Experimenting on Yourself - Never Recommended

Short Version:
I am going through some serious psychological withdrawal symptoms and some physical ones as well. This has made me uncharacteristically grumpy, rather depressed, and completely unable to focus. This is how you loyal readers have been granted with a whiny post rather than a brilliant and informative one. :-)

Long Version:
As you may know, if you actually make it down to the bottom of my Weekly Review posts, my husband and I have been trying for a healthy lifestyle upgrade in hopes of reversing the steady upward trend in our weights we've experienced since we got married. We've been tracking our activity levels (yea Fitbit - highly recommended) and calories in and we've both lost about 10 pounds in 12 or so weeks.

Then, on the recommendation of a coworker of my husband's, we read the book: Why We Get Fat by Gary Taubes. It is a very interesting read full of history and research summaries. I'm always disproportionately swayed by research. I'll give you a hint. This book essentially explains the science behind why an Atkins style low-carb diet works to help you lose weight, and helps with controlling blood sugar swings. We decided to try it.

Here's the problem. I love carbs. I like the sweet kind and the bread kind. I don't actually much like meat or fats (although I do love cheese). In fact, I would often substitute a small sugary item (hello mini ice cream cones) for a healthy snack during our previous 10 weeks of tracking calories under the assumption that 130 calories is 130 calories no matter what you're getting it from.

Nevertheless, we came up with a week's worth of breakfasts, lunches, dinners, and snacks that we were pretty excited about. After all, after 10 weeks of eating only 1200 calories a day, eating as much as I like of a subset of foods sounded kinda fun. We're all of 36 hours into our first week. Neither of us are happy campers. It is amazing how much I want something sweet even though I'm not actually hungry. It is amazing how little I've been able to focus today. I couldn't concentrate on the speech post I had planned. I didn't get any work on the s-blends resource I'm putting together. I usually enjoy those activities.

Someone tell me that you've tried this low-carb thing and that things get better. While I'm wishing, please tell me they get better sometime in the next 24-48 hours. Please?

Speech Rating Scale - Two Versions

You may or may not remember the Articulation Rating Scale I posted a few months back. I wanted a way to give children feedback on correcting distortions that showed progress even when they weren't getting the sound exactly correct. I came up with this:

Jenn (Crazy Speech World) came across that post and tried the rubric with the students in her school because the entire school was encouraging the use of self-assessment and rubrics with their students. She found the children really enjoyed using the scale, but her youngest students were overstimulated by the 5 point scale. So, she made a great simple version for her youngest kids. You can find the link to download it full-size in her post.

I really like the simple version and will be trying soon. Thanks Jenn!

Salt Art Revisited - Briefly

A little less than a year ago I did a post on an art project using salt, glue, and liquid watercolors that I did with the children. Great fun was had all around and the end results were rather pretty.

I needed some quick activity to occupy the children because, quite honestly, they were driving me a little crazy so I whipped out some salt, glue, liquid watercolors, and eyedroppers. This time I grabbed some cardboard I'd saved from all the pencil bags I bought for the busy bags. The kids had a blast. The end results were rather striking on a black background. I also used kosher salt this time. The coarser salt looked nice too. The children were trying for much more sophisticated drawings too.

Michael's giraffe and tree and lake with fish in it were my favorites of his.

Ava experimented with color and then created a piece she called the "penny trail".

Of course, this kind of art is the take a picture of it and then throw it away type, because even with the glue under the salt, once the pictures were vertical, colored salt and glue went everywhere. Still, fun was had by the littles and mama retained her sanity so all was good.