Mary Jane is 22 months old. This morning I stepped on the scale and saw the same number I saw the day that I learned I was pregnant with her.
It's about time, hm.
About eight of the 21 extra pounds I still had after I gave birth to MJ (counting from eight weeks postpartum, by which time the extra water weight ought to have been shed) came off "on their own" over the first year, and then for a long time I was steady. I think upping the swimming to twice a week made a pretty big difference. Doing that made me a little more motivated to practice some portion control, which I've been meaning to do, since MJ's recently cut her nursing back to only 2-3 times a day. Some combination of the extra exercise and fewer calories is doing something; over the last six weeks or so I dropped 13 pounds.
(Nobody is allowed to make any comments about how it must be time to have another baby.)
Feels pretty good, but I think I need to go buy myself some new pants. I kind of want to wait a little bit, though, and see if any more weight comes off. I'm still 10 pounds shy of moving from BMI-overweight to BMI-normal.
Speaking of physical fitness. My husband Mark was a track and field guy in high school, has always been more or less pretty fit and never overweight, periodically would run or lift weights for exercise in college, tries to keep in shape so he can ski as much as he can in the winter, runs a 5k now and then, recently took up rock climbing and weight training for that too.
We were talking the other night about getting older — he can feel it now some. He's 35 (I'm turning 34 this fall), and for him the muscle soreness takes longer to go away, the joints are a little stiffer, etc.
In a way, I have a sort of advantage over him. I was, erm, not a track and field person in high school. I was about as dumpy and sedentary as I could be. I was incompetent and frequently humiliated in gym class. My family made fun of me for being clumsy and awkward. At seventeen, I never rode a bike, I couldn't swim, I was much heavier than I am now, I couldn't really climb more than a couple flights of stairs without getting out of breath. All that lasted until well after I finished college. Since then, and especially since I went home to raise my kids, I've found plenty of physical activities I enjoy. And so as the years have gone by, I've pretty much gotten fitter and fitter, healthier and healthier. (Discounting fluctuations from my three pregnancies.) I feel better now than I did when I was seventeen. Every year I am setting new records. Getting older, for me, at least from the mid-twenties to the mid-thirties, has been getting better.
Not that I want to endorse being dumpy and sedentary in high school. But it has been wonderful to discover I didn't have to stay that way.
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