Merry Christmas

Hello my four readers!

Yeah, I know there are more than four readers on this blog, but it helps me to be more transparent if I just imagine there are only a handful of people reading.  I write our counseling newsletter at the high school where I work and every time I hit that "send" button, it tells me the number of people it goes out to - more than 7,000 in one fell swoop the last time I looked.  Yet, I must imagine it's only a couple of folks otherwise I'll get into a perfectionist mode and we don't need that out of me.

I hope you had a love and merry Christmas.  Hopefully it wasn't all about the presents but about love.  That's what I think about when I think about Christmas ... God's love for us to give us such a precious gift and our love for each other.  I have been blessed to spend the last few days with my mom.  While it's been hard living with another person and especially a mom for a fiercely independent person, it has also made me grateful that I can have this time with her.  I think of a very dear friend whose mother got ill from cancer right before the holidays a few years ago and passed away a few months afterwards.  She goes through incredible pain during this time of the year, so it really helps remind me that I am supremely blessed to have both my parents and stepmother around.

Instead of cooking, my mom and I decided to go to one of the Indian casinos for dinner.  We took along a friend of hers, who is one of my "aunties" that I have known since I was a little girl.  My mother has a gold card at this particular casino so we were able to stroll ahead of at least 400 people waiting in line to go to the VIP room and we got two meals comped as well.  I didn't do great in having a low-fat meal ... we were in a buffet and I rationalized to myself that it's Christmas.  I know, it's really stupid for me to think that way. I was completely aware of exactly what I was doing.  I'm owning it here though.  I can say that I didn't do nearly as badly as I could have.  Watching people in a buffet is very interesting.  There was crab, shrimp, lobster, steak, etc. and people had piles of food on their plates.  I am so glad I don't live in a place like Vegas with buffets in every direction you turn.

There was this guy that my mom wanted me to meet at the casino.  He's a dealer she has known for years.  She said he had a gastric bypass a couple of years ago and has really gone down in size.  She wanted me to talk to him about his experience while we were there tonight.  It turns out that he wasn't on shift and I said to her, "That's okay, Mom ... I've done a lot of research and talked to a lot of people who had the gastric bypass so I'm feeling really comfortable with my decision."  She then turned to me and confessed that she was hoping to hook me up with him since he broke up with his girlfriend.  I looked at her with a raised eyebrow - now my mom is trying to fix me up?  Seriously??  I had to hug her for being so cute.  God bless her caring heart.

I feel like I gotta run 10 miles tomorrow to work off the food I had today at the buffet.  I commit to being sane and rational tomorrow.  If I go work out, then great, but I will spend no more than an hour at the gym or no more than three miles out walking.  I have to remember what my physical therapists says about overdoing it for my knees and hip.  I gotta heed his advice.  Merry Christmas!