If Humility is the mother of giants, then children, at least my children, are her midwives.
I was just starting to be a little happy with how I look. I’ve lost all the weight I gained during my pregnancy with Peter, plus an extra ten pounds. I’m only a few pounds away from my lowest level since having children which is about what I weighed when I got married.
Now, if you’ve borne a child, you know that achieving your pre-pregnancy weight means very little in the grand scheme of things. Excepting the few women (famous models and actresses) who spend all their time and money on nutritionists, chefs, personal trainers, and nannies to watch the baby so they can work out, a woman’s body is never the same after having children. Even if you can wear your “skinny” jeans or that slinky dress and look fantastic, the naked truth (who threw that rotten tomato at my pun?) is that it is very difficult to get rid of that bulge in the lower abdomen.
C’est la vie.
Now it’s summertime here in the Northern Hemisphere, and pretty durn hot all over the US from what I understand, and you’ll have to excuse me if I just don’t feel up to wearing a girdle. I guess the shirt and pants I was wearing yesterday were a bit baggy, or perhaps it was just my relaxed, end-of-the-day, exhausted posture, but whatever it was it inspired Billy to pat my tummy and say with utter joy:
“Oh, Mom, I’m so excited about the new baby in your tummy!”
To which I patiently responded (while mentally noting the need to do more crunches):
“Honey, there is no baby in my tummy.”
To which Fritz replied:
“Sure there is, Mom. That’s how your tummy looks when you have a tiny baby growing in you.”
Who needs an EPT?
Billy then went on to ask if he could watch the next baby (since there will be a next baby at some point, since that’s what moms do) be born. He was really disappointed, crying!, when I suggested that he grow up, get married and watch his own babies being born or that perhaps he could become a doctor and help other babies enter the world, but that, no, he wasn’t going to watch his next sibling (whenever that may be) be born.
Fritz suggested that watching a baby being born might be gross since they are covered in blood. I agreed and made the mistake of expounding on this by saying that there’s blood and goop and other icky things. Fritz then decided he needed more information about why babies are all yucky when born and what was that whole deal about an egg anyway?
I answered these questions truthfully, but quickly, having decided that the whole point was merely to delay bedtime and not really some grand quest for information.
In the meantime, my ego was still sore from the tummy-bulge comments. A few months ago, I did some internet-research on the subject. My question was this: which helps more: cardio workouts or crunches? According to Google, the loudest voices in the debate are the plastic surgeons who say that the only thing to be done is a tummy tuck. There were pages and pages by tummy tuck proponents including my favorite one which described their “post-pregnancy tune-up” to include a tummy tuck, liposuction (for the thighs and other areas) and a breast-augmentation to replace tissue lost due to breastfeeding.
Bill’s all for that last part.
After much searching, I finally found a few quiet voices that basically said an increase in lean body mass was the key (achieved by both cardio and crunches) and, of course, patience was necessary since these things take time.
{sigh}
In the meantime, I’ve got my boys to remind me to do a few sit-ups and to motivate me to get out of bed for those pre-dawn runs. And also to remind me that tummy-bulge, whether it be a new life beginning or the instrument of Humility, isn’t such a bad thing after all.