Supplying School

It's that time of year again. Yes, it's time to buy school clothes, shoes and supplies.

Olivia is all about the shoes, by the way. She could not possibly care less about disinfecting wipes and Kleenex but shoes? We're going shoe shopping? Wait while she grabs her lip gloss!

After three hours, walked away from the store with two pairs of shoes for each girl, one particularly impractical pair of black dress shoes that once on her feet, were not coming off of Olivia's lovely tootsies. She wores those shoes to the next three stores and couldn't be bothered to try another pair, declaring before any others were even close to her feet, "Those hurt my toes." Or, "These fit perfectly, I don't need other shoes."

She found every mirror in the five-mile radius and pranced, tapped and bowed to her imaginary audience.

But my goodness it's expensive to outfit two little girls for school. What those of you with more kids do, I just don't know.

The supplies! Good heavens! We had to get Alyssa five pocket folders (thankfully, only twenty cents a piece), three spiral pads of paper with 70 sheets. She wanted the ones that were $1.67 each. I wanted to get her the ones that were $.15 each. Guess who won?

Yes, she did. I'm such a sucker.

Then you have the Kleenex, the Clorox wips, the multiplication and division flash cards, the wooden ruler (yay, on a dime!) And in the end, it adds up. We have more pencils than we can ever use so that was scratched from the list before we even got to the store. But the rest? Yikes!!

In other news, we still don't know which class (am or pm) that Olivia will be in this year. The school is saying it will all come down to transportation. But come on! They've known the bus routes since, well, forever. School starts NEXT WEEK!!

And for anyone keeping track (just me? Okay, then.), week two weigh-in put me at exactly 10 pounds lost. So far, August is being good to me, if I don't think about the money I'm spending on school supplies, clothes and shoes.

One Year

Last year on this day, August 13th, after months of negotiations and frustrations, tears and fervent prayers, I drove to Bryan, Ohio to sign the papers that meant the closing of the sale of our house.

Even the afternoon before the closing, I worried that the sale might not go through. My realtor really was useless.

One year ago, when I walked into the realtor's office, ready to sign away the next thirty years of my life to a mortage, the gentleman from the titling company, asked me where my husband was.

D'oh!! Another flipping hurdle. Tom drove an hour to get there. Thankfully, in that hour, I was able to get all of my own signing done and at last, we were the official owners of this house.

And the anti-climax cam when I asked my realtor for the keys.

He shrugged and said, "In the lockbox on the front door. You know how to get in."

But that's in the past. A whole year in the past!! We've made this place our home.

After hours of whining, bitching and moaning about it, eight rooms and three closets have been painted, which leaves only two rooms (if you don't count any of the rooms in the basement, which I'm not because, yay, the basement is Tom's domain) and four closets that still need to be painted.

It will happen. One project at a time.

Today we cleaned like maniacs in anticipation of a visit from Tom's sister and brother-in-law, who haven't been to visit in the year we've lived here. They live about four hours away but are passing through and we were happy to show off our home.

There was clutter, which is a given with two small children in the house, but it wasn't bad. Definitely not anywhere near the houses shown in episodes of "Hoarders: Buried Alive." Every carpeted room needed vacuumed and the bathrooms needed cleaned but again, it wasn't all that bad. We're more about clutter than filth, thank heaven.

Our house isn't always guest ready. But it doesn't take much to make it so.

And in the end, Tom and I are both so much happier in a tidy house. We really should have company more often.

Yay for a year in our home. How very blessed we are.

Again for the First Time

Last weekend was another one of those "Family Weekends" where nothing gets done. No laundry, no vacuuming, no dishes. It's great at the time, all that togetherness, but at some point, someone has to do laundry. Those clothes aren't going to put themselves into the washing machine and the number of pairs of underwear each member of the family owns is not infinite.

But the family time was lovely.

We spent a few hours at the lake on Sunday. The place was almost vacant when we got there due to a pop-up rain storm. We only had to spend fifteen minutes in the car before the rain let up and we descented upon the lonely stretch of sand.

Alyssa immediately plunged into the lake. She knows our swimming days are numbered as autum and school draw ever closer.

Olivia was equally brave, quickly making her way into the water up to her neck.

Watching the girls from the beach, I decided to strip down to my swimsuit in case I was needed to rescue an overly-brave child.

As soon as the girls saw me in my suit, they both implored me to join them in the water. It didn't take them long to convince me an soon I was standing beside Olivia as she bobbed up and down, declaring confidently, "I'm swimming!!"

I looked back at the shore and saw that Tom had taken off his shirt and was walking along the water line.

This man is three (3!!!) pounds away from his goal weight.

I am...sixty, that's a six and a zero, pounds from my own goal.

I sort of hate him.

Okay, not really but...it occured to me as I watched him walk that lonely stretch of sand that if we weren't already married, if we were strangers that day, there is no way I'd ever consider approaching him romantically.

I'm working on changing the fact that my weight affects my confidence so much. But I've learned over the past few years that as my weight goes up, my confidence in all other areas of my life goes down. Logially, I know that being heavy doesn't make me a worse mother/wife/daughter/friend/person than I am when I'm thinner. But I've never claimed to be logical. A Vulcan, I am not.

My problem on Sunday was that I realized that my husband is dreamy. And I'm not. I look like a frumy mom who doesn't take care of herself. And I hate that. Of course, I'm also working on that, the frumpiness/not taking care of myself part. So why even write about it if I'm already working on it?

Because I want to record my journey here, my journey toward healthiness, toward confidence, my journey to reclaiming myself.

Marriage

I almost feel sorry for my husband. Here is an actual email I sent him this morning:

"Good morning,

I wanted to actually get a message to you when it was actually still morning.

I wanted to thank you for all the work you’re doing around the house. I know there is still so much to be done and if feels like the evenings go by so quickly, what with the dinner prep, the eating, the cleaning up of the dinner remnants, and by then, Liv wants to be held and rocked and then she’s asleep and I’m tired and Alyssa wants some Mom-time and, well, the evening is shot.

So the laundry isn’t getting folded and put away, the bathroom floors (upstairs) aren’t getting swept and mopped, the girls’ rooms aren’t getting cleaned/organized and there is just so much I want to do and there never seems to be time to do it. And I want to get the clocks hung in the guest room and the bathroom and I would like to find something to use as a night stand by the bed in that room and I’m going to make the bed on Friday even if no one sleeps in it (it will be so pretty all made up.) And wow, that was quite the run-on sentence, huh?

Which is all to say that I appreciate all that you’re getting done and I’m sort of jealous even as I feel bad that you are doing it while I’m not. I feel bad and very much like a slacker. So I’m sorry that I’m a slacker…

And then there is the school shopping the girls and I need to do. Alyssa and I need to go through the brown paper bag in her closet and figure out what she already has for school supplies and then compare those to the list we got from Walmart for Edon third-graders (she’s a THIRD GRADER!!!) and then get what she doesn’t need. And I need her to try on her clothes for the fall and see how many pairs of pants she might need. I think she needs new socks too. So much to do and never, ever enough time. But we do have another weekend after this one.

Both girls need new shoes, Alyssa needs gym shoes and maybe a nice pair of dress shoes to wear with leggings/dresses. Olivia needs new tennies and a pair of dressier shoes too. She’s a hard one to buy shoes for because we never quite know if something is going to rub wrong.

We’re still waiting for the letter from the school about O’s schedule too. I’m hoping we’ll get a list of supplies for her too.

I’m rambling, but this is what’s going on in my head even as I sit and rock one or the other girl. Just wanted you to know that I may be an actual slacker but in my head, I’m so, so busy."

Poor guy. Not many thoughts go through my head that don't come out of my mouth. Evidently, not many go through my head that don't get spewed into a lengthy email message or blog post. Lucky him and lucky you, huh? I have to admit, I do so amuse myself.

Bed Hopping

Ugh!! Another post on sleep. Or rather, the lack of sleep. Seriously, when one's children are eight and four, one thinks sleep issues are a thing of the past. One is an idiot.

There are two beds in our master bedroom. A queen and a twin. The twin is still there from the early months when the girls and I were living there alone, with occasional visits from Tom, who was still in Huntington working on selling our old hours. I admit to being over-protective and I liked having the girls near me when it was just the three of us in the house.

So yes, these issues are all my fault. I admit to that. But even admitting it, I reserve the right to bitch about it too.

These days, the girls sleep in the queen bed and I am in the twin. It's actually pretty nice, except that poor Tom tends to fall asleep in the couch. But other than that, I like the fact that I am alone in that small bed and the girls have each other to snuggle up to.

Except for last night...

We went to bed early because we were all over-tired and cranky. The girls were in their usual spot and I was comfy in my little bed. And hour after we went to bed, Olivia woke up to find that it was Alyssa she was cuddled up against. This was unacceptable and so she joined me in the twin bed.

I made do with sharing the tiny bed for about an hour but then I gave in and moved to the queen just to have a little more room. This left Olivia to the luxurious space that was the twin bed.

An hour after I vacated the space next to her, Olivia woke again and moved her little self back to the queen, taking her place between me and Alyssa.

Yet another your later, I woke to the pressure of Olivia pushing against my back with all her 35 pound might. I snapped into the still darkness of the room, "For Pete's sake, Olivia, stop that!"

Then I moved, AGAIN, to the other bed, stretched and enjoyed for a moment the lavish space of a twin bed with no one next to me and went back to sleep for a few hours left until the alarm went off.

We have the frame for bunkbeds set up in the girls' room but there are no mattresses on the frame. Why? Because we haven't bought mattresses yet. Obviously, we need to do this and soon. Once we get mattresses on that bunkbed, we need to start putting the girls to bed there. And when they wake and try to worm their way back into our bed, we need to walk them back down the hall to their own room.

And we need to do this consistently until the day comes that they no longer even try to come down to our bed.

Will this be painful? Yes, for awhile.

Will it be hard? Yes, but only at the start.

Will there be tears? Probably, from several different characters in this farce.

Will I be tempted to just pull them into bed with me in an effort to get even ten minutes of extra sleep? Of course. Because I'm lazy. BUT!!! I know that in the long run, the above plan will yield the results we want (MORE SLEEP FOR EVERYONE!) much faster than anythign I've done so far. Laziness only gets you so far. I need to learn that and try something different before someone gently reminds me just how insane I am for putting up with this any longer. Bitching about it all is obviously not the solution or things would have been fixed years ago.

So I'm on the hunt for twin mattress to get this party started. Oh yes, and I need to paint the girls' room before moving them in there.

So much to do on so little sleep...

The Fat Cousin

I have two cousins who are older than I am. T is three years older and A is a year older. Growing up, they were the glamorous, thin older cousins I looked up to. And I could never quite compete.

I never really tried all that hard. We were very different. They were both smoking cigarettes by 13 years old and were hard partiers early in life.

I was studious, serious, all about the rules.

Except...I envied their thinness. I hated my body when I looked at theirs and compared my curvier body to their very thin, tall figures.

I'm the shortest of the three of us at five feet six and a half inches. That half inch is very important.

A is five seven and T is five eight. You wouldn't think that half in that A has on me would be that big a deal but when a girl/woman is five feet seven inches tall and a size 0, she gets noticed. At the time A was a size 0, I was probably a size 4, which, seriously? Not big. At all.

I know that now. But when I was thirteen years old and five six and a half and weighing 117 pounds, I felt huge standing next to my cousins who were taller but probably weighed somewhere aroun 103.

Now? I know they were unhealthy. And I know that I'm lucky I wasn't doing the things that helped them maintain that unhealthy weight.

But back then? It was the start of my very own problems with body image.

So with my 'healthy eating program' I'm trying to get to the root of the problem. I'm trying to accept myself at any weight, whether it is what I am now, or what I was last week or what I'll be next week.

I know that the number isn't the issue. It's my own attitude, it's how I see myself.

And I have to stop looking at others and comparing. I need to look inside and realize that I'm so very lucky to be healthy, to be strong.

This body birthed two beautiful little girls. It gets me to and from work every day and lets me take care of my family.

There will probably always be something I'd like to change about my body, even if I ever get to my goal weight and manage to maintain it. But even knowing that, I need to come to a place of peace with who I am, physically.

I need to get rid of the picture in my head of the fat cousin. She no longer exists. I wouldn't trade lives with T or A for anything in the world, not even for the chance to be thin.

I need to remember that each time I get down on my body. I need to remember what it's done for me and my family and celebrate it instead of hate it.

And hey, weight loss for week one is seven pounds. I'm calling that a victory over the fat cousin.

Bite Me

Alyssa's two front teeth are finally coming in. I say finally because, well, it's been forever since she lost them.

We had to have the right one pulled back in March of 2010 due to an abcess. She hurt it when she was three while at daycare and it was slowly just disappearing.

The right front tooth was pulled out while she was in a bounce house at the Indiana University Dance Marathon back in November of 2010. Those two front teeth finally started coming in about a month ago.

They're so cute. Except...they are beginnin to look like my two front teeth.

Aww, right?

No. Not awww.

I hate my teeth. I've always hated my teeth. I hated them so much that when I was 27 years old I paid for my own braces in an effor to change them. Yes, now they're straighter but still, I hate them. I hate their shape, I hate the fact that even after braces they're still just slightly crooked.

I don't want that for her.

Yes, she's way prettier than I am or ever was and so maybe she'll be able to pull these teeth off better than I ever could. And yes, we WILL be getting braces for her in her late pre-teens or early teens in the hopes of staving off major crookedness, but...if I could change this for her, I would.

She got so much from Tom in the genetic draw. Why couldn't she have gotten his teeth too?

I know this is such a stupid, minor thing to worry about. And I'm not really worried so much. Obviously, I can't change the shape of her teeth so what am I even going on about, right?

I guess I just wanted to log my apology to her for passing these teeth on. I do think she's going to be able to make them beautiful. With her witty humor, her sense of style and her charm, she's going to be just fine, even if she did inherit her mother's teeth.