Gettin' up off my fat butt.

So I haven't lost the baby weight from Evan. Probably because of the surgeries, and having to stop breastfeeding way before I planned to. And because I loooove food.

I have never before actually had to watch what I eat, but it was clear that now's the time. Two weeks ago I was about a pound shy of the "overweight" line for my height. And it's not like I'm muscular, so there's no excuse there.

I started using myfitnesspal.com (although there's a million sites out there). I am pretty against paying good money for stuff like Weight Watchers until I try free things first. MyFitnessPal has a Droid app Mike uses to scan barcodes of whatever he's eating.

It told me that to lose weight, I had to cut down to 1300 calories a day. Now, that seems insanely low. I'm not necessarily trusting a website with my health. But clearly, after tracking my eating for a few days, I was eating so much indiscriminately that I would never lose weight unless I changed.

So for the last week, I've been trying to be careful about my diet. Nothing crazy, just eating small meals throughout the day, measuring instead of just pouring out stuff like milk, making sure I exercise more, etc. And I've already lost two pounds.

Let's Go Bananas!

Baby version 2.0: Approximately 50% pudgier than version 1.0. Upgrades include 3x more arm folds, plus an extra chin for holding leftover milk.

(They were both nearly 4 months old when these pictures were taken.)

Mike Doesn't Think the Baby Looks Like Him.

Therefore, I present to you exhibit A.

We Bought Him a Real Bed. I Swear.

Someone didn't want to go to sleep the other night, so he snuck out of bed and read and talked to his plastic horses until he passed out on the mat.

Tuna Melt

This was today's lunch. Mike found some cheap sourdough whole wheat bread - it just happens to come in fun-size. This is a plus, because Nathan thinks it's cool and will eat it, and I eat less.

I've been trying to eat better so I can lose baby weight and just generally be healthier, but the whole two-kids-working-school thing is a bit hard. I've at least climbed back on the exercise bike for the last week.

As far as work goes, I'm pretty sad - we decided that it was not really working at home for me to be gone. The commute is long, the pay is low, and after you factored in gas and time lost, it just didnt work. They really want to keep me, and I may be able to stay on with one 9-hour shift on Mondays, but we'll have to get that worked out. In reality, Mike's side project working on bikes would make more than my job. I enjoyed the job and especially being with adults, so it's a little disappointing, but what can you do, really?

At least now I'm free to go back to school full-time, and World's Oldest Undergrad should be graduating next spring. I'm attending an MBA open house tomorrow - not that I'd go right away, but I'm interested in seeing what's involved.

Giving a Two Year Old a Big-Kid Room.

At Nathan's birthday party, my mom gave us the curtains made from the vintage cowboy material she found months ago. And they look AMAZING. I'm used to cheap IKEA curtains, and these blow those out of the water. Plus they're very heavy, so they do wonders at blocking out the light.



I'd been looking for the perfect set of bunkbeds with no luck for awhile, so I settled on the KURA bed from Ikea:



It's a fort bed at first, then it can flip over into a short loft bed like aboe and has the perfect space for a mattress on the floor underneath. This means the boys can use them as bunk beds at a younger age since it's easier to climb and not as tall as a regular set of bunk beds.

The blue paneling, however, was a huge turnoff. I remembered reading about how people painted those panels with chalkboard paint and hey, that's one thing I have in spades! So I did it up:



It was really easy, it only took about an hour in total, since the panels dried really quickly. Of course, putting the bed together was a two day long process especially because Nathan "helped" me, and by "help" I mean misplace half the screws. But he had such a fun time trying to help me out with the bed.



Here's the view from the hallway.



And a better view of the bed. I did buy the blue bed tent, and it's up now.

He really likes his new bed and new room, but was pretty pissed when we put the crib back up in his old room. Not such a big fan of sharing, that one. He got over it pretty quick when we redirected him back to FORT AWESOME BED. WITH DINOSAURS IN IT.

On Breastfeeding, or Not

I'm at a weird crossroads where I'm not sure if I'll continue nursing Evan, or just formula-feed him. Right now he's just about half and half. My supply went all crazy after staying in the hospital and being anesthetized twice in a week (meaning I had to pump and dump, but I was too tired and in pain to do so as often as I should, I only did it when I was about to shoot boobmilk high into the night sky).

Further complicating matters is that I'll be working part-time from 2-7PM Monday-Friday starting in a couple of weeks. It's a small company with nowhere to really pump, and I would normally consider doing it in my car except that I don't have an adapter and uh, there's people constantly walking through the parking lot because it's a transportation company.

And the thing is, those are far from insurmountable obstacles. I could find a way to make it work and continue breastfeeding if I really desired to. But here's the thing: I don't.

Right now, all the super-pro breastfeeding people just heard that from hundreds, thousands of miles away, and gasped and called me a terrible parent.

But I am tired. My back hurts from the position I have to contort myself into to get Evan to eat in the middle of the night. My surgery incisions hurt when I flip the other way to switch boobs, and the stent in my bile duct is still causing me pain. I just don't enjoy it anymore because of the pain and everything that's happened and already having fed Evan formula I can say that he honestly doesn't care what he's drinking. And you know what? There's no mythical bonding experience that exists solely between a breastfeeding mom and her kid that isn't there with formula feeding. I know this because I have now done both. Evan's got a lock on my face when I feed him a bottle just the same as when he's on my boob.



So I've given myself permission to give up, but I'm still not sure if I will or not. I guess time will tell.

The Hospital is Not a Place of Fun.

The last three weeks or so I had a few episodes of really bad stomach pain that radiated to my back. Friday morning, it was still terrible from an episode the night before so I headed off to the doctor. Five hours and an ultrasound later, I was in Beverly Hospital meeting with the surgeon. Turns out I had gallstones distending my entire gallbladder and a few in my common bile duct, affecting my liver. The next morning I was taken down to Beth Israel in Boston by ambulance (always kind of silly when one can walk on one's own). They sedated me and did a procedure where they went into my duct endoscopically (is that a word?) through my throat to get rid of the stones, and they also put a stent in so if other stones came out of the gallbladder, they would pass through and not get caught up like one of the 128 onramps during rush hour.

I felt extra bad because Saturday was Nathan's birthday and we had to cancel his party at the last minute. Poor kid. Good thing he's only two and has no idea what a birthday is.

Thankfully Sunday they let me go home, and Thursday I'll need surgery to remove my gallbladder. In a month, I'll have to go back to Beth Israel to get the stent taken out. Unfortunately, this is pretty painful, and I have spent a lot of time not breastfeeding because I'm on painkillers (still pumping and dumping the milk, however). I'm hoping I don't have to switch to formula permanently but only time will tell.

I haven't been able to eat much, and I especially haven't been able to eat the fatty foods I love. I just want cheesecake, and cheesy lasagna, and fried chicken... dangit!

Chalkboard-Painted Clementine Boxes

For the last month or so I've been HOUSING Clementines, with the help of a certain 3 foot tall member of the family. My friend Christa has some empty Clementine boxes in her kitchen to hold various sundry objects, so I figured I really needed to stop throwing them out.



Nathan's toys are all over the place, so I figured they could be useful under the TV. I coated the front panel in the chalkboard paint leftover from the kitchen cabinets, and used chalk to denote what goes in them. Not like Nathan reads. Or puts his toys away. But it looks good, damnit!



I like the way it came out. Also, you will note from the above picture that an IKEA entertainment center made of MDF is not to be trusted, as it's all warped from use.

He Didn't Even Throw Him On The Floor. Bonus.