Coming soon to a blog near you

A new me. I gained an obscene amount of weight when I was pregnant, like 60 pounds. Waaaay more than what they say is healthy. And B was a tiny baby -- 5 pounds 14 ounces -- so I can't blame much of it on him. Funny aside: I made M promise that no matter how big I got when I was pregnant, I'd never weigh more than him. He had a hard time keeping ahead of me toward the end there, poor guy. Anyway, back to my chubby self: about two months after B was born, a month before I had to go back to work, M and I both went on the South Beach diet. It was hella expensive and there's no way I could do it when I'm not home full-time, but it really worked. I got down to about 8-10 pounds above my pre-pregnancy weight.

And I stayed there. Nearly four years later, here I sit, still 8-10 pounds more of me than I like. I know there are lots of people out there who have genuine struggles with their weight and would probably give their right arm to be just 8-10 pounds above their ideal weight. But I'm living my own life, and I am starting to despise the body I'm living it in. It's time to take charge.

So here it is: I turn 40 in about two and a half months. When I turn 40, I will be the same weight I was when I turned 30. Since I only have a vague idea of what my actual weight was at 30, I've picked a number that I think is close. I'm setting the goal at 9 pounds less than I am today. Good thing I'm not aiming for my weight at 20 -- that's more than 30 pounds less than I weigh today, and I definitely haven't gotten any taller or anything. I was a skinny little stick back in the good ol' days. I remember trying to gain weight so the smallest size of Levi's 501s shrink-to-fits would stay on me. Ah, to be 20 again. No, scratch that. I'd just like to have the body of a 20 year-old and the mind of a 40 year-old. But I'm going to be realistic and aim for the 30 year-old bod.

Can I do it? I'm not known for my motivation when it comes to exercise. I love a good long walk or a sweat-inducing hike, but it's hard to find the time to work those in at the regular intervals I need to lose weight. I need to get back into a running habit, and I need to do strength-training twice a week.

I am, however, known for my love of cooking and food. Especially food that involves cheese. Not good when a body wants to shrink. My goal: more vegetables & fruit, less meat & dairy.

I'll check back in at the end of the week to report on my progress. I hope there's some to report! Anyone want to join me?

Dog days of summer

Where we live, on the last day before the outdoor city pools close for the winter, they have a "dog day." For $5, your pooch gets in to swim his heart out for two hours. We took Kenai and Josie today (aka the Doofi). Even though neither of them got in the water (except when we pushed them in, and then only for about five seconds), they had a blast running around & playing with all the other dogs. It was definitely worth the $5 just to see that much doggie joy. I'm hoping that by the time next year's dog days come around, Kenai will like the water more & will want to swim. He is mostly lab, after all. Swimming should be in his blood!

How did I get an early bird?!

B likes to wake up around 6am, sometimes even earlier. I am NOT a morning person, and sometimes this is really difficult for me. I'm sure that in ten years or so, we'll have the opposite problem. I'll be on here complaining that we wanted to go skiing, but couldn't get the B out of bed before noon.

Back when he was a baby, we'd hear him in there talking and singing to himself when he woke up. Sometimes he wouldn't call us for half an hour or more. We loved to lay in bed and listen to him. No more of that! He calls us the instant he wakes up now. It's like he's so full of excitement for the day that he just can't wait to get up and start it. He never actually gets out of bed though. Instead, he scoots down to the foot of his bed, opens his door, and calls out "Mommy, now can I get up?" If it's before 6:30, I usually say no. I turn on his lullaby CD and tell him to stay in his bed until the CD ends. It runs 35 minutes. Sometimes he falls back to sleep during that time, but usually he doesn't. At least he stays quiet in his room, and it gives us a little time to wake up before we have to be 100%. What are we going to do when he figures out how to turn of the CD himself?

I guess it's a good thing he doesn't ever get out of bed without asking first. I don't have to worry about him going down to the kitchen and playing with knives or something while we're still sleeping. I wonder how long this will last?

M & I have come up with a system for weekends that works pretty well for us. On Saturdays, M gets up with B and I get to sleep a little longer. On Sundays, it's my turn to get up. We usually go downstairs and watch a cartoon or two while I get my first cup of coffee in me. I don't like to talk before I've had a cup of coffee, so I need the cartoon to keep the B quiet for a bit.

On work days, we're usually up around 6:30, and we let the B get up then. Fridays are "B-Mommy Super Fun Days," when B stays home from school and I don't work. I occasionally try to grab an extra 20-30 minutes of sleep while M is up getting ready for work. A couple of times, M and B somehow managed to get up without me waking up. M took him downstairs & parked him in front of cartoons and let me sleep. I woke up to find M gone and B still watching cartoons. While it was nice to get that little extra bit of sleep, I felt very weird about it. I didn't like B being downstairs by himself with me upstairs sleeping. What if he started jumping on the couch, and fell and hit his head on the coffee table? What if he found the children's Tylenol, opened it and drank it? I mean, it would obviously be bad enough if that happened under any circumstances, but if it happened while I was upstairs snug in my bed, I'd never ever be able to forgive myself. So now I make sure I'm up before M leaves on Fridays.

Speaking of Tylenol...I didn't just randomly make up that possibility, although I definitely have a macabre imagination and have come up with worse. I read a story in the Denver Post about a three year-old kid who woke up before his parents, went downstairs, climbed up on the counter, opened the cabinet, reached up to the top shelf where the Motrin was, took it out of the box & the shrink-wrap (it was a new bottle I guess), opened the child-proof cap, and drank it. He lived to tell the tale, but it freaked me out completely. Note to self: this weekend, take all the meds out of the medicine cabinet, put them in the hall closet, and put a child lock on the door handle.

Happy birthday to M

M is 37 today! We gave him an iPod Nano. Wouldn't you know...about an hour after we gave it to him this morning, Apple introduced the next generation Nano -- twice the memory, plus it does video, for the same price. The first Nano is going back to Costco, and the new Nano has already been ordered from the Apple store. Now I'm off to ice the carrot cake. Happy birthday, M!

Check out the new 'do

I think it makes him look older:

Or maybe he just looks older because he's gained two pounds and grown half an inch in the last two weeks!

And a couple cute pix from bathtime tonight:

Bummer

I just got a message from our social worker, saying that she's moving on to another job. We've got our I-171H renewal process starting this month, which means a homestudy update. Now we're going to have to do that with a new social worker. Bummer. If you haven't been down this adoption road before, you might not realize how invasive and soul-baring a homestudy is. You pretty much have to spill your guts about your childhood, your relationship with your spouse, your parenting philosophy, everything. I'm not looking forward to doing that with a stranger. Our first social worker wasn't exactly a stranger -- she worked at the same place I do back in the late 1990s, so I knew her from that. She's a very open-minded person, and we were totally comfortable talking to her. I hope the new person is the same.

Hmmm...I wonder if the slowdown in China is what's causing this -- maybe the agency is having to let some social workers go, b/c they have fewer families starting the process. I hope not. I hope she just found a better job. I'll have to ask.

Berry Patch Farms

B & I went to Berry Patch Farms on Friday. It's an all-organic farm about half an hour east of town. You can pick your own for some things, and for others you can buy it in their little store. Two hours of berry-picking and $34 later, here's what we came home with (minus the 3 homemade fruit snacks the B ate in the car):

That's a LOT of berries. I froze half for smoothies. So far, we've had strawberry muffins, raspberry-strawberry shortcake, and raspberry kuchen. And what you see in the picture isn't anywhere near all that we picked -- I'd estimate that the B ate an entire quart of strawberries while we were picking. In fact, I doubt if he put a single berry in a box. They all went straight in the mouth. He ate so many that he peed orange when we came home! It's a true story, I swear.