Big Girl Panties

Have you ever noticed how as you gain weight you put off and put off buying bigger clothes, but you go pretty quickly to buy bigger panties.  I guess inside I am thinking that if I am in more comfortable panties, the clothes will ultimately respond likewise. For some reason this philosophy is not working for me right now.  Must be the estrogen (because it most certainly can't be the cheesecake addiction...) 

Cornbread Messes...

I am crying over cornbread.  Seriously.  I am sitting on the dining room floor, with a broom in one hand and a dustpan in the other, crying.  Tears are streaming down my face.  I am sobbing faster than I can breathe.  I am looking around the room thinking, "I can't do this anymore.  I can't stand it.  It's not fair.  All I do is work and clean.  Everything is for the kids.  EVERYTHING.  And this is what I get."  As I weep, my tears disappear into the sea of cornbread scattered around the room.  "Cornbread.  Why did I make cornbread?  Am I crazy?  Oh my God, I'm CRAZY now, too!!!  I am losing it!  What is the matter with me?"  (You are laughing, I know, cause you've been there.  Maybe it was toothpaste or Kool-aid or pop tart, but you've been there- the breaking point, where you cry so you don't kill anybody.) I start to get up realizing that wet cornbread is harder to clean up than dry cornbread, so I am in fact making life harder by crying over the mess- meant in  literal and otherwise terms there!  Cornbread is everywhere.  Three pieces of cornbread.  Three little girls.  "My dining room looks as if SPD just dusted for fingerprints on a quadruple homicide."  I giggled as I thought that thought because it was preceded by, "I could kill them.  I could just kill them." (Not meant in the literal sense here!)  Not only was cornbread covering the table, but every chair, corner, and crevice lay covered in cornbread as well.  So I swept and swept before I realized, "Duh, you should have wiped the table off first, genius!  Oh my gosh, I'm a moron now, too!  These kids are making me stupid!"  More sobbing here.  I know what you are thinking.  Where are the kids?  Why aren't they helping clean up the mess they made playing with the cornbread?  But I am way too much of a control freak to let them try to clean up cornbread mess (seriously, have you cleaned up cornbread before?  moist, yet crumbly...) And of course the whole "I could kill them" thing.  They are old enough to clean up.  My 9 year old could have decently removed a large chunk of the mess with a broom.  My 6 year old could have wiped the table off well enough to knock it all off on the floor.  But it still would have left a lot of cornbread, and I was having my whole little meltdown anyway. So it was safer for them to be banished for my little clean up tirade anyway!  Stop laughing at me and my mess of a life.  This little charade was the icing on the cake of my day, I can promise you. But I am coming to figure out that life is messy.  I know. I know. Common cliche used to define many a good tale, and maybe your mess is as mine is more literal than rhetorical, but still messy just the same.  I used to think that messy was miserable.  Messy meant that I wasn't living up to any expectation, much less the mountain-sized expectation I set for myself.  But lately I am realizing that messy IS life.  Without mess, life is boring and predictable (which granted, I could use a little bit more of).  Life without mess is life without a story to tell... and where would anyone be without a good book?!  Where would I be on a warm summer afternoon curled up on my bed if no one else had a messy life that they were willing to turn into a good story?  Bored?  Possibly.  Much cleaner house? Definitely.  Happy?  Never. I knew I needed to share my mess when I realized that my mess really is the story of my life.  And my mess is hilarious!  Those rugrats...I swear!