7,000 Sick Hamsters

So, here I am with my first weight-loss check-in, as promised. The news is pretty good. I lost about 3 1/2 lbs. my first week dieting, and that's during a week that included Thanksgiving. So, I'm proud of myself. I'd gone into the holiday really worried about it - I concocted various strategies that included eating nothing at all, or taking a Slimfast shake in my purse, or maybe faking illness so I could stay home and avoid the whole issue. In the end, I took a more moderate approach. I ate healthy, low-calorie foods all day until Thanksgiving dinner. When dinnertime came, I ate only one small portion of each thing, and I only chose foods that I really wanted. I did have pecan pie - one slice, I learned, is a whopping 700 calories - but I only had a small sliver. And everything turned out OK.

Here, I have to give my plug for The Daily Plate, the weight loss section of livestrong.com, Lance Armstrong's website. I'm finding it so helpful. It's got a calorie calculator, which tells you how much to eat in order to lose a certain amount of weight per week. You can log your exercise, chart your weight loss, and post to a personal diary. It's also got forums, where helpful people will answer your fitness questions. The people on the site stress healthy weight loss, which means no fad diets, and no ultra-low-calorie diets. I've learned that I can eat 1,800 calories per day to lose 2 lbs. per week. Every other diet I've tried has put me at a hunger-inducing, and impossible to sustain, 1,200 calories. No wonder I've failed in the past - I was starving! Now, I'm able to eat plenty of food, including some of my favorite treats, and weight is still coming off. It's been eye-opening.

Evan never fails to surprise me. She's 4 1/2 now. Today we went to the library because she wanted to find a book about kangaroos. I found four or five books on kangaroos -- in the children's section, mind you -- and put them on a table for her to look through. One of the books had some very graphic photos of a dissected kangaroo, complete with heart, lungs and intestines. I was pretty shocked to find that in a kid's book. I didn't know how Evan would react, but she just looked through the pictures very seriously. After a moment she said, "I want to get this one." I asked, "Are you sure, babe? There are some pretty yucky pictures in there." And she said, "If I can see what's inside the kangaroo, it'll help me learn." I couldn't argue with that logic, so we checked out the book. Her dad can't read it to her, though. Too squeamish.

I'm going to lose weight. Last night we watched some videos of the kids' birthdays, and I saw myself with horror. I honestly didn't realize I'd gotten this fat. The person on the screen was a stranger to me. A very large stranger. Also, at about the same time, I stepped onto a scale for the first time in months. I'm 206 lbs. I've been overweight all my life but I've never weighed more than 200 lbs., except during my pregnancies, which don't count.

Add to this the fact that I'm getting old. I'm 40 now, and I'm starting to feel all this extra weight for the first time. My back hurts. My knee hurts. I get winded going up stairs. In the past, when I've tried to lose weight, it's been about vanity, not health. I felt fine. I could do all the things I wanted to do, without much effort. But now, I feel as though my body is falling apart. My weight may or may not be causing these problems, but either way, it's certainly making things worse. I need to lose weight for myself, and for my family. They deserve to have me healthy, a full participant in their lives.

My mother died partly due to obesity. She had many health problems, and those that weren't caused by her weight were made much worse by it. I don't want to end up that way. I don't want my loved ones to be sad about my lost potential.

The good news is, I've already made some changes. I'm exercising regularly for the first time in my life. I've learned that my back pain can be controlled quite well by daily exercise, and by pretty much nothing else. So, I might not like going to the gym, but I like constant pain even less. In a way, my back problems are a gift to me, because they're motivating me to work out the way nothing else has, or will. If it weren't for the threat of pain, I'd be sedentary as ever. Funny how things work out.

I plan to report here on my progress. I'm not going to be one of those ladies at the Weight Watchers meetings I used to attend, obsessing about every morsel that entered their mouths. Nobody's going to care if I break down and eat a cupcake, nor will you want to know the details of the cupcake -- its flavor, calorie count, fat content, etc. It's just not interesting, and it's not going to help me to tell it to you. Instead, I'm going to let you know how I feel, and whether I'm generally meeting my goals of healthy eating and regular exercise. I figure, I might do better if somebody, somewhere, knows about my successes and failures. And please, feel free to share yours.

Chloe is 9 now, and she is absurdly hard on socks. A couple of weekends ago we went to a birthday party for one of the neighbor kids. A big jumper was set up in the back yard. When Chloe took her shoes off to go in the jumper, I was horrified to see she had a hole in her sock the size of a Granny Smith apple. And yet she'd somehow overlooked this fact when she'd selected socks that morning. Today I was folding some clean laundry, and I saw that a pair of Chloe's socks that are less than a week old already have four holes in them. It could have something to do with the fact that she doesn't like to wear shoes. Last week she was leaving to go to a friend's house. She had socks on, but no shoes. Her friend's house is about a quarter-mile away. She'd been planning to walk there, just like that. With socks, but no shoes.

We have a new hamster. Her name is Butterscotch. She is golden brown and white, and she's very cute, even though she looks a lot like an extra-fuzzy mouse. She doesn't say much, and that's probably why I like her. She's the only member of the family who's not constantly asking me to get her something. She just eats and sleeps, and runs on her wheel. She doesn't even argue over which channel we should watch, or what we should eat for dinner.

I started a play group on Meetup.com a couple of years ago, when my oldest daughter was 2. It started out well, with a good group of members who participated regularly. The drama so common to groups of women was notably absent. We went to parks. We met for coffee. The kids had a good time.

The problem is, while the kids got to know each other, I got to know ... other people's kids. The conversations I had with the other mothers ranged from pregnancy to labor to childbirth to potty training to the best type of sippy cups. I know how dilated these ladies were at their 39 week OB exams. I know who had the epidural and who did not. I know who got stretch marks and who escaped unscathed. I know which kids have tantrums, which are picky eaters, which refuse to sleep in their own beds. But I know virtually nothing about the women themselves.

Two years of seeing these ladies two and three times a week, and I don't know what kinds of movies they like. What kinds of music they enjoy. What their husbands do for a living. What they themselves did for a living before they left to become stay-at-home moms. I know what kind of mothers they are, but I don't know what kind of women they are. And that's a shame.

It's not that I haven't tried to change things. I tried scheduling moms' nights out, in the hope that we could focus more on ourselves. But even though the children weren't present, they remained the center of attention. It was like navigating a maze in which all paths ended at the same point. All conversations led back to the kids.

I've come to the conclusion that these women -- from all appearances sweet, loving people -- don't really want to get to know each other. They want to get out of the house and be in groups and have other adults to talk to, but they don't really want to open themselves up or reveal anything. The children are a shield we all use to protect ourselves from real human connections outside our families. Play groups are like the social equivalent of fast food -- easy, pleasant, but not very nourishing.

Labels: play groups

My day, in a nutshell:

"Mom. Mom. Mom. Mom."
"What, Evan?"
"That's a tree."
"Oh."
"Mom. Mom. Mom. Mom."
"What Evan?"
"It has leaves."
"Uh-huh."
"Mom. Mom. Mom. Mom."
"What, Evan?"
"A car doesn't have leaves."
"That's true."
"Mom. Mom. Mom. Mom."
"WHAT, EVAN?!!"
"I wasn't talking to you."
"Then what were you doing?"
"I just really like saying 'Mom'."

Repeat, over and over again.

This may be Southern California, but the forecast is always the same: whiny, with a 90 percent chance of tantrums.

The kids in this house will whine about anything. Especially Evan. "I want some orange juuuuuuuice!" "But IIIIIIIIIIII want that booooooooooooook!!!" "I don't waaaaaant to take a naaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaap!!!!!" I put on her Nikes instead of her Care Bear shoes? Whine. I offer her a cheese sandwich instead of chicken nuggets? Whine. I tell her it's time to go to bed? Full-on, screaming, head-banging tantrum.

OK, so she just turned 3, and you've got to expect a certain amount of this. But it seems excessive when you're the one who has to listen to it 12 hours a day.

Before I had children, I naively thought that all those tantruming kids at the mall, or at the movie theater, or sitting next to me at a restaurant, were the product of permissive and clueless parents. If I ever had kids, surely mine would be delightful little angels, coloring creatively on the back of the children's menu while waiting for their food to come. They'd smile fetchingly at me, while making cute and surprisingly precocious observations about the world. They'd be this way because I, my friends, would know how to parent.

Yes, I was one of those people who glared or rolled their eyes at the parents of unruly kids. Holy cow. I wish I could track down all of those parents and send them personal letters of apology, because it turns out this is just the way kids are, and there's nothing you can do about it.

I've tried all the methods the experts recommend: You give time-outs. You ignore the tantrums. You tell the child that mommy can't hear her until she speaks calmly. You never, never, give in to the tantrum. I do all that. And you know what? It doesn't work.

I read a book on parenting that said the biggest lie parents tell themselves is, "It's just a phase. They'll get over it." But I'm praying that this is just a phase. And if it's a lie, it's one I need to believe.