Me. An Update.

This is me.

28 weeks

30 weeks

31 weeks

31 weeks.

While Eric was taking pictures, Zeus came in an plopped down on the ground. He is the saddest looking dog. He obviously knows that something's up.

I've officially gained 21 lbs. My goal was 25, and I'm going to pass that, but I'll still be way under 60 lbs. I think I'll end up somewhere around 30 lbs., which is healthy I suppose. I definitely got the dreaded stretch marks. I didn't honestly think I would avoid them, but there was this little glimmer of hope. The belly button is still quite in (except for when Eli kicks right behind it- not only is that painful, but it actually flattens out my BB while his foot is there. Fuuuurreeaakky.). I took our my navel ring. Only because when someone (usually unwanted) touches (grabs) my stomach the first thing they would say is, "Oh MY GAWD! Is that your belly button!?" Then I'd have to explain that it's my belly ring, and I'd get all kinds of reactions:

Can I see? - No.

Why are you still wearing that? - Because I can.

That's bad for the baby? - You're Stupid.

Can I see? - No.

I have stopped running. Which is sad, but, well, it's... HARD. I get in a swim every so often, but that's really it. I'm going to try to get out and walk more, but this heat and humidity is ridiculous. For my own enjoyment, I want it to be mild this summer, however, for my work's perspective, I need it to be hot as hell. Not sure what we'll get.

PS here's a reminder: This was 7 weeks.

Boob Gate 2010

My boobs are huge. Prior to being pregnant, my boobs were BIG, but not ridiculously massive. I could still race in a swim suit if I wanted to. However, going from a 36 D to a 38 F (as in What The F!) is not exactly taking too kindly to me.

Pull up a chair, and let me illustrate what has now become Boob Gate 2010.

Yesterday morning I got work feeling less frazzled than normal, mostly because I looked cute. I was wearing this super cute green dress, and a black one button cardigan. It's so comfy. However, the tube top part has started to become a little snug. No big deal though. Here's what I think I looked like.

Cute, right? Well, I thought it was a darling outfit.

I had a 9am appointment with a potentional new lifeguard. She's young, and impresssionable. Just the way I like them- makes them easy to train. What's this got to do with Boob Gate 2010? Please, stay with me.

We hold the interview in my office. It's got a long L shape desk that sits up against a window overlooking my pool.

See? Here's my chair, and the chair the interviewee was in. The interview went well, but about halfway through she seemed to get really nervous. Like, Really nervous. And she stopped looking at me. What is with teenagers that makes them all of sudden get weird? I thought maybe it had something to do with my discussing what a tight ship we run, and how I have a zero tolerance for a lot of things. We also discussed appearance and professionalism. That's really important to me, as I put (way too) much emphasis on how I look, as that's how people percieve you.

She was all fine and dandy, but a little weird averting eye contact. Maybe she had a short attention span. Regardless, things went well, I told her I was intrested in having her on my staff. In conclusion, I stood up to shake her hand and thank her for coming in. That's when I turned to my left to look out at my pool.

That's an old picture of my office. I now have a dry erase board on the outside that also acts as a mirror of sorts for me. As I was looking out at my guard, I realized, through the reflection of my window-mirror, I now looked like this:

That's right, ya'll. My super super cute little green tube dress betrayed me, my cardigan, and giant nude colored nursing bra.

The Girls Were Out. The tube part had slide down to right underneath my bra. I hadn't felt a thing.

All of my right boob, and pretty much all of the left. Out. Actually, they weren't entirely alone. You see, I was leaning forward for most of the interview, with my gut hanging... and the Girls just sitting on top.

So, here I am, talking to the new hire about the Christian principles of the YMCA, and I have my tee-tas in her face, three feet away.

Stunned, I pulled my top up and stood there, looking away. I finally turned back towards her, and apologized. I AM SO SORRY. I DID NOT KNOW.

She then says, "I was going to say something but I thought it would be rude."

Ooookay. Let's go back to young and impressionable. If I were interviewing a 30-something, she would have said "Sorry, your top is down." I could have pulled it up and continued. No, teeny bopped Tina didn't have the balls to say to her potential new boss "Ma'am, your tits are out." I politely suggested that it might be rude NOT to tell someone the milk jugs are swinging freely.

I'm going to skip the second interview and send her to training. I don't really want to see her again until I feel less like a flasher.

Awesome.

Chill Out, Yo!

http://www.cnn.com/2010/LIVING/wayoflife/05/03/o.well.lived.life.key/index.html?hpt=Sbin


Lighten up on yourself to have a better life
By Elizabeth Gilbert, O, The Oprah Magazine
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Author: Too many women stress over whether they are accomplishing enough
Also, women find more faults when comparing themselves to other women
Writer urges women to accept mistakes, letting others be more perfect
RELATED TOPICS
Stress
Relationships
(OPRAH.com) -- Nearly all the women I know are stressing themselves sick over the pathological fear that they simply aren't doing enough with their lives.
Which is crazy -- absolutely flat-out bananas -- because the women I know do a lot, and they do it well.
My cousin Sarah, for instance, is earning her master's degree in international relations, while simultaneously working for a nonprofit that builds playgrounds at woefully underfunded public schools.
Kate is staying home and raising the two most enchanting children I've ever met -- while also working on a cookbook.
Donna is producing Hollywood blockbusters; Stacy is running a London bank; Polly just launched an artisanal bakery...
By all rights, every one of these clever, inventive women should be radiant with self-satisfaction. Instead, they twitch with near-constant doubt, somehow worrying that they are failing at life.
Sarah worries that she should be traveling around the world instead of committing to a master's degree. Kate worries that she's wasting her education by staying home with her kids. Donna worries that she's endangering her marriage by working such long hours. Stacy worries that the capitalistic world of banking is murdering her creativity. Polly worries that her artisanal bakery might not be quite capitalistic enough.
All of them worry that they need to lose 10 pounds.
It's terribly frustrating for me to witness this endless second-guessing. The problem is, I do it, too. Despite having written five books, I worry that I have not written the right kinds of books, or that perhaps I have dedicated too much of my life to writing, and have therefore neglected other aspects of my being. (Like, I could really stand to lose 10 pounds.)
Oprah.com: Why women never hear the good stuff
So here's what I want to know: Can we lighten up a little?
As we head into this next decade, can we draft a joint resolution to drop the crazy-making expectation that we must all be perfect friends and perfect mothers and perfect workers and perfect lovers with perfect bodies who dedicate ourselves to charity and grow our own organic vegetables, at the same time that we run corporations and stand on our heads while playing the guitar with our feet?
When I look at my life and the lives of my female friends these days -- with our dizzying number of opportunities and talents -- I sometimes feel as though we are all mice in a giant experimental maze, scurrying around frantically, trying to find our way through.
But maybe there's a good historical reason for all this overwhelming confusion. We don't have centuries of educated, autonomous female role models to imitate here (there were no women quite like us until very recently), so nobody has given us a map.
As a result, we each race forth blindly into this new maze of limitless options. And the risks are steep. We make mistakes. We take sharp turns, hoping to stumble on an open path, only to bump into dead-end walls and have to back up and start all over again. We push mysterious levers, hoping to earn a reward, only to learn -- whoops, that was a suffering button!
Oprah.com: 10 life lessons you should unlearn
To make matters even more stressful, we constantly measure ourselves against each other's progress, which is a truly dreadful habit.
My sister, Catherine, told me recently about a conversation she'd had with a sweet neighbor who -- after watching Catherine spend an afternoon organizing a scavenger hunt for all the local kids -- said sadly, "You're such a better mother than I will ever be." At which point, my sister grabbed her friend's hands and said, "Please. Let's not do this to each other, okay?"
No, seriously -- please. Let's not.
Because it breaks my heart to know that so many amazing women are waking up at 3 o'clock in the morning and abusing themselves for not having gone to art school, or for not having learned to speak French, or for not having organized the neighborhood scavenger hunt. I fear that -- if we continue this mad quest for perfection -- we will all end up as stressed-out and jumpy as those stray cats who live in Dumpsters behind Chinese restaurants, forever scavenging for scraps of survival while pulling out their own hair in hypervigilant anxiety.
Oprah.com: 6 steps to a regret-proof life
So let's drop it, maybe?
Let's just anticipate that we (all of us) will disappoint ourselves somehow in the decade to come. Go ahead and let it happen.
Let somebody else be a better mother than you for one afternoon. Let somebody else go to art school. Let somebody else have a happy marriage, while you foolishly pick the wrong guy. (Hell, I've done it; it's survivable.)
While you're at it, take the wrong job. Move to the wrong city. Lose your temper in front of the boss, quit training for that marathon, wolf down a truckload of cupcakes the day after you start your diet.
Blow it all catastrophically, in fact, and then start over with good cheer. This is what we all must learn to do, for this is how maps get charted -- by taking wrong turns that lead to surprising passageways that open into spectacularly unexpected new worlds. So just march on. Future generations will thank you -- trust me -- for showing the way, for beating brave new footpaths out of wonky old mistakes.
Fall flat on your face if you must, but please, for the sake of us all, do not stop.
Map your own life.
By Elizabeth Gilbert from O, The Oprah Magazine © 2010
Elizabeth Gilbert is the author of "Eat, Pray, Love" and "Committed"
Subscribe to O, The Oprah Magazine for up to 75% off the newsstand price. That's like getting 18 issues FREE.Subscribe now!
TM & © 2010 Harpo Productions, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Goals: To Set, or Not to Set

Goals should be a attainable, achievable. Something that when you reflect on them, you know you can make, no matter how difficult the path to checking them off may be.

When I was 18, I really wanted to do figure competitions. Well, having some cheerleading/dance/gymnastic background, I was thinking more about fitness, than figure. But I'll get back to that. Figure competitions, themselves, are sort of silly. They consist of dozens of women from 18 to Grandmas strutting their stuff, literally, in rhinestone bikinis and clear stripper shoes. The pose, not in the bodybuilding type poses, but more of a "Look at how muscle x is separated from muscle y, but there are clearly no striations, because that would be body building.." I dunno, maybe not. However, these women are the fittest looking ladies you'll ever see. No, they don't look like this all the time, that would be damn near impossible. But, coming up on show time, they cut and lean like it's no one's business. I could be wrong, but I think about 70% of the training is actually nutrition. Eating this meal, at this time, for this purpose. It's amazing.

So here's what I'm kind of thinking about: I'm seven months el pregneato, due in July. I realistically probably wont be doing much of anything athletically for a while. Okay, a couple months. As much as I want to say a couple weeks, we all know that's bullshit. There's stitches and stuff, and ya know, as some friends pointed out, you generally will want to shower and shave your arm pits instead of going for a run. (PS, babies can't go in running strollers when they're a couple weeks old. That means you can't leave unless Husband is available to watch the Little Dude). I digress.

I have found a little information online, most of it about contest prep (looks like a 12 week program). I'm gonna need a pre-pre-prep course, and then a pre-prep. But, it looks like, if I really buckle down, get in workouts when I can and WATCH MY NUTRITION to support myself and the little nipple suckler I hope to have, I may have myself ready to start some type of program come, oh, January or February. Let's do the timeline, shall we?

Give Birth: July 24th ish

Maybe consider some type of workout: September 18th (8 weeks. I also realize this reduces the likely hood of me running the Kansas City Half Marathon in October- at least at any reasonable speed)

12 week prep date: Feb 1, 2011

Prospective date of competition May 2, 2011: I know there's one today, so I'm just setting a year out.

Doable? I dunno. I've emailed a few people, some trainers, some competitors, to get their thoughts. I really need to know what's realistic. I won't do it if it will take away too much time from Little Dude. I want to be healthy and happy. But I also don't want to lose sight of my athletic self. I know training for IM won't be in the cards for a while, and I want a challenge like that.

So, I might have a new goal for next spring. Or I might not. Before I can say yes, I need to know what is achievable. For now though, I'm not telling myself no.