Mama Got Back!

I have a confession to make. I am addicted. I know I shouldn't have, but last night I stayed up waaaaay to late playing with Manga Studio and drew another cartoon. I can't help it. I love to cartoon! And Manga Studio is so much fun to work with. I'm a graphics junkie!

But that's not really the addiction I wanted to talk about. No, I want to discuss the **other** addiction. The BIG addiction. The addiction that's getting to be a pain in my ass.

I am addicted to calories.

Yeah, I know. Shut up, you can't be addicted to calories you moron. Everybody has to eat **something**.

I don't usually talk about my weight here in the blog, mainly because so many of my friends look at me when I say anything about it and go, "But you look so frikkin' thin!" To which I always say, "That's because I keep all my fat cleverly concealed in my ass!" And I have to admit, I'm not really overweight. I have a shape and it's not round, it's hourglass. But there's a little more sand in the hourglass these days and that's getting to be a problem.

The problem started waaaaay back when, during my second pregnancy. I put on very little weight during that pregnancy, only 17 lbs. And then afterward I dropped weight like nobody's business. I mean, I didn't have to do anything, the fat just melted off of me like snow in July. So what's the problem with that, you ask. Well, for starters, I lost too much weight the year after Sam was born. Ask my best friend Mary. I got so thin she urged me to see a doctor and have some tests run. The tests all came back negative for whatever it was they tested me for, so I was all right. It was just hormones, my doctor said. My metabolism was running a little fast because of post-pregnancy hormones and breast feeding. It would slow down eventually and then I'd go back to my normal weight.

Except that in the interim, I got into some bad eating habits. Like say, polishing off a bowl of ice cream before going to bed every night, and drinking lots of coffee and tea with sugar and milk in it, and eating just about anything else under the sun because I kept losing weight and nothing, I mean nothing stuck to my ribs.

Until one day something did stick to my ribs and then my weight loss slowed. That's right, it slowed and then before you knew it, my weight crept back up to normal and then a little beyond.

I was fine with that for a while. I was a little heavier than I was used to, but only a couple of pounds and all my clothes still fit, so I was good with it. I mean honestly, I had a nice hourglass figure, right?

But then I stopped breastfeeding Sam and I started gaining more weight. And then my hormones started going wonky twice a month and that brings us to the current situation.

Two times a month, I suddenly pack on an extra five pounds and it takes me two weeks to get rid of it, just in time to pack it back on again. It's a menstrual thing, I know it is, and the weight is mostly water weight, but it's also some weight that I put on because I get these horrendous cravings for sweets and salty foods. During those two times of the month I will mindlessly devour anything I find that is not nailed down or else is not one of my kids. And on a few occasions, I have even considered eating the kids, the cravings were that bad. So I'm constantly gaining and lose those same five pounds and while I'm still not fat, I'm running into this little problem.

None of my damn clothes fit half the time.

I do not have the money to buy a whole new wardrobe. Really, I don't. I just bought new shorts because summer is coming and I know my capris will not fit during those "fat" times. But I can't afford anything else. And I don't want to own a second set of clothes just to have for those "fat" times of the month. I don't have the closet space for it. It's driving me crazy. I know in another week I'll be back to a comfortable weight and my clothing will fit just fine (and some pieces will even be a bit loose), but right now I feel like the Sausage Queen of Hamburg, I'm that swollen with water weight.

What to do? I looked up "water retention" on Web MD to see if there was anything I could do without getting a prescription, and all they told me was exercise and drink lots of water. Taking in more water is supposed to convince my body to not hold onto so much extra fluid. So I've been exercising and drinking water until I feel like my back teeth are floating. And my weight hasn't budged.

Oh well, the hazards of getting older. "One day I shall wear purple" and all that crap. Just as long as I've got something to cover my ass.

Freaky Fruits and Swimming Suits!

Ha ha! Look at that title. I'm a poet and I didn't even know it!

Ah hmm. Seriously though, we've had an interesting week. Michael left Tuesday for a training course in Houston, abandoning-- er, I mean leaving me with the kids. My knee is doing much better, so I was mostly able to keep up, but after a week on my own with those demon spawn, I am wiped out.

First thing we did after Michael left was hit the grocery store. Michael does all the grocery shopping, so I always use his trips as an excuse to buy the stuff **I** want. I didn't get much, just some fruit and side dishes that I knew he'd never in a million years pick up (curried veggies, anyone?). Cassie saw a star fruit in the produce section and immediately decided she had to have one. It just looked so freaky, but not nearly as freaky as the horned melon. If you've never seen either of these fruits, the star fruit looks like a banana sort of thingie with a star cross-section (in other words, if you slice it into pieces, you get lots of star shaped slices), while the horned melon looks like something Jacques Cousteau picked up off the bottom of a coral reef. It's a sort of neon orange see-slug thing. Or maybe it's a sea cucumber. Or are sea cucumbers actually a sort of sea slug? Who knows? It was orange, spiny, oblong and freaky and Cassie had to have it, and since **I've** never had one either, we got it.

I served the star fruit that night. It tasted... odd. Not really sweet, and not really tart. Sort of like weak kiwi flavored gelatin. The star fruit is yellow on the outside and yellowish on the inside. Cassie spent all of dinner telling me how much she just **loved** star fruit after only taking one bite of it. And that was the only bite she took. I had to finish the rest of the damned thing off. Blech.

The horned melon was very different though. It was freaky inside and out. On the inside, it's neon yellow-green, with sections like a pomegranate. Little round fleshy pods wrapped around a tiny seed. It tasted pretty good, definitely more like kiwi, but with a big juicy squish every time I bit into it. Both Cassie and Sam ate a couple of piece once they got over the color.

Ah, color. I never get enough of it in my life, and here's where we now talk about swimming suits. Since screwing up my knee the other week, I've gone back to swimming. In fact, I've decided just to forget about running and swim as much as I can. I'll be in the pool four days a week it looks like, but until yesterday, I only had one swim suit. So I ordered two more from Swimoutlet.com. I went with their grab bag option. Grab bag swim suits are $26 a piece instead of the usual $40. The only catch is THEY get to pick the color. You pick the size and the style, but THEY pick the color. The grab bag suits are all the colors that didn't sell the previous year, and now that I've got my two new suits, I can kind of see why. One of those suits isn't bad - it's a hot fluorescent pink and orange print that sort of looks like a 1960's acid trip. But the other suit... oh man, the other suit is a reversible suit. One side is Grape Ape purple and the other side is **lime green**. Both colors are eye-blinding.

But hey, for $26, it's not a bad suit.

Right?