ADF Day 1: Hello again!

With apologies to Pangie for waiting so long… 😉

To be fair, a lot has happened since my last serious go at this, so hopefully my faithful audience will be forgiving.   In the past two years, I have divorced, changed jobs, watched my ex-husband remarry, moved, and changed jobs again due to a promotion.   Ergo, I’ve had rather a lot on my mind at any given time, and finding the time (much less the energy) to devote to dieting and blogging has been a little tricky.

But suffice it to say, we’re doing pretty well all things considered.   The divorce was not fun, but it could have been worse.  A’s remarriage was at best ill-advised, but while there is not a lot of love lost between his new wife and me and she has not done the best job of ingratiating herself with our kids, I suspect she could be a vast deal more horrible than she is.  She tolerates them and is reasonably nice to them, so they don’t hate going over to their Dad’s house for visitation, at least.  Z does ask if we could forego visitation periodically, as I think he locks horns with her more than the others, but I think he just finds their house boring and the rules enforcement there to be silly and disconnected with reality.  He’s 12, so he’s the one thinking that way now, and being h0me with me is more comfortable.

I worried a lot about the move.  It was such a big change and took us all out of a comfort zone we’d inhabited rather fiercely for almost all of my kids’ lives.   That was hard enough, but the prospect was made all the more scary by the fact that we were moving from our suburban existence into the city, a move most suburbanites where I grew up would consider to be tantamount to leaving Eden to set up camp smack in the middle of Hell itself.  For decades, the city has been pleading with the counties around it to cooperate in the construction of a mass transit train that would provide easy commutes into the city and cut some of the automobile traffic, and the residents of the counties turn it down every single time.  They fear that the criminal elements in the City will waste no time hopping on that train and using it as a handy conduit to bring their destructive influence across the river.

But it had to be done.  The full time job I landed was a dream job.  I did the commute for the first six months, but it entailed a 45 minute drive in every morning and often as much as a 75-90 minute drive home at night.  All of that time was cutting strenuously into family time with the kids and making our dinners fall unhealthily late.  As I mentioned in previous posts, we did look for a rental situation somewhere in the middle, but that was a hard road to travel.  With all of the mortgage issues that have happened in the past five years, the competition for rental homes is fierce.  The rental costs are inflated as a result, I realized before long, and yet it was still possible to use the money I had planned to set aside for deposits to apply for a mortgage instead.

So, we bought a home.  It’s a 1920s 3-bedroom, two-story family home in a pleasant part of the city. (Surprise, surprise, County Folks —  it turns out those do exist!)  The house is smaller than our house in the county, but it’s not ridiculously so.  The kids share rooms for now, but we’re working on plans to finish the attic so that we can add one more bedroom to the mix.  The yard is smaller, but it turns out that smaller yards are infinitely more manageable. 😉  I can mow ours with a reel mower in under 30 minutes!  We have nice, friendly neighbors, and my commute is now about 8 minutes.  Boo yah!

The kids also landed in one of the best school systems in the state, too, thanks to nepotism.  But we’ll take it; Z is engaged in Student Council, is the vice president of his Chess Club, and has recently started attending Geography Club.  He is pretty nerdy, but seems to have no trouble making friends anyway.  Nerdy is still ‘in’.  N has taken up the viola, S has found she loves to write, and L is reading and writing well above his classmates.  Collectively, they seem to be doing okay in spite of all of the upheaval.  They’re sad sometimes, but they talk about it and then seem to be over it.  They’re doing well in school, behaving like themselves, and acting like kids.  That’s very good.

The only downside to all of it has been that my weight has crept back up.  I’m not back up to where I was initially, but I’m drawing far closer than I ever wanted to do.  I’ve had to forego my Mediums and Larges for XLs, and my most comfortable pants are 16s.  Without trying to buck responsibility there, a lot of the issue has been that doing ADF the way I did before required a lot of time and energy that I simply don’t have these days.    I cannot, for example, just dedicate a two-hour block to walking the treadmill like I used to do.   And frankly, I’m just often too tired after work to bother, which means I require a big motivator to get me back on track.

Enter motivator:  C proposed last week.  We’re planning to marry in June, and I want to like my wedding pictures.  I also just plain want to make him an attractive wife, even if he claims he thinks I’m beautiful just as I am. 😉

So I’ve actually been dieting since last week, but I hadn’t had my act together enough to blog.  Pangie started her 21 day stint over again today, so I decided to do the same and see how well I can do.  If I have to make changes to suit my new life, so be it, but I’ll make them along the way rather than trying to anticipate.