Wes, dutiful husband he is, went out to procure both dinner and a box of chocolate cake mix. And wouldn’t you know it, that chocolate cake mix cake went SPLENDIDLY with homemade peanut butter buttercream!

Determined to avoid gestational diabeetus, I threw out (most of {ok, fine. Some of}) the leftover cake and made a concerted effort to eat healthier the rest of the week (a very difficult task as Tiny Baby has one HECK of an unrepentant sweet tooth). Then…Twitter happened again.

Today is National Carrot Cake Day! ARG! It should be absolutely no mystery at all what I’d really like to eat right now. No fair! Pregnancy is hard enough without spurring cravings with random national fattening food days!

Sigh.

Happy National Carrot Cake Day, everyone! I hope your pancreas is as forgiving as mine seems to be…

(We saw Contraband, for the record, and enjoyed it)

With my hair and makeup still looking so pretty, Wes decided when I got home that he wanted to take me out for dinner. We dropped Aidan off with his grandparents and scooted.

Wes had done a search for the best local restaurants and found an Italian one he wanted to try (you can check out their menu here). When we pulled up, we were a little skeptical.

It was in a strip mall, with a jungle of vegetation outside and neon lights on the windows. It looked…Umm…Like not the kind of place you expect to find really yummy Italian food.

Still, we would not be deterred. We walked in and found a tiny little restaurant crammed full of patrons. We were seated at one of the last empty tables and promptly attended by one of the best waiters I’ve ever had.

Everything we had there was absolutely scrumptious, surpassing our expectations and ensuring we went home with happy bellies stuffed full.

As we left, I looked back at the restaurant. Sandwiched between a Mexican supply store with a display of cowboy boots in the window and a self-service dog washing store, it was completely unassuming. You would never think it was voted one of the best restaurants in that city.

If I had just been walking by, I probably would not have given that restaurant a second thought, and that would have been a mistake.

It just goes to show you…Sometimes eating at shady, rinky-dink places gives you salmonella. But sometimes it gives you the best surprise dining experience of your life.

I’d be all poised and unruffled, producing meal after glorious meal in a spotless kitchen while my adoring husband looked on and sipped a martini and thought about how happy he was to have married me.

Part of this rosy little fantasy came true. Even though Wes never did pick up a taste for martinis, I did become a pretty decent cook. I’m adventurous, and will attempt to cook anything once. This led to some epic successes with just enough failures thrown in there to keep me humble.

It also led to Wes and I both gaining around 20 pounds our first year of marriage, but that’s another post entirely.

When I graduated and got a job, I had a lot less time to spend on cooking meals. The more time I spent at the office, the less time I spent in the kitchen. Our fare got simpler.

Then, we got poor and so did our food quality. Did you know that you can feed two adults two meals a day for four days in a row with just one pound of ground beef, a can of olives, a box of pasta noodles, and a jar of pasta sauce? And that they will get heartily sick of eating the same freaking thing over and over and OVER?!

Then, I got pregnant. And stopped cooking. Because food (and especially food SMELLS) are abhorrent when you’re pregnant. Wes took over the cooking, and we discovered he’s a dynamite chef in his own right.

When Aidan was born, we were all optimistic I’d get back in the kitchen like a good housewife. That…Didn’t happen. Did you know it’s hard to cook when you’ve got a baby to care for? Babies are no respecters of menus. Neither are toddlers, now that I think about it.

I’ve recently ventured back to cooking. It all started with homemade chicken noodle soup and then…I couldn’t stop. Eggplant parmesan, borscht, roasted chicken…I’m living in my frigging kitchen and I’m exhausted. And well fed. And happy. But so frigging tired of chopping vegetables!

But that’s just how I roll. Feast or famine. Couch potato or gym rat. Writing novels or not at all.

Sometimes I feel like I need a moderator for my past-times. Then again, let’s be honest. I’d probably never listen to him/her anyway.

Yeah…Uh, me neither. But wouldn’t that be a pretty awful thing to do?

Or, maybe in a less caveman-esque statement, you can tell yourself that the food you eat on your birthday has no calories, but that doesn’t mean the scale will agree with you afterward.

I gained .2 lbs. last week, leaving me still under 180 lbs. but barely. I’m 179.8, which is basically a grande latte away from 180. So. ARG.

Making matters worse is my brain. My brain is giving up. My brain has decided that less than ten pounds away from goal weight is the same as being my goal weight. My brain is telling me I’m starving all the freaking time, and my brain is a dirty, dirty liar.

For 17 weeks I’ve had the self-restraint of a frigging monk, and now it’s like my brain’s at a Mardi Gras celebration. I keep telling my brain, “Put your shirt down and step away from the scones,” and my brain slurs back to me, “Shhhh.Don’t worry, I know what I’m doing.”

But who has to clean up the mess the next morning? Me. Who schleps out of bed to hit the gym? Me. You always hurt the ones you love. I’ve stretched this metaphor too far.

Thankfully, I still have my calorie counter. My militant calorie counter, which turns red and angry when I go over my calories for the day. Because I’m such a people-pleaser by nature, I can’t not record every single thing I eat (that would be lying!) so I’m still on the wagon.

But I don’t want to be. Never have I wanted to bury my face in a bowl of M&M’s. I can just imagine the smooth, cool feel of the M&M’s against my face, the rush of sugar when I crack their crunchy little shells.

Instead, I’ll sip my coffee, eat a reasonable tuna sandwich for lunch, and think about my author shoot this weekend. Think about how pretty JK Rowling looks in her author photos.

I bet she doesn’t bury her face in M&M’s.

Anyway, if you’re interested in my thoughts on staying on the wagon, head on over to my post on the Fitness Together Sammamish blog. I make a little more sense over there.

Jody and Griffin, some friends of ours,are getting into the chicken raising business, with the intention of selling the eggs and meat. Curious about the process, I asked if I could be a part of it. They said yes, they were butchering some chickens on Wednesday, would I be interested in participating?

I said yes, and that’s how I found myself hanging out at a chicken farm this morning.

When I showed up at the farm, I got the grand tour and what I saw was happy chickens. They had lovely enclosures with plenty of room to walk around and spread their wings. They had large, green pastures to peck around in. These were happy birds.

Cindy, the woman who owns the farm, clearly had an emotional attachment to the birds. She told me she’d talked to the condemned birds the previous night, letting them know it was their time to go. And when it was their time to go? It was done with dignity. I suppose there’s no painless way to kill a chicken, but if there’s anything close, it’s the way they did it.

Even though I observed, I couldn’t quite work up the nerve to do the deed myself. I did, however, help pluck and dress the chickens afterward. I learned a lot about anatomy, and feel confident I could prepare a chicken for dinner should the occasion ever arise for me to kill my own dinner.

I’m still processing the experience. I don’t think a normal person can watch something die without feeling that as a spiritual impact of some kind.

For now, though, I can say one thing with certainty: I’m having serious second thoughts about buying our meat from grocery stores. After watching the happy chickens and knowing what their lives were like before they were killed, I’m not sure I want to eat chickens from commercial vendors.

There’s just something very meaningful about looking your dinner in the face. I know, you’d think it would be weird. But it wasn’t. It was really neat to know exactly what the chickens ate, where they lived, and how they were handled. I think of all the food documentaries out there shedding light on the meat industry and think maybe I’d be better off without watching them.

Because I know what I saw, and I know what I felt. It felt…respectful. My friend prayed over the chicken before slitting their throats, and that felt right. When I eat those chickens, I’ll know they were grass-fed, free range birds, and that feels right. I don’t need to know the particulars of the mis-treatment of those animals to know that this is a better alternative. When it’s right, you know.

I don’t know if I’ll ever need to use the information I learned, but I don’t think that was the important part of today. I think the important part was me coming to terms with where my meat comes from. Today was an interesting day, and while I’m certain I haven’t found the bottom of this particular barrel of emotions, I’m confident I’ll like what I find there.

(PS: If you’re local to Seattle and want to get down with local farmers who raise happy chickens, check out Wholesome Eats Pastured Poultry!)

I have been assaulted by cupcakes in the past few days. Literally assaulted. Like, every freaking where I go, there’s a luscious cupcake staring me smack in the face, smelling its yummy smells and luring me into perdition with creamy frosting. I blame birthdays. We celebrated a couple in the family over the weekend, with the last birthday getting celebrated on Monday night.

Tuesday afternoon was my personal training session so I climbed into my car, eager to put Cupcake Alley behind me to head for Greener Salad Pastures. And what should I find in my car?

A cupcake.

Wes took one on Monday night with the intention of eating it later, and then forgot it in my car. It had sat there all night, filling my car with the transcendent smell of chocolate, peanut butter, and TEMPTATION.

I sat there staring at it, like it was a rattlesnake that might bite me. Moving slowly, I reached for it, careful not to move too quickly lest it cram itself in my mouth. Carrying it into the house, I set it on the counter and then turned, my hands shaking with the exertion of being so close to peanut butter buttercream and not eating it.

I managed to make it to my personal training session without further incident, but it was a near thing.

And that just about sums up this week in weight loss. It turns out that cupcakes are still fan-frigging-tastic even after you’ve lost 27 lbs.

But, I have lost 27 lbs., which means I lost weight this week, which means I had only a brief interlude with the no good very bad weight loss plateau. Huzzah! For details on what I did to defeat the horrible weight loss plateau, check out my blog post for Fitness Together Sammamish for this week!

As the predatory waves infiltrated my brain through my nostrils, I felt a Hulk-like anger and rage flow through me. Were it not for the stroller weighing me down, I might very well have vaulted over the planter and taken him, and his pretzel, down.

Oh, I am sick of dieting. Heartily sick to my core of healthy food and reasonable portions. Reasonable is code for “rarely full.”

Yeah, there will be no more breakfasts like this for me.

I miss the days when I would sit down on a Friday night with half a pizza, a martini, and chocolate chip cookies for dessert. I remember with GREAT fondness the last 25 years of my life wherein I was blissfully unaware of how many calories I consumed each day. Yeah, my body wasn’t skinny but I didn’t really care because I had cupcakes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m skinnier now and my pants fit much better. But do better-fitting pants buy happiness the same way a stack of French toast and a piping hot mocha do? Absolutely not. I won’t get belly-patting contentment and bliss from eating my smaller pants.

I blame my knee for this outburst. My left knee, the resident slacker knee, is injured. Again. I injured it during middle school and it’s never been able to get over it. I suppose middle school really does irrevocably damage you, one way or another.

This is my life now.

In trying to overcome the weight loss plateau, I decided to increase the intensity of my workouts by incorporating some brief sprints while jogging on the treadmill. My left knee said thanks, but no thanks, and now I’ve got a sore left knee and I’m still not losing weight and all I want is to stuff my face without consequences and GRRRRRR!

So you see? Losing weight isn’t all sunshine and kittens. Not around here. Around here, you get a fair representation of the intricate psychological workings of a former glutton mourning her loss of gastronomical freedom.

Really, I’m sure Darren Aronofsky could do a riveting documentary of my mind’s inner workings and need very few special effects to make it absolutely terrifying.

Wes knows this. And he’s supportive. Well, most of the time, at least. He went to Costco the other day for healthy lunch options and came back with…Mozzarella Sticks. And chicken alfredo.

Nevetheless, regardless of the force required for old habits to die, he is supportive and encouraging and it’s really very helpful. He asked me what I wanted to do for Valentine’s Day and I replied nothing, because newly calorie cognizant Erika is terrified of Valentine’s Day. There are chocolate covered sea salt caramels on Valentine’s Day. And wine. And food. None of those things are congruent with my desire to be less lumpalicious.

Wes disregarded my desire to do nothing for Valentine’s Day (you cannot suppress a man so fantastic) and came home with a prime rib roast, flowers, chocolate, chocolate wine (oh yes, it does exist), and a baguette of French bread.

I took one look at the stuff in his arms and ran straight to the gym. I had thirty minutes in which to exercise and I worked up an impressively pink face in the time allotted to me.

When I got home, I decided I would enjoy everything he brought home. In moderation.

This is a new concept for me, this moderation business. If one chocolate chip is good, one whole bag will be, like, five hundred times as good!

But lo, I had a husband who wanted to spoil me so I tried just a smidge of everything. I sampled some of the chocolate wine, I nibbled the prime rib roast, and had just a little of the dessert he made.

All in all, I ate exactly enough to meet my calorie goal for yesterday AND got to enjoy chocolate and wine and deliciousness.

This is a watershed moment, you guys. Knowing that watching my weight does not equate to a miserable hermit-like existence wherein cottage cheese and almonds are my only friends is life-changing. And I was pleasantly surprised to find that I was perfectly content with just a few sips of the chocolate wine and just a few nibbles of chocolate.

All in all, it was an excellent Valentine’s Day in virtually every way possible. I hope yours was good as well!

By the time they wake up, you’ve been up for hours and suddenly your day is split into two parts, and by the time you get to the evening you feel like the morning was actually yesterday and you’re exhausted but you don’t know why because you worked out yesterday not today and…Oh, wait, this morning was today.  Weird.

I have worked out for at least 25 minutes every day for three days in a row.  I know this may not seem like much to people who exercise regularly, but it’s a lot for me.  I’m sore.  Very sore.  So sore, in fact, that I had trouble sleeping last night because I felt like I had a toothache in my legs.

To be honest, I really dislike feeling sore.  Some people like it.  From what I hear, some people love feeling that burn that lets them know they committed fitness.  For me, though, it makes me sad.

I like feeling good.  I love being warm and snuggly, with a full belly and plenty of sleep and maybe a soft blanket to cuddle under (wow, Aidan and I have a lot in common).

This whole soreness business is the opposite of what I like.  I know it’s good, and I’m thankful I have the opportunity and means to attain my goal of losing weight, but if I’m being honest I have to say I really don’t enjoy the process much.

Maybe if I’d been more sporty as a kid, I’d feel differently.  I was one heck of a reader and had an incredible vocabulary, but was painfully awkward and far more comfortable lifting books than balls.

Wes assures me it will get better, that the more I workout the more my body will become accustomed to the abuse.  I sure hope so.  Because I can say with certainty that cupcakes never made me sore (and yes, I know cupcakes make you fat and that makes your knees sore, but I like to think the cupcakes aren’t the problem, it’s the meat and veggies I eat in addition to the cupcakes that are making me fat).

*sigh* There’s really no hope for me, is there?  I have the sneaking suspicion that it’s exactly this kind of self-deluding nonsense that got me into this mess in the first place.