In The End, I’ll Probably Wish I Ate More Kettle Corn

I must open with the dramatic news that Madeline took about six steps yesterday. We all were in the kitchen. I was sitting on the floor with the girls and Nicole was in a chair. Madeline was standing by the fridge and I held out my hands and said “Come to Momma” and instead of her typical reaction (laugh at me; crawl in the opposite direction; act like I don’t exist and work her way over to Mommy) she walked six little steps right to me, with a huge Maddie smile on her face. Not confident strides, more like onetwo pause three pause wobble fourfivesix fall. She did it on the last day of her tenth month, so heretofore I shall be saying that my daughter started walking when she was 10 months. Avery walks around holding onto furniture or pushing anything that can be pushed but she hasn’t made the leap to doing it on her own yet.

Today I am so very tired, which is unusual because this sort of lethargy usually doesn’t hit until Friday, after I have run the marathon of a week. Vitamin B-12 has let me down. When I put the girls down for their morning nap I so desperately wanted to nap too. I haven’t felt like that since the dark dreary days of winter, when sometimes I didn’t get out of my pajamas until eleven (if at all) and I would parent from a reclined position on the couch until the coffee did its job. Right now we are in the kitchen and the girls are pushing around a teak stool that I so loving varnished myself (almost asphyxiating myself on the fumes in the process) while I sit here contemplating my tired ass. It is post-lunch, which means playtime for a while, which then slides right into naptime, which means I will get a break.

The thought crossed my mind that maybe I am not eating enough, and maybe that is why I am really tired. I have had more dizzy spells lately, which could my low blood pressure, but the dizzy spells plus lethargy usually adds up to not eating enough with me. I am running about four miles a day, except for my break day, when I run zero. When I exercise like that I typically do need to eat slightly more than I usually do. But but but there is the rub. I am not good at moderation. Not at all. So telling me to eat a little more means in my head, fine, I’ll add a jumbo bag of gummi bears, or a huge bag of pretzels and/or nightly ice cream to my diet. I don’t know in-between.

Say I buy a bag of my favorite pretzels, the Herrs Sourdough nuggets. I open the bag and have a few nuggets, then clip the bag and put it away in the snac-ibet (snack cabinet, which also holds cereals, oatmeal, nuts and crackers). Roughly four minutes later I will reopen the bag, take out another handful and re-clip. I can do this until the bag is gone in two days. You would think I would just eat from the bag or get a bowl, but I won’t. But I will use one of our mini-bowls and refill that 17 times. It’s sort of like how even after almost a decade of smoking I never once bought a carton of cigarettes. Oh wait, maybe I did in customs, but never outside of an airport. I smoked up a storm, one pack at a time. Talk about denial.

Back to food. Now my flawed logic is this: I am going to consume the entire bag at some point. Maybe a week is an acceptable amount of time; maybe five days. Regardless, each and every perfect nugget will end up in my belly. What difference does it make if I have the whole bag in one day or seven? So if it makes me happy can’t I just sit around and eat the entire bag in one day?

If I ate like that daily, then that would be a problem. One bag of something each day for seven days equals not good. But, to be honest, bags of pretzels beget bags of pretzels. And gummi bears. And Wheat Thins. The occasional pint of ice cream that Nicole and I will share at night. The mini boxes of Junior Mints. The movie-theater sized boxes of Junior Mints. I can eat my way through every aisle of the food store. And don’t put a package of Girl Scout Somoas in my fridge because I will eat that in one day, if not one hour. I embarrassingly ate my ay through a box at a friend of Nicole’s once and blamed it on my pregnancy. Little did she know I could eat that many cookies even when I wasn’t incubating two life forms.

Just like drinking, it is easier for me to just abstain instead of moderate. But that is not to say I don’t eat. I have three solid, normal meals a day and two snacks. I don’t buy skim anything or lite anything or fat-free anything (except for the dulce de leche pudding, which only comes in fat free). I have a pudding cup every night. (Pudding cups are this season’s ice cream bars, which were last’ summer’s dessert for me. ) Tonight is pizza night and I will gladly eat my two slices and then slice away very long-sided isosceles triangles of pizza from the remaining slices until I have consumed roughly half of another whole slice. I will have my pudding cup and maybe two, since they are a ridiculous 60 calories a piece. And I am not hungry. But eating more might make this lethargy and dizziness go away.

Or, and this is a big or, the girls are just draining the energy out of me.

Pictured above, Avery models their new bathing suit for an upcoming trip to visit Nana in Florida. It seems so tight on her and it is 12 to 18 months. I would get it in a larger size but it was sold out. And the price was great: ten dollars each at Old Navy! They will be “swimming” in their first pool soon and that means either Mommy or I will need to get into a suit too. I must say i would sooner get into a bathing suit than see another picture of me smiling. For some reason, my smiles look like they were carved out of the fleshy part of my face with a blunt object. Seriously. What is up with that? Oh well.