Adventures of Fast Turtle and Baby Bug

Welcome home, daddy! You were greatly missed. Although, as you fell into a deep and completely un-rouse-able sleep on the couch well before the harrowing dinner hour and (later than it should have been) bedtime for fast turtle and baby bug…well, it was almost like having 3 babies to take care of.

Waking up this morning to a sparkling clean bathroom, courtesy of your jet-lagged person being wide awake at 4am, well, that more than made up for your sleeping through the evening.

Our little family is complete again.

Holy moly, day 43. I can hardly believe it–it doesn’t feel like it could have been that long already. And yet, here I am, having just passed the 10 lb mark this morning. I seem to have settled on losing around 1.6 lbs per week, which is just awesome. Having my parents living with me these past three weeks has been great, as we’re all on the plan and can cook together.

The secret so far? Fat-free, sugar-free pudding (1 point!) for dessert and air-popped popcorn with salt and spray butter (also 1 point) to help fill up. I was never too much of an evening muncher, but having both popcorn and pudding to look forward to makes you forget you’re even on a diet.

Of course, daddy comes home tomorrow (hurrah!) and that will probably shake up the eating…given that he’s got the metabolism of an olympic athlete and is always, always hungry. And happy to put away roughly 4 times what I can eat should eat at a given meal! The upside is more time to exercise now that he’s home…

I am a big one for making New Years Resolutions. Although I rarely keep them, there’s just something about marking the passing of time by acknowledging both what you are grateful for and also what you’d like to have more of in your life that I find irresistible. My resolutions are usually of the banal “lose weight” and the well-intentioned “learn how to_______” variety, with a “be more appreciative” thrown in for good measure. Only on the last one have I made any progress over the years!

Naturally, as I head into my 30th birthday coming up this summer, I’ve got lots of ideas percolating around about what I want to accomplish during my thirties. [Coincidentally, my friend Robin, blogging at There is More to My Life, wrote recently about her life goals, and I thought it was an opportune time to continue the theme.]

When I graduated from college, my life goals for my twenties were the simple, big ones: I wanted to have traveled, started a family, and be working towards a PhD. Easy, right? Well, I did manage to live abroad for 2 years, so I think I made a serious dent into #1. Obviously, the family is a check, a happy, blessed check. As for the last one, well, I can only barely give myself credit for it, as I’m finally taking a class this summer that is starting off the long, long path towards my PhD. Although, now that I pause to reflect, I did finish my master’s degree already, so what am I thinking? I deserve at least one quarter credit.

I’m actually really excited about turning 30, probably in no small part because I’m so happy with my life. I really enjoyed my twenties, I got to do a lot of cool things, I met my wonderful husband (we’ll have been together over 5 years when I turn 30, which means that I spent more than half my twenties with him…wow!) and we had our sweet, darling babies that really are just the light of our lives…all in all, my twenties have been pretty good to me.

As for my goals for the next decade, I think they are a nice mix of the practical (hopefully attainable) and lofty (pie-in-the-sky). I do want to finish my PhD. I do want to have a career that is personally fulfilling and where I feel like I am making use of my unique qualities–that the path I find is one where I am called to really help improve the lives of others and leave the world, at least my small corner of it, a better place than I found it. I would love to channel my decades of on again-off again writing into an actual book that is published. I want to learn to bake bread and make yogurt. I want a real vegetable garden. I want to live healthfully–not so much for the vanity of losing weight and looking better, although I do have that vanity–but also because I want to be the mom who rides bikes with her kids and runs after them and gives them an appreciation for healthy foods and the wife who grows old with her husband. I also want to live healthfully for the world around us, and although I’m still figuring out exactly what that looks like, it’s so exciting to be living in a time where so much of the national–and international–dialog is about how to live in harmony with our place in the greater scheme of things.

What are your goals?

Here are our little babes-in-togas! Are they the most darling little babies ever, dressed up in gramma’s old scarves and little hats. Er, wait. Yes, upon closer look I can confirm: Baby Bug is indeed wearing a pair of underpants on her head. Out of respect for the owner of the headgear, I will not divulge names. But, yes, they are clean underpants. What kind of family do you think we are?!

Since Recep left, and it’s actually both easier and harder than I thought it would be. Easier, probably because I’m staying at mom & dad’s house, so I haven’t had to do the single parent thing yet. I’ve had to do the wake-up-at-3:30-and-sleep-in-the-rocking-chair-with-crying-baby thing (oh, baby bug, you are 20 months old! Too old for nighttime wakings!), but at least I had good company.

Harder, though, to only talk to him for a few minutes every day. I’m used to us calling each other several times a day, and then spending all evening together. We don’t do things apart. Maybe that makes us weird, I don’t know–but we cook dinner together, we eat together, we put the kids to bed together, when I’m on the treadmill he’s about 3 feet away, working on his computer–and we’re talking the whole time. I find myself looking around for him when I’ve read something funny, wanting to share. I’m aggravated by the smallest things, because he’s not there to soothe things over or tell me to get a little perspective. Our cable isn’t working and I don’t know what to do. Yes, the cable–did you think this was only about my deep yearning for his company? It IS about that. It’s just also a little bit about the cable.

And, of course, with him gone so far away, there’s that nagging voice that pops up now and again. What if he doesn’t come back? Oh, I know, it’s crazy.  Really, I do know. But, don’t we all have those little voices sometimes? The ones that tell some of us we’re not pretty enough, or thin enough, or smart enough, or successful enough, or a good enough mother or good enough wife. Please, tell me I’m not the only one with the voices! Anyway, my voice du jour is, what if he likes being home so much that he doesn’t want to come back? It’s completely unimaginable, which is probably why it makes such a good fear for those inner voices (I’m sure Dr. Phil has a better name for it, but we’ll go with my nomenclature for now) to latch on to.

3 days, 21 hours, and 37 minutes since he left. Which leaves me with 16 days, 22 hours, and 23 minutes until he comes back!

The departure for Turkey was, how can I put this…complete chaos. It’s a miracle they made the flight!

Their flight left at 5:45. So, we planning on being there at 3:45. Leaving our house no later than 3:00. At 2:00 Recep had one bag to pack–his carry-on. I thought we were fine. Oooooh no, was I ever wrong! He’s running around until nearly 3:00 doing last minute who-knows-what, and THEN tells us that we’re driving his aunt and uncle, too, which means we have to take the seat–with kid’s car seats–out  of the van, go get them, load them up…knowing how they are (perpetually late) I call over there at around 3 to tell them to be
ready in 5 minutes. Recep’s other aunt answers the phone and says “they aren’t packed yet.” After a couple minutes of my saying “Are you teasing me, and everyone is really all pack and standing there, laughing in the background?” I finally believe her, and tell her to tell them to get ready NOW.

At this point, I am starting to really panic. In the meantime, we are finally getting the van loaded up, the kids packed up in mom & dad’s car, and I have to empty the entire freezer (2 of those GIANT Ikea bags full!) because everything is starting to defrost, and I don’t want to have to throw away all that food. My parents take off, and we leave to go get everyone else. It’s about 3:15. We get there, and Recep starts to bring bags out.

It’s 3:30 and we still haven’t left yet. More bags coming out. (Everyone can take 2 bags to be checked, weighing 50 lbs or less, and 2 bags to be carried on, and they have ALL maxed out. Doing the math…that’s 8 GIANT suitcases and 16 carry-ons, plus a car seat and a stroller.) It’s after 4:00 before we finally get everyone in the car and we RACE to the airport. We pull up, everyone jumps out, I wave over one of the baggage guys with the big rolling carts, and…someone tells them to go away, that we don’t need help. So I went and got two of the little carts that you have to pay for with quarters instead, and tell Recep that if he wants to make the flight he has to RUN to go check in and get their tickets. Somehow they get all their luggage together and go, and since I didn’t hear otherwise, I assume that a miracle happened and they got on the flight. Update: Recep has safely landed in Turkey!

And I went home (well, to my parents’ house, as we have no electricity at home) and crashed.

Yes, daddy is leaving us to go visit family in Turkey and go to his sister’s wedding. Leaving tomorrow and not returning for three weeks. 3 WEEKS. I don’t know what we’re going to do. I don’t know how the kids are going to handle it. Will they notice? (I ask only because when I went on some overnight trips when Kerem was 1 and 2, he never even asked for mommy!)

What will we do for 3 weeks???

“Day 20″ sounds so much more impressive than “a little over 2 weeks,” doesn’t it? Or, is that just me?

Impressiveness aside, it’s actually going quite well. Allotting points is definitely helping me make better food choices and better portion choices (and isn’t that the whole point? *snicker*) and I haven’t yet felt terribly deprived. Probably because I’ve been sticking with my one big “luxury” of having two (or sometime more!) cups of tea a day. It’s been a long time since I had desserts regularly, and we never have kept many sweet or junky foods around, so not having chips, cookies, candy et cetera hasn’t bothered me a bit. My big sugar intake has always been tea: Three cups of tea with milk and sugar adds up to 6 points per day, which is a pretty sizable amount when you only have 22 points to eat for the day. I’ve slowly been switching out some of the sugar for Splenda, and right now I’m actually having a 0 points cup of tea (Splenda, no milk).

Obsessive tea drinking aside, I’ve so far lost 4.2 pounds. Which somehow is about 1.4 pounds per week. And while I’d love to be one of those people who loses like 5 pounds the first week and then 2 pounds a week after that, if I can keep trucking along at 1.4 pounds a week, I’ll be just fine!