Size 4 Jeans

So I’ve finally given up and hired someone to clean the house. I’ve always said that we’re not dirty, just cluttered, but lately it’s edging closer to dirty, especially in the bathrooms and kitchen. Problem is, I HATE to clean. Yeah, cleaning is one of those other words that gets a HATE in capitals tacked on in front, so you just have to DWI (Deal With It).

I can always think of something else to do besides clean house, and it really takes no effort whatsoever to get on with something else entirely when faced with cleaning the bathroom. Add to that the fact that it takes about 30 seconds for the rest of the people in this house to dirty it up again, and there’s just no hope of ever turning me into my grandmother. My wonderful grandmother, may she rest in peace, LOVED to clean. Okay, maybe she didn’t love it (though she sure did it a lot), but maybe that was just because it gave her something else to be a martyr about. However it truly was with her, her house was always clean, and she was well and truly over set when she got to the point where she keep the house to her satisfaction any longer, because she was just too old.

Well, I’m not THAT old, not even close, but there are some cleaning tasks that my hands, arms and back just don’t handle well anymore. My hands and forearms are weak due to chronic tenosynovitis, and any really strenuous or repetitive action (think scrubbing sinks and bathtubs to remove lime deposits or stovetops to remove whatever’s been baked on) and then my hands hurt and I can’t do the things I LIKE to do. Ha, sorry, not going to go there. As for the back, well, vacuuming is okay, but bending over scrubbing bathtubs and/or floors doesn’t make it either.

There you have it, in a nutshell: why I don’t go out of my way to clean. But then there’s the guilt. Read the rest of this entry »

To go way back in this Size 4 story, I was a shapeless stick with bony parts sticking out in spots as a child. I was always thin no matter what I ate, which I didn’t fully appreciate at the time. Food was okay as long as it was something I liked, which was the tricky part, being a picky little thing back then.

And no, I was not anorexic, as doctors used to worry with pointed looks at my mom during those yearly checkups during childhood. Okay, maybe I was technically anorexic based on my height and weight, but I didn’t throw up my food voluntarily to stay thin. That’s just gross. But I couldn’t gain weight. It was physically difficult, if not impossible. I actually tried to gain weight once, because I thought the Army sounded like a good idea and they wouldn’t let me enlist if I didn’t weigh 120 pounds or something. I ate and ate, and still was 1.5 pounds shy of the minimum, and I finally gave up trying to get in and considered it their loss (thank goodness I came to my senses, I decided later, olive drab not being my color and all). I lost that “extra” weight that I put on for the Army in short order with no effort beside just eating normally, and when I got married at 22, I carried only 94 pounds on my 5′8″ frame. Can you say “skin and bones?”

Yup, that was too thin. I was often sick, since I guess my immune system was not up to snuff because I was sooo thin. I wonder what my husband saw in that stick, sometimes. Cooking dinner every night added ten pounds to my body in about a year though, and having babies completed the transformation from “stick” to “pear.” Then I had hips, but no boobs. Read the rest of this entry »

Back to what I was thinking about in the beginning, before I was interrupted by that miss you thing. Yes, I intend to be wearing a size 4 when I die, as I said.

I turned 40 earlier this year, and while the years have been good to my shape I know it won’t last without some intervention on my part. I’ll say it again, I HATE exercise. Blech. It’s not fun, and no matter how much I tell myself it should be, can be, will be fun and good for me, I still HATE it. Yes, that four letter word, HATE, will always be capitalized when it’s attached to the word “exercise.” Get used to it. BUT (and that’s a big “BUT,” which is also something I don’t like!), I like clothes. Specifically, I like having LOTS of clothes to choose from, so I can wear what fits my mood any particular day, or go without doing laundry for a couple of weeks. Yeah, I hate laundry too, but note the lack of capitalization on that one. Laundry doesn’t produce the same level of angst as exercise does, for sure.

The problem with the clothing is that if your weight goes up, your clothes don’t fit right. Jeans aren’t comfortable if they’re cutting into the fat on your hips (aside from being even more uncomfortable in more sensitive regions), and they don’t look good if they’re so tight that you’ve got muffin tops above the waistband. That muffin tops vision is courtesy of my daughter’s sixth grade Australian English teacher. She was a hoot, and she told her students that one day, that they shouldn’t wear jeans that were so tight that they caused muffin tops to show!

So what to do if your jeans are too tight? Buy more in a bigger size? No, no, no my friend. Never do that. If you do that, there’s no incentive to lose those muffin tops now is there? Read the rest of this entry »

Wow. I just realized that I went through the entire weekend and didn’t speculate about when my husband would get a new job ONCE. How wonderful! Now back to real life…When are we moving?

“Did you miss us?” This from my husband when he comes home after an absence of three whole days. He took my oldest daughter on a weekend holiday and I stayed home with the youngest. Frankly, no, I didn’t miss them, and I said exactly that just as he said “lie.” In other words, he knows perfectly well that I didn’t miss them, but expects me to lie about it, like it’s some sort of abnormality that I didn’t miss anybody. After I said “no,” his voice dropped and octave and his face fell. What the heck?

You know, this has nothing do do with whether I love them or not, because everyone can use a break now and then without feeling guilty about not missing someone because they’re not around. I thoroughly enjoyed their weekend absence for various reasons. Let’s see, the kids weren’t arguing because only one of them was here, I didn’t have to fix big meals because he wasn’t here, I had the bed to myself sans the oh-so-soothing symphony of his snoring, and I had a break from teenager attitude and demands. What’s not to enjoy?

We go through this every time one of us is out of the house overnight which is just ludicrous. It’s not that I don’t like being around my husband and family, but I certainly don’t pine away for them when they’re not around, even if it’s for a couple of weeks. Maybe if I could ship the kids off to grandma for the entire summer, or if my husband would take a job in Singapore for a year I might get to the missing point, but probably not too quickly. I mean, you miss people when they’re gone, like moved away or dead or something like that, not when they go on a jaunt for a weekend.

Sometimes I feel like he must have married the wrong girl, because I am sooo not dependent enough to suit him. I like being alone, thinking my own thoughts, and I don’t get much of that alone thing these days. My creativity levels were soaring this weekend, and still are for that matter, though I wonder how long it’ll last now that life is “back to normal.” And of course, if he decides that I’m irritated because he’s acted like a sap because I said that I didn’t miss them, then he’ll just say he knows how I am, and it doesn’t bug him, it’s no big deal and all that. But we both know which is the real lie here, don’t we?

**P.S. I had planned a different post for today, but then this irritation came up and the whole post was running screaming through my head, so I finally let it find its way to the screen. I’ll get to that whole “Size 4″ thing later…

Yes, things may move around a bit as I tweak the code here and there and get settled in my blog. Don’t panic. It will all be perfect in time…

Let me be completely clear at the outset: The title of this blog says exactly what I mean. Size 4 Jeans, ’til death do us part. Put simply, I fully intend to be wearing size 4 clothing when I die. I wear a size 4 now, and I expect that it won’t change.

This does not, however, say anything as to why I would call my blog that. The title is a result of a fair amount of convoluted thinking that started when I woke up yesterday morning. It’s difficult to reconstruct the exact stream of consciousness at this point, but in the interest of back story, I’ll give it a go:

I woke up thinking “damn, I really should try to exercise, but I really HATE it. Being 40 probably means that I can’t skate by much longer on metabolism alone, and every year it gets harder to keep my weight where I want it. And yeah, I may be thin, but I’m not fit. But I HATE exercise! Maybe if I started a blog to keep track of the ups and downs, maybe interact with some readers who had the same feelings or could share some new fitness activities, that would motivate me.

“Of course, then there are all the people that look at me and say ‘what do you have to gripe about? You’re thin, you look great!’ like I have less of a right to be conscious of my weight than they do, or the people who say ‘yeah, right, where from?’ when I say I need to lose five pounds if the subject comes up in conversation. That kind of thing really pisses me off. I’m not obsessed about my weight, I’m just conscious of it, and if I’m conscious of this five pounds now I won’t need to lose 20 later. I should be able to say what I like about my weight, without being quiet because I’m in a room full of people who have more to lose than I.”

And that set me off on a whole round of things that I sometimes don’t say because of someone else, things I get irritated about, things I wonder about or have to get out of my system, or things I just want to chat about. I spent an hour or two brainstorming about these types of things, so there’s lots of content waiting to get put on the screen that I won’t talk about on my other blog. No, I’m not telling where that other blog is, because nobody needs to know that. Read the rest of this entry »