I am a lame farmer

But I can admit when I was wrong. She is a he. She, er, he woke us up at 6:20 this morning, cocka-a-doodle-dooing. We're trying to muster the courage to make him into pozole, but really we will probably just call Animal Care & Control. Unless you want him?

Maggie will be sorry to see him go.

I want another wedding

Ok, I know I'm probably super slow on the uptake here considering 12 million people have already watched this on You Tube, and my mom sent it to me, and my 60-year-old Unitarian Universalist lesbian cousin sent it to my mom, but, I love it anyway.  It makes me incredibly weepy-happy.

The Mister and I walked down the aisle to Johnny Cash singing Memories are Made of This and it was pretty great.  But now I wished we'd boogied.

Whatcha gonna do with all that junk?

Me, at 16, with Mark Darling and my smoking bod

So, I’ve gotten fat. Fat for me. I have cellulite on my upper arms and my gut is looking a little fanny-packish. It’s not the first time. It won’t be the last. But I am sort of pissed about it.

In 2008 I spent more than $1,000 to lose 11 pounds with Jenny Craig and gained it back in six months (I know. I know.).

So far in 2009, I’ve lost the ten again, and gained it back, again. Plus four.

I am not quite as fat as I was after giving birth to twins. I’m not even exactly what you’d call fat. I’m on the chubby side of normal. I can still squeeze into my size 10 jeans, but the resulting muffin top makes all but the most maternity of tops utterly useless. I weigh 164 pounds.

That’s one of the most humiliating sentence I’ve ever written. And I’ve written about my pubic hair. Twice. At the same time, to be perfectly honest, it's not that big a deal to me. So I'm a chubbers? Oh well. I have other things going for me.

Me, at 39, with Hilary and my much less smoking bod

My mom used to describe her particularly thin and self-denying friends as "having a horror of fat." I don't have that horror. In fact, I prefer some soft edges. But I would like to look a little hotter in my clothes. Just, like, 15 pounds hotter.

What makes me mad is that for all my rotundity, I’m not a glutton. As I’ve established, I love my chow, but I have never, not once, eaten an entire pint of ice cream, or polished off a whole frozen pizza. I am not secretly gobbling candy bars or sneaking Pop Tarts.

Yes, I went about six weeks without a drink-free day this summer (hello, last six pounds), but that was a highly unusual binge and doesn’t account for my overall waddliness.

I exercise. I love chard. I drink eight glasses of water a day. WTF?

I get tempted to blame the Mister, who was born with genes so tall and sleek, that fat cells verily run off of him. I’m pretty sure we weigh the same. And he’s 6’ 1”. And he EATS. Like every hour. He has dessert after dinner, lunch and breakfast. He thinks roll-em-up pancakes stuffed with jam and sprinkled with powdered sugar are healthy because the batter has an egg in it. Sometimes, right after he eats, he has an actual snack-size anxiety attack about where his next meal is coming from, especially if we are going to the movies and he thinks it might be a couple of hours before his next caloric intake.

Imagine, if you will, the pleasures and pains of trying to keep up with him. I mean, it’s nice to share a hobby, but the results of our shared recreation are that I get cellulite on my upper arms and he weighs what he wrestled in high school.

The real reason for the fanny pack gut

All this is a long-winded way of telling you that today I joined Weight Watchers (which I could totally be CEO of by this time if I just had a little more willpower). My plan? To enter the normal range of normal. Stay tuned to watch as the only-slightly-overweight-me emerges like a 39-year-old butterfly from the really-quite-alarmingly-overweight-me. It’s gonna be a showstopper, folks.

Our Lady of Dora the Explorer

This morning Maggie got dressed all by herself, the whole shebang, even the socks and shoes.  Oliver ran into the bathroom where I was getting out of the shower to tell me about it. “Maggie got dressed all by herself,” he said. “Isn’t that impressive?”

Um, that’s a three syllable word, people. I don’t mean to brag, but that’s impressive. Maybe it’s all those New Yorker articles we read to them before bed.

Or maybe it has something to do with the lack of TV.  They saw nary a screen flicker until they were almost three and now they watch only DVDs (including the never-ending Thomas the Tank Engine--Oh My GOD but that’s boring) and only now and then. As far as I know, they’ve never seen a commercial.

Before you think I’m some insufferable, holier-than-thou ass wipe, I just want to say that although I was mostly on board with the no-TV rule, The Mister and I had some real blow-ups over his Stalinesque adherence to our self-imposed hardship (the path to the people’s liberation is through interminable hours of PlayDough kitchen!). I mean, can’t a mother get a break once in a while?  What’s the harm in putting on 30 minutes of Dora while you grab a little shut-eye, or mix an old-fashioned?

Actually, I can answer that: the harm is in how easy it is.  I had heard about the whole TV-as-babysitter model, but until I tried it I had no idea.  I had NO idea. It’s like a miracle. The closest I’ve come to real silence in the last three years is when I put on a copy of Sesame Street’s Learning Letters. I sometimes watch as my little angles sit rapt and motionless in front of the TV and wonder why I made it so hard on myself for so long.  This whole time I could have been showering, or brushing my teeth, or even returning emails!

I can’t get that time back.  But maybe there is some consolation to be found in the fact that my kids love books and have great vocabularies and know how to catch chickens. 

Or maybe your kids grew up on a steady diet of The Bachelorette and I Didn’t Know I was Pregnant and could recite pi to its 23rd digit by age two.  Feel free to put me in my place if so.