Let's Open Up a Dialogue

Good Housekeeping Magazine has a column every month that is written by an emotional eating expert. It seems a strange career to me, but I guess that if there is a market for it, why not? Anyway, each month this column offers tips on ways to overcome emotional eating such as keeping a food diary, celebrating successes with family time rather than ice cream, etc. Some of these are actually pretty good suggestions. However, in this month's column the expert suggested having a dialogue with your fat. Excuse me? I don't know about most people, but my fat doesn't actually talk. Although, if it did the resulting dialogue might go something like this:

Me:"Hi, I'm Shauna."
Fat:"I'm Fat."
Me:"How are you today?"
Fat:"Jiggly and soft. And you?"
Me:"Likewise."
Fat:"So what are your plans for today?"
Me:"Well, I'm going to get up at 6:30, plan and prepare three healthy meals for my family, get everyone dressed and to school on time, drive my shopping cart way too fast so I can pick everyone up on time when school is over, exercise until I'm sweaty and weak, wash and fold 50,000 megatons of laundry, and maybe even sweep the floor after every meal and vacuum the cheerios off the carpet, all the while chasing my one year old who's idea of a long nap is about 30 minutes. And than at about 9:00 p.m., when the children are finally in bed and the house is at least semi-clean (Ouch. Except for that Lego I just stepped on.), I'm going to collapse in my bed for a few hours so I can do the same thing again tomorrow. What about you?"
Fat:"I'm going to be with you every step of the way."

Seriously, I have a much healthier lifestyle than I did in college. Blast my 34 year old metabolism! I think that is the only thing I would like about being 20 again. Back then I consumed by own body weight in chocolate every year and still had a better figure than I do now. So does carrying a few extra pounds while chasing three kids count as weight lifting? In the mommy athletics world, I think it should.

Intro to Nathan-isms

Daniel and Nathan are very different. Everyone knows this of course. Daniel has always been concerned with doing things correctly, which includes knowing the proper words for things. Nathan on the other hand, is not so much concerned with correctness as he is in just doing something. Where language is concerned, this means that he doesn't care a lick about using the correct word, he just wants people to know what he is talking about. Hence his coining of the phrase "reindeer sticks."


Back in December, several weeks before Christmas, I was driving Nathan to preschool and he was hitting me with a barrage of questions (which is totally normal for him). The conversation went something like this:

Nathan: "Why can't we see Santa when he comes to our house?"
Me: "Because he knows when we are sleeping."
Nathan: "How does Santa know when we are sleeping?"
Me: "Because he's magic."
Nathan: "Why can't we hear Santa's reindeer on the rooftops?"
Me: "Because he knows when we are sleeping and won't come if we are awake."
Nathan: "Why can't we see Santa's sleigh?"
Me: "Because he knows when we are sleeping and won't come if we are awake."
Nathan: "Why does Santa have a big belly like a bowl full of jelly?"
Me: "Probably because of all the cookies he eats."

(Silence for about five minutes. It is peaceful.)

Nathan: "Why can't we hear Santa's ho's?"

(Silence again because in my head I heard 'hose' and for the life of me couldn't figure out what Santa had to do with gardening. Then the synapses fired and I started to laugh. Of course, I was trying not to laugh because I didn't want to give Nathan a complex.)

Me: (gasp, choke, giggle) "I don't know." (chortle, snort, chuckle)


Sometimes I think that my four year old, with his infinite curiosity, has a better grasp on reality than I do.

Revelations

When I was a child I had a recurring nightmare. I started when I was 3 or 4 and I still had it on occasion when I was in college. The dream goes like this: I am at home, happily playing with my siblings or friends. Suddenly I look up and see a disembodied hand in a white glove. Now this hand is not bloody or gross in any way. It is just a hand, sans body, that happens to be wearing a white glove. The fingers of the hand are opening and closing and as the hand slowly gets closer and closer to me, I know without a doubt that it is “Coming to get me.” Which, of course, it does. Then everything goes black and when the lights come back up, the whole thing starts over again in a different room of the house. In the light of day, this dream is (and was) not scary in any way. However, at night, alone in the dark, it scared the pants off me.

Several weeks ago at Sunday dinner, I happened to mention this dream to my sisters and my mom. Patti paused for a minute and then reminded me of a game our dad used to play. We were to hold very still and he would open and close the fingers of one hand, bringing it nearer and nearer to us, all the while saying, “I’m going to get you,” over and over again. When his hand got to us, he would tickle us crazy. This game was very fun. I never once thought of it as something to be afraid of. Until Patti mentioned it in relation to my nightmare of choice. Then my mom reminded me that when my dad was in the Navy, which just happened to be during the time when this game was the most fun, he wore white gloves with his dress uniform. As these facts settled themselves in my brain, I could not restrain my instinctive response: “It’s Dad’s fault!!”

Irony

Inspired by Patti's blog, and with a few minutes to spare, I just met my daemon on goldencompassmovie.com. I answered all the questions, even admitting that yes, I never talk to people I don't know at parties and then it gave me my daemon's name:Aeron. I thought, "Okay, that's fun. Now what animal do I get?" Then this big old hairy black spider crawled onto the screen! And I started laughing. I mean seriously, can you imagine me walking around with a big creepy spider on my shoulder?! Anyone who knows me knows I have had a total spider complex since I saw "Arachnophobia" in high school. Seeing that spider crawl out of the guy's ear just about killed me. It's so bad that I can't squish them or catch them if they show up in the house. I just cover them up so they can't escape. Kev always knows if I've found a spider because he will come home and find a random butter tub hanging out somewhere in the house.

There was one time before we got married that I found an absolutely ENORMOUS spider in my bedroom in the basement of my parents' house. I knew I couldn't go to sleep with that thing crawling around in my room, but being unmarried and too old to ask my Dad to take care of it, I had to find a solution. However, I knew that if I used one of my shoes to squish it, I would get the heebie jeebies every time I wore that shoe. So I borrowed one of Rachael's. Squished the heck out of that big old beast. Heard it pop (mega yuck!) and everything. I told Rachael about the shoe about two years ago. She laughed and rolled her eyes at me.

So now I'm laughing and getting goosebumps at the same time.

My Inspiration to Blog

My older sister Patti has been telling me I should blog. Up to this point I have had no motivation to do so. However, in every mom's life there must be a place where she can express her feelings on the fact that her kid is the kid that threw up on the dentist. Yup. That's my kid. Gagged on one of those cotton rolls. Hard. I felt worse for the dental assistant than I did for my kid. The dentist gets to just walk away, but the assistant is the one who gets to clean up. We've only been going to this dentist for about a month.

I'll bet he won't forget who we are.