I. Am. Responsible. For. Everything.

Hubby (Cadillac) & I saw a new doc yesterday. We ditched the old doc because he refused my request to put on gloves when he took out my ingrown toenail-- I know, yech!

Anyhoo, this new doc is great and is also the doc of Cadillac's folks, so we knew he was good. He got on Cadillac's case about his weight. Actually, he got on MY case. "Don't feed him more than 1800 calories a day," he said to me. "Go on a family walk for an hour every day when he gets home from work."

"Oh-kay," I said, wondering if I should defend myself. I make things like baked salmon with salad for dinner, limit sweets, go crazy if he buys the kids sugary cereal-- why do I have to caretake my hubby to this extent, too? Is he not an adult? Can he not pull out the bag of celery if he wants a snack?

The other thing is, Cadillac is still, oddly, in pretty good shape. That is, he can run 6 mph forever and he is still strong. He just doesn't get enough exercise. He has a desk job. He gets up at 445 am and goes to sleep at 11 pm, because we're dealing with kids and then he likes to watch TV and then he decides he's going to do some laundry or whatever...and I tell him to go to bed and he's too stubborn to. What am I supposed to do, tuck him in and sing him a lullaby?

Anyway, I am not sure how much weight he needs to lose. Our Homedics scale says he weighs 14 pounds less here than he did at the doctors! I weigh 8 pounds less at home. So what the heck? Which scale is wrong? What's going on?

I tend to think the doctor's scale is wrong, because I can fit into certain clothes at certain weights and not above; and I now fit into my pre-baby clothes. So there.

The scale also measures body fat; it has an "athelete" setting so it won't think you're fat because you have loads of heavy muscle. Unfortunately, Cadillac has a titanium plate in his neck and can't use this feature-- it sends some kind of electric signal through you and it says people with metal plates are not supposed to use it.

But I am hopeful. Maybe he doesn't have so much weight to lose. And I started making him lunch and told him he's accountable for his exercise. We're going to do the family walk thing. It won't kill us, after all.

Editing the novel

After a long, hot summer of waiting, my editor delivered my edits to me, in the form of an 11 page treatise. It was a fantastically well thought out letter, and left me on my knees thanking God that she liked it well enough to buy it in the first place.
I spent a month or so adding 22,000 words, cutting characters, and reshaping it into a much better novel. This required a lot of babysitting, provided gratis by the grandparents; and my hubby, who took a week off work so I could work nonstop. Everything was in my head, waiting. The only thing stopping me was the fact my ass kept falling asleep.
Tis complete, and now I await my editor's comments. More waiting.

The local paper had an article about some delayed gratification project done in the 60s, called the Marshmallow Experiment. They took kids and put a marshmallow in front of them, saying, "You can either eat it now or wait 20 minutes and get two." Apparently there's a correlation between intelligence and waiting. I would have eaten it, fearing a trick.

This book is also a big lesson in delayed gratification and makes me crave chocolate and In and Out. Or maybe that's just PMS, which feels like it lasts 3.75 weeks these days. Time to move on to the next project.