IT ALL BEGINS TOMORROW

Fact: I am overweight.

Fact: I am the Matron of Honor in my sister Cheryl's wedding in just under 5 months.

Fact: I have not successfully dieted or exercised regularly in almost 3 years.

Fact: It has been officially 4 weeks since I gave birth to Amanda.

It is time. Time to get back on track.

Before I got pregnant, I was a bit overweight for my liking. I was roughly 146 pounds, which for my short five-foot stature is just TOO much. The most I had ever weighed, before this pregnancy, was 150. So I knew, at 146, that I was pushing the limit.

I had excuses though - the fertility drugs, which are known to cause weight-gain; the emotional roller-coaster ride of infertility, which also can cause people to have extreme weight-gain or -loss, depending on how that individual deals with stress. (Side note: I always wished I was the type of person who lost their appetite when they got stressed out, instead of the person who eats everything in site and THEN some when she is feeling the pressure!) Also, I haven't really afforded myself the opportunity to enjoy a real workout schedule in years. I would workout for two weeks, and then take it easy for two weeks (during the "two-week wait"). The way I saw it, especially once we were undergoing treatments, there was no way I was going to potentially jeopardize an embryo from implanting by going out on a 3 mile run. Or by attending a spinning class. So for two weeks I would start to build up an endurance level by exercising, and then for two weeks I would do nothing, and lose any momentum I had built up. And eventually I just stopped trying to make the effort all together. In my head, I decided that I would REALLY try to do a legitimate workout routine once I either got pregnant and had a baby, or once we decided for once and for all to stop trying to get pregnant.

Well, now it is time. Amanda is four weeks old today, and I have officially not been pregnant in four weeks. It is time to start working on ME.

The wonderful thing is, I have a good head start. I gained 36 pounds during my pregnancy. (For those of you keeping score, yes, I was 182 when I gave birth - ouch!) But, when Amanda was 2 weeks old, I had already lost 26 pounds. 26 pounds in 14 days - that is almost 2 pounds a day!!!! I was thrilled, because it meant I only had 10 pounds to go to get to my pre-pregnancy weight.

However, with the holidays, and with the stress of learning how to live my life with a baby (and especially with that baby being sick), I have noticed the weight starting to creep back up. The past couple of days I have been teetering between 160 and 161.

I am going to the gym tonight. I have actually been going for the past 2 weeks, but literally have gone twice in the past 2 weeks. Tonight I am going, and it is going to be the start of a routine. Three or four times a week; that has to be my new regimen if I want to accomplish anything.

Tomorrow, I am joining Weight Watchers. I have done Weight Watchers many times before in the past, but being a person who has tried EVERY diet under the sun, Weight Watchers is the only one that has worked for me. It is the only program I am able to LIVE on, since it is not filled with "diet" foods that I would never eat on a permanent basis. In 1999, I was going to the gym religiously, and was following Weight Watchers by the book, and I got myself down to a svelte 118. My goal had been 115, but I was thrilled with where I ended up. The problem was, once I got to my goal weight, mentally it was as if I had crossed the finish line, and so I stopped doing everything that had gotten me there in the first place, and the weight came back on within a year.

My goal weight for Cheryl's wedding is between 125 - 130. That is pretty aggressive - we're talking about a potential 30 - 35 pound weight loss in five months. But I want to go for it.

And I am thinking about posting my weekly progress here on my blog. I think of it as a way to make myself accountable. If I have to put it in writing, in public, where there are people that will actually read about it and see that I am or I am not doing well, it may make me more likely to stay on track.

So that is my story for now. After tomorrow's Weight Watcher's meeting I will post my starting weight, and you can follow along with me. If you want to try your own weight-loss mission along with me, that would be great, and we can exchange tips and tricks and motivation for each other. The more the merrier, right?

And we will NOT call this a New Year's Resolution, since those are meant to be broken, right?

UPDATE: WHAT I DID

I've only got about 30 seconds to post, so this will be a quick one.

I went to both the wake and funeral, and was glad I did. It would have felt wrong to me to not be there, as his grandma was a big part of my life, too, for the past nine years.

Amanda is still sick. She seems to be improving, but it is slow going at best. It sucks so much so see her try to yawn or take a breath and gag on mucus. I am hoping we are in the home stretch.

Anthony's mom watched Amanda on Monday, while we were at the wake, and my mother watched her yesterday, while we were at the funeral. BOTH of them told us the exact same thing. "You two are SO lucky, she is SUCH a good baby. Even sick, she hardly fusses."

I haven't blogged about this yet, have I? How great our baby is? I don't think I have. Let me just say this: tomorrow she is 4 weeks old, and she has periodically slept through the night so far. Enough said.

I've been afraid to put it in writing here, though, for fear of jinxing it. Like at the beginning of my pregnancy when I said "Wow, I haven't had ANY nausea!" and then spent through week 23 sick as a dog.

But so far, so good.

And now that Christmas, New Year's, and the funeral are behind us....now that my baby is almost a month old....maybe NOW I will be able to try to fall into some sort of routine? I hope so. For Amanda's sake, and mine!

HAPPY NEW YEAR

Let's hope so...my baby is sick, and let me tell you all, this is the worst feeling I have ever experienced in my life.

We took our tiny 3-week old to the emergency room yesterday morning, not because we were overly paranoid "new parents," but because after my second phone call to her doctor's office this is what they recommended we do.

The official diagnosis? "The Common Cold."

But at 3 weeks, she is far too young for ANY medication. So we give her saline nose drops every few hours, suction the boogies out of her extremely stuffy head, and have her sleep for her naps and at night propped upright in her car seat, since the post-nasal drip seems to be what irritates her the most. Nothing worse than seeing her start to gag and choke on phlegm she just swallowed from post nasal drip. It is heart breaking. I haven't cried this much in I don't know how long.

My sister Eileen let me take her baby carrier which she never used with Kayleigh. It straps around my body and then I can put Amanda in it, sitting upright, held tight at my body, while I am left hands free to do stuff around the house. I love it because then I don't feel like a horrible mother leaving her awkwardly sitting all bent in half in her car seat for hours at a time. (Although that is in fact what the doctors told us to do). I swear I have used the term "world's worst mother" about myself nearly 50 times in the past 48 hours.

I hope this cold passes soon. I was already very upset about having to leave her both tomorrow and Tuesday for several hours at a stretch so that I can attend Grandma's wake and funeral, but leaving my baby with her Grandparents while she is sick? The thought of being away from her NOW is truly unbearable.

Happy New Year? I certainly hope it improves, because it is starting off with a bang. Sick 3 week old, wake, funeral.

I just want my baby to get better as soon as possible. She looks at me with those big brown eyes as if to say "Why aren't you helping me?"

It is truly, truly unbearable.