After having done both, here’s my conclusion.  Insanity is primarily a cardio workout.  If you want to perform as an athlete, Insanity is a great all-around conditioning workout.  It is short and to the point, no fluff, just work hard and let the sweat flow.  My heart rate monitor was telling me I sometimes burned 1000 calories, before breakfast.  That kicks in your metabolism all day.

P90X is more of a look good workout, lots of upper body strength training.  Pull ups and bicep curls will help you look good, but aren’t particularly useful in most sports.  However I do like the variety that P90X provides, Insanity doesn’t have anything like the stretching, yoga, or kempo DVDs which are just different, and sometimes that change is very nice.  I also think the Ab Ripper DVD in P90X gives you a better ab work out than Insanity, but I like that most of the time Insanity incorporates it’s ab workouts into the normal cardio routine.

I’m sure my pull-ups suffered a little bit during Insanity, not working pull-ups as I was with P90X, but otherwise I’d say I still got a reasonable upper body conditioning, even though Insanity is primarily a cardio/legs workout. Insanity has a few floor and push up routines that do a great job of working the chest, shoulders, and triceps, so even though you aren’t spending as much time on them as P90X, it still gives you a good rip.

Here’s some before and after pictures that cover my journey over the last 2 years.  Hard to believe I’ve been doing this consistently for that long already!!!  Insanity added some minute definition.  Even though I’m not dieting, it trimmed a little fat.  However I’m surprised that I didn’t lose weight during Insanity.  I really thought I’d lose another 5 lbs on Insanity, but my weight remained stable so I didn’t include an updated weight chart.

When I first started Insanity I was constantly hungry.  And my body was sufficiently sore from one day to the next, making it kind of difficult to keep up with the workout schedule.  So, for the first time ever, I decided to look into protein powder drinks.  I can definitely tell that when I drink a recovery drink after a workout, two things happen.  First, I’m not starving by mid-morning as I was before, and second, I was able to come back to the next day’s workout without as much soreness, which allows me to push myself a little bit harder.  So, I still feel a little uneasy using recovery drinks with crazy chemical names, but it seems like it has helped my ability to concentrate at work, and my ability to hit the next day’s workout harder.   I wonder if I would have lost more weight if I hadn’t been using a protein shake, but I have to remind myself that I’m really not interested in losing weight, I’m interested in being in good shape.

Believe it or not, a few people have actually been requesting updated before and after photos, since my last set was from nearly a year ago.  I’m flattered that some people are so interested in my progress.  So without further ado:

Finally, one thing that I like about Insanity is that you take a fitness test every 2 weeks to track your progress.  P90X has worksheets used to track progress too, but it was kind of fun that these were like milestone days in the Insanity program.  I will continue to update these stats as I repeat the Insanity program.

As you can see, even though my body didn’t appear to change drastically from P90X to Insanity, my fitness tests clearly shows that I had significant improvement in conditioning.  It’s important to note that the fitness test isn’t just about maxing out your repetitions, it’s about doing it in a regimented period of time.  For each test, you have 1 minute to complete as many reps as possible, then you have 1 minute to rest.  After the first few tests you’re winded, but the tests keep coming.  So it really is just as much (or more) an endurance test as it  is a strength test, and you can clearly see my endurance improved over time.  That’s what I like about Insanity.  It gives me increased confidence that I can out perform the average Joe, and very likely I’m more agile than he is due to the types of exercises Insanity uses.

I’m going to repeat Insanity, but this time try harder to get dips and pull-ups in while I’m at work.  I think the combination of the two will be pretty tight.  I started out doing this in Phase 1 of Insanity, but when Phase 2 started it kicked my butt so hard that I didn’t have the strength or motivation to continue doing pull-ups during the day.  Now that I’ve been through Phase 2 once, I really don’t have any excuse anymore.  Once I’ve completed Insanity the 2nd time with ancillary exercises, I intend to repeat Insanity a 3rd time, but then I will incorporate the extra DVDs I received in the deluxe kit, which includes an upper body workout routine and a more intense ab workout.  So I still have plenty of room to grow with this workout series.   After that, I have a schedule that mixes P90 and Insanity to get the best of both worlds.  I’m looking forward to it.  After that I might need to purchase P90X-2, or whatever the latest and greatest is.

Dig deep,
Nate

Core:
We fought through the sickness in the house and finished week 18 last week (well, before Monday morning). One of the benefits of homeschooling is that even though Hannah had a couple days off, she wasn’t “behind” when we got back to it. This puts us halfway through the P4/5 core. Hannah always really enjoys the science books, right now we are reading “What’s Under the Sea”. Hannah was thrilled to see a picture of “Nemo and his anemone” in the book when we read about coral reefs. Still continuing with the daily Mother Goose and weekly Uncle Wiggly stories. I think we will start a book called Milly-Molly-Mandy soon, which Hannah has already peeked at and is excited about. For social studies, we are starting a new book called “Stories from Africa”. I’ve only read one so far, but I really liked it. I think that this one is a Sonlight exclusive.

LAK:
Hannah has about 4 weeks left of LAK. We didn’t do all the activities and all the reading this first time through. She is starting to show a little more interest in reading and we’ve been averaging one book a week of the Fun Tales set from Sonlight, but I don’t think we will catch up before we are done. My original plan was for H was to go back through LAK and hit some of the activities we missed and complete the reading assignments. However, due to having the girls and summer looming over my head I have decided to attempt to do LA1 with all three of them instead.

LA1:
Hannah and our oldest will be ready to start LA1 at the end of May when school lets out. The middle one hasn’t had as much reading background, but knows all her letter sounds and is starting to blend. It may be a little bit difficult for her, but she catches on pretty quickly and I think we can make this work. If I need to back off on some of the reading, I can. I want them all to be doing the same thing to simplify MY life. Right now we have homework time before dinner, but everyone is doing different work and distracting each other and it drives me nuts. I can work other subjects with Hannah before the girls get home and we can focus on LA with all three of them for writing and grammar. I think my biggest problem is going to be the reading practice. They all are pretty smart, so if one of them hears the other one reading a story, they will try to memorize it and when it is their turn will try to recall instead of read. I’m going to either have to do a rotation each day or split them up to do it. . . haven’t decided how that will work yet. I’m also hoping there may be a little bit of competition in the writing assignments to make them nice and neat and do things correctly. This could backfire on me, but we’re gonna try.

Math:
We’ve stalled a little bit on math lately. H has been doing numbers up to 30 and +1s. So she does the number line up to 30 then a set of questions like 17 + 1 = up to 29 + 1 =. I’ve discovered that she knows the answers but she doesn’t feel as confident writing her numbers, and gets frustrated. So if I offer to write half of the answers for her, she will do the whole page without complaining.

Karate:
I tried the girls on a karate class that was a disaster. Mostly because the two fosters aren’t very good with following directions and listening. Hannah has also been frustrating because once it gets to something that she thinks is too hard, she just stops participating. So . . . we attended about half of the classes and won’t be going anymore. Maybe we’ll try a dance class over the summer. . .

From the teacher’s point of view:
I finally feel like I’m starting to figure out how to organize things and make sure I’m prepared with what I need when I need it. This is a picture of the school bookshelf. Sonlight sells ‘sticker labels’ for each core so they each have their own color. I think its a great idea, and helps my household recognize the school books so they get back on the shelf eventually. Its also helpful to keep the cores separated. I think this will really start to save my bacon when we start Ben on P3/4 in the fall. We’ll have two different cores going and the labels will help keep us organized.

We didn’t do a whole lot for Easter. Had a nice slow weekend at home. We had been to carnival/celebration things the two weekends preceeding and we have a couple more coming up.
We did a little egg hunt in the backyard and gave the kids their baskets.

Pictures here.

I also uploaded random other photos since the last time, hopefully you can find them in the feed here.
P.S. I’m actually disappointed in Chrome in this area, the IE interface for feeds is much nicer.

It had been awhile since I had looked at my side of the tree (because I was capturing data from Nate’s side). So, I did what any unsuspecting person would do . . . I got onto Ancestry and ‘walked’ my side of the tree. Bad idea . . . Apparently this triggered Ancestry’s search engine to realize that I was working on those areas. This of course is a good thing, if you are focusing on a small number of people. However, my side of the tree goes back over 10 generations in a lot of areas and in a few cases all the way to the pilgrims/quakers/first settlers of America. I have a lot of people on my side. What happended next is I got swamped with all the new ‘connections’ and hints that Ancestry decided would help me with my research.

So, since January, I’ve been trying to dig out from under the thousands of entries in my rss feed. Just so everyone knows, after 1000 entries in Google reader it stops counting and just says (1000+). A number of them were duplicate entries from a member who has a lot of the same people as me in their tree. I get a hit for every person, photo, story that matches. So those could be done analyzed all at the same time. I also found some major errors in a couple places (like finding out someone I thought was a bio mom was actually a second or third wife and I needed to research the actual mother instead). Overall, I’ve gained a ton of new data and sources for my side of the tree and connections. So it wasn’t wasted effort. In the middle of everything, I’ve also gotten some new hits on Nate’s side. Which is good, it means my maintenance system is working.

All this to say that I’ve mostly dug out from under the pile of hits that I unknowingly triggered and I think I’m ready to start working on my side the way I was planning to in January. When I’m using the rss feed, I’m at the whim of the hint and have to follow the tree of the person that matched me. That’s great for getting some info, but I like to be much more methodical (who would have guessed?). I like to work on a single person and immediate family and ensure I have links between the generations. I also like to fill out siblings (aunts and uncles) if I have them, because that is the best way to find other’s working on my same line.

Diltz/Henry lines . . . here I come.

Do you really believe this?

I’ve been seeking spiritual gifts because I want to love the way Jesus loved, in supernatural power and action.  I want to know God’s will, to help people know God, and to demonstrate that God has power today.   I guess I got kind of burned out on “God is love”.  Yes, God is love, and power is nothing but dangerous if not motivated by love.  But love is also impotent if not accompanied with power.  What I’ve been coming to realize is that the American church experience typically does not match the clear biblical model.  Jesus and the early disciples didn’t just talk about love, they demonstrated it by helping people.  And not just helping people in the natural like feeding the hungry and taking care of orphans and widows, though it is right to do these things, but they also had faith that God was all-powerful, and so they helped people in the supernatural by healing and casting out demons.  I don’t believe the gospel would have spread around the world if Jesus did not heal.  If Jesus simply said, “I’m sorry you have leprosy.  Really, I feel for you, so have peace that God loves you just the same!”.  If that’s all he said and then moved on to the next person, would that person accept Jesus as the Messiah?

I guess you could say that I’m in a phase of testing.  Testing myself and testing God’s Word.  I hear radical stories of miracles happening in far away mission grounds, but I’m lucky to be part of a church that believes those things are necessary and available today in America too.  Our church is seeing more and more of these miracles, and as a body our faith is growing very quickly.  I’m sharing my piece of that experience.

When I talk to someone about Christ, I want to fully know that God is willing and able to do something in their lives to demonstrate His love.  I don’t want it to be head knowledge or faith.  That is why I’m seeking the gifts.  But more importantly, after that person has been the recipient of a personal, supernatural touch from God, I want them to receive God’s love in a personal way that transforms them.  Over the last year or so, I’ve had a few encounters with the supernatural as it pertains to God’s love for others.

3. I had an opportunity to be a part of a healing prayer team for a young man.  My role in this was intercessory prayer, nothing more.  During this time I saw a vision of Jesus entering the room and sitting down beside the young man.  I didn’t share this at the time, but the leader asked the young man if they were feeling/seeing anything.  The young man announced that he felt some tingling/burning in his right leg.  You can imagine my excitement when I shared that I had just seen Jesus sit at his right side.  When you consider that Christ is so personal that he was blessing this young man with a physical touch, what a mighty God we serve.
4. During small group prayer for an individual, I received a prophetic word in my spirit: “Yash asha senequia” which I interpreted to mean “the Lord doesn’t just mend”.  The Lord makes new.  2 Cor5:17.
5. During a prayer and praise I felt anointed for deliverance.  After giving a testimony I invited anyone who felt like they needed to be set free from something to come to me for prayer.  The individual I prayed for unloaded some baggage and received healing in a big way.  He was so on fire that night after receiving that healing that he later ended up giving an alter call for the deliverance of others.  Halleluiah! 
6. A large family was parked in a suburban.  The car wouldn’t start, and it was warm outside.  The engine turned too slowly, the car sounded ill.  After observing several attempts I prayed for the car and to my relief the car started and the family was on their way.  Was it natural or supernatural?  I don’t know, but prior to my prayer I didn’t think there was any way that suburban was going to start.
7. I received a prophetic word for a woman in church that “today you would be filled with the Lord completely”.  I didn’t know what that meant really, she is already a spirit-filled woman, but I felt like it was a life-giving word worth sharing.  The next time I saw her she was so excited to share that that at12:30am that same night, she woke up with a powerful “revelation from the Lord and received an outpouring of righteousness that freed her from long standing issues”.  She said she laid in bed laughing and rejoicing with tears of gladness.
8. I’ve been fortunate to be apart of 3 physical healings.  In all three instances I saw no immediate evidence of the healings.  However, in all 3 instances, the recipient of the prayer told me in coming days that their ailments healed that same night.  So it is by their testimony, not my own, that I say praise God!
9. One night at prayer and praise I had a pain in my jaw.  I had no pain earlier that day, so I thought it might be a word from the Lord.  I asked anyone who was experiencing a pain like this to come to me for prayer.  To my surprise, I ended up praying for 4 people that night.  One of those women received incredible blessing that night, including a word of knowledge from another member of the congregation.
10. That same night at prayer and praise, I felt the Lord was telling me to walk out of church and head to the nearby bus stop.  To my surprise, as soon as I stepped out of the church, I saw a man pushing his son in a wheel chair across the church parking lot.  I had a dilemma.  I really thought I was supposed to go to the bus stop, and yet common sense says the opportunity to show God’s love was right in front of me.  Maybe it was an excuse, but I decided to keep on towards the bus stop.  It was empty.  I spun around and went back to look for the man and his son, but couldn’t find them.  I told my pastor I chickened out, but he reminded me that Peter wasn’t a failure for sinking; he was the only one who stepped out of the boat!  He was excited that I was listening for the voice of the Lord and obedient to it even when it seemed unconventional.
11. I received a word of knowledge for a woman at church that I didn’t know and had never spoken to before.  The word of knowledge came first as a vision, then an interpretation to that vision, then the knowledge of who it was for.  I don’t know how I knew who it was for her, I just felt like God wanted to reach out to her.  The vision was essentially some swirling playground swings.  My interpretation was that she had some emotional scarring that revolved around playground swings.  She confirmed that she used to receive much physical and emotional harassment as a child around the playground swings, and it was an area of pain in her childhood memories.  I then shared with her a message from God, how he sees her, and how he adores being with her, like a father gently pushing his daughter on the swings.  She was very thankful for that personal touch of love from God the Father.

I hope this is only the beginning.  I share these things only to give testimony and encourage you that the supernatural gifts of the Holy Spirit are for all believers!  We should walk with power and authority, claiming hearts and territory for the Kingdom of God.  I want to speak truth and life into people’s lives.  I want to make good on Jesus’s promise that we too will minister in the same way he did.  And I want to spread the word that love conquers all, even death.  Christ has risen, and he has given us new life!

Amen. 

Base P4/5:
Continuing with the daily readings and Mother Goose rhymes with a theme of “around the world”.

We started an art appreciation book and also a sticker book which is just meant to introduce lots of new vocabulary.

Hannah really enjoys the current ‘science’ book by the Berenstain Bears. I’m always surprised by the amount of detail that they get on each page and its one of my favorites to read. The first section was about the months and seasons of the year. The second was about animals, plants, and earth science and the third section is about machines, energy, and experiments. I’m sure we’ll read through this one again.

I also am a big fan on the socials studies book we’ve been using. I’m always pleasantly surprised with the Usborne books. Its very detailed regarding different occupations and has fun play on word names for the people in the stories.

LAK:
We definitely don’t stay on track with this program (which is OK since its a Kinder program). We’re on week 28. Working on the letter “G”. She has 8 more ‘weeks’ of this program, but I want to go back and do some of the extra activities that are suggested as well as the reading materials.
Last week I had a breakthrough with the early readers that come with this program. Hannah always resisted them to the point of throwing a fit even though I knew she knew the letter sounds. So I had shelved them back on week 12ish. But she recently really got into coloring her worksheets when she was done with them, and this particular set of books is black and white. So I offered to let her color them if she would read them to me first. Success! She’s read 4 of them so far. We might just catch up before week 36.

Math:
Hannah is still working through the Kumon book and Ben is doing a Kumon folding book. She is doing early addition and sometimes will randomly call out a math problem.

PE:
The girls of the family are taking a karate class through the Gilbert rec program and Ben is going to do his first class by himself, another movement class. He didn’t even cry about being left alone. In fact, Kathy said he was getting on all the elements before the teacher even got them all set up.

Art:
Kathy, as always, does a great job finding crafts for the kids to do and I’m thankful for her. She’s been making extras for the girls so they don’t feel left out. I think these flowers are pretty cute.

<-- This is a pic of Ben being so excited to ride on the train!

There was also a small coaster, airplanes, carousel, . . . and they had a ton of food and music and other stuff for the carnival side. The kids had a great time!

Enchanted Island Photos

Other photos that have posted recently:
- Trip to the Millers in early Mar
- New random pics of Ben
- 2011 Scrapbook April – June added

Some of the new features are an RSS feed of the most recently added photos. This is available from the sidebar. This will be useful since I split the photos up among so many folders when I upload new ones. The slideshow feature is nice and it seems to work better across the different browsers than the old one. There are some additional plugins that I haven’t had time to look at yet and supposedly video support will be coming, so looking forward to that. There are also some upgrades on the administration side of things that will save me some time. Yay!

There are a couple things I’m not too happy about (I’m going to try a couple different themes and see if it will fix my nit picks) and I lost a little bit of the customization that we had done on the old one. So . . . that will be occuring as I have time to get it back to the way I like it. Considering how many albums and photots we have, I may never get back to the old folders to rearrange them. Most people probably won’t even notice.

All the old links will still take you to the old gallery, but anything new I post will link to the new gallery. Eventually, I’ll update the old links and get rid of the duplicity.

If you see anything that doesn’t seem to be working right in your browser (ahem, Ginny), let me know and I’ll see what I can do. I tested it in IE and Chrome.

Yay for forward motion, new features, and easier user interface!

New Gallery, or you can get to it from the menu bar.

 An expanded title  would be “A Survey of Tools and Techniques for Separating the User Interface from Business Logic Implementation in LabVIEW”, but that doesn’t fit on a slide very well.

The main goal of the presentation was to provide motivation for this year’s topic of Separating User Interface from Implementation, establish a tone of open discussion, and create a baseline of understanding of the current tools and techniques currently in use to achieve this separation.

https://decibel.ni.com/content/docs/DOC-21733

I wasn’t very happy with where I ended up, which was to do some studying of the Levitical laws and ceremonies and what they really meant to see how they should apply to me today. Well, thank God for Beth Moore (and her daughter Melissa) for shedding some light on this area for me. They point out that this is also an area that the early church had to traverse as they formed a new religion out of the traditional Jews AND the Gentiles. “This new thing God did meant Gentiles no longer needed to convert to Judaism to be included among god’s people. In Peter’s words, God has purified or cleansed the Gentiles’ hearts by faith.” (Melissa)

In Acts 15, commonly referred to as the Jerusalem Council, we find Paul and Barnabas appointed to attend a meeting with the elders in Jerusalem to once again discuss the issue of circumcision and whether it applied to Gentiles, and to come to an agreement that would affect the direction Christianity was going. Their was ‘much discussion’, Peter made his statement referenced above, and when everyone had had their say James finally ‘spoke up’. We are studying James currently and are discovering that he was very influential in the early church in Jerusalem. He was a Jewish Christian leading the most Jewish of the converts out there (even some of the Pharisees). He recognized the need to have a diplomatic solution that would meet the desires of both sides of the issue (the Jews and the Gentiles). And this is what he decided: Acts 15:19,20 “It is my judgment, therefore, that we should not make it difficult for the Gentiles who are turning to God. Instead we should write to them, telling them to abstain from food polluted by idols, from sexual immorality, from the meat of strangled animals and from blood.”

Why did he pick those four things? Because he KNEW the law. In Leviticus 17 and 18, these are the sections of the law that say “to the Jew and the alien among you”. He basically gave all the Gentile believers a free visa to Christianity, while restraining the Jewish converts from making them follow all of the 600+ laws that they had been trying to keep and hadn’t done a very good job at.

So, now I have a better bearing on the rules I should live by from this side of the cross, Mark 12:30 which points to the 10 commandments and Acts 15 which points to the Levitical laws for the Jewish aliens. I’m much more excited about that than trying to wade through all of the law to determine what applies to me. If I could just get that love thing down, I think everything else would fall into place.

Mark 12:30 And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ 31 The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”