December Rules

Before I start this post, I want to thank Statia and Crazy Incognito for their thoughtful comments on my last post. I really appreciate your points of view and I am grateful that you both commented. I also want to say that I think that the school and the teachers make a HUGE difference when it comes to good versus bad experiences with preschool.

Olivia’s first experience with preschool, when she was three years old, was tough. She was small for her age, she was thrown into a class with larger, older kids who were very, very aggressive and there wasn’t a very good teacher to student ratio in that class. My mom was gracious enough to volunteer as the class Grammy so she could be in the class each day that Olivia was. If that hadn’t been possible, I’m not sure we’d have been comfortable sending Olivia to that class.

Her current class, though? Is so, so different. There are fewer kids, the kids themselves are much less aggressive and the ratio of teachers to students is so much more acceptable.

And Olivia loves school these days. She’s older, more mature and absolutely more willing to walk away from me and Tom and my mom and go off to class by herself. This is what she did on Tuesday, when I took her to school because I had to take in the snacks (which included a gallon of milk.) She showed me to her locker, put her backpack in there, got her folder out, hung up her coat, kissed me goodbye and walked away. It was awesome! So different from her class two years ago. We like this class so much we’ve decided that O is going to attend it another year before heading off to kindergarten.

I definitely agree with Statia in her thoughts that it’s much less fair to kids with special needs to thrust them into kindergarten without any sort of preschool to prepare them.

And little J? She absolutely doesn’t seem to be suffering during her time in preschool.

And back to our regularly scheduled programming:
November was kind of a wash when it comes to weight loss. I’ve decided to count it as a good month, though, even though I only lost one pound for the entire months because, well, that’s still a loss and a loss of one pound is better than a gain of one pound.

So I’m trying to be positive here.

I’m facing down December, the month of parties and festivities and celebrations and gifts and giving and love and joy and I’m seeing a lot of fattening foods to go along with all that joy.

But it doesn’t have to be a bad thing for my scale.

I’ve made up some new rules for myself for December.

On days when we have a party or a celebration of some kind, I am going to allow myself to enjoy the food being offered. I am not going to feel guilty for this either. I will eat chocolate and cake and pie. I will also enjoy some spinach dip with sweet bread, thank you very much.

But on regular days, days like today? I will be good. I will eat my breakfast bar, drink my water, have my salad for lunch and my turkey lettuce wraps for dinner. I will not obsess over those indulgent days but I also won’t allow those days to leak into every day of this month.

For now, it’s the best I can do.