HOLY MONKEY... The scale says whaaat?

Geeyyyaaawwwwsh. I stepped on the scale this morning; something I've been dreading and putting off for weeks. I was not happy with the number staring back at me. I still haven't started that diet I was talking about a while back, and my little indulgences just keep getting worse. You know those Fisher Price toys where you turn the dial thingy in the middle to an animal, then you pull the handle down on the side to hear the noise that animal makes? I was seriously expecting to hear, "The cow says... MooooOOOOO" when my feet touched the scale. I could hear that little toy guy's voice in my head as I stepped on it.

This past week has been so stressful, and I am definitely a "stress eater." The whole miserable, depressing Vietnam mess, sicknesses, 3 college visits for Alex, everybody's overlapping schedules, Dr.'s appointments, homeschool barely getting done all week, kids' basketball out the wazoo, and the laundry is hopelessly BACKED UP again. Both of our dryers are broken at the SAME TIME. One turns but doesn't heat, and the other heats but doesn't turn. What are the odds? No, seriously... What ARE the odds?

Yes, we have two dryers. One washer, but two dryers. That may sound like a luxury to some. I understand... BUT- Two words for you: 1) Six and 2) kids. My laundry room does not currently smell luxurious. You may recall from the power outage before Christmas, I am not a huge fan of the dirty laundry smell. We have roughly 25 loads, give or take, each and every week. Not too big a deal. When it gets backed up, that's 25 loads sitting around, taking up space, all at the same time. School clothes, church clothes, playing outside in the dirt clothes, I-just-put-on-another-clean-t-shirt-and-got-ketchup-all-over-it-even-though-I-wasn't-even-eating-ketchup clothes, towels, sheets, and sports stuff. Oh, Dear Lord- the sports stuff...

Show of hands: How many of you know a teenage boys' gym bag, clothes, and shoes smell a bazillion times worse than a normal person's? OK, good. So we're all on the same page, then. How are they manufacturing that smell? Where does it come from? It's unholy. The only way a normal person can smell as bad as an athletic teenage boy is to:

• Number One- Die and decompose for several days,
• Number Two- Allow the family cat to urinate on you repeatedly, postmortem.

I'm sorry, that's kind of yucky. And possibly uncalled for. I hope you weren't eating. And I mean no disrespect to cats, the deceased, or my boys. I love my boys dearly. They do take showers. Really, they do. It's just a universal part of being a teenager, but in this house it's multiplied by 3 of them, and a week of disgustingly overdue laundry.

Anyway, what was I originally talking about? Oh, the scale. My weight. My gigantic, fat face. The other day, as I was putting another cookie into my gigantic fat face, I had the thought that as soon as the stress dies down a little, I really am going to get serious about losing weight. My son's wedding is in FIVE MONTHS. I gotta do something. As soon as things get back to normal, as soon as I'm not such a stressed-out mess... Then I realized something. I've been waiting for that day for 18 years! I chose to marry a man with 3 children. We had Alex nine months and 2 weeks after our wedding. Mike came along 19 months after that. Then Evan, then Tuck, then Livie. We started Bri's adoption process when Liv was 4 months old and spent the next 23 months not knowing when our daughter would join our family (and you guys who have or are adopting know what I mean. Adoption and Stress always go together, am I right?).

It was a real "light-bulb" moment. I left NORMAL behind a looonnnng time ago. The day when the stress stops is not coming. And I don't mean that in a bad way- honestly. I love my big family and wouldn't change the choices I've made. I'm just saying that it's time to face facts and stop making excuses to eat and stay fat one more day. There will always be a reason to wait one more day. There will always be stress. I'm sick of it. It's time to handle it like a big girl.

So, this is it. Tomorrow, Chelle turns over a new leaf. Again.

UPDATE: The above post was typed late last night. It is now Mon. morning and so far, so good. I kept my word, and the new leaf is turning. This morning I did not eat Oreos, M&M's or any other digusting treat for breakfast, and I did not drink a little coffee with my cream. I had a diet muffin (which was yucky- we won't be doing that again), a BANANA (did you guys know about this stuff called, "fruit?" Am I the only one who never heard of it before? It isn't made of chocolate. Apparently this thing I ate this morning grows on a tree and is not made of chemicals. Go figure...), and fat-free creamer and Splenda in my coffee. Somewhere in this house, we have a treadmill. You would think something of that size would be fairly hard to misplace. I'll dig under the clothes piles and see if it turns up. Life Change 08: Operation Chelle Reduction is off and running!