A New Direction

I’m taking a slightly new direction in our journey and shifting this blog a bit from only camping-related goodies (which I still love) to more of a broad focus on our crazy and fat life!  Working full time, having Superman (my darling husband) gone a great majority of the time, all these kids…crazy is one good descriptive word for it!  The other one is a perfect word as well, because when I say fat I mean filled with all the amazing, blessed, tender, awesome moments that come with having a terrific life and amazing family.    

But I also mean literally fat…as in I threw out another pair of jeans the other day.  They were my last remaining jeans…you know the ones I'm talking about.  The ones we all have stored in the back of the closet, just in case we over-indulge during the holidays.  The ones that are at the top end of our size range.  Maybe they are left over from that after-pregnancy weight loss, jeans that you didn’t need any more but something was telling you not to give them away.  The fat jeans. 

I’ve been wearing my fat jeans for some time now, the culmination of a painful back condition and a job that keeps me anchored on my butt in front of a computer for 8 or 10 hours a day.  Well that and Oreos.  And brownies.  And cookie dough ice cream sundaes.  I love sweets and I eat them when I’m stressed, which is a lot!  And all the while I’ve been telling myself “tomorrow I’ll eat better,” or “I am going to exercise tomorrow, definitely,” or my favorite “oh, I haven’t gained that much…”  Well, honey, yes you have.  And tomorrow is here.

It literally hit me the other day as I walked through Target and started to get the most uncomfortable feeling between my legs  (ahem…don’t go there – I know what you’re thinking!).  This feeling was very unusual and not particularly pleasant.  It was rubbing, a little burning, suddenly constricting…..it was a sudden hole bursting in the crotch of my jeans!  In the middle of Target, on a Tuesday afternoon, my go-to fat jeans failed me in a BIG way.  Thankfully my sweater was long enough to hide my shame and the moment I got home I trashed those traitorous jeans. 

This left me with one pair.  One poor pair of jeans that I stuffed my cookie-plumped butt into on Wednesday morning.  “Not too bad,” I thought.  I had a burgeoning muffin top of a belly that my sweatshirt thankfully covered but I was feeling a little smug as I got them zipped up.  Not too bad, at all.  I sauntered into the kitchen for my coffee and as I was leaning over the counter, Superman walked in.  “Hon,” he said.  “Yeah, babe?” I responded, and then he was strangely quiet.  “Um,” as he flipped on the kitchen light, “um, looks like you, um, you got something there on you.  Oh, honey did you know you have a big hole in your jeans, on the butt?”   Kill me now – not this pair, too!  Superman is so kind to me and thankfully in 20+ years of marriage he has learned how to read my expressions – he didn’t say a word, walked over to the pile of folded jeans he was packing into his suitcase, and silently handed me one of his pair.  God bless that man.

So here I sit, composing this blog in my husband’s jeans because I have none that fit, and I am hoping that this too-tight pair doesn’t fail me in a public way, too!  This is my personal intervention with myself and I need to start getting healthy.  And I invite anyone reading this to come on along with me!  I promise I won’t this won’t be a preachy, whiney, oh-God-I’m-dieting-again blog, but it will be informative, non-judgemental, friendly, and crazy.  And probably literally fat for a while longer.