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Part of me hasn’t written in a few days because there are things I want to talk about, but I’m not sure I want to write them here. Things I want to say, but I don’t know if I want to say them to the public at large. There are things going on, but they have less to do with weight loss and general nonsense and more to do with… me, my life, my family.
Which brings me to two questions. Why blog and what to share?
I know they’re important questions. I started the blog as a way to talk about my weight loss journey. It was and still is a central part of my life. It’s a huge part of me, whether I like it or not, and is immensely helpful to have a place to put the emotions of weight loss. This way I don’t burn anyone out by whining about it.
I also like the community. I may not have made tons of friends through my blog, but I’ve made some, joined a community, and enjoy that piece. I enjoy finding other people’s blogs, reading blogs, and being a part of the community.
What about the rest? The rest of my blog is… a little of this and that. What I did, what else is going on.
What’s taboo. I don’t talk about my marriage, except to say how wonderful it is. Clearly, it is always wonderful all the time, obviously. But even on the slim chance it wasn’t wonderful all the time, I wouldn’t write about it here. I rarely talk about it- that’s between my husband and I.
What about things like trying for babies? Or things that go on in my family? Things that are upsetting/ bothering/ annoying me? I don’t typically write about that stuff, but I’m not sure why. I have a post in drafts, and I can’t decide if I want to share it. I just don’t know.
So, my *ahem* loyal readers, here’s my question(s) to you.
~If you blog, why?
~How do you decide what to blog about and what is sacred?
~What do you like reading about in other people’s blogs?
~What makes you cringe in a kind of “oohh… that’s too much information” kind of way?
Share!!
After what may be the most pathetic post ever, I decided to celebrate the friends I have.
They are my gold. I’m certainly obtaining silver, but these girls. They have been with me through thick and thin. They have listened to me whine incessantly about my past. They have been with me through several boys, and stuck with Khalil and I through our ups and downs. They celebrated with me when we got married. They always have time to listen. They know me. They love me despite my many faults, which they know. We have had fights and arguments, called each other out on things, and yet they are the ones that stick by me. They are all my friends for different reasons. We connected on different levels, in different ways.
But we will always be connected.
These are my girls from California. Jenn, Naomi (me) and Jessica.
Amy. (and I).
I love my friends. I miss them.
Love Thursday brought to you by chookooloonks
When I was in high school I had a very close-knit circle of girlfriends. There were six of us, and we called each other “the brat pack”. I had known some of them for two years, and some of them for fifteen by the time we graduated. Since high school, they’ve all faded away, the last two to go this past year.
In my first two years of college, I didn’t have many girlfriends. One of my brat pack members was at school with me, and we stayed friends. I made a few other friends here and there, but overall was busy creating very unhealthy relationships with boys. I left that college and none of the friends, save the one from high school, really stuck. However, I did stay friends with a girl I met while working at a camp while I was in college.
Then I went to my second college. There I made the truest friends of my life. There weren’t many, only three. But for some reason I clicked with them. They are my lifelong friends, that I have no question about. So I added them to my cache of my high school friends and my camp friend.
Here’s the problem: All of these friends lived in the states I attended college. One year after graduating, I moved to my home state. I had one friend here, for a while, that ended this year.
I miss my friends. I miss them with an ache that is almost physical sometimes. I miss seeing them for coffee, for dinner, for movies and TV. I miss talking to them. I miss going shopping with them, doing things with them, doing nothing with them.
I am making new friends, slowly but surely. But they aren’t the same. They don’t have the history of my old friends. I don’t have the same comfort level. The intimacy isn’t there, at a time when I need it desperately. I feel so far away from my closest friends that it’s hard to tell them my deepest stuff over the phone. And I don’t feel comfortable enough with my new friends to tell them.
Thank God for my sister. Without her I would be lost.
But I still miss my friends. I try to explain this to my husband, but he happens to be a boy. And his best friend lives five minutes away. Also, he doesn’t totally understand the need a girl has for girlfriends- close, dear friends you can pour your heart out to whenever you need to. Who will support you through thick and thin. Who know you.
It’s hard to know what to do. When you’re in college, intimacy happens quickly. Because you are at a level of high intensity in your life, of finding out who you are and growing up. You share your history with them, and have lots of time to get to know them. Once you are married, with a job and people start having children, it is harder to make friends like that. While you may make friends at work, or online, they’re not made at the same intensity and intimacy as your high school and college friends were.
I miss my friends. I miss the comfort and ease, protection and safety I feel with them. They are just a phone call or plane ride away, but it is too long.
I’m a foster care social worker. What this means is that I work in conjuction with our state child protective agency in foster homes- as a support to the family and advocate/ therapist/ case manager for the children. Our homes are what are called “therapeutic foster homes” meaning that the children require a little more than the “average” foster child- i.e., their behaviors are worse.
It’s a hard job. It’s emotional- as hard as you try, it is very hard not to get attached to the little people you work with who have been through so much- hell and back. I was talking with a relative of my husband’s, and he said something along the line of, “Wow. So you’re responsible for these kids lives.” I reframed it for him- in some senses I am, and in others, well, not so much. But yeah, every day I carry around the lives of little people who have to trust the adults in their lives to keep them safe.
To say the kids I work with have been through hell and back is an understatement. I do therapy with some of my kids, and usually leave sad and angry. Sad for what they have been through, angry at what we put them through. Not only do they have “issues” of abuse and neglect, but foster care is not a pretty picture. These children move around far too often, and often for not very good reasons. The families we have are wonderful, and try their best, but after years of abuse and then transition, well, these little people can be hard to live with.
I have always been very good at keeping my job separate from my life. In the field I’m in, burnout is rampant and when you burn out you are no longer an effective worker. You lose your perspective and your energy, two things which are crucial to the job. Crucial to these children’s lives. One way to prevent burnout is to “leave work at work”. Usually I do ok with that, but sometimes… sometimes it’s harder.
The hardest time I have is when my children are disrupting from the homes that they are in. Homes that I have worked hard to help save, homes I have put time, effort and energy into to make sure they can stay. And it’s not about me- moving for these kids adds another notch on their belt of “I’m not worth it”, “It’s all my fault”, “No one loves me” and “No one really cares”. Our goal is to give children homes that can unteach all of those lessons.
From the thirteen year old boy who has moved four times in three years, and still has temper tantrums, to the seven year old who is being adopted, to the 10 year old who just went to an inpatient psychiatric unit, to the 21 month old who headbangs… I carry them with me. Their hurt sometimes becomes my heartache. Their pain invades my dreams. I worry about them and worry that they might be going through things I don’t know. Because they don’t trust the grown-ups in their lives, it can be difficult for them to trust us. Even though their lives depend on it.
When you see me, or when you are interacting with a social worker, know that they are carrying their children with them. For their own sake they are working hard to keep appropriate boundaries, take care of themselves, separate themselves from their clients, but know that somewhere in them at that moment lies the lives of children who are unable to care for themselves. Know that they worry about those children. Know that they celebrate the joys with those children. Know that they love them even though “clinically” they should be more separate. They love them in a way that is not the love of a parent or family member, but in a way that means they want the very best for children who have experienced the very worst.
Know that they care.
The recipe for Pumpkin Chocolate-Chip Cookies, AKA the recipe for The Most Dangerous Cookies Ever. If you come here for weight loss support, just skip right over this post.
1/2 c margarine
1 1/2 c sugar
1 egg
1 can pumpkin puree
1 tsp vanilla
2 1/2 c flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp nutmeg
1 tsp cinnamon
1 c choc chips
1 c nuts (I omitted these)
Cream margarine and sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in egg, pumpkin, vanilla. Mix and sift flour, baking powder and soda, salt, nutmeg and cinnamon in seperate bowl. Add to cream mixture, mix well. Add chips, mix well.
bake at 350 for 10-12 mins until lightly brown. (I actually cooked for 13-14)
remove to cool, makes 3 1/2 to 4 dozen.
recipe can be doubled.
Also, just an FYI, they come out VERY moist. They are more like a small cupcake, they don’t really get like Tollhouse cookies do- hard or anything.
Enjoy!
National Blog Posting Month!!
Fussy and Kerflop (formerly Very Mom) are hosting NaBloPoMo. It’s a challenge to blog EVERY DAY in the month of November. I’m pretty excited for the challenge.
Best yet? There are prizes!!!
So. Um. Anyone want to walk me, step by step, through how to get that little picture in my sidebar? Anyone?
Love Is…
Grandmas.
Holding hands.
These are my grandmas. They live many states away from each other, and their children (my parents) have been divorced for 10 years. They are still friends and on the rare occasion that they see each other, they held hands.
Brought to you by Love Thursday
Come see me over at:
http://lessofpaige.wordpress.com
I want to thank my first Blogging home, Blogger, but I have found a site that actually keeps up with me as I type. How refreshing!
Last night we found out that an in-law of an in-law died. (My mother-in-law’s sister-in-law’s father, in case you needed to know.) The funeral is today at noon, and there’s no way my husband can go, so we went over to the wife’s house (who’s husband died, can this get more confusing?) to see the family and pay our regrets last night.
I’ve watched my sister handle grieving people. She is a nurse, who used to work in hospice and now works on an oncology nurse. She knows how to say the right thing at the right time. She’s comfortable dealing with this stuff head on.
Me, not so much. I’m usually the person who says the wrong thing, “How are you?”. How are you? how do you think they are? Their husband/father/grandfather just DIED! Shut UP, Paige! SHUT UP! Yeah. I just don’t know what to say. I do the “I’m so sorry” but always feel like… how many times do these people have to hear that. Sheesh.
I haven’t had to manage alot of personal grief in my own life. Some, yes. But not alot. But- and I do not mean this to be trite- I’ve read something about grieving people that has stuck with me. How they feel like people are nervous around them.
Nervous that their grief, their pain, their suffering, might be contagious. Grief makes us sad, and it makes us scared. It makes us- me- sad for the people who have lost someone they loved. And it makes me scared- if that could happen to someone else, it could happen to me. I was watching Miami Ink the other day, and they had a young wife who’s husband had died. I. Lost. It. Royally. Just cried and cried. If husbands actually do die, that means mine could too. I just couldn’t go there.
It’s kind of ironic. I do therapy, and I can be around grief when I am working with clients. But I pull on a different skin when I’m working, in a big way. And how to manage grief is different when I’m working and when it’s in my personal life. It’s easier when I’m working, because I can depersonalize it and focus on something else- helping my client walk through the grief. I have something to do.
Because isn’t helplessness the most frustrating part about watching people who are grieving? There’s just nothing you can do but be there. Just- be there.
The man who passed away last night was not someone I was close to. But it still made me sad, and made me very sad for the people who I am more close to who had a significant loss this week.
Last night was a bad, ugly night. I wrote about the stupid cookies, then felt so bad. I was totally out of control, and well aware of it. When I wrote and was eating the cookies, my husband was grocery shopping.
I was crabby. Short. Snippy. Bitchy, if you must. I get that way sometimes, but 9 times out of 10 I know exactly why, or it only takes a little bit of time to figure it out. This time, I wasn’t sure. I didn’t know. I knew one reason that I was a little bit irritated, but felt like it was stupid. Not something I wanted to talk about- mostly because it was little.
My husband came home with potato chips. I saw those and thought, “Mmmmm, those would be SO GOOD with some french onion dip”. What do I pull out of the next bag? Lo and behold, French Onion dip. I wanted those chips. I wanted them in a way that I wanted the cookies, in a way that I haven’t wanted food in a long time. I’m a big victim to the slippery slope- once I start making excuses and allowances, it becomes very, very hard to stop.
This started with the cookies, and was continuing on with the chips. I expressed several times how much I wanted those chips. So the point where my husband felt bad that he brought them home. Please don’t blame him. I am a very, very firm believer that two adults live in this home, and both should be allowed to eat at they please and not be brought down by the other person’s attempts to change. That translates to: I don’t think he should have to diet just because I do.
He’s so good about it though. If I ask him to put a food away, he will. I do ask him to please help keep me accountable, and he does, in a very gentle and kind way. Because I ask him to, not because it matters to him outside of it mattering to me.
Where was I going? Ah. The cookies and the chips. I wanted them both. Badly. I wanted to sit somewhere, with the remaining cookies, the chips, and the dip, and be left alone. To eat. To taste the sweet and salty goodness.
I ended up in tears. Khalil asked me what was wrong and I just started to cry, “I don’t know”. I think I felt like I failed. I failed because I kept eating the cookies. I failed because I wanted the chips. I put alot of pressure on myself- every other time I’ve lost weight, I’ve either done it half-heartedly or have failed after a while. For alot of reasons, this time has to be different. And I want it to be. But that means I have to keep working at it. And last night I really wanted to give up. Be done.
But I don’t. I have to walk through the hard and ugly days, and make it to the next day, or week, or month, and keep going. I can do this.
Khalil went through the recipe for me, telling me what we needed from the pantry. (I am far too lazy busy to do work like that myself.)
While I was in the middle of cooking, he asked me “Why are you making these again?” And I told him, “Because I felt like it.”
I had the honest-to-goodness true intention of eating only ONE pumpkin-chocolate-chip cookie.
I have eaten… probably close to 15, if not.. well, let’s just leave it there. I didn’t KNOW that they would be so good. I didn’t know that the moist pumpkin would meld so well with the slightly crunchy chocolate chips. I didn’t know that mixing two of my favorite flavors would rend me helpless. Honest to God, I thought I was going to eat one cookie.
On the way home tonight, I thought to myself, “I want some of those cookies”. And I knew I’d eat some. Then I thought, “What if I went home and planned not to eat any cookies? What about that?” Because that has actually worked for me- if I make up my mind about something, I usually stick with it. But when I said that this time, I laughed at myself. Ha ha, that’s so funny. You are just as helpless against the pumpkin-chocolate chip cookie as you are against the cookie-dough Pop-tart (I had four one day. Four.).
Needless to say, unless they all leave my house, I will not be making pumpkin-chocolate-chip cookies again “because I feel like it”.
Also, as a side note? I’m watching a TiVo-ed episode of “Mi Vida Eres Tu”. It’s a requirement for my Spanish class. I wish I knew what they were saying.
Ahem.
This could be dangerous.
I can blog from work.
I am considering moving house.
I have liked my last house over at Blogger. But there are some things that I didn’t love, and so I’m house searching right now.
If you want to see my old home, visit me at http://lessofpaige.blogspot.com. That blog will remain until I choose a home and import my old home on over.
I’ve been blogging for a little over a year. I talk alot about my weight loss journey. So far, since about June of this year, I’ve lost close to 30 pounds. I use the Diabetic Exchange Diet, which gives me certain amounts of each kind of food. I also exercise using the Firm.
I’m a wife, aunt, sister, daughter, and friend. I blog about those relationships occasionally.
I’m a social worker. I work in the foster care system- not for the state agency, but for a private agency that works in therapeutic foster care. I have been doing social work for over 6 years now. I love what I do and can’t imagine doing anything else.
My husband and I are trying for a baby. That’s been going on for about five months now. Hopefully one day this will morph from a weight-loss-social-work-family-whatever blog to a mommy blog. Ah, such dreams to aspire to in the blogging community.
Here I am:
If you’re stopping on by, please say hello!
I love fall.
I like spring, too, and summer. I like spring- the coming out of winter, emerging feel of spring. I like summer, I like the sizzling hot, I like beaches, I like the heat of summer. I like winter too- but mostly just the beginning. The first snow, Christmas, and wearing sweaters.
But I love fall. I love the crisp air. I love the smell of the leaves on the ground. I love apple picking and pumpkin carving. Hay rides. I love going to fairs and fall festivals. I love the weather- it’s not so warm I’m always hot, but not so cold I have to wear a jacket. I like that it’s chilly in the morning and at night, but warm in the afternoon.
Also? I LOVE food for each season. Summer brings ice cream and iced coffee. Winter is time for hot chocolate.
But fall? The food that fall brings. Hot apple cider and a plethora of apple desserts. Pumpkin and apple pie. Pumpkin lattes. Cider donuts. Pumpkin bread. Thanksgiving food. Fair food! Fried dough, funnel cake, cotton candy, apple fritters, caramel apples.
Which of course leads to the dilemma. No, dilemma just isn’t the right word. Temptation is I guess. I love this food. Alot of it doesn’t come around all the time. And if it does… well, it’s just not the same. I want to eat it. I want to let my discipline go. I want to not worry about it. A couple of times, I’ve already done so. But I know that I can figure out ways to do every season without always having an excuse. Once I started losing weight, I went all. summer. long. without Dairy Queen. Listen, maybe to you it’s not a big deal. But for me? Huge. HuGE. Every summer, I went at least a few times a week. This summer, instead of going to DQ every week, I lost weight. I felt better. I look better.
I have to keep that. Maintain the focus and discipline. This weekend already I’ve felt myself not wanting to be careful. Just wanting to eat whatever when I go out. Not worry about the consequences.
But there are consequences. Thirty pounds of them.
Fall is here. I’m trying not to fall.
Love Is…
My sister.
I have learned so much from my sister.
About how to be a good mother, who your children feel secure with.
About overcoming some of life’s biggest challenges.
About facing your worst possible nightmare, surviving it, and moving through it with grace.
About being a sister and what that means.
About being best friends with your sister, how much that means to me, and what a gift it is.
There’s so much more I could say. So much more I want to say. My sister is amazing and my best friend. I’m blessed to have her in my life.
*Brought to you by Love Thursday.*
I got some new pants this weekend. (thanks Shannon!) They fit me and are not too big on me. I received several nice compliments today and was asked how many sizeds I had dropped.
Three.
I have dropped:
20
18
16
I now fit into 14s. I can hardly believe it. I can remember when I was at my highest weight looking at the 14s, and trying some on, and just wanting to cry because they would barely come around my stomach. Much less zip up or be comfortable.
I have done some very hard work. It’s funny, and I think some piece of this is because I exercise, but the weight loss has slowed down. I’m approaching 30 pounds, and it’s going more slowly. Which is fine. Because my body feels different, and I fit continually into smaller clothes! My body is changing. I measured myself on Monday, and have lost 5 inches in the last couple of weeks- almost an inch in most of the spots I measure myself. What a nice feeling.
It’s this stuff, these good feelings, that I need to hang on to when I feel done. Burnt. Tired.
When you start dieting, you’re all gung-ho. You come up with all these ways to do it right. You print out sheets upon sheets of a food journal. You sign up to sparkpeople. You enter your food at least every night, if not as you’re eating it. You obsess about both exchanges and calories. You exercise religiously. You swear off of all white carbs. You don’t go out to eat because you don’t know how and you don’t know how many ounces of chicken are in that salad you got. You weigh and/ or measure your food. All. Of. It.
Oh? You don’t. Well, I did.
And I started to see results. And they were good. And encouraging. And then I went to the MD, and he told me even better news. And that was encouraging too.
Then it got to be alot. It got old talking about it all the time. It got tiring to write about it. It got exhausting living that way. No matter how many times I convinced myself this was just a diet and at some point in my life, I could stop and it would be fine, I knew that wasn’t true. Because the thing is? That I can’t stop. If and when I stop, I gain weight. I’ve done that no less than two times now, and more than anything I don’t want to do it again. All those 16, 18, and 20 sized clothes that I packed away? I want them to stay away. So I can’t keep going how I’m going, all orthodox and rigid-like, but I cna’t stop either.
So I decided. I would let the journaling and calorie counting go. I have a very good idea in my head of how many exchanges I can eat and how to get them in throughout my day. I gave myself two weeks to just do the exchanges in my head. At the end of two weeks I would see how I did. I also took something of a break from blogging on both this blog and my community blog. I just needed a break.
Today was the last day. I was down close to two pounds, which for this point in my journey, ain’t so bad. I’m picking back up the pieces I miss- blogging- and for now letting go of the journaling and sparkpeople. I am going to keep a very close watch. If I find either my habits slipping or my weight going in the wrong direction, back to journaling it is.
In the meantime, I have to find ways to live with this. For, well, a long time. For me, this is the first steop. Seeing if I can do it without the journaling and calorie counting. Doing real-life eating sensibly, in my exchanges. We’ll see from there.
On another but possibly related note, this blog has been mostly all weight loss all the time. I’ve had a few non-weight loss (or gain, as the case may be) related posts, but will probably do some more of that. So I can share a little more of my life. Not just the fact that I’m losing weight.
And successfully, at that.
I kind of got burnt on it all. I was writing all of my food in a food journal, plus putting it online so I could keep track of my calories. Keeping track of water drank, food, exchanges, calories, blogging…. it all got to be too much.
So I stopped. Blogging, journaling, etc. I am still eating the way I’m supposed to, for the very most part. There is less accountability, but also less stress. If I didn’t stop something, I was going to be done altogether, and that is the last thing I want. Either the journaling went or everything went.
I gave myself two weeks. Two weeks “off” of journaling to see how goes it. Monday is my official check-in, and I’ll reassess from there. If I’ve gained weight, I’m definately going back to journaling. If I’ve lost, probably not, for now at least. If I’m the same, I have to think about it.
But I have missed blogging. So here I am.
