Lap-Band Update

Well some of you may know I had to cancel all of my original appointments:( Kristopher's company only hires twice a month, and so even though he completed his 90 days, he had missed the first hire date of the month, so we had to wait until the end of the month. That conflicted with my appointments, so I had to cancel them.

The GOOD news is that Kristopher was officially hired on! YAY! So in a few days he'll be going in to sign up for his bennifts and we will finally have our health insurance! When that happens I'll be re-scheduling all of my doctor's appointments so we can get this thing going!

I'm hoping to have my surgery scheduled for right after the new year. It would be a great start to the new year to have my surgery and start my new life right at the start of the new year :)

I'm not too dissapointed about having to push this back, because I really will enjoy having one last Christmas of completely unrestricted pigging out :) Christmas is my FAVORITE time of the year and everyone always has the best foods! While I know I could do it if I had to, it would be very hard to start my new way of eating in the middle of the holidays. I will be able to deal with it much better after a year of eating with the band before I get to Christmas. Then next Christmas when I'm not able to stuff myself with eggnog, cookies, Christmas candy, beef stick, candy canes, hot chocolate, and all the other wonderful Chrsitmas foods, at least I will be over my food mourning period and I will know how much and of what I can eat so I don't feel like I can't eat anything. It will be great :)

Then by October of 2010, I should be at my goal weight/size in time for our SoCal Family Adventure! That's not the official name, we need to come up with that :) I'll be so excited for our family vacation to all of the Southern California theme parks so that I can actually ride the rides without the constant fear that I won't be able to fit in them or have to sit in a car by myself because there isn't enough room for anyone else :( That's the worst feeling in the world :( Anyway, that shouldn't be a problem anymore!

I will update my appointment schedule once I have it! Thanks for all your support :)

Getting Excited for Halloween!

Well my house is all decorated for Halloween! I've been having a lot of fun so far :) I have more decorations that I'll put up on Halloween, like bleeding candles! Here is a pictures of my huge vase of gourds with worms! They look pretty cool :)

So I LOVE making cookies and other goodies during the holidays, but tonight I was just way too lazy to mess up my kitchen that I just cleaned, and so I caved! I bough PRE-MADE dough!! :( Oh, the shame! Did Martha Stewart ever BUY pre-made dough??? I highly doubt it!

What's worse is that I bought TWO pre-made doughs! They were on sale for less than it would have cost me to buy the stuff to make two batches of cookies, but still. The point is that while the cookies tasted alright, I missed out on the fun of being absorbed in the "season" by making the cookies myself, from scratch. *sigh* oh well! I'll make up for it at Christmas :)

These aren't real cookies....for shame, Stephanie. For shame!

Changing Colors

Well, it's that time of the year where the weather is getting cooler, the days are getting shorter, and the leaves are changing color. This natural event signals me that it is time for my hair to change color also :) I usually go blonde in the summer and brown in the fall, so in typical Stephanie fashion, I am now a brunette! Kristopher was really trying to get me to dye it all jet black, but I just don't have the guts for that! So instead it is now a nice mohogony (dark)brown with caramel (light) brown highlights that I put in myself! Here are some before and after pictures :) Enjoy!

Hodge Poge

Hello :) I'm just adding a bunch of random pictures from September. I've added captions, enjoy!





I'm SO excited that my hair is as long as it is, it's taken forever to get this far!
Yay!
Cleopatra and Chicken are FINALLY getting along again!
Awwww

My hair again :) lol

Chicken LOVES to cuddle w/me when I'm laying in bed working on my laptop. He's so sweet :)

Yep, he wedges himself right up in there!
I opened this mini Heath Bar and found this evil little chocolate monster smiling back at me, LOL!
My Chicken Littles :)

Well that's it! I'm working on getting a scrapbook page entry so that you can all see all the scrapbook pages I've done. It's not as good as seeing them in person, of course, but for those of you that aren't able to see them in person, this will have to do.

FINALLY!

Alright I'm on my way! I finally have some doctor's appointments set up to get going on my lap band! Actually, I don't believe I've made the official announcement. Well, here it is...I AM GETTING LAP BAND! I have spent a lot of time and effort researching this and have decided this is my best option. It's been mentioned that SOME OF YOU don't feel that I've made a real effort to loose weight on my own. Well I'd like to thank you for your opinion and evaluation of my efforts, however from this point forward, please keep that to yourselves. Until you know the exact amount of hours I've spent sweating to death on my elliptical, and how many calories I've counted, how many weeks of NOTHING but vegetables I've eaten, how many different dosages of meds I've been on that are supposed to help me but didn't, then don't judge me. I'd rather go through this surgery that is a SURE THING, and get healthy NOW, than wait around another few years, gaining more and more weight and then finally dying from a heart attack because I had to prove that I'd tried hard enough on my own first. No thank you.

Moving on. I have my first set of appointments coming up this month!

*On Thursday the 23rd I have a weight loss seminar in Phoenix. This (among many other things)is required by the insurance company in order to be approved for the procedure.
*On the 24th I have an appointment with my new primary care physician, Dr. Flyte in Casa Grande for my referral to the surgeon.
*On the 29th I have my first consultation with the surgeon!

I'll still need my psych. evaluation to make sure I'm sane enough to know the full implications of the surgery and that I'm not doing it for the wrong reasons. Of course all of this is really dependant on the insurance company approving the pre-operative appointments. Which of course they will :)

So I will keep everyone posted on how everything goes once it's been done!