Posts from — December 2008

Music: “Life in Technicolor” by Coldplay

Yestertime has been getting the big ol’ shaft lately because I have been tirelessly working on a top secret Christmas project for several UNDISCLOSED RECIPIENTS.  I’m pretty stoked about it, even though it made me stay up past midnight three nights in a row and use words that would make Margaret Cho blush.

So all my two hands free time was spent on that, and I had to let go of the long held perception I have that I AM A MACHINE.  Something had to give, and it was the blog.

Also, there was the mastitis.  For those of you who haven’t had it or heard of it, it’s kind of like the Flu Virus Version 2.0: all the perks of the original plus painfully sore boobs!  It’s great!

All day last Thursday I kept feeling kind of achy and just generally crummy, but I just chalked it up to Life With a Weensy One.  As dinner time approached though, I started to feel chills-y and feverish and finally had to go lie down and let Lorso finish the supper schlep.  I slept for about 15 minutes – just long enough for LG to digest the last vestiges of her previous meal and start to demand that the tank be filled back up PRETTY PLEASE.  Feeling ill is a miserable state, and when you have a baby that you are responsible for all hours of the day you can’t quite get the continuous rest you need for bouncing back quickly, so things start to seem pretty grim once that thermometer creeps past 100.  My temperature reached about 101 and I felt like our house had been relocated to Antarctica, even though I’m pretty sure Lorso had on short sleeves and Bug was stark naked for bath time and seemed nonplussed about the frigidity I seemed to have in my very bones.  So I added a sweatshirt on top of my two long sleeved shirts.  And then I got under an electric blanket.  And then I turned the space heater on high.  Still – I quivered like a leaf.

Finally I fell asleep, and about 2 hours later I woke up in a haze thinking, “Mffpht…feel toasty…and sticky.  Am I having that dream where I bathe in a vat of warm syrup again?”  Then as I regained my full consciousness my thoughts quickly became “OMG. AM A FRAJILLION DEGREES. INTERNAL ORGAN MELTDOWN.”  I may have lost a couple of pounds in sweat.  Always the optimist, I thought, “Heck yeah! Kicking off Operation DeFlabbify with a BANG!”

Everyone I’ve ever talked to about mastitis pretty much universally said that they thought they were going to die when they had it, they felt that sick. So I felt a little like I drew the Get Out of Jail Free card when I was back to normal by Friday night.  Maybe I had the mildest case of mastitis ever in recorded history, or maybe I just had a touch of the 24-hour flu and need to adjust the underwire on my nursing bras. Whatever the explanation, I am grateful that I never reached the “Wishing For Death” stage of mastitis.  Thank you Boob Gods.

And now I can get back to this blather!  Aren’t you glad.  Coming up soon I will have a little video for you all about our life with LG so far.  Set to music!  Because I am that fancy!  Also, I cannot resist the opportunity to put an actual soundtrack to my life, since I am often playing one in my head.  There is usually an orchestra involved, because my life is clearly a sweeping epic, a la The Thorn Birds.

Bring on the violins!

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Also, life has been a lot like this for me.  It’s uncanny how parallel my experiences have been to Rebecca’s.  I’m having a hard time not linking to her blog every day and just saying “Ditto”.  Except maybe for the extreme high on life happiness all the time.  I’m hovering more around the 85% of the time mark.

Diaper hull breach levels: CRITICAL

Baby clothes supply: DEPLETED

Dash – Dash – Dash DOT-DOT-DOT  Dash – Dash -Dash

Can I just for a quick sec talk about something potentially boring for oh, 99% of you? Fantastic. Here we go.

Post-pregnancy weight loss: what’s up with that junk?  I am feeling quite flummoxed in this particular area, simply because apparently last time tiny fat-sucking aliens came down from space and took the pounds right off of me while I went on eating as many fat grams as I could cram into my piehole.  Ok, it MAY not have been aliens, but it’s as good a reason as any as to why I snapped back into my size AHEM jeans three weeks after giving birth.

There’s a new thing called “Momversation” that is being played on several of the blogs I read (including Dooce, and the fact that she was one of the panelists is about the ONLY reason I would ever even click on something with a name that asinine. In fact, all the women involved are some seriously cool chicks, which is good, because otherwise the fact that I was sitting at home with a newborn watching something called “Momversation” would make me want to pull on my tapered, high waisted, acid washed jeans and a scrunchy and drive my minivan off a high cliff) and the most recent topic of conversation involved post pregnancy weight loss. But instead of making me feel like I was not alone in my quest for non-doughy abs, I felt like maybe I have been setting myself up for a mighty disappointment by thinking that it will all go as it did last time, i.e. I will simply sit on my duff and laze the pounds away.  Listening to those women, I started to think that perhaps I have been a little too high and also mighty about my body’s ability to turn on the super-metabolism and help a girl out.  The part that especially got to me was when Rebecca mentioned that she was a dedicated breastfeeder, and yet the pounds were not “melting off” like so many people had said that they would.

Yeah, I’m pretty sure those exact words came out of my mouth once or twice. And I really thought it was the breastfeeding last time. Maybe it was, but maybe it was just the fact that I was still in my twenties back then.  Now that I’m an old gray harpy at 30, my body is all, “HELL no I’m not giving up this extra insulation – it’s f’ing COLD outside, woman.”  And yes, I DO realize it’s only been 5 weeks since LG was born and I also realize that I am a fairly small person to begin with, so it may look like I am perhaps on crack cocaine when I say I want to get into better shape.  But I’ll just lay it right out there: I am still packing on 20-25 extra pounds.  More importantly, I FEEL those extra pounds, and they leave me breathless after racing Bug to the mailbox.

We do not have a long driveway.

So I’ve decided to do a humbling and potentially mortifying thing and report on my progress in said area with you, the Internet. I am doing this as a way to be accountable to SOMETHING, even if that something is just the comments section of my little corner of cyberspace. (i.e. “Rachel, your recent comment about inhaling an entire bag of Cheetos and washing it down with several shots of whipped cream straight from the nozzle makes me think that maybe you could be trying a wee bit harder in your quest to shrink your GIANT ASS.”).  So I say to you: BRING IT, INTERNETZ.

I’m not going to turn this blog into a “getting in shape” blog, because my GOD I can’t think of anything more heinously boring to write about every day, but I will check in now and again with what I’m doing to make positive steps toward a more healthy body shape that I can feel good about.  I’d like to be able to say in a few months that my body is stronger and more physically fit than it’s been in a while, and that’s going to take some attention.

I am starting slowly, as I have not continuously walked more than a hundred yard stretch at a time for several months and I have forgotten what section you buy “vegetables” in at the Kroger.  So today in my first act of Operation Deflabbify, I dug tirelessly through some old boxes of videos until I found the VHS copy of MTV’s The Grind that I won at a party a few years ago in a game of Trivial Pursuit.  I dusted it off and set it next to the VCR so that it could be easily found.

Tomorrow I may even watch it.

Baby steps.

OMG what is happening to me.  I AM A BOWL OF MUSH.

I am all enamored with these, spit bubbles included:

And I would like to feast upon these, NOM NOM:

And I am infatuated with these, both Chin One and Chin Two:

Also, let’s not forget my love affair with this mug:

I am hearting all of this so hard it has liquefied my gray matter into tiny rainbows and puppies and Nicholas Sparks novels.  But if being dopey over all of this is wrong, I DON’T WANT TO BE RIGHT.