In 2005, I started making calendars for the grandparents (and for ourselves) every Christmas. It’s this wonderful, neck cricking tradition where I pour over all of the photos from the year, trying to pick only the 20 or so best ones. I always end up in a very melancholy place while doing this because looking at the moments that are gone and the children that just keep growing is terribly sad to me. I know. Perhaps this should not be, but I can’t help it. I look at these fun old moments, and my favorites really aren’t calendar worthy, so I choose the ones that look like calendar pictures.

This year Amy is in charge of the calendar for that side of the family. She has asked me for six or more photos. Well, you know I can’t narrow it to 6, but I did my best.

For some reason, as I went back over these, this one memory stuck in my head, so I feel like I should share it.

I was sitting at my 6 week postpartum appointment, (14 months ago) feeling much better than I’d felt in…..well, 6 weeks. I had finally started taking iron pills again, and it was making a world of difference.

The midwife and the doc-in-traiing-of-the-day gave me the good ol’ postpartum depression questionnaire.  “Do you have feelings of hopelessness?” “Do you want to hurt yourself?” “Do you feel depressed?”  etc. etc.

I answered the questions as truthfully as I could, while still trying to maintain my integrity…..can’t be done….

She looked at me, wearing my biggest, brightest April smile, and she said, “Well, you failed the quiz, but you look okay. Are you okay?”

“No, I haven’t really been okay,” I told her, “but they sent me home from the hospital with no iron pills, and I was too far gone to understand the mistake and fix it. So I have four small children, I’m breastfeeding, I’ve been in pain, not sleeping, and I’m anemic. Who wouldn’t be depressed?  I’m just so incredibly tired, and I’ll be fine now that I’m taking iron again.”

My midwife also had four children, so she got it. We agreed I’d be fine, and that there was no way around the funk.

I wasn’t totally fine until THE WEEKEND. What happened on THE WEEKEND? Nonna came and weaned John David to bottles for me. She sent me out into the town while she stayed home and fed JD.

It was the strangest experience. It felt like leaving your house and forgetting your left arm. I jumped at the sound of every baby. I cried sometimes. I felt like I had done something terribly wrong, and I should run home and feed my baby! I was a little bit nuts!

I tried to enjoy it, and I did, but it was all so strange. My hormones were out of control. It was an experience I cannot describe. Eventually, we got him completely weaned, and suddenly it didn’t matter if I forgot my iron pills that day, or if I took only one instead of two or three. (I had a serious anemia problem).

I’m always telling postpartum women to not forget to take their iron. Ha! They probably think I’m crazy because not every woman needs them.

So most of the photos I chose for the calendar were from after the fog lifted. It was a 10 month–oh yeah–10 whole months– fog of crying, breastfeeding, dreaming about laundry, trying to get 4 small children out the door to take the kids to school or wherever. It was a year of learning how to multi-task, learning to accept my messy house, apologizing to Betty who was probably the only cleaning-lady in the neighborhood that knew and understood I could not get it all de-cluttered before she got there.

No, I don’t even have a cleaning-lady now, but I do hand out chores to the kids like candy.

It was a beautiful year, and it was the most stressful year I’ve ever been through, which is saying a lot considering all the year-long and half-year deployments we’ve weathered.

God got me through. Should I have been medicated?  huhuhuhuhuh uh-huh. Yeah. Definitely. But I really wanted to breastfeed my baby. Why? I don’t know. I can’t explain it. The same reason I want to do every little *best* thing there is to do. I like to drown myself in self-inflicted-pressure.

Am I okay now? Absolutely. I am more than okay. I am happy, blessed, and thankful. My house is still messy, but see, I’d rather have a fun blog and lots of children than a perfectly clean house. I was the girl that snubbed home-ec class (jokes on me) to take band and honors classes. My heart will never really be in the housekeeping. It’s important to me, but it’s not my gift, that’s for sure.

I love how God gives us all different gifts. We all complement each other, and that is how it is meant to be.

Amy, let me know if you have any trouble down loading the pictures from here.

(There are also several great ones on the About Us page that we could use for the calendar.)

This one is my favorite, Amy. It was taken by a really sweet friend in Virginia, and it reminds me of a super fun phase of our life. I want to go back, but I know the right thing to do is to make this place happy too. I think we’re doing a good job of that. This is like a two-year vacation at the beach, really. Then it will be off and away, to where– we do not know yet.

“The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.”   John 3:8

What do you think about when you look at your past year?

The post The Annual Calendar, The 10 Month Fog, and Postpartum Depression appeared first on Stories of Our Boys.

BEFORE

What I look like, every single time, right after giving birth:  This was a few days after I had Caleb. I weighed about 170 pounds in this photo.

And this is what I normally look like:

That’s a 35 pound difference.  (After all, a few pounds actually DO belong to the baby.)

  This is not my favorite topic:  weight loss.  I don’t like discussing it because it often makes us feel bad. Maybe it’s just me, but when I’m going through a heavy phase, hearing skinny people talking about their weight really gets on my nerves.  It can be a sensitive issue, and I like to make people happy, not sad, so I’m going to address this just this one time.  After this, you’ll read no more weight loss posts from me.

Being the vain person that I am, I do eventually always buckle down and get the baby weight OFF.  That may be easy and happen naturally for some of you.  If you gain 20 pounds, then what work do you have to do?  This post is for the women like me:  the ones that gain 40+ pounds no matter how hard we try to eat right and exercise.

I always feel like people come and visit me right after I’ve given birth, expecting to see me looking thin already.  Instead, they meet a chubbier version of April, that still looks pregnant, but the fact is that WEIGHT LOSS TAKES MONTHS, NOT DAYS.

When I’m pregnant, my body handles food and exercise completely differently.  It clings on to every bite I eat.  I have gained 55 pounds every single time, save this last time.  This time I gained 40ish.

By the time the baby is 9 months old, I almost always have it whittled off.  I can’t tell you how to get stick-skinny because I’m not stick-skinny, but I can definitely tell you how I lost 40-55 pounds.  ; )

Oh!  And you have to give the tummy circumference extra time.  After giving birth more than once, it may take you up to two years to get your middle shrunk back all the way, and you may always have a little extra skin.

APRIL’S RULES FOR WEIGHT LOSS:

1.  Breastfeeding.  If you can, at least give it a try.  It takes a while to see results, but eventually you should.  I have friends that didn’t have to do anything more than breastfeed.  I have other friends that breastfeeding did not help at all with the weight loss.  It definitely helps me lose the weight faster because it burns so many calories.

2.  DO NOT SIGN UP FOR A DIET PLAN.  Boooooooooo diets!!!  Don’t do it.  Crash diets do not work, and any weight you lose from the one month you’re able to stick to your crazy diet plan will just come back when you wake up and realize that that Nutrisystem food tastes disgusting.  (It does.  I’ve tasted it.)

3.  DO make permanent changes in what you buy at the grocery store, and try to get your husband on board.  (That’s the tricky part.)  One year after having Daniel, I realized that I had actually gained a bunch of weight while my husband was in Afghanistan for 6 months.  This was not pregnancy weight.  This was sedentary lifestyle weight.  I knew I had to get it back in gear.  First I read this book:

  She will drill into your head great fundamentals of eating right.  For me, it was a great reminder that I do not have to have dessert every day.

Then I made these dietary changes:

a. I cut out soda.  (except for a treat once every couple of weeks)

b. I stopped buying any junk food at all.  Not even Oreos.  Since that time, Alan has added back in buying ice cream (ugh).  I guess I need to get back on his case.  If it’s not in your kitchen, you can’t eat it.  It’s really that simple.

c.  I replaced the junk food with these snacks:

-greek yogurt

-yogurt covered raisins

-popcorn  (Read the label.  It’s not bad.)

-almonds

-100 calorie granola bars

-blackberries

-cheese

-cheese and crackers

-cereal

Pssssst!  You know all those articles that tell you not to drink juice, etc.  Well, okay, fine, it’s worse than water, but it has HALF the sugar of soda.  Also, coffee is extremely beneficial to your health, and it fills you up too!

4.  Oatmeal makes a great meal, any day, any time.  That wasn’t really a change, as I’ve always eaten oatmeal, but I just wanted to put that out there. ; )  It doesn’t have to be complicated and time consuming to be healthy.  These health magazines make it way too hard with all the complicated recipes with ingredients you’ve never heard of.  Instant oatmeal is just fine.

5.  EXERCISE.  Every day!!!!   I’m not talking P90X or Insanity everyday.  That is not my style.  Who has time for that?  Not a mom of lots of little ones!  You work in exercise wherever you can.  Buy DVDs that are 30 minute programs, or sometimes I just cut the long ones off at 30 minutes.    Just make sure that at least once a week you’re doing some kind of strength training.  I also do stretching at least once/week to keep back pain away.  Ever since my yoga teacher moved, I am a wreck.

WALKING IS GREAT EXERCISE!  Plus, it can give you alone time.  Whenever possible, as many days a week as Alan gets home before dark, I leave all the kids with Alan and hit the sidewalk for a 2 mile walk. Sanity time!  Remember!!  Jesus always went off alone to pray!  We should too!

In addition to that exercise, I walk my children home from school.  That adds in another mile, and when you add in pushing a double stroller, it is a significant work out.

If you really want to torch calories fast, RUN, or attend a strength training class.

My most successful weight loss was not related to pregnancy at all.  It was after that Afghanistan tour, when Daniel, my 3rd son, was a toddler.  I actually got to the point of no chubby middle section because I worked out really, really hard every single day.  I was doing a whole lot of running, and a little bit of weight lifting.

I will have to get my anemia under control before I can work out like that again!  I’m too tired to even think about all that stuff.  Meanwhile, I’ve still lost 45 pounds just breastfeeding, walking, doing yoga, and not buying cookies or soda!

6. DO NOT count calories.  Just eat somewhat healthy, and when you’re starting to feel full, you know, QUIT EATING.

7.  Sleep! Sometimes you might just be getting a late snack to stay awake.  Instead, assert your will power, and go to bed.

8.  EAT EVERY THREE HOURS, and duh, don’t skip breakfast.  Eating every three hours keeps you from getting that starving feeling that makes you pig out.  It also boosts your metabolism. Snacks should be small but nutritionally helpful.

9.  Oh yeah!  If you have a c-section OR even tearing from a natural birth, do NOT exercise until 6 weeks out.  Trust me.  I thought I could be all tough and carry around two babies at once, two weeks after giving birth, and there were busted stitches as a result.  Youch. You don’t want that. ALWAYS wait six weeks.

I wish I had more before/after pics to share, but I’m so vain that I always delete my ‘fat’ pictures…. However, I do not delete pregnancy photos, so here are a few of those:

See, I’m not one of those thin pregnant women….

As you can see, I never really posed for any ‘before’ or ‘after’ pictures, because the weight loss was always so gradual.  That’s the kind of change that lasts.  It doesn’t have to be complicated to live a healthy lifestyle.  Just get moving, and skip the non-nutritive foods at the grocery store!

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Thankfully, it has not been so long since I exercised that Daniel had forgotten.  I said to him, “Daniel are you ready to exercise!?”  And Daniel did not miss a beat!  He ran to the cabinet, pulled out the 2s for him, and the 5s and 6s for me.  He was doing the postnatal bootcamp right along with me.

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