Finding time to blog?
HA.
Now I’ve been back to work for close to a week and a half and yeah, it’s not awful. Not great but not awful. There were company-wide layoffs during my maternity leave and my team was impacted significantly, so really I’m just grateful to have a job at all.
Obviously you’ll notice from my lack of posting that I’m still getting the hang of this whole “time management with a full time job, husband, two kids, and two dogs” thing. I work all day, rush home to cook dinner as quickly as possible, then spend those precious few evening hours after dinner and before bedtime creepily staring at my children and trying to soak up as much of their cuteness as possible in a very short amount of time. It’s never enough damn time. I’m currently typing one-handed so I can hold Liam while he sleeps.
But we’re good, you know, we’re surviving. Getting into the routine of life again. I was granted the benefit of work from home Fridays for the next month, which is nice. As much as I’d love to work from home every Friday (or better yet, every day) forever and ever, I’ll take what I can get at this point.
Last Friday was a lot tougher, productivity-wise, than I expected. Working from home and watching Molly was easy. As you’ve probably noticed from my posts, she’s a very independent girl and excels at entertaining herself (blame it on being an only child). On work from home days before Liam came along, I got a lot done. Now… not so much. I didn’t notice it as much when I was home and not working, but toddler + newborn is not conducive to many hours of uninterrupted work. Who knew?
Going back to work also means I’m back at the gym. One of the huge perks of my job is the free company gym a short walk away, and the ability to use my lunch hour to take advantage of it. New for this year is a Pilates reformer class, which I am loving already. I took a weight training/interval class Monday called CoreWorks, which wasn’t that difficult as I was doing it, but 24 hours later my muscles strongly disagreed with that assessment. I spent the entire day today lumbering around like a moron because I can’t bend my legs correctly or raise my arms higher than shoulder height. It’s like the Walking Dead up in here, moaning and groaning included. Oh well, I legit have 50 lbs to lose in 5 months, so this is the price I pay.
I’ve realized, especially since going to the gym and finally being forced to confront my body decked out in spandex in front of full-length mirrors, that I have body dysmorphic disorder…in reverse. Rather than obsessing over a perceived flaw and seeing myself as fat when I really weigh 99 lbs, I have the opposite delusion. My brain thinks of me as basically average weight while my actual reflection in the mirror begs to differ. Blame it on being thin most of my life – I still catch myself grabbing for size Small or even Extra Small while shopping, looking at the proportions and thinking, “Yeah, that should fit,” and being genuinely confused when it doesn’t. I almost laughed out loud while observing myself in the mirror during Pilates today. Like, my body shape is so beyond how I think I look/how I think I should look, it’s almost funny. I caught myself wondering, “Whose thigh is that? Is that seriously what my thigh actually looks like?”
And before you say, “But you just had a baby!” …don’t say that. Everyone says that. I know I just had a baby, and the weight doesn’t magically disappear overnight, and breastfeeding may burn calories but it also makes you hungry as hell, and I have two kids under two so I should really cut myself some slack. I know, I know, I KNOW. But this is not who I am. I remember writing a similar post when I started gaining weight while on fertility drugs (which is actually hilarious because I’d LOVE to weigh that much right now). I cannot reconcile the person in the mirror, the person who has no clothes that fit, with who I see as myself. The ‘me’ I’m familiar with is petite and small. It’s a huge adjustment to just look completely different, you know?
But since I can’t cut calories in an unhealthy way because it would affect milk production (plus it’s like, unhealthy or whatever), I am eating a 90% Paleo diet and working out 4 days a week. Baby steps. I’ll get there. I just went through some old posts and it looks like after Molly it took 8 months to lose 50 lbs. I’d say that’s doable again this time.
Speaking of working out – I was at the gym on Monday, chatting with the instructor who knows I had a baby recently, and we inevitably wound up having a version of the conversation I’ve now had with friends, family, acquaintances, and strangers alike. It goes something like this:
“So you had a baby! Boy or girl?”
“It was a boy.”
“And at home… you have a… what?”
“I have a girl.”
“Oh that’s wonderful! So you’re done having kids now?”
And depending on who that person is or how exasperated I am about answering this question for the millionth time, I have a few different answers prepared:
“Nope! We want a big family.”
“Nope! We aspire to be the Duggars. Late start, but we’re still shooting for at least 10.”
“Nope! We’ve got three more on ice. It’s a long story.”
Sigh. I’m not sure what it is about the one boy, one girl thing that leads people to assume my family is “complete.” Granted, my situation is way different than most, and I don’t expect anyone to realize that I have three frozen embryos chillin’ in New York City and a strict personal ‘no embryo left behind’ policy. But still. It astonishes me that even complete strangers size up our family situation so quickly and automatically assume that I’m done having kids, and then react with bewilderment when I admit to wanting more. Which I would want whether or not I had the frozen embies. And frankly, the stunned reactions make me feel weird for feeling that way.
Once I give some variation of the response above, the person usually replies with,
“Really? Wow! Good for you!”
And I agree. Good for me. Having more than two kids may be expensive and chaotic. It may even be totally batshit insane crazy. But the fact that I went from wondering if I’d ever get to be a mom to contemplating the possibility of five children makes me feel very lucky, indeed.
Other than that, not too much going on. I’m a little pissed off at myself for procrastinating my last week of maternity leave, which is the same thing I did last time. I was insanely productive the first few weeks, and then sort of just regressed into laziness as time went by. I’m hoping to get a few projects done this weekend, since I do have off Monday for President’s Day. Somehow my 2-month-old has outgrown his 3 month sized clothing already and I need to switch out his clothes, again. Also, and please don’t be too shocked at this one – I never finished Molly’s baby book or made my big year in review photo album that I swore I’d make before going back to work. I know! And I know that at this point I should just give up on the stupid baby book but I can’t. It will get done. IT WILL.
Well friends, hopefully I’ll be inspired to write again sooner rather than later. I’m sure there’s more to say but one-handed typing is really no fun at all.