For the past 14 years, I have been in an ever-constant battle with my weight.  I blame a lot of it on stress and anxiety.  Those 14 years were full of home renovation, a high-pressure job, a husband who works solely on commission in the bursted bubble of a housing market and two premature babies…one of whom threw in congenital heart disease just for good measure.

So, yes, I’ve been stressed.   But, I won’t deny that a good portion of my jiggling thighs is because I love chocolate.  And beer.  The three of them together equals the perfect storm of cellulite.

The thing I have come to realize, as my 40th birthday nears, is that burdens don’t go away; they just change.  Life is never going to be easy.  It’s time to acknowledge that and work with it, instead of against it.  I don’t want to fight myself anymore.  I want to fight the fat.

Tonight, I completed my first of 36 boot camp sessions.  I was excited, but to tell the truth, I was scared of not being able to walk afterward. 

My friend Melisa is a group fitness instructor and I talked to her just before I went to class.  She told me that because I’m social that I would love the atmosphere, that I would have fun and that I should “embrace the pain”.

What she failed to tell me, is that I should also embrace the vomit.

Apparently, the instructor saw it coming when my beet-red face turned crisp-cotton-white, which is probably when I felt the room spinning.  She stopped the class.  FOR ME.  Which is really not embarrassing at all.  You know, if you’re made of stone.

After she got me a Gatorade, things improved.  Not a lot, but enough for the walls to stand still.  I fought through.  I did not quit.

Then I came home and started typing and searched the internet for a photo of the boot camp to insert in this post.  I typed the name of the workout facility into Google, hit images, and saw this picture…

Thank goodness for that Gatorade.

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My mom and I were recently discussing the names of her grandchildren.  I have three sisters, and between the four of us we have 12 kids.  Eight of them are boys. 

Their names are Stephen, Paul, John, Peter, Matthew, Daniel, David and Adam.

Do you think anyone can tell that we’re Catholic?

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This morning, I opened the living room blinds to see the sun creeping up in the east.  The sky was lavender; a mix of pink and blue.  Blue!  We haven’t seen a blue sky for a long, long time around here.  You will have to excuse the hyperbole, but it feels like forever ago.

I have considered the purchase of a “happy light” to get me through this gloomy period.  The winter months in Ohio are so dark, cold and gray.  Always gray.  Well, except for today of course.

Things seem so much more hopeful when the sun is out.  Life is brighter, happier and significantly more beautiful.  The gray days make me irritable and longing for summer, when daylight hangs around until my children are already tucked into bed.  On the rare occasion that we see the sun in the winter, the warmth on my skin makes the slush beneath my feet just a little more bearable.

There are only so many Chai tea lattes a girl can drink to keep her warm and only so many layers of fleece.  I need the sun.  I need its glow, the color it brings and the way that it produces a contrast between a frozen landscape and the sky.

The sun makes me feel good.  Today, I feel good.

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You know how you have a day off, but your kids still have to go to school and you scream, “This is going to be GLORIOUS!”, and it immediately goes downhill when you shovel the driveway for the fifth time in a week, and drop off the kids at school (which is not the same as dropping them off at the pool) and they argue the whole time, then you go to the ob/gyn and get a pap smear, and after that you go to the grocery store for the first time since December 23rd and trudge through the snow with a very full cart, then go to the pharmacy and find out they don’t have your medicine in stock, and after you take your boatload of food home and put it away you go to your mom’s house to shovel her driveway, and you’re sweating, and coughing, and it’s heavy, and your coffee is cold, and then a man comes across the street with his snowblower and finishes the job for you, and that man is 90 years old, and he smiles at you, and having crossed his (snowblown) path makes your heart happy and the day ends up being glorious after all?

Yeah, me too.

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