Hot Dogs, High School Musical Tanks, & Summer Fun

Cade and I are loving summer. We go to the pool nearly everyday, and totally dig the waterslide. The pic of him going down the waterslide (thanks Laur for taking the pic) is phenomenal - to me, it depicts the epitome of childhood happiness - what it should be like: full of adventure and trust and fun.

Cade and I got together with friends and my sisters this afternoon for hot dogs and sprinklers. I decided to sport my $2.99 special tank that everybody delighted in making fun of me for. Whatevs. Zac Efron's my peep.

And can I just say I am mucho delighting in my summer tan?

A Glimpse of Light in the Dark

My blog is an invaluable tool in my recovery. I began it on a whim; because all of my friends were, it seemed, and it was time for me to join the blogolution, I was told. I was violently against journaling, and I was wary to begin a blog because it seemed, essentially; like online journaling – I mean really, it is.

But I began it. Hesitantly. And I found, quite suddenly and surprisingly, that I loved it. Passionately. It became an outlet for me, something to focus on rather than the killer inside me, anorexia. It began because “everybody was doing it,” and it transformed into a path to self-discovery. I was able to see through the haze of calories and bones and weight loss that there was more to me. I learned that I could be funny. I realized I very much enjoyed writing satirical pieces. And what’s more, people liked to read my blog. I have had many emails from people all over the world whom I’ve never met thank me for my blog and the humor and hope I write about. I was humbled. And awed. I was making a difference, however small. I was something more than anorexia.

So in April I began my quest once again for weight gain, for real and true recovery (whatever that is). And you all watched and cheered as I got a feeding tube placed, as I slowly but surely gained weight and regained health. Some of my posts were happy and funny, and some were sad, and perhaps a little melancholy as I came to terms with weight gain and some un-fun things in my life. I’ve felt unsteady with my new body, and you all kept me going, kept gently reminding me that life was worth it.

But then.

This past month has almost been unlike anything I have ever experienced before. The depression I am wandering through is heavy, consuming. All-encompassing. It stifles me, presses its profound weight on me so that it suffocates me and I can hardly move my hands or legs or head, for the weight of it wearies me. I vacillate between an endless darkness with no light in sight to an anxiety that is so jarring, so razor-sharp, that it sends me to the bathroom hyperventilating and vomiting.

I do not know what is wrong with me. I only know that I have been desperately trying to hold on, with the help of my friends and my family and my treatment team. I (finally) see my psychiatrist later this week, and the will-power it has taken to make it through to my appointment with him has taken more indomitable strength than I believed I possessed.

My parents have been fervently praying for me. My husband, so worried, has not been able to work because I could not be alone, and, in this state, could not work either. He murmurs a prayer for me every few minutes, and continually keeps me in his heart.

And then.

And then and then and then.

Today, at 3:34 pm, the fog lifted. Just a little. I could see light. I could see that there is goodness in my life and in this world, even if it is far from me at present.

I smiled. I laughed. I picked up Cade and threw him in the air and gave him hugs and kisses.

I did a load of laundry.

I showered without being prompted by Brandon to do so.

And I sat down to write this blog.

To let you know that
It’s going to be
okay.

I'm going to be gone for awhile.

Happy 4th

Have a great independence day weekend everybody. Go freedom!

BMI, SchmeeMI

Ugh. This calculator is not an accurate measure of body weight and health. We all know it doesn’t measure the amount of fat vs muscle you have, so you could be deemed overweight by the damned calculator, when in reality, you just have a lot of muscle and probably look smokin’ in a swimsuit.

So, my question is this:

Why do health professionals (coughmydieticiancough) still use it? Really. Please? Someone tell me!

49

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed.

I've read almost half - that's pretty sweet. Many of these are on my list, I just haven't gotten to them yet, for one reason or another. This is definitely the nerdy bookworm side of Brie that doesn't come out all that often!

Look at the list and bold those you have read.

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austin
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkein
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible - New Testament - I have read much of it, but not all
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck - my all time favorite book
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres -
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel - on my bookshelf
52. Dune - Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte's Web - EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Feeding Tube & Other Stuff

Okay, well, to update on the feeding tube (it's been awhile, hasn't it?): my D is allowing me to only put it in 3x a week now, on Mon, Wed, and Sat when I go to my yoga class so that I can especially make up for any burned calories. I’ve made a lot of progress as far as weight gain goes, then have lost a bit, so I’m working to perhaps gain it back on my own without having to rely on the tube entirely. A huge fear of mine (and my treatment team’s) is that I’ll get so reliant on the tube; I won’t eat much solid food. I definitely don’t want to do that, so I’m happy for the chance to use it only 3x a week and see if I can manage.

I absolutely adore my yoga class. It’s YOGAMAZING, if you will. I love the mind/body connection, and how it’s about strength and endurance and not cardio and calorie burning and weight loss. Last night when the hour was up, I was so disappointed. I could have gone on forever.

Here are a couple of pictures of the kitten. He’s pictured with my mental kitten, Hairy. Bobbi wouldn’t pose with them, she’s still miffed about the small mammal using her littler space and eating her food and sniffing around her butt et al.

The Cadester is doing great. He’ll be two next month, I can’t even believe it. Since I lost my camera, (I can’t even talk about it, I’m so upset) I can’t post a plethora of adorable pics, but I’ll post this one – I stole it from my friend Laurie’s blog. That’s her little boy, Conner, who is hella cute. As you can see Cade’s big and blonde babymazing. He talks like crazy now, and strings three and four and five words together already. He’s great at communicating what he wants and needs. When I pick him up from the babysitter, he’ll inform me the whole way home that he was scared. “I scared,” he says, over and over. ...

Unfortunately, as you can tell, he seems to have a tender little sensitive personality like his mama. When I nap, he’ll say, “Mama tired. Night-night mama,” and kiss me goodnight. He’s my perfect sweet angel baby, and he’s so fun to have around. His current obsession is his shoes. He always has to be wearing either his Crocs or sandals. And he’ll tell me which he wants to wear, and it switches all the time – sometimes it gets old because he wants it changed all. the. time. This morning, the first thing he said to me as I pulled him out of the crib to get him ready, was “Cwocs, mama. Cwocs.” I put on his sannals (sandals) and he was mad, but I couldn’t find the other cwoc. He definitely is a small man who knows what he wants – and he lets everyone know. He subsists mainly on mac ‘n cheese and waffles and gummy bears. I can barely get him to eat much more, which is a bummer, but the kid loves to go through weird food phases, as do all toddlers, so I’m hoping his propensity for narrowing his food choices are a sign of him “just being a toddler,” rather than “having a mom who has an eating disorder and therefore passes on weirdness to him.” Yikes.

What else? Not much, I guess. Loving the summer heat, and when I’m not loving it, I’m cursing the ozone and the faulty atmosphere and global warming for making it so damn hot. This is usually when I’m in my un-air conditioned car, sweat trickling down my back and neck and me not being able to hear myself think because the windows are rolled down on the freeway, and it’s pretty deafening. Seriously. I can’t even think about it, it just makes me all tight and angry inside.

Okay, well, sorry this post was neither funny nor interesting. I just don’t seem to have much to post about lately.