Annie Valentine

I know that there are medicated women out there with the ability to clean and conquer thousands of square footage a week. Their cleaning supplies are neatly bucketed and stored, the vacuum never sits, unused, in the middle of the living room floor for four days in a row, and you will never find the color yellow in their bathrooms unless they intentionally put it there.

There is no soy sauce bacteria growing on the bottom shelf of their fridge (bet you didn’t know that stuff could multiply), dirty diapers hidden behind the couch (talk about multiplication), or enough toothpaste residue sprayed on the bathroom mirrors to support the “marbled glass” theory you give the plumber.

My house is huge. Let me tell you, it’s a dirty old monkey and my back is getting downright tired. I’ve got four helpless little rats running around this place and it’s time someone hired a hand.

Last night Old Tightwad and I sat down for our monthly, oh fine annual, budget meeting. Due to the fact that I hate discussing money with him unless it’s a gift card he doesn’t have need of, I’ve managed to put him off for nearly a year.

“I need to see your list of expenses,” he said. Now, I can assure you that while there is a list, I’m sad to report that it’s being recorded in Heaven and I only have access to it in faith-relying moments of serious customer service difficulties.

And so it began. I have repeatedly informed him that living over on this side of the pond has upped the ante in just about every spending situation. Prepared-ish though I was, it was a battle. $70 a hair apointment–but wait, that’s in Euro’s. How often? Every eight weeks? Times that by 26 and divide it by 12, pour a little soy sauce on it…by the time we got to toilet tissue I was ready to cry constipation just to earn a hall pass.

“Well,” he said, “Looks like we’ve covered everything.”

“Uh, sorry but we’ve got one more category to add,” I said, leaning over and manhandling his spreadsheet. I quickly typed in Housekeeping.

We stared at each other.

See, the bacon man works with a number of gentlemen who have brought wives and small children to this far off land of tile floors and monstrous bathrooms. And you know what they all end up doing? They hire a housekeeper. And let me tell you, these boys look pretty darn good on date night.

He gulped down some ice water, sniffed, and did his shoulder hunch “look at the floor and contemplate” routine while rubbing his hands together, all in an effort to scrounge up a way to trick me out of my much needed extra help.

“Yeah, I can see that,” he said. “Okay, if you have to,” he paused and shrugged. “I mean, unless…”

“Oh, I have to.”

“Well, how many hours will you need a week?” he said with That Gleam–the one that means he’s about to engage in a bout of bartering.

I thought fast. “Six.”

“Three.”

“Five!” I yelled.

“Four, and that’s all you get.”

“Done!”

I think I was so happy I actually glowed like Mr. Clean himself sitting there on that couch. But, being the fight-to-the-end fellow that he is, Mr. Last Word looked over and said, in his most innocent way, “Boy, I wonder what families who make less money do in these cases? I mean, how do they get by?”

“Golly, Sweetie, that’s a good question. Let’s be sure to thank Heavenly Father for our many blessings tonight,” I said brightly, then jumped up and ran from the room.

My new housekeeper comes on Thursday. These floors are going to look so good after someone else mops them.

I have got to get a grip on my eating.

It’s been a long time since I’ve actually had trouble keeping the scale within the right frame of digits but the past three weeks (since my New Year’s resolutions were carved in internet) things aren’t loving me. The other day for no good reason and three great days of dieting and yoga I stepped on the scale and it was up THREE POUNDS. (That is me yelling about my weight.)

And you can call it whatever you want–water, muscle, dense fat–but you can’t reason away how tight my jeans felt.

Of course I went right down to the kitchen and got even with my scale. You want to see three pounds? I’ll show you three pounds. I then proceeded to eat my way through the house for the next ten hours to prove a point.

It worked. The three pounds has been hanging around for an entire week and I’m pretty sure it’s now in a solid form.

So, here is the top five list of super drastic dieting measures I’m debating between. Something will launch on Monday, I just need to bet on the right horse.

1. Get a tummy tuck. Totally improbably at the moment but something I’m counting down to in the next few years. Feel free to add this to the list of Reason’s Why Annie’s Vanity Will Keep Her Out of Heaven.

2. Run away the pounds. This is an awesome and ideal method that I can’t do because of my stupid broken back. Walking around the house all day hurts me so running is kind of out of the question. I do have a girlfriend with an eliptical, however, and I’m planning to go work out with her a few times a week if life ever allows it. Also I’m doing yoga.

3. Jump on the HCG drop diet one more time. This is Hell on Earth, I know because it saved my bacon when we moved here. I think it was the only thing I had control over for a little while there, good thing because it kept me from ballooning out during the fast food phase of the move. I hate this diet but it totally worked and I kept the extra weight off afterwards (minus the three recent pounds that really suck and need to disappear like now). I just dread the loading days…

4. Amputate a leg. Painful and inconvenient.

5. Do a regular diet of 1200 calories a day, minus sugar, no carbs after three and absolutely no caffeine. Or caffeine. When I’m maintaining there’s nothing like a Diet pop to chase away the afternoon sugar craving, but it doesn’t help so much when I’m trying to drop back down to my best three numbers. I love those numbers, I want those numbers. I really hate not being able to wear my four favorite pairs of jeans without the ginormous jelly roll (much bigger than the muffin top, let me assure you).

I have until President’s Day weekend to get this weight off. That’s four weeks and I would like to be down eight pounds. This is a reasonable goal. Tough, yes, but doable.

And so I’m now going to go have a talk with myself in the mirror. That girl has got to get a grip on something other than the Peanut Butter Mother’s cookies she bought on sale at the commisary today for 19 cents a bag (I grabbed ten of them).

And the battle wages on…

So Jason sold our old queen bed.

Here’s the thing about extra cash. We’re not dying of moneylessness, our cupboards are overly stuffed with food I should think about cooking, and I’ve been blessed with a spouse who pays me to stay home and make house to my heart’s content. But when an opportunity comes up to earn an extra buck you can bet Old Moneybags will jump at it with arms and legs extended.

The fellow who bought our bed lives a good thirty-five minute drive away–that’s 35 minutes of autoban time. The autoban kind of rocks. Thanks to many speed limitless stretches of highway 95 mph is my new minimum.

After the initial sale, he pocketed an extra $50 by offering to deliver the bed.

“How are you going to get that bed there?” I asked.

“Easy, I’ll just tie it to the top of the car.”

“That sounds stupid.”

“Watch me,” he said with a grin.

It was date night. Mr. Uhaul informed me we needed to “drop off the mattress” on our way to dinner with friends. Because obviously that kind of thing takes no extra time.

When I came out of the house and saw the queen sized mattress and box spring stacked on top of our little Mazda 5 micro van with one measly tie around the center I almost turned around and stayed home. Unfortunately his usual ratchets didn’t fit around both mattress and box spring so he’d had to improvise. The bed looked like a stack of newspapers with a little piece of string tied around it. “It’ll hold,” he assured me as we slowly climbed in the car.

We headed out on the two-lane highway with tentative speed increases. “See?” he said. “It’s going to be fine so stop panting.”

I gulped. The moment his odometer hit 40 mph I watched through the sun roof as the mattress combo slid right out of sight off the back of the car.

“STOP THE CAR! WE LOST IT! WE LOST IT! OH MY GOSH WHAT ARE WE–” Jason pulled over and we got out. The bed had indeed slid back a good ten inches but one shove put it back in place.

“Turn the car around!” I said, “There is no way I’m doing this, take us–”

“Sweetie, it’s going to be fine,” he said with a buttery voice. “We can’t turn around, they’re expecting us and he’s already paid me. Besides, we’ve got dinner reservations.” He started out once more and took the on ramp to the autoban. Within thirty seconds, whoosh! The mattresses slid out of sight.

“ARGH!!!! IT’S GONE IT’S GONE, WHAT HAVE YOU DONE? I TOLD YOU NOT TO–” Jason quickly pulled over and we got out once more. Again, ten inches to the rear and I thought I was going to throw up.

“Look,” he said, “We can’t turn back now. Why don’t you just sit in the back seat and pull down on the rope a little, okay? I’m sure it will make you feel better.” Did I mention that the tie was threaded through the interior of the car?

Shell shocked, I climbed into the back seat and got a good handle on the nylon ties, pulling them tight with my lousy little biceps. We started out once more, flashers blazing and odometer not going above 35–until Jason got lazy and felt safe. Suddenly he was hitting 40 and whistling and–

WHOOSH! Despite my sweaty death grip and body weight that mattress slid right out of my grip and out of sight. One blood curdling scream was all it took for him to pull the car over.

By this time I was crying and shaking and convinced we would lose the bed on the autoban, kill a bunch of Germans and get deported back to America. My arms were numb and due to our extremely slow speed the GPS ETA was 30 minutes away.

At that point even my industrious husband couldn’t deny that perhaps it wasn’t the best way to make a buck.

In the end, don’t ask me how we delivered it intact but we did. Guess who got the money?

I just wrote this letter to one of my girlfriends, Melissa Bastow from “Because I Really Can’t Get Enough of Myself” and The Barrel online magazine. Since many of you fall into the same category, I thought I’d share…

Her email asked:

Hi Annie!

How’s it going?  Do you feel glamorously European?  Because that’s how I picture you now.  With your fancy salads.

I fell off of blog world for awhile, so mostly I just see some of your post titles and thumbnails of awesome european vacations on facebook, and then I just have to hate you a little, because I rarely even see the outside of my house.  Are things good there?  How’s the school thing going?  I did read a few of your posts about German kindergarten, but that was months ago, is it better now?  And, most importantly, did you get some good rugs to cover the tile in your house?!

Making my deadline while adjusting to Our New World has been just about enough to do me in. I should probably be medicated but that means I’d have to find a doctor and make an appointment…whatever.

So we did it. We taught our children to eat salad.

I came to the dinner table prepared for battle. We had four kinds of lettuce, dressings galore, bacon bits, cheese, chicken, grapes–no way could they hate salad.

And, well, I think it would be best if I just showed you a little clip or two.

But here’s where it really got good.

All in all, it was an absolute success all the way around. We discovered that ketchup is, in fact, an acceptable dressing, and that teaching our kids to eat new foods is as simple as educating them about exactly what and how they’re eating it.

Simple…HAHAHAHA! If that wasn’t an oversimplification I don’t know what was.

Vegetables. I love them. Broiled, grilled, steamed, candied, I can’t get enough of them. And don’t even get me started on salad, it’s my favorite food group. Over here in Germany they’ve got lettuce that’s an absolute dream, not a day goes by that I don’t go all rabit in the fridge department.

But somewhere along the way/the move/the parenting I sort of…stopped feeding my kids vegetables. Sure we’ll do the token can of green beans here and there, and I’m fanatical about fruit (probably because someone once said something like as long as they eat fruit or vegetables they’ll turn out fine–also that could have been in one of my dreams), but vegetables? Not so much.

Plus produce is expensive, Party Pizza is not.

Add to this equation a kid (Rex, 6) who’s got clinical food anxiety–seriously, do not mix his bread and his cheese together unless it’s on a pizza crust–and one routinely overwhelmed parent and what do you get?

Children who do not eat vegetables. My children. No eat veggies.

I have to add here that we are making progress with Rex. His parent-imposed New Year’s Resolution is learning to eat new foods and he has successfully tried two new things this week–pot roast and schnitzel. This is a big move in the anything-but-pizza direction.

On Saturday we took a dinner invitation to eat with some new friends of ours. Three of our four kids are the same ages and genders, they’re tons of fun to hang with, and they have a BBQ smoker. Like we’re going to pass up free pulled pork.

Unfortunately they breed little green progenies who like vegetables. I’ve decided there is an elite group of parents just like this. Their children will most certainly grow up to be astronauts and plastic surgeons who give credit to their rocking parents for successfully making them stay at the table to consume large amounts of leafy vitamins, rich in ranch dressing.

My kids? Probably therapy; I’m sure we could start it anytime now.

My first mistake was forgetting to feed the kiddies lunch. We had a late breakfast (donuts, anyone?), Mama’s on a diet, and we had four toilets to clean. Before I knew it we were running out the door to an early afternoon dinner appointment. I thought, no biggie, we’re eating in like twenty minutes. They’ll be fine.

This was a slight miscalculation. See, smokers are kind of nothing like microwaves, my oven of choice. By the time we sat down to dinner my kids were coming frighteningly close to eating the curtain rods; too bad they weren’t made from celery stalks, that would have guaranteed their safety.

With four kids we’re conditioned to adding kid-friendly items to meals. Hot dogs, burritos, suckers, anything that will keep them from trying to talk to us while we eat. This meal had none of that. Pork, home soaked beans and salad (which I brought, go me).

The only thing on the table that appealed to Rex was the white sandwich buns and ketchup, and his was the best attitude of all my kids.

Picture one table and six kids. Three of them are quietly eating the well-balanced, high-fiber, high-protein, brownie-points-in-Heaven-for-feeding-your-kids-the-right-stuff meal. Three of them are not. Which three kids would you want to take home? 

By the time June (4) had gouged their new table with her fork, Rex had made cheese soup on his plate from his water and, well, cheese, and Harrison had pouted and told us that we were, “So mean!” I kind of wanted to curl into a cabbage patch and wilt.

And so, come Monday night we are starting Project Learn To Eat Freaking Salad Already. All week long we will be discovering the wonders of salad and it’s many faces. From bacon bits to mandarin oranges, blue cheese dressing to Italian (her six-year-old requested oil and vinegar KILL ME NOW), we will taste them all.

And they will love it. Plus anyone who participates will get money and Reeses’ Peanut Butter cups afterward. Cause we’re tough like that.

For those of you that need them, I’m posting over at Vanessa’s today. Check it out.

The other day I was chatting with one of my girlfriends. She’s kind of an amazing Christian woman who gave up a year to Jesus: went cold turkey by dropping all her fiction and reading only the Bible.

Just hearing that news gave me hives. How can I live without a weekly dose of the paranormal? What else am I supposed to do at 2:00 am, eat? Drink blood? A girl has cravings you know.

So I asked her. How was it? See, I’ve grown up reading the scriptures, King James’ Version no less (heavy on the thee’s and thou’s) and I’ve got to tell you, it isn’t what you might call a quick read. When she told me how wonderful and fascinating it was I decided maybe I’m just not the right type of righteous to commit that much leisure time to Heavenly Father.

But the next time I talked to her it came up again. “You know,” she said, “I should tell you that it wasn’t all highs. Reading the scriptures is a discipline, great moments and a lot of boring parts in between. But that’s what a discipline is.”

Discipline; now there’s a word I like to avoid.

I’ve never considered my religious actions a discipline. It’s always been portrayed as a “feast” for the soul, something that will fill each and every day with bright moments to guide me along my journey of rainbows and unicorns. I have felt enormous overall blessings from obedience, but let’s just say reading the scriptures never kicked my sugar craving.

But I think I’m starting to get it now. Practicing religion in just about any form is a discipline. A kick you in the pants, stomp all over the easy fluffy things you love and (unfortunately) depend on, discipline.

Two years ago last week I found out I was pregnant with baby number four. For the past two years I’ve been hanging on for dear life with my poor paint chipped toenails. I was sick, pregnant, recovering from surgery, adjusting to four kids, potty training a large toddler, moving my family half way around the world, trying to teach my child a foreign language, etc. But things are finally starting to gel. This new year has allowed me an opportunity to settle into my yoga pose a little more and look up.

What I see is more than seriously atrophied muscles. My entire life is one flabby mess, brought on by the necessity of “just getting by.”

And so, in an attempt to completely overhaul my soul and my body I have put a ton of rickety old wheels in motion this week. From personal scripture study to seriously painful body contortions, I am on a mission to bring my life back into something that does not resemble a big pile of cheese fries.

The word for the year? Discipline.

I think I need some vinyl…

There’s nothing like having your mother casually force a New Year’s resolution on you to inspire and motivate personal betterment.

My folks came for a visit last month. It was awesome, we loved having them here and they got a front row seat to Exactly What Goes On Behind That Curtain.

Due to the bad weather and my father’s old hip (he got a new one yesterday, yay!) we spent the majority of their visit hanging out around the house. This left very little room for excuses like, “Oh, you know how kids hate to travel!” and “She only screams in the car,” or my personal favorite, “I don’t know, they always eat it at home.”

The saddest part of this story is my great effort. While they were here I was very careful to yell less loudly. I tried to only grab June by the hair when no one was watching, and I swear I followed through with all my threats, excluding the “I’ll take your birthday away,” since I’d already sent out the invitations. What do you do?

A few days after my parents returned home I called my mother. It had been a particularly rough couple of days (probably due to the post-parent blues), I was feeling like a lousy failure in just about every area imaginable, and all I wanted was my mama to tell me something nice like, “You’ve got great teeth,” or “Honey, don’t feel bad, your feet are skinny.” That kind of thing.

But before I even had the chance to tell her how dumpy the world was looking she opened up with this one, “Well, I’ve ordered you four parenting books.”

Four. Parenting. Books. Not one, not two, not even three. Four. FOOUURR. This number translated into “You suck as a parent, here are some books that might save your children hundreds of dollars in future therapy appointments.” I almost had to hang up the phone right then and there.

It’s not that I didn’t want or need them (this is called stating the obvious), it’s that, well, I’m prideful. I’d like to think I can figure all this kid crap out myself. That soap in the mouth will cure Junie of her trash talking sassy face, or putting Harrison in time-out will make him think about Jesus after I yell at him.

My mother and I had a good talk about this three days later because it took me that long to swallow my pride. She told me something that changed my perspective entirely. When my older siblings were in high school someone gave her a parenting book. And you know what? It changed her life. It was the best gift anyone ever gave her.

I was really glad she told me that, it softened the blow last week when my first two books came in the mail. Let’s just say title’s like, “How to Stop Screaming” and “How to Behave So Your Toddler Will Too” didn’t sound like they were geared so much toward naughty four-year-olds.

Oh well, I’m still her kid and I have the feeling she’ll be telling me how to behave until she’s ninety-nine. If only I get that lucky.

Isn’t it interesting that while sitting down to compose a soul-changing resolution list, something motivating and poetic geared toward personal peace and happiness, my first entry always begins with the word “Lose…” and usually ends with the word “…pounds”?

I tried this year. I have been wracking my brain for new and improved ways to improve my life, my mothering, my marriage, my home. Upon closer examination it appears that my soul could use a lot of work.

Unfortunately I’m way too wrapped up in my waistline to give my soul top billing.

When I put fingers to keyboard in my yearly attempt at self-betterment this morning, totally intending to focus on the big M’s (mothering, marriage), the only M’s I could think about were the peanut butter ones sitting in the bowl next to me.

“Lose ten pounds” was first on my list. I suppose that wherever #1 on your resolution list is, there your heart is also. Mine is in the candy bowl.

And my obsession isn’t even well-earned. I’ve got four kids and at least half my jeans fit, both my legs work (when walking), nothing wrong with my arms (except the one the doctor set wrong that handicaps me from playing sports with balls), I only lost half my hair with the last baby (2/3 with the June Bug), and I’ve got a collection of stilettos guaranteed to keep the word “drab” out of my vocabulary. I’m doing fine, why worry?

Because I can’t let go of those last ten pounds; usually six pounds but Christmas was kind of tasty this year.

But oh that is going to change. Tomorrow. Tomorrow it will change.

This morning I woke up de-ter-mined to rid my life of toxins like sugar and…well, sugar. The stuff is killing me. Three weeks of reckless abandon has cost me five pounds in the wrong direction. Five pounds! I can’t remember the last time the holidays did that to me.

I had two eggs for breakfast, avoided the cinnamon rolls, left-over pita chips, party punch and bowl of candy, then made the mistake of running off to late church at 1:00 without eating lunch.

Note to self: remember lunch.

By the time we pulled in the door at 4:45 I was ready to eat Jason’s tie. I ran to the kitchen, held the medium bag of M&M’s up to my mouth and poured them down my gullet as fast as my little throat could swallow them.

Tomorrow I’m trying again. Rule #1 of dieting: Do. Not. Get. Hungry.