Kimberly Rae Miller's Blog

Can I shout out Target for having nursing rooms? Yay for leaving the house!

Oh restriction, my old frienemy, welcome back to my life.

I started this blog a long, long time ago. Eleven years ago if memory serves. This blog baby is now a middle schooler. And my life looked a lot different back then. I was a working actress who needed to look a certain way. I was dating and felt immense pressure to be hot. I was young and childfree and had the time and disposable income to exercise all the time and buy only the best, healthiest foods. And I was disordered. What I ate and weighed and how much I exercised was what my life revolved around. I pretended it was all about moderation, but it wasn’t it was an obsession. Moderation has never been my strong suit.

And then I got married. Well, actually, I got engaged and tried to diet down for my wedding only to find that my metabolism had been totally destroyed by years of restriction and I worked really, really hard to fix it. And I stopped dieting. And I haven’t dieted since. Roy and I have been married for five years and I haven’t restricted my eating in all that time. I’m not going to say that I’m in the best shape of my life. I’m not. There are definitely times that I wish I were fitter. Thinner. Times when I stare at my closet and long for the single digit sizes shoved into the corner that I can’t bring myself to get rid of. But also, I’ve got things to do, kids to raise, a business to run and a house to keep standing; those moments are not what my life revolves around and having a life that isn’t dictated by restriction is nice.

And then I had Iris.

Turns out my easy baby—seriously, temperment-wise I totally lucked out with this kid—is allergic to milk and soy proteins. This is a pretty common allergy among infants and most kids grow out of it, but for now it means that I need to restrict my diet since I’m breastfeeding. Dairy isn’t as hard as I thought it would be, but soy, soy is in EVERYTHING! I’m not dieting, or at least that’s not the intention, but I do have to restrict again and even though it’s not for weight loss purposes, all those instincts come flooding back and one restriction leads to another and to another. It’s so easy to fall back into old obsessions. And I’m working really hard to keep my diet brain in check. 

Speaking of obsessions. I swore up and down this time I wouldn’t worry so much about my milk supply and just supplement with formula as needed. But Ms. Iris does not do formula. She hates it and just screams when we try to give her a formula bottle. Not a great combo for a mama who struggles with supply, so I have to pump wherever we are and take one million supplements. Which is why I have a car pump and a house pump.

I’m hoping to use this switch up in my routine for good instead of evil. Over the last few years, as our expenses grew (hello mortgage and daycare, I’m talkin’ to you!) I’ve definitely erred toward more cost-efficient food than the elite healthy options that rocked my single lady fridge. But it’s not just the purity of the food options that have gone downhill as our budget got tighter; it’s the actual food I will eat. Ethan is a very picky eater and doesn’t eat much, but what he will eat I buy in bulk. Fresh fruit, I hardly ever eat anymore because he will, and I feel like I’m stealing food from my child if I eat an apple. The sprouted grain bread I favored before procreating was replaced by a soft, sweet, fluffy wheat bread he’ll eat. Fibrous cereal has been replaced by frozen waffles shaped like Mickey Mouse. It’s his fridge, I just live with it.

These new restrictions have meant that I’ve actually have to prioritize my own eating again. The other day Iris and I roamed the aisles of Whole Foods reading labels and filling a cart of foods that I can eat safely while breastfeeding her. I haven’t put that much care into feeding myself since Ethan started eating solids. It feels selfish to spend more money on myself. But I’m doing it for Iris so it’s somehow excusable.

Man, motherhood is a total mindf*ck.

Back when I was single and childfree the quality of the food I ate was of the utmost importance. Sure, I was starving myself, but the food I did eat, it was healthy, it was balanced, it was food that on some level meant that I cared about myself. So, I’m using this phase of babyhood as a chance to right some wrongs, wrongs in my past and wrongs in my present; to take the me of yesteryear who cared about what she ate and the me of today who doesn’t obsess about calories in and calories out, and meld them into a better version of myself. One who eats food to nourish herself, not just her children, because I don’t have to eat like a toddler. Right? Right! Right?

Wish me luck.

Before Ethan was born I was so scared about how the birthing process would play out. People like to bombard pregnant women with the horror stories of their own birth experiences. Smiling and nodding through nine months of the gory details of other peoples’ nether regions is sort of a pregnancy rite of passage.

As it turns out (you can read Ethan’s birth story here), I birth babies fairly easily, so I wasn’t too worried about what giving birth would be like this time. My biggest fear was giving birth too quickly, as Ethan’s labor was less than three hours long and he was out in under five minutes of pushing. My whole pregnancy this time seemed to revolve around the logistics of go time, who would watch Ethan? Would we make it to the hospital in time? After all, everyone told us that second babies come faster. Would Roy be cool delivering our baby in the living room if need be?

He seemed pretty down with the idea, but I have a “no looking below the belt during labor” policy, so that wasn’t my favorite option. And so, in an effort to control the uncontrollable, I spoke with my midwives about induction. I’d heard horror stories about long, painful induced labors that ended in distressed babies and scared mamas, but I also didn’t want to give birth in my living room, so I decided it might be worth the risks in our case. I decided that March 18th would be our daughter’s birthday.

Turns out a lot of other babies wanted to be born on March 18th and the morning of my scheduled induction, I got a call from my midwife apologizing profusely, but asking if I could come in the next day—they were having a baby boom, and there were no L&D rooms available.

I’m a firm believer in listening when the universe speaks to you, so I just laughed it off, and The Fella and I went out for pancakes and enjoyed a nice little day off together while Ethan was at preschool.

Guess what happened next?

That night, a few minutes after Ethan cried from his bed to come to sleep with us, I turned over felt a pop in my abdomen and a gush of (definitely not anything like) water. It was actually more viscous than water, a little gooey. I was basically leaking Aloe. Yeah, aloe, let’s go with that. Anyhoo, I turned over in bed, looked over Ethan to Roy, and said, “I think my water broke.” And then went to the bathroom to put on one of those sexy adult diapers I had stocked up on for the postpartum period.

I wasn’t having any contractions yet, but I didn’t actually feel my contractions all that much with Ethan, at least not until he was crowning, so I decided to call the midwife on duty at the hospital. I was hoping she’d say I could wait to come in until after I dropped Ethan off at school, but she said because I had a history of fast labors she wanted me there ASAP, so we called our friends to come watch our little man and I took a shower.

I’d imagined things being far more harried and chaotic this time around, but it all felt very calm, even a little euphoric. But that could just be the hormones.

When my friend Eddie came in the door, to watch our little man, Ethan announced, “Hi Eddie, Mommy’s water broke!” And that absolutely made my night. I was so worried about leaving my little man and coming back with a new baby, but he was so psyched about the process that I felt pretty calm about leaving him and knew that he’d be spending his day with his favorite aunts and uncles while we were at the hospital.

We drove to the hospital and waited…and waited…and waited. I was 4cm dilated when I got to the hospital around 4am, and I was 4cm dilated eleven hours later when we finally made the call to start a Pitocin drip.

This is what I look like when I’m in labor.

I didn’t have Pitocin with Ethan, so I wasn’t sure what I was in for (for those of you who aren’t hip to the L&D drug lexicon, Pitocin is synthetic Oxytocin, which is a hormone required for labor, it helps bring on contractions if your labor isn’t progressing particularly quickly), but this was basically our plan of action for my induction anyway, so I was prepared for an assisted labor this go around. Honestly, I didn’t feel like the Pitocin contractions were all that much more painful than my regular contractions, but when they started speeding up I decided to get an epidural. I didn’t have one with Ethan (I tried, they put it in wrong and it didn’t work, I gave birth to him standing up and felt every single stitch they did afterward!) but was sort of like, “Hey, let’s try this without pain this time and see how it goes.”

It was about 45-minutes from when they started giving me the Pitocin that I was fully dilated and ready to go, so it really did progress things very quickly for me. Even though I had the epidural I still felt some pressure in my abdomen so they checked me out and I was basically ready to push about 10-minutes after I got the epidural. Iris, like her bro, was a fast delivery, about three pushes, under five minutes, and out came a baby with a full head of black hair!

Also, the epidural was great. No pain! None. Not any. Zero. Zip. And Iris was totally fine, not lethargic at all and a great eater from the getgo, which is one of the things people worry about with epidurals.

Iris Ariel Schwartz was born at 4:25pm on March 19th, weighing 7lbs, 120z. 

And this is what I look like right after I give birth.

They handed her to me and I thought, “Well, this is not what I was expecting.” Since my only other experience had wielded a blond, mostly bald, tiny Elmer Fuddish looking boy.

She was also screaming her head off, two inches taller than her brother was and a pound and a half heavier. From the very beginning, Iris has been totally different from her big bro.

She’s really a very chill baby. If she’s unhappy about something she’ll let you know, but as soon as you fix it she calms down. She likes being held, but also prefers to put herself to sleep (Ethan still needs to be holding me to fall asleep). She eats like a champ and is growing like a weed. At seven weeks old she’s almost ready for 3-6 month clothes. And thank the heavens, she’s an awesome sleeper.

Our transition to a family of four has been much, much gentler than I expected it to be. Ethan adores his little sister, and we are loving our perfectly complete little family.

Comin’ at ya live from underneath a puking baby. 

Tap…tap…can you hear me?

Is anyone out there?

Oh, there you are, one person, who still reads this blog.

How are you?

Long time, huh.

I fell off the blogging bandwagon a long time ago. Sure, I posted every few months for a while, because I still loved this space, but I’d sort of lost my passion for the medium. I felt like I’d already shared so much of myself in my books that there just wasn’t much left to give.

And, well, also, I felt kind of boring. After all, when I started this blog, I was 25. I was single. I was an actress and a writer, navigating the work and dating world of NYC, and happily obsessing about everything I ate and how many spin classes I managed to hit a week. It was fun and dramatic. And nothing like my life is these days.

If I can be candid, and that’s kind of my thing, I’m happier now in the small simplicity of my grown-up life than I ever was with my moderately cool youth. We traded in the city for the suburbs, our late nights out for early mornings in with our two little humans (oh, yeah, I had a second baby a few weeks ago!). While it’s been years since I stood in line at a cattle call, I still spend time on stage speaking about hoarding and disordered eating all over the country, but acting is no longer a part of my life—something that feels at once very strange and completely natural. For the most part, I’ve traded the stage for the page. After two memoirs I’m trying to figure out how to write a book that doesn’t include my friends and family

(It took me a hot minute to post this because my blog was hacked…again. It happens every few years, regardless of the extra money I pay to my host to prevent it. Ahhhh, the joys of the Internet.) Happy New Year from all of us!

2018 I have big small plans for you.

I’ve taken a few weeks off from many of my social media platforms because I’ve felt like 2017 has been such an Internet exhaustive year. There’s so much anger and anxiety in all of my feeds (except for Instagram—which is totally my favorite social media platform now because people just look happy and glamorous all the time). The world just feels so mean…at least on-line. Which is why my resolutions for 2018 aren’t work or health related, they’re all focused on spending my time in more fulfilling ways.

Resolution #1

Read all the books. Well, not all of them, but certainly more than I am these days. It’s pretty embarrassing to be a professional writer who hardly ever has time to read. I blame having a toddler, but I also feel like I spend an awful lot of time scrolling Twitter when I could be reading something far more substantive. The goal for this year is a book a week. Many of those will be for work because I’m knee deep in research for my next project, but a book is a book and it all counts. I even bought myself a pretty new moleskin notebook so that I could write my thoughts on each book and reflect on my reading year next December. I’m currently reading The Last Lincolns, by The Last Lincolns by Charles Lachman (research) and Afterlife by Marcus Sakey (this is my car book, because I spend a lot of time in the car waiting for a certain small human to wake up).

What are you reading? (meaning, what should I be reading?)

Resolution #2

Find a fitness-free hobby. I feel like whenever I have time for myself I always resolve to go to the gym or go on a run or do an exercise video, but I’d really like a hobby that doesn’t require a shower. I actually really enjoy sewing, but haven’t done it seriously in a long time, so I’ve been watching a bunch of refresher videos on YouTube and have dusted off my trusty sewing machine.

Resolution #3

Less social media. Period.

I’m not naïve enough to think I can quit social media cold turkey, but I certainly don’t need to check it more than once a day to get the general gist of what’s happening in the world.

That’s it. To borrow a phrase from Maxine Waters, 2018 is about reclaiming my time.

What are you resolving for 2018?

Picture of my parents’ ambulance accident in Newsday newspaper. They made the news!

Guys,

August was a doozie.

I had such big plans for my last month of full-time momming, but life has a way of surprising you for better and for worse.

The month started out in true Miller-family fashion: drama. I often joke that my parents are the luckiest unlucky people I���ve ever met. If something bad is going to happen, it���s going to happen to them���but they always seem to find a way through the situations that would break just about anyone else. August 10th is our wedding anniversary, and my parents were planning to come over and watch The Little Fella so that The (Big) Fella and I could go out on a real life date to celebrate. They decided to pick up some dinner on the way over, when my father started to feel not-so-hot in the parking lot of the restaurant they were stopping at. He���s been dealing with some cardiac irregularities that are being closely monitored. They decided to call an ambulance and put us on notice that our dinner plans were probably not going to happen. Obviously, we were okay with that and just wanted my dad to be seen by a doctor as soon as possible. Since they were out and about, they called an ambulance to pick them up at the restaurant and bring them both to the hospital. On the way to the hospital the ambulance got into an accident and flipped over.

For serious. That actually happened.

Meanwhile I���m at home wondering why no one has called me to update me on what���s going on and I start calling around to all of the hospitals in the area, but none of them have my dad. And neither of my parents are answering their phone. So I���m freaking out.

Eventually, I get a call that both of my parents are hurt and which hospital they���re at.

So now, I���m pretty sure I���m going to lose one of my parents on my anniversary, and I���m just trying to keep my emotions in check so I can drive to the hospital without causing an accident of my own.

They���re both pretty banged up, but they���re both still alive. I won���t go into their injuries, but thankfully they both made it through and will have some healing and lots of doctor follow-ups ahead of them. After they were released from the hospital they stayed with us for a while. But now they���re home and on the mend.

Oy! So that was the beginning and middle of the month.

Meanwhile, The Little Fella, cracked two of his teeth in a bad fall in the bathtub and had his first ER visit (for a different fall), because he���s a toddler and apparently that means he has a death wish. He���s okay, too. I���m not sure I am. I���m going to have to bubble wrap him. Is that legal?

I think August 2017 aged me at least 10 years.

The good news is that I���ve been getting a bunch of freelance work, so now that The Little Fella is heading off to daycare and I���m ready to get back to being a working human, I actually have work to do.

So, August wasn���t the relaxing month I���d hoped. But I���m grateful September looks like it���s shaping up to be ���normal.���

I only have one resolution for September, as I get back into some sort of work routine and that is to work on my posture. Now that I���ll be back in front of a computer for multiple hours a day I need to focus on not turning into a mollusk. My posture really has become terrible over the last few years and I need to nip that in the bud before permanent damage is done.

What are you resolving for September?

I used to think that I would never let my child watch TV. But I do. Because I’m not perfect and sometimes you need the kind of chill only a Disney movie can provide.

For better or worse, one of the most drastic changes in my personality since having a child has been a shift away from my perfectionism. 

For the majority of my life I lived by the belief that if it wasn’t perfect it wasn’t worth it. If I made a mistake in my penmanship, I wouldn’t just cross it out, I would write the whole page over again. If I strayed from a self-prescribed diet I would scrap the whole thing and start over with something new. If I didn’t have the right outfit or shoes for an event, I wouldn’t go. If I couldn’t do a full, hardcore workout, why even bother going to the gym at all? My life was very black and white. 

Over the course of the last 14-months I’ve gotten very comfortable with the grey area. It’s amazing how quickly my need to be perfect devolved into a “ehh, close enough” mindset. Not to say I don’t care, but nothing is within my control these days. The house is messy. My clothes are usually covered in something indiscernible and slimy, my work is rushed and done during the exhausted hours after Ethan has gone to bed. Sometimes I just go to the gym to walk slowly on the treadmill and watch a movie.  My hair is, oy…I need to cut my hair–I totally understand mom hair now. And my diet…well, I’m working on it, but not with the laser focus I used to. 

I’ve been reading a lot about how to manage my autoimmune disease through diet. A lot of recent literature suggests that a Paleo-esque diet helps moderate the hormone fluctuations and inflammation associated with Hashimoto’s. But, umm, there are a lot of moments in my life that aren’t Paleo friendly, preparing toddler approved meals (sure, sure, I thought he would just eat what I ate and have a really broad, accepting palate…before I had him), trying out the restaurants in our new hometown. birthday cake, cocktails with friends. You know. So my mentality these days is mostly Paleo. During the day-to-day I’m happy to make separate meals for me and my guys (I do much of the time anyway since they’re vegetarian and I am not), but if I have to taste some mac and cheese to make sure it’s palatable–no stress. If there’s a cute little ice cream shop that needs trying on our weekend adventures, that’s okay. If a girl’s outing includes vineyard hopping on the North Fork of Long Island, I’ll take two. 

Since most days are normal, run-of-the-mill days I feel like this is a pretty livable balance. 

So here’s what my day looked like yesterday, and one of my August resolutions. 

Breakfast: Scrambled eggs and an Israeli salad.

Snack: Coconut water blended with frozen fruit. It’s like a slushie that I can give my kid to get some fiber into him.

Lunch: Pork chop and baked summer squash chips.

Dinner: Roast chicken, asparagus and salad made from veggies my BFF grew in her garden.
And a rum punch cocktail, because the days are long and I’m not perfect.

FYI, I’ve been posting more of my recipes on Instagram than on my blog. If you want to look up some of the things I make follow me on Instagram at @kimberyraemiller. 

I’m a cartoon! Sort of. I promise that I won’t make my entire blog a commercial for my new book. But, you know, it’s exciting, and I think that little bookmercial is just about the coolest thing ever. (I’m also simultaneously glad they didn’t make one for Coming Clean, because that would have been awkward). 

So, about that giveaway. Congratulations Cassie! (I’ll be emailing you momentarily) There were a lot of entries between the comments here and my social media platforms, and I basically kept a spreadsheet of each entry and then used a random number generator to choose a winner. Luckily, my publicist said she might be able to scavenge another tote bag. So, if you didn’t win this time, I’ll be hosting another giveaway soon���so stick around

And now it’s time for our regularly scheduled new month’s resolutions. 

I, for one, am flabbergasted by how quickly this summer has passed. How is it already August?

My biggest resolution this month is to really enjoy this last month of full-time momming. You see, when I was pregnant with The Little Fella I just assumed that I’d be able to work part-time and mom full-time. I would write while he slept and mom while he was awake. Well, that just didn’t happen. He is a terrible sleeper, and I am not disciplined enough to work hard at random one hour intervals. Also, as he’s getting older he’s getting SMARTER��� so smart���I can’t keep up with how much stimulation he needs on a daily basis���so we decided that he would go to a daycare three days a week starting in September so that I can work, and he can be exposed to new things and new people. I’m having a hard time with it emotionally, because no one will ever love my baby like I love my baby, but I’m also really excited to have some time for myself and my brain, and to start working steadily again. So this month, The Little Fella and I are going to swim and sightsee and beach and play at the water table for as long as his little heart desires. We’ll try new flavors of ice cream, go out for lunch with Gradma and Grandpa and practice our walking skills at the playground. 

My next goal is to get my office in office-y order. We’ve been in our new home for 4 months now and there’s still so much to organize and unpack. We’ve kind of lost momentum on that, but if I’m going to start September off ready to start working on another book and whatever articles come my way, I need an office space that’s conducive to legit work. 

The Fella helped me hang my favorite inspirational art on the wall next to my desk. Now I just need to get my desk in order. 

And finally, I’m resolving to start photographing my eats again. Not so much for the diet aspect, but for the actually caring about what I’m eating aspect. Today I had baked zucchini for lunch. I wanted to make a  protein and a carb to go with it, but I got so sidetracked by making a variety of food options for the dictatortot that I just didn’t have time for anything else. If I learned anything from my ruptured spleen and time in the hospital it is that I need to take as good care of myself as I do my family. A little accountability in the form of photos goes a long way. 

What are you resolving for August?

(If you’re new to my blog, I like to make new resolutions for each month, they feel way more manageable and achievable than the New Year variety)

It���s time for another birth story. This time it���s a book baby, and while just as much sweat and screaming went into this labor of love as my last one, there were far fewer stitches, thank goodness.

I remember when Coming Clean was published, thinking that I would never be able to do it again, to sit down and bare my soul on paper. I swore that if I were ever to write another book, it wouldn���t be a memoir. While the final product of my first book was a blessing, the actual writing process was something akin to living in my own personal emotional hell for a couple of years. Only a crazy person would subject themselves to reliving their most painful memories on a daily basis.

Which is why when I first conceptualized Beautiful Bodies (fun fact: the originally name for the book was SKINNY) and sold it to my publisher, it wasn���t a memoir. It was historical nonfiction with a few personal anecdotes thrown in for good measure. But, what became abundantly clear after a year plus of writing a book that was basically the history of dieting throughout this human experience we share, is that it was missing something. Me, it was missing me. And so I scrapped the entire first draft of Beautiful Bodies, we pushed my publishing date (it was originally supposed to come out in October 2015) and I started over.

I knew what I had to do; I had to do it the hard way. The way I���m good at, but the way I hate. And so began the long emotional journey of dissecting my relationship with my body, a relationship that has been the most important and tumultuous one of my life. In many ways Coming Clean was easier to write. Hoarding has had such a clear impact on my life that I knew instinctively how to tell that story. But my body, my insecurities, they were a part of everything I did. My body and its lack of perfection was the one thing I could never forgive myself for, and that colored so much of what I did and who I became. And being honest about all that was hard.

I remember a particularly emotional night when I was feeling blocked, ready to give up and write a check to my publisher returning my advance and call the whole thing a big mistake because I just couldn���t get there, I couldn���t summon up the emotional honesty to commit to telling this story. The Fella tried to coax it out of me, asking all the hard questions I refused to, and I hated him. I cried and yelled, threatened divorce and even threw something at him (okay, the last two only in my head, but still). But I answered, and I got there.

And while I poured much of my heart and soul into my story, I didn���t quite give up on my first plan for this book, which is what I think makes Beautiful Bodies most unique���throughout, my story is our story, as people. I didn���t scrap the year of research I did into evolution and diet history, I included the nuggets I found most interesting and most healing, in hopes that they would help others find a sense of purpose and pride in their own bodies.

Writing Beautiful Bodies was so much harder (and took so much longer) than I had ever planned, and while Coming Clean was perhaps the biggest story of my life, I do believe that in many ways Beautiful Bodies is the most relatable.

Beautiful Bodies publishes this Tuesday, July 25th. I am so grateful and humbled by the response it has received so far, being named as a summer must read by Elle magazine, PureWow, PopSugar, Bitch Media, W magazine, InStyle, and earning a starred review from Booklist!

I hope that you will like it, and in honor of its release I���m hosting a giveaway, so follow me on Social Media and leave a comment here with your favorite thing about your own body for chances to win!  I will be announcing a winner on August 1st!

I refused to take off my clothes for the first 24 hours at the hospital because I thought they were going to let me go home…they didn’t (also, not sure why I’m clutching my chest like that–very dramatic)

I���ve always felt like I was pretty in-tune with my body, at least in regard to health. I���m the kind of person who could tell you exactly when they were ovulating or would leave a party because I was tired and sleep was more important than socializing. But, I���ve been feeling pretty rundown for a while now, and just chalked up my exhaustion to having a less-than-stellar sleeper, moving, and trying to cobble together some semblance of a career during nap times.

Who wouldn���t be exhausted?

Except I wasn���t just run-of-the-mill exhausted. I���ve been sick for months and didn���t know it. At least, that���s what the nice infectious disease doctor at the hospital thinks. You see, a couple of weeks ago I woke up with intense pain in my abdomen and shoulder. I didn���t really understand the connection and just assumed that I had gas and had slept in a weird position and tweaked my shoulder. The pain faded and a night or two later came back with the same coupling. Still, I didn���t think much of it until I started to feel really weak, started having dizzy spells, I may have actually fainted at one point, nausea set in and some scary sweating-chill combos kept me up at night. Still I walked around like this for about a week before heading to the doctor. Because, you know, I have a baby to take care of and a book coming out and things to do.

But eventually, when my fever spiked at 102 and I could no longer breathe without wincing in pain, I went to an urgent care center. The doctor suspected my spleen was enlarged and took some blood work. Apparently, spleen pain radiates to the shoulder. Who knew?

It turns out I had mono. I didn���t even know you could get mono at 34? And even though I had a diagnosis I couldn���t help but feel like something bigger was wrong, I mean the pain in my abdomen was crippling���that���s not normal mono pain. I gave in to the stubborn nagging of my intuition and decided that I���d go to the Emergency Room on Wednesday night after The Fella got home from work. My parents begged me to call an ambulance, but I told them that ambulances are for really sick people and I was just going to the ER as a precaution, so that I wouldn���t pass out while I was alone at home with The Little Fella. Luckily, my best friend is a serious superstar and spent a very long night in the ER with me, entertaining me while experienced morphine for the first time and proceeded to tell the whole ER that I was totally good now and no longer needed medical attention (a very nice resident, informed me that I would no longer feel that way once the morphine wore off). I was actually pretty surprised when the catscan showed that I had a belly full of blood and had been living with a ruptured spleen for a week. I was admitted, and after a few days of blood tests, found out that I���d had mono for a long time. I just had never given myself a chance to heal, and was just running around on four hours of sleep a night like it was no big deal.

I���m lucky, the rupture in my spleen was relatively small as far as ruptures go and the doctors don���t think I���ll need surgery. Which is good because I���m seriously phobic of surgery (if you’ve read about my mom’s history with surgery, you’ll understand why), and the internal bleeding should resolve itself as my spleen heals. In the meantime I need to rest.

I wouldn’t say hospital food is good, but I will say it was nice to eat a few meals without a tiny dictatortot yelling at me for some of my food.

I���m not sure I really know how to rest anymore, but I am lucky in that I have a great network of friends and family helping out with The Little Fella so that I can sit around watching Netflix like a bum.

All this has been a real wakeup call, I need to pay more attention to myself. It���s as simple as that. And yet that is so very hard.

There are lots of mommy bloggers I follow who always seem have their hair and makeup done and their kids are always pristinely dressed. I’m not one of those bloggers. 

Nine months ago I wrote a blog about my feelings regarding my postpartum body, how hard it was to look at my newly plus sized figure. I was just three months into this momming business. I hadn’t slept more than two hours a night for 90 days. I was breastfeeding and pumping constantly to increase my supply. I was basically chained to my couch underneath a baby who was eating or who would only sleep while I was holding him. And yet I expected that I’d bounce back immediately. 

I wish I could go hang out on the couch and hug the me of nine months ago, then I’d make her a sandwich and hold the baby while she ate it. Ethan just turned one and I’m only NOW starting to really lose my baby weight. I do go to the gym 4-5 days a week now, but it’s not so much about my calorie burn as it is carving out an hour or so a day just for myself. Time to be alone in my thoughts while jogging or lifting weights or just walking on a treadmill watching a movie. Now I can do that. Nine months ago I couldn’t. That’s not to say others can’t, I know people who ran marathons a few months after giving birth.  I wasn’t one of those people. I didn’t have that kind of baby. That’s okay. I wish I’d known that was okay.

So much has changed between my body and me over the last year or so. My body is bigger and softer now than it has ever been before, but I’m also at peace in it–something I can’t ever remember being. This may be the first time in my 34 years that my body has felt like my home.  I am thankful for it in a way I have never been before. It got me through the hardest physical year of my life. It made and nourished another human being. It’s earned a little slack in the bouncing back department. Sure, I’d like to fit back into my pre-baby wardrobe, but I don’t have a deadline. I’ll get there when I get there. 

Food is another thing that I have a totally different relationship with now. Before Ethan was born I loved to cook. Cooking was what I did at the end of the day to relax. Now, while I still love cooking, I either stick with easy foods I can prepare while he plays in a playpen (which usually has a 15-minute tolerance level) or foods I can prep while he’s napping and heat up later for dinner. If I make dinner during nap time it means I don’t get other things done, like cleaning or writing articles or working on books or blogs. Everything is a trade-off. All of this is hard. I’m not going to obsess over the calories or macros or points involved in the food I feed this family, I just focus on healthy ingredients and hope for the best. 

There’s something about just not having the time to obsess over my weight/having more important things in life to focus on that’s actually very freeing.

Who knew that my lumpy, bumpy post-baby body would be the body I ended up feeling the most like myself in?