lost in my rant....this is about dogs. So guess what the homemade raw dog food is, PALEO!! Yay!! I was all over this when I got home and saw my sisters dogs eating the same diet that we were!

Meet Sam and Bob, our paleo dog subjects. Bob is our big baby, he's sick all the time, he has been to numerous vets that tell us different things but mostly that he has allergies and he has to be on  medications his whole life. And I guess this is not uncommon for dogs. What?! I don't accept that. Sounds so familiar to human doctors doesn't it? Why aren't we looking at the source of the problem...like maybe dogs aren't suspose to eat grains.

Our local butcher grinds up bones and everything for dog food

$31 total for 8lbs of chicken and 8lbs of beef

Apples, Blueberries, carrots, celery, green beans and flax seeds total price $18

Cut up and mixed together

Thought about eating it

Mixed the beef and chicken together

Bob gets about 2 cups and Sam get just under 1 of half and half mix 

Cleaned the bowls

split them up into daily servings

Made about a month of food froze the leftovers. 

they slept like babies : )

Going to mess around with ingredients next time. We can get our dogs the chicken with the bones in them. They are big enough that they can chew up the bones. Think it will be more cost effective. We also went to our local discount grocery store and found out when they sell their veggies on their last day. Found out for $1 they will sell a full bag of veggies that are past their sell date! That should save us some money next time too. We'll update on the costs. This batch cost us $50 for a month for two dogs. Got a lot of our information from:  http://www.barfworld.com/ you can buy it from them pre-made. We used their ingredient list to get an idea of what to put into their food and how much to feed them.

Anyone else make their own dog food? Cat food?

Confessions of an adrenaline junkie

Okay, okay, I admit, Jere and I are completely addicted to adrenaline and endorphins. Our latest adventure included a 4.2 mile obstacle race called the Iron Knight and of course the big move to Ohio in the middle of the winter. We laugh and call ourselves out every time we're about to do something ridiculous..."off on anther Shanna and Jere whirlwind adventure" or "next on the Shanna and Jere show".... never gets old. We love change, we love adventure, we love the unknown and thus our life is one leap of faith to another.

CrossFit Evo teams at the Iron Knight

300 Push-ups between 4 of us

40 pull-ups No Kip, girls got help! Oh yeah!

4.2 miles of running all together in between tasks

Equipment carry

The Boys did all of this task

Jere playing in the woods

Tire Flip

Humvee push

After the race we got back together for the sweetest handstand photo op ever!

The next day Jere and I were packed up and ready to hit the road. The lessons we learned in FL will be coming home to Ohio with us.  Trading the sunshine and palm trees for snow and gray skies we knew what we were getting ourselves into. We were prepared.....well at lest we thought we were, until we realized we would be driving during the worst winter storm since 1967. Awesome!

Jere drove this bad boy and I followed with his truck

Last picture in the ghetto of Orlando. : )

SPARK fueled our entire 24hr drive.

Yes exactly how I remember Ohio....gray and cold.

So thankful for my sister and her bf! They helped us move in the blizzard

Of course we helped them out the next day as they moved into their first house

Big things coming up next on the Jere and Shanna Show:

1. New flip house
2. Babies
3. Crossfit Gym (starting in our garage)

Preferably in that order. : ) Tomorrow I'm going to show you how to make raw paleo dog food! And a sneak peak at our new CrossFit home, until we have a house and a garage to start ours.


In food news:

Poached eggs on top of sausage, bacon, mushroom, & peppers with some avocado

It was like a delicious stew all mixed up