Mother's Day

I have so much that I need/want to share with you (whether you feel it needs it to be shared!), so I'm going to start with Mother's Day and work backwards.  I had a great Mother's Day.  My boys cooked me a delicious breakfast and gave me a new Pandora charm and a fabulous locally handcrafted basket.  Then I got an afternoon at a fancy spa with a girlfriend where we were programmed for a facial and massage.

And this is where my Mother's Day took a turn for the worse.

We entered the bathroom/changing room of the spa and it was super swanky.  Lots of little baskets with disposable toothbrushes and Q-tips and bottles of lotion.  And I can't even tell you how beautiful the showers were.  They had a rain head plus a regular shower head plus 4 jets coming out of the wall. W.O.W.

And then I noticed the scale.  We haven't had a scale (that worked) in our house for a couple years so I never get the opportunity to weigh myself.  Naturally, like women all over the world, I was drawn to the scale like a moth to a flame.  I could not help myself.  It had a lot of buttons on it so you could set it for your age, height, etc if you wanted to, but I stepped on as a guest.

And I was obviously a fat guest.

I COULD NOT believe the number that I was seeing.  

Now I know I've gained weight since I started work.  You can't go from playing tennis a few days a week and walking to run errands to sitting at a desk for 8 hours a day without gaining some poundage.  But Holy Mary, Mother of God.  The number was so big that I couldn't even calculate how many pounds I'd gained.

Naturally I stewed during the two hours of my massage and facial.  The poor therapist kept trying to rub out the lines on my forehead and as much as I tried to tell myself to relax my fat self, the more the lines got furrowed into a perfect V.  I actually wondered if she was disgusted while doing my back massage because I was sure there were back fat rolls that she was having to deal with.

While I was "enjoying" my facial and massage, I was hatching my "skinny me v.2012" plan.  The plan that I concocted involved early morning exercise and starvation, neither of which sounded very appealing to me, but they seemed like the only option.

So I set my alarm clock for Monday morning at 4:55am so I could go out for what passes for a middle-aged shuffle/walk/jog.  I was a little concerned about whether weirdos would be out at that hour, so I told Jimmy that I would only "run" (term used very, very loosely) around our block over and over and to come look for me on that block if I wasn't back home by 5:30. 

Now let me tell you about this hour in Bogota.  It's dark and deserted (and potentially a little creepy for that reason), but it's also quiet and peaceful and you can actually hear chirping birds and not honking horns.  It's so lovely and tranquil.  However, between the hours of 2am and 4:55am, I chose to focus on the dark and deserted (and potentially creepy) aspect of being outside alone and therefore, I did not sleep.  So when I had to get my lardy self out of the bed at 4:55, I was really, really tired and really, really grumpy.

But I dragged myself out anyway and didn't see anybody creepy.  Just a few other hardcore, die-hard exercisers like myself that just realize it's a no-pain, no-gain world out there.  Well and there was that one person who was dragging a suitcase down the street.  But other than that, total peace and tranquility which was great because there was nobody around to witness the humiliation of my middle-aged shuffle/walk/jog routine.

Of course, my real priority as soon as possible after I got to work was to visit the embassy's health unit to weigh myself on their scales.  Everybody knows that doctor's office scales are never wrong and I knew this would be the true measurement.  

At least that's my story and I am sticking to it.  That scale (which is the old-timey kind where you have to move over the weight blocks until it balances and not that ridiculous newfangled digital number at that hoity-toity spa) produced much better results.  According to that scale, I am one pound over the weight that I have hovered around for the last 20 years (excluding pregnancy of course) and not the 17 pounds over that the newfangled digital spa scale showed.  

Now of course, in hindsight, it seems a bit absurd to think that I could have gained 17 pounds while still wearing my same clothes.  Wouldn't I have noticed that I was carrying around the equivalent of an average one year-old baby?  It also seems absurd that I wasted the luxury of those spa treatments, fretting over this. And actually the most absurd thing of all is that I got up at that ridiculous hour to exercise.  HELLO?  I HATE exercising and I particularly hate exercising at 5:00 in the morning.

The moral of the story:  always, always, always get a second opinion before making a rash decision.

Happy Mother's Day to all the great moms and mom-figures in my life!