Ah yes, the long awaited Weight Watcher post about my “Baby Weight Be Gone Campaign.”

I’ve been putting this one off you see.

I’ve had a “WW Part 5″ post in draft mode for awhile now. The trouble is that every week I think “I’ll lose a whole bunch of weight this week and then I’ll finish the post.” The bad news is that my days losing “a whole bunch” of weight in a week are way over friends.

Like, way over.

The last time I spilled my guts to you over my WW adventures I had lost 36 pounds. That was 7 weeks ago.  As of Thursday, I have lost a total of…wait for it…wait for it….

43 pounds.

I realize that it’s great, blah, blah, blah, but that means that I’ve only lost 1 pound per week since then.

(What a whiny baby, right? I annoy myself).

I’m not a mathematician by any means, (although, let the record show that I can rock some addition and subtraction), but if I started on March 1st, that was nearly 6 months ago, right?. Right. There are 52 weeks in year, so half of that is 26 weeks, right?

So 26 divided by 43 pounds, comes out to 1.65 pounds per week. Right?

I’m not breaking any records by any means, but the weight is ssssssllllllloooooowwwwwwlllllllyyyyyyy coming off.

And, guess what?!

Being the huge girly girl that I am, I tried on my wedding dress last week and IT FITS!

Let’s take a walk down my wedding memory lane, shall we?

And lastly, my love waiting for me at the end of a very long, tear filled aisle. My Love, My Zach.

Whew. Memory lane is apparently filled with a few teardrops tonight. I sure did love, love, LOVE my wedding day.

OK, I’m wiping my tears away and focusing on my amazing wedding dress…back to business.

Not only does it fit, it looks great if I do say so myself.

When Zach and I got married I told him that I didn’t want to preserve my dress because I wanted to be able to wear it whenever I wanted.

Ya know, like walk around the house, eat a sandwich, run to the post office, pretend to be a runway model, prance around, go on play dates, make dinner, whatever was on my agenda for the day. I mean, it is my dress and technically I’m still a bride, so why the heck not?

Plus, since I refuse to actually weigh myself because I’m such a scaredy cat, the dress is just as good as a scale.

So basically my “dress scale” told me today that I’m at my wedding weight which was around 10ish pounds less than “normal” Molly weight.

I will tell ya though, with all this WW point counting, etc., I’ve been eating like a maniac lately.

For example, here was my menu today.

Breakfast: Egg McMuffin from my friend and yours, McDonald’s. I could seriously eat them 3 times a day, so freaking good.

Breakfast Take 2: Nonfat, no-whip Peppermint Mocha from Starbucks. Ditto to the above statement.

Lunch: Glazed Chicken Lean Cuisine. Total opposite of the above statement. If I never saw one again, it would be fine by me.

Lunch Take 2/Dinner/Dinner Take 2/Snack: Big, Beautiful, Best thing ever of all time: A Banana Spilt from Brusters. The heavens opened and there was a party in my mouth when I took a bite of this glorious creature. I ate this at 2:00pm and I knew full well that my eating was way over for the day. Do I regret this?  I think you know the answer to this. Never, ever, ever, never do I regret my sugar escapades. Never.

Dinner Take 3: Bag of grapes. (yup, the whole bag. Don’t judge me).

Basically I’m on an “eat as many preservatives as possible” diet, along with counting all my WW points. It’s a great marriage of a low calorie/preservative filled lifestyle plan.

Ugh. Again, I annoy myself.

And yes, before you ask, I am still breastfeeding.

Thanks for rubbing it in.

In my defense, the only foods that go into my Bitzy’s mouth are organic foods that I make her. No sugar, hormones, additives, none of the yucky stuff.

I figure that she gets enough preservatives in my breast milk, the food I feed her should be au natural.

Anyway, how did we get off this tangent?

Back to my frenemy Weight Watchers.

The bottom line? It’s working and my pre-preg jeans are baggy.

Isn’t that a fabulous bottom line?

Well, and that if I eat one more Lean Cuisine I may explode, but let’s focus on the positive.

So there you have it.

Maybe this week I’ll jinx myself and lose 5 pounds…but just in case, I’m not holding my breath.

Love to all,

PS: All photos were taken by Tyler Pelan at Lighting His World Photography.

Remember the old meanie that so rudely laid his airplane chair back on Bitzy and my lap on our way to the wedding? As I was trying to get my wonderful husband to stop poking the seat of the old geezer in order to punish him, I noticed that beside me sat an even older man.

When I say old, I mean old. As in fought in the Civil War old. Or maybe drove a buggy on the Oregon Trail old.

I’m thinking around 100ish.

No joke.

Don’t get me wrong, I love old people just as much as the next gal, but I did find it odd that he was flying.

Where did he have to go anyway?

So, I asked him.  ”Where ya goin’?” in my annoyingly nosey way.

He just stared at me and grinned.

Oh dear.

It was then that the flight attendant saved me by informing me that my old friend was deaf.

Ah, that would explain why he had looked at me and grinned rather than answering my all important question about his comings and goings.

For those of you who don’t know, I have a very large soft spot for the deaf and hard of hearing community.

So of course, I instantly fell in love with my old friend.

In fact, I have always really wanted to learn sign language, I truly desire to be able to communicate with such an incredible community of people.

However, apparently I don’t desire it enough to sit in a class for longer than 2 hours.

Even though I took 10 years of Spanish and remember approximately 2 broken sentences, I figured that 2 hours was plenty enough for me to learn ASL.  Shockingly, it was not.

I annoy myself.

Anyway, as I nestled my girl in my arms I watched as the old man and his seat mate communicated in the most primitive way.

They passed notes.

As I sat back with awe at watching the barriers of age, disability, color, ethnicity or anything else for that matter melt away,  I was amazed.

We are all just people who need community.  We need connection. We need love.

As I was brimming with all kinds of love, I leaned over to Zach and asked him nicely not to murder the man who put his seat back on me.

So he didn’t.

I think he may be sweet on me.

I’m so glad that I had the privilege of meeting a new old friend and helping my husband escape prison.

A good day indeed.

When my amazing friend Danelle asked me to be a bridesmaid in her wedding I was, of course, honored and excited.

Weddings are my favorite, after all.

Especially when the wedding is a God honoring union of two precious souls, so of course, I said “YES!”

After all the oohs and ahhs of wedding planning and we hung up the phone and I realized that I missed one very important factoid…

We would have to fly in order to get there.

Like, in an airplane.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not scared of flying, thoughts of taking my incredibly fussy child on an airborne capsule with no way out suddenly sent me into hysterics.

At the time of this call, my girl was crying constantly (ah the joys of colic) and I couldn’t imagine a worse nightmare than sitting still for 2 hours on a plane with a baby who’s greatest joy was crying her eyes out.

I was terrified.

T.E.R.R.F.I.E.D.

I even had nightmares about taking that little bit on a plane.  All the stares and whispers from strangers about what I terrible mother I was.

I scoured the good ole world wide web about how to prevent her from being a holy terror on the plane (other than Benadryl of course).

All the advice was basically the same.

To Pray.

All I could do was pray.

Thank the good Lord, as the weeks have continued my girl has gotten better and better.  Crying is now only 2nd or 3rd on her list of her favorite things to do.

Anything is an improvement.  Believe me.

As I obsessed about this trip my fear turned into more of a constant worry and dread.

Finally the fateful day arrived and we were prepared.  Her feedings were perfectly timed to begin at take off (to help her baby ears), the flight departed at her nap time, she was changed…

All systems a go for a great flight.

Right?

What I didn’t take into account was that we weren’t the only people on the plane.

Can you believe that they didn’t let us fly by ourselves?

Don’t they know that this is our first time flying with an infant?  Was the airline not aware of my constant worry and dread?

As we nestled into our seats in the very back of the plane (white noise=good / bathroom dooring slamming= bad), I was anxious to see how this all would turn out.  She was content and happy to read books and play with her toys as we sat and waited for take off.

So far so good.

As we took off she ate like a little champion and then fell asleep quietly in my arms and didn’t wake up until we landed 2.5 hours later.

That’s right.

I wasted so much time worrying when my genius, amazing, beautiful, joyful, well behaved child was a dream baby the entire flight.

However, there were a few snags of course.

One of my pet peeves is when grouchy old men lay there seats backs on airplanes.  Drives.Me.Bananas.  I know that it’s his “right” and his “preference” to lay that seat down, I just find it be so…so…so…intrusive.  Let me also point out that he slammed his seat back with no regard to the precious cargo in my arms.

I wanted to smack him.  In fact, Zach almost did.

Imagine me with a baby in my arms all snuggled and relishing in my perfect child’s airplane etiquette while my husband plots/obsesses about how to punish this oldie for laying his chair back.

It was quite funny actually.

So after all the worrying, everything worked out just fine (even without Benadryl).

It always does doesn’t it?

My lovely girls, Shellie & Megan.

Before our wedding, I had the bright idea of getting a personal trainer to slim down for the big day. His name was “Sonny.”  Oh how I loved/hated Sonny.  He had the appearance of being a nice man, but on the inside he was evil.  He was out for blood and guts.

So every Tuesday and Thursday evening Sonny and I had a date. Jillian Michaels has nothing on Sonny. While he doesn’t scream like Jillian, he was equally horrendous.

Although, I’m proud to say that I only cried once.  I begged, justified and tried to persuade Sweet Sonny on why I just couldn’t complete those horrible leg thingy’s he had me do…he smiled sweetly and waited until I pulled myself together and made me finish every last rep.

What a wicked man that Sonny.

Anyway, on one day in particular, Sonny must’ve eaten something with meanness as it’s main ingredient ’cause he killed me. I was screaming all the way through the workout. It was brutal.

Perhaps it was because I was leaving for a cruise with my best gals the next day. We were heading to the beautiful Bahamas for a getaway.

So I bid Sonny good riddance and packed up for a week of bliss!

The next morning I woke up and as I attempted to get out of bed to head out, I felt the old familiar pang of soreness. But this wasn’t a case of stiff muscles…this was more like paralysis.  The real deal, can’t move, can’t think, totally and utterly still with stiffness.

Stupid Sonny.

As we headed through the airport I could barely walk. I was searching endlessly for a wheelchair, while my girlfriends were laughing at me. I whined, whimpered and complained while walking through the endless airports. But then, something wonderful happened…

I realized that if I walked on my tippy toes, it didn’t hurt as bad. Sure, I looked ridiculous, but I didn’t care. Finally, I felt a little relief.

Then, I remembered a kid in elementary that had been in a fire and had suffered terrible burns on his feet as he lay in his crib as an infant. He had to wear special shoes that looked like tennis shoes but had a wedge canvas heel on them. How is this a remedy for a severe burn, you ask? I have no idea. My medical degree from Greys Anatomy didn’t cover burns. All I know, is that in my feeble mind, I called them his “crib shoes.” I never actually said it out loud, but I had declared at the tender age of 5, that he wore crib shoes.

So, I say to my friends, “Look, it looks like I’m wearing crib shoes.”

They looked at me as if I had a monkey suit on.

Sweet Julie & me.

“What did you say?” They replied.

“Ya know, the shoes that burn victims wear. It helps the burns on their feet.  They are called crib shoes.”  Then, I went on to tell them about the kid in my school who wore these infamous shoes.

All three of my precious friends stopped in their tracks, crossed their legs and tried not to pee on themselves from laughing so hard.

“Why are you laughing?  it’s not funny!!! It’s really sad. It’s horrible that people get burned and have to wear crib shoes.”

So my wonderful friend Julie says to me, “Are they really called crib shoes? I’ve never heard of that. Did you make it up?”

“NO!” I replied. “That’s the medical term for them!  I swear!”

Take in mind, that I’m still on the tips of my toes trying not to fall over, plus let’s face it, I was so high on Advil that it was making my face itch. I’m sure that the flies on the wall were laughing as well.

Through the endless peels of laughter, we came to the conclusion that “Crib Shoes” aren’t a medical term for anything. I had, in fact, made up that name and had seared it into my brain for the past 20 years.

Turns out, that laughter really is the best medicine. Strangely enough, after our episode in the airport my legs started feeling a bit more relaxed…even without my crib shoes on.

Or maybe it was the Advil.

Anyway, even today as I write this I have tears rolling down my cheeks with laughter. What was I thinking?

Crib Shoes?  Hilarious.