Having a baby fucks with your body. No duh, I know. But it has fucked with my body in ways I didn’t anticipate. At the start of pregnancy I weighed 181. I had been steady at that exact number for a while. By the fourth month, after all the sickness, I was down to 169. At the end of my pregnancy I was 202. I was back to 181 by ten days after giving birth. In the past eight weeks weight started creeping on and I have waffled between 187 and 191. But I look different. My face and neck and upper chest and arms are the thinnest they have ever been in my life. I would say noticeably thinner than when I weighed 155. So all of the added padding is between my boobs and my knees. My efforts on google tell me that my breasts probably weigh about five pounds more than they did when I was at my lightest. This results in me having a noticeably padded middle and butt. Fair enough. I would mind more if Noah whistled less often. I’m sorta half-assedly thinking about size but mostly thinking about strength. I would like to get back into my size 12 clothes because I have more in that size and they are cute. Seeing as I care more about being smaller than about being lighter exercise is more important than diet, though diet helps. I’m walking at least five miles a week and feeling terrible that I’m not doing more. I’m doing the 100 push up challenge (damnit, I have to do week two again cause I’m such a wuss). I’m starting to do more planks and I’ve been doing alright with crunches. I should get in some heavier exercising, but it’s hard to do with munchkin. I want to start yoga but I’m too big of a pussy to leave munchkin for that much time at a go. I need to do more and I just haven’t yet.

Then there is that sex stuff. When we have sex I feel sore at the beginning as if I’ve been having tons of sex recently and uhhh we haven’t been having tons of sex. I would like that feeling to go away already. Orgasm is still inconsistent and not as amazing as pre-kid. I’m working on it. It’s hard to work on it when I don’t have a lot of time to spend on it though.

Then there is sleep. I am so tired. And before anyone thinks to say, “Well duh you are sleep deprived” no–you don’t understand. I’m not sleep deprived. I’m sleeping 8-10 hours a night and still napping during the day. I don’t understand how anyone can work with a nursing baby. I’m muddled and confused a lot of the time. And I don’t do all of the nighttime parenting–Noah changes as many or more diapers than I do. (Have I mentioned how much Noah rocks?) The munchkin sleeps for 5-7 hour blocks most nights. She starts waking up every 3 hours after the first big chunk cause she eats a little then falls back asleep. I really can’t complain about her sleeping though.

So, I don’t want to go on a diet. Let me explain why. Not that anyone really cares, but I like to babble. There is the altruistic reason: if you take dieting too seriously it compromises milk supply. I’m not going to do that. But let’s get serious. The reason I am not going to diet is because I am so fucking hungry if a slow moving cow went passed me I might clean the bones before it could get by. I wasn’t told that my own leg would start to look tasty. I’m hiding how much I eat most days because I feel sort of ashamed of how much I am eating. I went to eat with a friend last weekend and I didn’t finish off all the food on the table even though I wanted to because I felt gross. 🙁 I don’t actually think she would have any sort of negative thoughts based on that (and hell, she’s going to read this) but I’m really not rational in the moment. As a result of my constant ravenous hunger I am trying to increase the percentage of my diet devoted to vegetables. This is a struggle, but I’m doing ok. We are cooking a lot. I’m actually really proud of how much we are cooking. We have managed to cook at least five nights a week for the past month and some. Some of the nights we don’t it’s cause we have too many leftovers. 🙂 I’m eating out of the house about three meals a week. That’s really awesome when I compare it to pregnancy where I was eating out of the house 15+ times a week. So I’m all proud. 🙂 I’m cooking a greater variety of things than I ever have before (another yay for Noah and his cheerful encouragement of my efforts!) and Noah has been cooking things I’ve never had. I’m being GGG.

Let me tell you though. Cooking, shopping, meal planning, and clean up is fucking daunting. No wonder I never managed when I was working. I can’t believe anyone has the time to really do it while working full time. I realize that my epiphany is really lame, but I can’t believe that women are expected to keep up with this while working. And many relationships do have that expectation. I’ve always been spoiled (uhm rich enough) to not have to deal with it as an adult. And my kid isn’t additional work yet. My respect for working mothers is growing by the day.

I’ve made messloads of progress on the garage. It’s just about clean enough so that I can park in it. I have it in the back of my mind how much it will suck to load the munchkin into the car in the rain. So I’m working towards being able to use the garage. 🙂

So the happy mediums I am struggling to find: eating enough and trying to figure out how to have my diet be healthier than not, sufficient exercise to increase my strength faster than she gets heavy (oof lifting a toddler would be rough right now), enough sex to keep Noah and I both on a more even keel emotionally, keeping the house clean enough to not feel guilty while not stressing about perfection, and spending enough time reading. 🙂