I used to run track in high school for the sole purpose of keeping in shape between basketball and volleyball seasons. I didn’t enjoy running and I wasn’t very good at it. I wasn’t fast or good at hurdles, so none of the sprinting events were for me. I couldn’t jump worth a crap. And I certainly wasn’t going to be lumped in with the group of bruisers who were the ’throwers.’ So, that left distance running. Distance running is the food you push around and leave on your cafeteria tray, and only the hungriest, most desperate kid, will ask, “Hey. You gonna eat that?” No one else wanted to eat that, so I did. At every meet, I would run the 3200, the 3200 relay, the 1600, and the 800. Collectively, 4 miles. I would gut it out each time, dragging my wheezing, cramped-up body across the finish line in a glorious whimper. I’m pretty sure I never, ever won or came close to winning a race. 

The stupid thing, and also my biggest high school athletic regret, is not joining the throwers. I would have made a GREAT thrower. I was tall and lean and freakishly strong. My Mom and Dad used to shake their heads and remark that I was “built like a brick shithouse.” (It took my preteen/teenage self a while to realize that that was kind of a compliment.) I have a linebacker frame, with Russian power-lifter muscle, camouflaged by some of the necessary curvy girly bits. Probably I could have put the shot farther than most of the boys.

All of that is to say that I also lose weight kind of like a guy, at least partly because of the large amount of muscle I’m carting around. It comes in handy when moving pianos and sleeper sofas, too.

Week one was successful! I bought a new scale on Amazon, because my old Tanita was no longer the reliable horse she once was. You could shift your weight from heel to toe and get a 3 lb. variance in the reading. LOVE the new scale. It’s solid, weighs you in .2 lb. increments, and is 100% consistent so far.

From 7/17 to 7/24 I dropped 5 lbs. I know. That’s too much in one week and most likely it was a lot of water weight. Still, it’s encouraging to see the numbers drop daily. (I weigh myself nekkid every morning at 8:00 a.m.) I tracked all of my calories and nutrition and I got in 4.5 hours of walking/jogging/running, 1/2 hour shy of my goal. And, here I am reporting it, albeit a couple of days late.

This week is not shaping up so well. I’ll be lucky to hold on to any loss from week one. We’re at my mother-in-law’s lake house in SC and the food is good and flowing freely. I’ve tucked that new scale that I love so much and brought with me for motivation under a wicker stand in our bathroom and I’m avoiding eye contact with it.

My friend, Cara, threw down the gauntlet with the following e-mail to a bunch of us on June 1^st:

“Check this shit out. I was told about this today at work and I am totally doing this. Dameon has agreed to participate too. Let me know if you want to do it too. It looks friggin’ awesome! The race we are doing is on Oct 9.  Let me know! www.warriordash.com”

First of all, I find the sentence, “Dameon has agreed to participate too,” hilarious. He doesn’t sound fully committed to the task, does he? As Dameon noted while reclining on a beach chair and sipping an icy brew under the shade of an umbrella during our vacation in Duck, NC this year, “This will be the farthest I’ve ever run in my life…even if you add all the times I’ve ever run together!”

As per Cara’s instructions, I checked that shit out, because, seriously? Anything with ‘warrior’ in the title is intriguing. Must be the Norman blood that flows through the angry, Summerville veins. The Warrior Dash is a roving, obstacle-laden race that sets up throughout the US all year long. Our particular race is on October 9th and is 3.15 miles long. It includes 11 obstacles with names and descriptions such as: “Breathless Bog! Plunge under water and weave between submerged logs! Cliffhanger! Repel down the steep ravine! Warrior Roast! Leap over the warrior fires!” When I saw that each participant was issued a Viking helmet upon arrival, that sealed the deal. I registered along with Cara, Dameon, and my cousin-by-marriage, KT.

However, I’m not in what you would consider peak warrior condition. I’m more in Netflix every night with a heaping bowl of mint chocolate chip condition. Considering that I would like to be able to finish the race without rupturing any organs or stroking out while scaling the wall of hay bales, as of Saturday, 7-17, it was ON like Donkey Kong. Operation: Don’t Die During the Dash

My Dad always told me that in order to achieve your goals, you needed to write them down. That there’s something psychologically compelling about having inked the goals onto a piece of paper rather than just having them float in obscurity in your head. What’s even more compelling for me, is to state them where others can see them. Since I’ve had trouble in the past being accountable when I’m the only one watching, I figure that the possibility of grandly failing in front of a bunch of onlookers will prove highly motivational. Because, if there’s one thing I know about me, it’s that I like to fail very, very quietly in private and then cover it up like a cat turd in a sandbox.

Also, I am drawing inspiration from my cousin Lindsay, as she sheds her post-pregnancy weight and chronicles her weekly successes or set-backs with her Friday Summer Shape-Up posts. She’s hard core and posts her ACTUAL weight and changes.

From Saturday, July 17^th to Saturday, October 9^th is exactly 12 weeks. In those 12 weeks I will:

-Lose 30 lbs. (2.5 lbs./week. I know that 2 lbs./week is the recommended max weight loss, but I’m upping that just a touch.)

-Exercise 5 times a week for one hour intervals or more.

-Update the blog weekly with my weight changes and work-out progress

-Track my daily caloric intake and exercise at www.myfooddiary.com. (This is an excellent tool for weight loss. They have a huge database of food and provide you with the ability to add and save foods and recipes that aren’t in the database. You track your daily food and caloric intake, exercise, and body measurements and weight. They provide nutritional analysis of your daily eating as well as lots of charts and graphs and information to keep you motivated. I think the cost is $9/month.)

Time to get my WARRIOR, on!!!!

1. No, Mel Gibson is a casino’s big lemon.

2. Straw? No, too stupid a fad. I put soot on warts.

3. Reviled did I live, said I, as evil I did deliver.

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

Yesterday, I noticed the late afternoon light falling across our opened front door in a particularly appealing way, so I quickly went to get my camera and tripod. I set up the shot, adjusted the camera, and snapped a series of pictures of the empty doorway. But when I look at this one, I swear there is what appears to be a little boy standing behind the beveled glass.

I think I’ll ask Sam. He was right beside me as I was setting up the camera. In fact, he insisted on looking through the viewfinder at least twice, and at one point, he even went around to the front of the camera and pressed his cheek and eye against the lens. He was also playing with the tripod some.

Maybe he saw something.

Nate stretched out his arms and said “I’m a biiiiiiiiig foooooooouuuuurrrrrr”.

He reclined in my lap, looking up at me, and I cupped one hand on his head and pulled his bangs up off his forehead. Now he resembled nothing so much as a puppy with its ears pulled back, and his mischievously gleeful expression never changed. It’s an expression he wears sometimes when he wakes up first on a Saturday, and quietly dances from one foot to the other towards our bed. It’s an expression that’s all teeth and tongue and sparkly eyes and crinkly nose. It’s that puppy, now with its chest on the ground, paws splayed out front, and looking up sideways. 

So he smiled up at me, and I smiled back down at him. And where there was once a baby, there was now a little boy. I smiled back down, because this was his big day. I smiled back down, because he’s happy and gracious, even when the birthdays aren’t his. I smiled back down, because today, it’s all about him. And he smiled back up at me, well, because he’s Nate.

The time of Three is now gone, and he’s Four Strong. He’s Baby Seal Four, and he smiled and he smiled.

***

And there were giant red poppies, handmade from colored tissue, and each had a Rice Crispy Treat nestled in its center.

And there were exhausted Mum-Mums, Da-das, and Grandys who had stayed up and up.

And there was a great slab of poundcake, cut into the shapes of a rabbit and a magician’s hat, then slathered with homemade buttercream frosting.  

And the kids’ table sat awaiting kids, and there were top hats and stuffed bunnies and wands and draped over small chairs, there were capes that sparkled with glittery red names.

“The Notorious Nate,” said one cape.

“The Amazing Allison,” replied another.

And Zac was Zany, and Clare was Captivating. Rachel was Radiant, and Liam, Lively.

Aleister, Hannah, and Colleen?  Awesome, Heavenly, and Crafty.

There was the Glamorous Grace Margaret, and the Lovely Leia. Elise the Enchanting, and Everett the Energetic.

“Sam the Stinker,” croaked the last, small cape at the end. 

And then there were grandparents and brothers, parents and friends.

And later, there were magic tricks and balloon animals and live bunnies and unexpected doves fluttering from impossible places. And there were bags and scarves and wooden clowns that started off one color but ended up another. And then there were handkerchiefs with disappearing polka-dots and drawings that colored themselves. There were volunteers from the audience, and pileups of hastily shouted magic words. 

And each of these things was punctuated by peals of laughter and claps and occasional looks, stolen briefly over tiny shoulders to assure that we were all watching too. And there, in the first row, was Nate - the Big Four; the Man of the Hour - with his cape falling over his small shoulders and his plastic hat perched perfectly straight atop his head. And he was beaming and bouncing and delighted. He was smiling with his mouth open, and when the magician would do something particularly magical, he and Allison would clap and look at each other. Allison is his best.

And then there was a tight circle of the Glamorous and the Zany, of the Amazing and the Enchanted. And there was the tearing of paper, and there were things that were new. There were things to be coveted by and then shared with the Lively and the Stinker.

And then four striped candles were lit, then not, and shortly afterward, a rabbit disappeared, followed by a hat.

And faces were wiped and hands were washed. Friends were thanked, and poppies were given. And then, one by one, groups of hats and bunnies and wands and capes began to disappear as well.

***

And Nate’s in his bed, and he’s snoring softly. His Big Day is over, and he’s got his ‘baby’ - Curious George in ’RollerMonkey’ Gear - on one side of him, and his much loved Elmo Binky on the other. I pull his robot covers up to his chin, and in his dark outline, I can see both the baby he was, and the boy he will become.

***

click for more pictures of the gala