I Have Thoughts #6

First, if there are a lot of typos in this post, I apologize in advance. I am tired. Isaiah gets up for work at 5:45am, and there's no going back to sleep for me after that. Also, we've finally finished night weaning Imogen and as a thank you she's been waking up regularly between 6-6:30 instead of 7:30 like she used to. Her bedtime is still the same so I don't know what gives. It's probably not the weaning thing (because let's be real, she's almost 11 months old, she doesn't need a bottle at 5am); I'm thinking it's more a developmental phase combined with teething. She has been working on four - yes, count them, FOUR - teeth this last week or two, and it's been off and on hellacious for all of us. Three of them have finally broken the surface, thank the Lord above, so we only have one left and please, Jesus, make it come quickly.

She's also been fighting her afternoon nap like it's her hill to die on, and while she usually does eventually fall asleep, it's kind of stressful for me to sit there and listen to her jabber away and play with the zipper on her sleep sack for 45 minutes to an hour. And yes, I've tried putting her down a little bit earlier and a little bit later for the nap, and neither has made a difference. I know she's not ready for one nap yet, and I've read that there's a nap-fighting stage between 10-11 months, so I'm just trying to weather the storm over here.

Anyway, like I said, I'm tired, and I've been letting Imogen watch far more Little Baby Bum on Netflix than I'd like to admit. At least it's educational???

In other news, I'm starting to plan Imogen's first birthday party (who am I kidding, I started thinking about this months ago). The more I think about it, the more I want to cancel it, and we haven't even invited anyone yet. My mom's flying up for her birthday, which will be awesome, but I really just want to have some family time and not have to think about food and decorations and who we're going to invite and blah blah blah. Let's be honest, people don't have 1st birthday parties for the baby, anyway. It's just for the photos and the baby book. And Facebook, if that's your thing.

In reality, there's no way I could get away with NOT having a birthday party for her, not with in-laws who live here and a grandma flying up for the occasion and friends who have parties every chance they get. I would be the scourge of the family. A plague on both my houses. So, I'm researching inexpensive party decorations and trying to decide exactly how much DIYing I'm willing to do.

The other problem is location. It's not like we're inviting an army, but we'll probably have at least 15 people (ughhhhhhhhhhhh) and our house is flat out too small. There's a small building in town that would have been absolutely perfect and they normally rent it out by the day, but it's unavailable in June and July. Of course. Our only other options are to beg someone to let us have it at their house (nahhhh) or to have it at a covered campground or something outside, and I literally do not remember the last time it didn't rain on the 4th of July. Rainforests, man, always raining.

I'm probably putting way more thought into this than I need to be, and I seriously wish we could just invite her aunts and uncle and grandparents and be done with it (even though that would still be 5 too many people) but I already feel like I'm putting my foot down by saying no, we are not inviting half the police department. Like I told Isaiah, the people you invite to your daughter's first birthday party are people YOU want to spend time with, because the baby couldn't care less. She doesn't have "friends" yet.

Enough about the birthday party.

Did you hear that Ireland just made abortions legal? I shed literal tears when I read the news. I happened to have Imogen sitting on my lap playing with her blocks at that very moment, and the thought of someone murdering her before she was even born had me weeping and hugging her. Screw anyone who thinks unborn babies are not alive. To me, she's been alive since the second I saw that second pink line on my pregnancy test and nobody will ever be able to convince me otherwise. The fact that people were sobbing with joy and celebrating in the streets makes me absolutely sick to my stomach. They're literally celebrating infanticide. Crying tears of happiness because they're now legally able to murder babies whenever they want. If that doesn't disgust you too, there's the door.

On a lighter, less depressing note, has anyone here ever tried the keto diet? Normally I'm not a huge fan of fad diets - I figured out what works for me in terms of eating habits a while back and as long as I stuck to that, I was able to maintain my weight pretty easily. Post-baby, though? Nope. What worked before has most definitely not been working. I used to eat semi-low carb and that worked fine, but the same ratio of carbs to fat/protein has not been working anymore. I was talking to my sister-in-law a week or two ago, and she and her husband have been following the keto diet since last September and she's lost almost 40 pounds. And she doesn't work out. Like, not even a little bit.

Now, I'm not really a fan of NEVER working out, because I like to be fit in order to be able to go hiking on tougher trails and not feel like I'm dead before I've started. But I was intrigued, and since my previous eating habits were doing nothing for me and I have nothing to lose (ha ha) I thought I might give it a shot.

Let's just say I've lost 6 pounds in about two weeks. I know a lot of that is probably water weight, but that's fine - at least something is happening, whereas previously the scale wasn't budging no matter what I did. I still have about 20 pounds I want to lose, but my jeans are getting looser and the scale is going down, so I think I might stick with this for a while. It's simpler than I thought, too, even though when I'm tired I crave sugar and that's not an option with this way of eating. It seems counterintuitive to eat a lot of fat in order to lose fat, but I can't really argue with the science behind it. I don't want to talk forever about this because I know it's super annoying when people blab on and on about their diets and weight loss and whatever, but if you're curious about it, let me know and we can chat about it.

Also, the first person that says "Tee hee, I can't relate because I never had to change a thing after I had my baby and I was back in my size 4 skinny jeans only six weeks after having him/her! But good for you for figuring out what works for you! Tee hee!" gets a loaf of bread thrown at their head. I can't eat it right now anyway.