My work-out routine suffered last week and this week as we flipped the switch from freewheeling summer to scheduled school mode. From little boys in jammies until noon, watching Tom & Jerry with unchecked cowlicks bouncing on their big heads to “get up, get dressed, brush your hair, eat your breakfast, let’s go we’re late!” From, “eh, I can wear this one more time no one’s going to see me,” to “shit. I have to do laundry again so I have clean panties at the bus stop.”

Between last Thursday and Monday of this week, all three boys spiked ridiculously high fevers and/or chucked multiple times. How they deal with being sick tracks with their personalities. Nate collapses in an Elmo blanket heap wherever his legs give out, sleeps, and is lethargic. Yet, he remains sweet and cordial despite his fiery flesh. Liam RAGES at the sickness, yelling and screaming melodramatic things like, “I’M SICK AND BURNING AND I’LL NEVER! EVER! FEEL BETTER EVER AGAIN!!!!!! AARRRRRRRRRRGGGGHHHHHH!!!!” He is seriously uncool in the face of adversity.  Sam regresses by about 12 months. He fusses and is clingy and won’t let me even get around the corner out of his sight. “You come way down on your bed, Mum-Mum?” My bed, incidentally, is a makeshift pallate in his room on the floor consisting of a thrice-folded, queen-size, foam mattress topper, a green, animal print fleece baby blanket, and a pillow. It’s very luxurious. He threw up on my mattress and on various parts of my body no fewer than 3 times in 12 hours.

We had Liam’s first day of kindergarten on Tuesday. Bill turned 41 yesterday. And, we’re getting ready for a small dinner party of family and close friends on Saturday to celebrate the old man. So, I did not sweat or bleed or cry nearly enough to meet my goals last week. I have changed things up a bit. I’m running for an hour, three days a week and strength training for an hour on each of my other two work-out days. The scale is not dropping as fast as I would like, but I have to admit that I can see a difference after only a few weeks with the barbell and dumb bells. My bum has lifted a bit, and my hamstrings and quads are beginning to yawn and come out of hibernation.  

I mentioned before that I use www.myfooddiary.com to track my caloric intake, the nutritional composition of the food I eat, daily exercise (or lack there of), and calories burned. They might have the most comprehensive list of calorie burn for exercises and activities that I have ever seen. Each activity falls under a general heading (gym, household, lawn, outdoor, sports, etc.) to help you more easily locate your specific activity. Their choices range from ”dog bathing” to “chain saw use,” “paddleboat” to “quoits.” (wtf are quoits?) The very last category is ‘miscellaneous.’ Under it, there are four choices: standing-light activity, shopping, sexual activity-moderate effort, sexual activity-vigorous effort. First of all, shouldn’t sexual activity fall under ‘household’…maybe ‘lawn’ if you’re feeling particularly bold and the mosquitos aren’t out. And second, what sad sack is going to admit to ‘moderate effort!?’ That just seems cruel on the part of the people at myfooddiary. “Hey Joe, check it out. ’cornfedgal’ out in Des Moines half-assed it in bed again last night!” *high-five-smack*

Week 1: -5.0 lbs.
Week 2: -1.9 lbs.
Week 3: -0.0 lbs.
Week 4: -0.6 lbs.
Week 5: -1.0 lbs.

Total to date: -8.5 lbs.
Weekly average: 1.7 lbs.

I gave birth in October 2004, March 2006, and November 2007. In case you’re slow with the digits like I am, that’s three births in three years and one month. That’s also a one-way ticket to LOOOOOOOONville and I highly don’t recommend reproducing like crystal meth infused bunnies.

It’s a logical assumption to think that the weight I’m dropping is residual baby weight, compounded by multiple pregnancies in a relatively short amount of time, that I carried over like a big, fat remainder in a long division problem. But, that isn’t the case.

With the exception of the run-of-the-mill BS that goes along with pregnancy (fatigue, mild nausea, fluid retention, peeing like a damned leaky lawn sprinkler during the third trimester, heart burn, etc.) the only real problem I ever had was being in false labor with Liam for three days before I was in actual labor with him for 26 hours…still bitter about that. We didn’t have the heartbreaking infertility issues that are so common in “older” couples, there was no preeclampsia or gestational diabetes, no horrible morning sickness or bed rest ordered, no stretch marks and no post-partum depression. None of the babies were even so much as jaundiced at birth. They latched on easily and were *voracious* nursers. We were lucky. I gained 25-30 lbs. with each boy and within two weeks of delivering each time, it was all gone. My shape wasn’t back, unless you consider a deflated kiddie pool a body shape, but the weight was gone.

All of that is not to brag or take credit for dropping the baby weight quickly, because I didn’t do anything to lose it other than breastfeed. When you consider that 10 to 12 of the 25 lbs. was baby and placenta and a huge amount of fluid weight was released in the week following delivery, there wasn’t that much left to lose.

Liam weighed 8 lbs. 4 oz., Nate weighed 8 lbs. 4 oz. and Sam weighed 8 lbs. 2.75 oz. The doctor said that if Sam hadn’t pooped on his way out, he probably would have been 8 lbs. 4 oz., too. (Oddly, I also weighed 8 lbs. 4 oz. when I was born.)

Besides obviously being amazed that I had just pushed another human being out of my body Turducken style, I was FLOORED by how huge the placenta was! For some reason, I had pictured it as an innocuous, silver-dollar-sized piece of liverwurst, happily attached to the back of my uterus, knitting baby booties to pass the 9 months. But, no…this crimson, liver-sized monster was practically as big as the baby itself, minus a giant, unyielding, coconut head and Olympic swimmer shoulders, and smoked a Camel Light and chatted up the doctor while it was being weighed, measured, and checked for veiny goodness. (Check it out if you dare. You have ample gross-out warning.)

While the weight I’m carting around isn’t pregnancy weight, the babies are most definitely the root cause of it. They were beautiful little time vampires who sucked the minutes from my days, a good part of my nights, and often, my sense of self out of me. After they were down for the night, sometimes I would sit and think, ‘Man, I don’t think this is how I’m supposed to feel. I’m doing this wrong. I’m missing…something. Maybe somethings missing from me! I got a defective set of hardware! I’m missing the instruction manual and bolt #3A that holds the whole damned desk together!”

As the boys got older, and with Bill’s help, I regained small pieces of time and wee bits of myself. To the point where, most importantly, I felt like working out and could take an hour out of the day to go sweat and not feel like I was abandoning my kids or overloading Bill. It got easier.

I thought last week was going to be a disastrous set-back, but I guess all of the swimming we did helped off-set the Swiss Roll with Pop Tart chaser diet I was on. I did exactly zero structured exercise and ate terrible, delicious, chemical-dipped foods, but still managed to drop 1.9 lbs. Maybe it was momentum from the week before.

Week 1: -5.0 lbs.

Week 2: -1.9 lbs.

Total to date: -6.9 lbs.

This year, I took the boys out, and let them shop for their own Mother’s Day presents for Jill. This resulted in her receiving the following:

• 1 Battle Force Strike Team (3 Pack) - Poseable Figures and Weapons
• 1 Pack Glitter Girl Rings (9 Styles)
• 1 Pack Velvet Art (with 5 colored pens)
• 1 Rubber Snake
• 1 Monster Truck
• 1 Glitter Girl Nail Set
• 1 Spider Man Light-up Yo-Yo
• 1 Neon Folder (to hold boys’ artwork)
• 1 Birthday Card with subsequent Mother’s Day crayon modifications
• 1 Whoopee Cushion

Mum-Mum: “You guys! Why do I have to tell you the same thing over and over? How come every morning you make noise and I have to come in and tell you to be quiet because Sam is still sleeping? Why can’t you remember and just do it?”

Nate: “Because we just can’t! We’re widdle boys, Mum-Mum!”

Dada: “What were you doing?”

Liam: “We were fighting Sam!”

Dada: “Do you think I want you fighting Sam?”

Liam: “I wasn’t the one fighting him. I was the one blocking him so Nate could get him.”

front

back

The front of the card this year was all taken in one shot - there was no Photoshopping necessary other than for the border and the text. In years past, I’ve had to take the best elements from several pics and combine them all into one shot. This time, after the turkeys were wrapped up and trundled off into the front yard, all that Jill had to do was stand behind me and yell over my shoulder, “Hey boys, you know what we’re having for dinner tonight? Spaghetti and POOPballs!”. I found out later that she’d been saving that one.

Liam and Nate looked at one another for a beat, then burst out laughing, and Sam joined in simply because the other boys were laughing, and they were holding his mittens. So, poop joke = mirth, togetherness, and what can easily be mistaken for brotherly love.

*sound of camera clicking*

The back was done in Photoshop with the help of my Intuos4 PC Tablet. Initially, the cards came back from the printer and the yellow snow looked lime green. So we had to order another set pronto. Unfortunately, after a week of waiting for the mistake to be corrected, those cards also arrived with lime-green whiz. In the end, we decided to send them out anyway. It was either that, or we were going to have to hang onto 500 holiday postcards until St. Paddy’s Day.

As usual, my part in all this was mostly that of a Photoshop Puppet and Printer Liaison.

It was all Jill’s idea.

(To be visited by the Cards of Christmas Past, click here)