Archive by Author | anne_sokol

losing weight

So, if you remember (those who read here regularly), I was wanting to lose a decade of gathered up baby weight before I turned 40 last December.

I started at 195 lbs (I didn’t weigh myself during my last pregnancy or for a few weeks after, so I was more than that).

For the year I was 39, I lost to about 145lbs. That’s about 50 lbs! I mostly did it on my own, eating oatmeal, fish, salad, eggs. I would do a cycle of good weight loss, then stop when I lost interest, then go back to a cycle of loss, then stop. It helped me to do it in strong spurts.

But then I turned 40, and I lost all desire to diet and exercise. I still wanted to lose all the weight, but I didin’t have enough desire to actuallly do it. So I regained to about 167.

I was kind of thinking and praying about what to do. Sometimes I would try to motivate myself. But it was short-lived. Then my mom and dad came for a visit in June of this year, and mom had been losing weight, too, and we were talking about how we wanted to keep losing. So we decided, why not start now, and we joined the Curves that’s on the third floor of our mall.

During that month, we exercised faithfully 3x/week. We both gained a little weight still, from all our eating and special times, but I lost fat. At Curves, you really focus on shifting your muscle/fat ratio, so your body becomes more and more able to burn calories (because it’s more muscle) and it becomes easier to maintain weight loss.

By the time mom was leaving, they were announcing their 8-week Food School starting early July, so I joined that. It was a weekly group/class about eating and weight loss, and overall, a healthy lifestyle. I was ready to join because I was tired of motivating myself and really wanted someone else doing that, I like getting more education, and I met ladies at various places on the same road of weight loss.

It was really, really fun! And the important thing is that I really committed myself to doing their eating plan with little to no exceptions (even when we traveled) and exercising very regularly and faithfully.

It’s now September, Food School has been over for a month, and I’m still going strong. I’m still on the weightloss part of their diet, because my body is still willing to shed weight. I’ve lost 20 lls (back around 145), my percent of body fat is 31.9% (I started at 38.1%, and the norm is 20%-30%). My muscle mass has increased from 27.1% to 30.3% (norm is 35%-38%). And I love the beautiful, muscular curves in my arms and legs.

I haven’t eaten sugar for over 3 months now. I can’t believe it. Sugar in my coffee was an absolute must–otherwise, why drink it?? But the Food School teacher said she loves lattes without sugar, so now that’s what I’m doing, too.

A few major lessons from this:

  1. I’m trying to make a life-change, not just achieve a goal weight. Lord willing, I will keep up my exercise and good dietary changes for the rest of my life.
  2. I’m noting times when I would, before, have eaten in order to help myself. Times of fatigue, stress, Vitaliy being gone, emotional fatiuge or frustration, boredom … and I’m finding other ways to comfort and strengthen and busy myself that don’t involve food. It’s a good thing. When I want to eat for no good reason, I remind myself that I love how my clothes fit and how my body looks, and that’s worth more to me than this temporary, often non-physical craving to eat.
  3. God used this to start a wave in my life of learning self-discipline. This diet and exercise requires a lot of self-discipline. It’s stressful, even in a good way, but it breaks down, into small steps, a huge task that I can’t accomplish in one or a few bursts of energy. So I’ve started applying this to other areas of my life– currently, fundraising and home schooling. It’s helping me break down those huge jobs into small steps and tasks and do them consistently to accomplish a huge job in good time.

I should post a photo sometime soon 🙂

when God changed my questions about childrearing

I guess this blog and birthinukraine.wordpress.com are nice (sometimes-not-nice) chronicles of my parenting journey. What a wonderful and deep way to know God, to be tested, to build one’s character, be sanctified by the enjoining work of the Holy Spirit.

The other day, I was writing a bit in Russian for the gals in my church about my parenting journey, and I wanted to record that here.

One of the ways God drastically changed my view of childrearing is found in Philippians 2:13:

For it is God who is working in you, enabling you both to desire and to work out His good purpose.

Starting out, I pretty much knew how to make things a battle of the wills. My will versus my child’s will.

But when I started learning from God, He gave me new questions, particularly about teaching obedience:

  • How can I be ‘on my child’s side’ in the process of teaching him obedience?
  • How can I, through the power of our relationship and intimacy, teach my child to obey, even to make it not that hard to do?

Like God does those things for me….

Asking these questions changed me a lot and changed the way I viewed my children, and the process of teaching them.

How can I constantly have goodwill towards my child, as God does towards me?

What is the big picture of my “good will” for my child in particular areas where I’m asking for compliance? Can I (at some point) explain that fuller picture of the good things I am willing for my child when I am, for example, teaching her not to hit? (Big picture of my good willing: I am willing (desiring) for her to become a good friend and sister who is self-controlled and able to be full of love.)

It’s just all so very fascinating.

Can I, as God’s child, become aware of, explore, and enjoy the greatness of His good will/desires for me as He is teaching me to obey in this area or that? Rather than just focusing on certain motions of obedience (though that is a step)?

Connecting my emotions to my life

I assumed that my emotions would be naturally connected to motherhood, to my children.

In some ways they are; in other ways, not.

Sometimes I do things to connect them. Like taking a girlie out for coffee and reading.

So, here’s my latest idea! I’ve never gotten in to charm bracelets, but now I’m thinking they’re awesome!

Look!!!!

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It’s charms representing my children!!!

I can use it to pray for them! I can find other charms for special occasions! I can start a group thing with the girls, and buy them bracelets with charms that represent things!

I’m liking this!

 

 

follow-up test on myself

I was writing in the spring about dealing with disappointment with my life.

Yesterday was an interesting test of how I’m dealing with that, and it’s going pretty good!

So yesterday, I was generally rather fatigued, Vitaliy was gone a few days (these are 2 big factors), and last night, this funk came on me again. …. My thoughts are like: Why can’t I do birth work? I hate homeschooling. Why is my life like this? Why am I making these choices?

Those are The Funk thoughts. It’s totally gone today, so you know, it’s a momentary thing. But it’s important.

So, how did I go through it?

First, I went for a walk. And I thought. I thought several good things.

I made a choice to be home with my children, and that choice is valuable to me. It’s important to me to do this. Making that choice means saying no to other choices.

If I were working in birth (or whatever), I would also have parts of it that I hate (like I sometimes hate homeschooling). I’m just choosing between what I want to struggle with disliking.

If I were doing birth stuff, I would also have moments when it feels empty and like it’s robbing me of other, more fulfilling things. The grass is greener thing would still happen, no matter what I would be doing. Especially when I’m tired and a bit emotionally empty.

I went to do some grocery shopping. I’m on a diet right now, but as I was walking through the store, I realized that normally, this is a time when I would comfort myself by eating– bread, chocolate, whatever.

So I asked myself, how can I go through this funk in a different way? My stomach is not hungry, but my emotions are hungry. Food won’t fill them up.

It’s a form of grieving for a life I won’t have, and that’s OK, to grieve a little bit for those dreams, but I don’t have to wallow in it and wreck my health and other goals during that grief.

So I was feeling pretty good by now, that I was going through and coming out of this funk in a pretty good way– able to value the life I have and not eat to comfort myself like I usually do.

I ended up buying some clothes on sale, too 🙂 I needed a new fall jacket, and the one I liked was on sale! $24 instead of over $40!

Cool. Progress!

I felt like my dad, buying on sale, and I felt like my mom, buying clothes …

Andre, loves his little MEP math stuff 🙂

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a dream come true

It’s nice to have some cheap, easy dreams, though it doesn’t mean they’ll be fulfilled quickly. I’ve wanted a SMALL CD player in my kitchen for years.

YEARS.

What took so long? I’m not exactly sure. Trying the small computer for music. trying the phone for music.

Nothing worked really.

Once, months back, we asked in a technology store for a CD player. They said they didn’t sell them anymore.

?????

Jaw. To. Floor.

So, I was just in that same store 3 days back, looking for an immersion blender. And guess what I saw?

Yes, there they were, on a shelf, three dinky CD players all by their lonesomes.

And I knew. It was time.

For the dream to COME! TRUE!

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Bach, Hayden, Mozart ….

Yum.

organization and cleaning

My old love for housecleaning is returning. After being decimated by my major life adjustments of the last 12-13 years.

😀

I’m starting to enjoy it again. One is that the kids are older. Another is just letting myself just enjoy it and go slow. I don’t like schedules and I don’t like working fast in order to just get it done, setting a timer, etc. I like going at my own pace and just enjoying it. So, I cleaned my kitchen yesterday. Here it is:

See that shiny Big Berkey water filter? I used my purple rags (from FlyLady) to shine it. I used them mirrors, windows and cabinets, too.

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Shout out to Big Berkey, too. A fabulous, high quality filter. It’s great for a large family (filters fast), portable, requires no power source (just gravity!), and the filters are accessible and cleanable. Loved it for years!

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The clean floor is what I love. Kitchen floors deal with a lot of gunk, you know.

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Another thing I’ve been enjoying right now is that Vitaliy and I are both talking about cleanliness and organization. I like it when we have a topic we’re in tandem about. Four kids, tons of stuff, ministry stuff, office stuff, humanitarian aid, constant travel, home school …. We both are working on making small steps to keep things cleaner, neater. It’s nice to be “of one mind” about this and we have talks about how to use this to make our lives easier and more helpful.

MEP math and my sweetie boy

I’m going to mention MEP math here for a moment because they are worth mentioning!

The Centre for Innovation in Mathematics Teaching is located in England. They developed a free, online, high-quality math program. I started it years ago with Skyla and Vika. Then I moved to textbooks when it was too hard for me to be so involved (read, more babies and toddlers), and this year, I’m going back to it.

I’m really impressed with the program.The lessons are brief, scripted even, and have great visuals and manipulatives for kids. It also just intrigues me how they introduce and teach concepts!

Upfront, it’s a lot of printing, and I’m doing a lot of my own printing this year for our schooling (using Ambleside Online). While I was printing out the first lesson batch for the girls I though, hey, let me print out a few lessons to do with Andre (he’s 4yo).

We’ve done 2 days so far, and he’s enjoying it. We’re BOTH enjoying it, and that is important.

On this page, meeting the family, asking questions like How many children?” Who is beside the dog? Who is youngest? … Then counting to 5 on fingers and drawing sticks.

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Here, I love this picture. He drew our family. I’m the one with the big head. I like to think,  because I am the largest “presence” in his life 🙂

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Here we counted boats, cars, houses. We colored a certain number of them

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Here he is working on the bed this morning. Things I’ve learned from this: He is fairly exact– must color in the entire space in the object. He picks up ideas fairly quickly. He has pretty good finger control for his age, too.

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learning to “like” again ….

So, you know, I talked about how I want to learn to like my church again.

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A couple things I’ve noticed. Stopping the evil internal dialogue has gone a long way. A long, long way.

And you know, to do that, God got serious with me. It was like He was communicating to me: Now is the natural moment that I’ve shown you this issue (your negative internal rehearsing of sins), and you need to stop it now at this natural moment of conviction/healing. If you don’t stop it at this natural moment of growth, things will go downhill in a bad way.

(hilarious skit:)

Second, years ago, when all this negative started happening … Anne, the individual, went into hiding. It was not time to talk about my secondary convictions, to show people who I am as a person, as an individual believer, to talk about the personal ways God was leading me to do such and such. It was a time of …. some hostility. And so, I just didn’t see any point of inflaming or entangling things with other life issues. I’m an avoid-conflict person, so I just hid huge, important-to-me parts of myself because I didn’t feel safe talking about them or sharing those parts of myself with my church.

So, in order to start “liking” my church again, I need to give myself the courage to be myself openly. Not in a brash, in-your-face, do-it-my-way kind of way at all. But more of, this is the good ways God’s led me, these are the deep things my heart cares about … kind of thing.

And, I’m starting to feel the safety, in my church, to do this again. To be uniquely who God made me to be, and enjoying their unique-nesses, too.

Third …. I think God has led me in a specific way to open myself up to making personal friends in church (with other moms). So I’m putting myself ‘our there’ for that possibility. We’ll see what comes of this, but I think overall, it will help me make church folks more able to see me as a person, get to know me, mutual enjoyment, etc. It’s hard for me to do, actually, because I like being alone. But, learn and grow! Learning to give up the comfort that I want to so carefully keep around me.

So, that’s where I’ve come so far, with nurturing a more mature “like.”

this pastor’s wife’s trauma

I always imagined myself a missionary. I never imagined myself a pastor’s wife. Never. Ever.

Warning; I need therapy, counseling, etc. Until then, I’m blogging. It’s cathartic.

Vitaliy was ordained as an evangelist in 2009, and he was *one* of the 3 pastors of our church. He was not the main pastor.

ordination6

But then.

Then.

We came back to Ukraine (from a visit to America) around 2010, and while we’d been gone, our church had exploded.

I can’t write details. It’s like big-legal-trouble details. And the sad/key thing is that it all involved the informal and formal leadership structure of the church.

There’s a lot I’m not going to write (you can thank me) because I have, cyclically, worked through forgiveness issues. I will just say, it was a baptism by fire into being the main pastor and his wife. It was having to do *at least something* with unrepentant or sadly trapped leaders.

It’s been six years, and the fall out is still hanging around. Maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m pathetic.

But here’s my today thing: In order to grow normally spiritually, I want/need to start enjoying my church again. I’ve dealt and am dealing with the forgiveness, the patterns of rehearsing their sins in my thoughts. I’ve committed to keep a guard over my mouth and stop the damaging, internal dialogue. Now I really want to start just liking them all again.

So, how to go about nurturing and re-creating “like”? 😀 It’s a cool question. …. I may be back with more.