Toxic toys?

I would like to preface this post with the emphatic announcement that I am NOT PREGNANT! Not even a bit. Laylee may think otherwise. Laylee may tell people otherwise. My abdominal region may hint otherwise but the truth is, I am not currently with child.

Being twelve weeks pregnant with my second baby, I have, as the pregnancy books like to say, "lost my waist." Although when you don't have much of a waist to begin with, I think a better description might be, "too fat for the fat pants". I finally hauled out my box of maternity clothes, but I'm at that awful in-between stage, where your regular clothes resemble sausage casings and maternity clothes look silly.

But I have to go to a wedding next weekend and of course I have nothing to wear. So I went to the mall today in search of a comfortable, friendly-to-nonexistent-waists dress.  

Children have a habit of saying whatever is on their mind. No matter what it is. Last week we were at a baseball game and my daughter spotted a man with a fake arm, a metal hook arm. She was so excited. She stood up on the bleachers, pointed to him, and shouted for her brother. "LOOK! It's a pirate! A PIRATE!"

I never really know how to react during those times. I shushed her and then tried to ignore her. But clearly he knows that he has a hook arm. And my daughter can't be the first child who has yelled something like this. But I still couldn't help but wish for a hole to open up in the ground beneath the bleachers and swallow me.

This past weekend, in the dressing room at my local department store, my daughter suddenly says, in a voice so loud that it carries to the neighboring town: "Why does your body look like that?"

"Uh, like what?" I ask, cringing inside.

I am on Day Three of my new exercise program.

Day Four if you count the day I pulled my running shoes out of the back of my closet and dusted them off. I am inclined to count it as they did have quite a bit of dust on them that needed to be cleaned off.

Day Five if you count buying new running socks. Everyone knows that the first step to establishing an exercise regime is shopping. First for trying on clothes in your size that no longer fit. Sob. And second for buying some actual needed exercise item, like socks.

A janitor at town hall took this shot. That's what you get when you elope!

This past weekend my husband and I celebrated our 13th wedding anniversary. Thirteen years. Thirteen how-can-I-possibly-be-that-old years.

I haven't done anything else in my life continuously for that length of time. Friends have come and gone. Jobs. Houses. Dreams. Goals. My sanity. Some I miss, some I don't.

I look at the photographs of us on our wedding day and I don't recognize those people anymore.

I am not the same woman my husband married all those years ago, and neither is he the same man. We've grown and changed and evolved into different people, most of the evolution positive.

I want to tell that girl in the photograph not to be in such a rush. Not to march into adulthood responsibilities so fast. To linger more on the way, check out those detours more closely. I want to tell her to lighten the hell up.

I want to tell her that life is long, but the living goes fast. Make the most of it. And once you have children, it speeds forth like you are living in dog years. One day you will find yourself talking about something that happened a "couple of years ago" only to realize the event of which you are speaking happened 15 years ago.