Mr. Clean, Mr. Clean!

I was hopeful but skeptical when Ginger mentioned trying out the Mr. Clean Magic Eraser right after we moved here. We bought one package and each took one to try. Gin later reported that it worked for her, so I was looking forward to trying it out on Ava's crib, which was hopelessly scarred and marred by its neighboring contents on our moving truck. I never got around to working on the crib during Ava's waking hours, so before my in-laws came for a visit, I broke down and used it in the half bathroom that obviously needed a serious paint job before we moved into this apartment. It really does work! All the coffee-colored drippy-looking I-don't-even-want-to-know-what-caused-those nasty stains located all over the lower part of the wall next to the toilet are GONE. Banished. Eradicated. Magically erased. The product worked so well that I had to do the entire bathroom just so the walls wouldn't be two-toned. And they'll send you one free to try out if you visit the site! If I were the "Queen of Clean" I'd definitely stamp my seal of approval on this product!

America the Underactive and Dehydrated

There is too much clutter in my home. It is making me feel ill every day. Well, that and the fact that I am consistently drinking too little water, eating too much sugar, and generally getting no exercise. I need a fairy godmother to wave her wand over my clutter-ridden apartment and a timer watch to beep every thirty minutes to remind me to drink my water, for starters. As for the sweets, I think I wouldn't be craving so much if I would get rid of the clutter and drink my water. And I know it's time to pull out the Walk Away the Pounds videos now that I'm a year post partum and can no longer rely on the research that suggests women should take it easy on their bodies for a year beyond giving birth. It's time to get rid of the blubber, even if I am thin and certainly not overweight. I'm told the stretch marks and linea negra down my belly are here to stay, but I don't have to live with the blubber. But I'm sort of lazy about exercising, so this is a real challenge. Maybe I should suggest to ABC that they create some sort of reality show for new moms working off their baby weight. Why not? Everything else seems to be reality show material. Have you seen the flab on these guys on The Biggest Loser? Why must they remove their shirts for weigh-in anyway? WHY!? The women weigh in with a shirt on, so I think they guys should too, to make it equal. That shirt only makes a few ounces of difference anyway, and they could spare American the show of disgusting excess fat. We all know they are overweight. We get it. We don't need to see it. If we want to be grossed out, we will watch Fear Factor. You know it's even in syndication now!? What does that say about our culture? The reason we are all overweight is we are too busy sitting on our duffs (probably with a nice serving of Ben & Jerry's) watching people eat bugs on Fear Factor (or avoiding it like crazy with our remote controls from our cushy La-Z-boys) or having their teeth whitened and hair colored on some makeover show or letting some guy demolish and recreate their home in a unbelievably short period of time to actually have time to take care of ourselves. Who has time when there's reality television to watch, right? And besides, we've all worked hard all day...we're tired. We've earned an evening on the couch to continue the process of body deterioration, right? It's not our fault our society is generally overweight, battling heart disease, stroke, and cancer more than ever, is it? This is just happening to us! "They" aren't supplying enough drugs to make our bodies tolerant of inactivity and overeating! It's "their" fault! Right? Wrong. We need to take responsibility as a collective society, and that starts with individuals like me. It is MY fault that I am allowing the baby fat to hang on. I could be doing something about it, but I'm not. It is MY fault that I have a half-gallon of Edy's ice cream in my freezer now that there was a great sale at the store. It is MY fault that I couldn't stop at six chocolate chip cookies this weekend and proceeded to cook the rest of the cookie dough squares last night. It is time to get off my duff and walk away the pounds while my one-year-old watches and learns a good habit. I hope she never has to teach herself to take care of her body like I am having to do. I hope it comes naturally for her. Something she never even thinks about because it is so automatic. I hope she doesn't find a Happy Meal to be all that interesting (despite everyone's assessment that that makes me un-American). I hope I can replace my bad habits with healthy ones before she is old enough to remember. And I hope that means she will know a healthy Mama even when she is old and gray...and healthy.

Cravings defeat otherwise healthy woman

I don't have to be pregnant to have cravings; I have had non-pregnancy cravings for as long as I can remember. I vaguely remember a night during my adolesence when my dad even went out for fresh peaches just to shut me up. I am convinced that, like most things, cravings must be hormonally-driven. A food craving will just eat away at me until I finally consume the craved delicacy. I can try to wait it out or eat something else instead (something I already have in my pantry, something that doesn't require a late-night trip to Kroger or the dreaded-but-so-much-closer Food Lion), but I have years of experience telling me that is futile. "Go ahead and indulge in chocolate cake with chocolate icing before it becomes chocolate cake with chocolate icing AND Blue Bell Natural Vanilla Bean ice cream [the mother of all ice creams]." (Britt learned this lesson the hard way sometime around my 8th week of pregnancy.) Postponing the indulgence is just the beginning of a process of packing in even MORE calories than I would have over-consumed by indulging in the object of my craving to begin with. If it's chocolate chip cookies I crave, chocolate chips eaten straight from the Nestle bag (perhaps with a side of natural almonds to keep me from eating too many morsels) will not satisfy my desire for chocolate chip cookies! Food cravings become a NEED more than a delightful idea. There is a huge difference between "Mmmm...that sounds good," and "Oh, Britton, I have had been craving Italian cream cake all week."

I bake things from scratch as a general rule of preference. It's usually deemed "not worth the calories" to eat convenience delicacies. An exception was granted last weekend, when I discovered the Nestle Toll House refrigerated chocolate chip cookie squares after a several-week-long craving episode with no end in sight and no time to whip up a recipe for 5 dozen cookies (and no mathematical energy to half the recipe). This was quite a craving to not only convince me to accept a convenience variety of the craved item, but also to pay a premium for said item when I found myself in the refrigerated section without my Kroger Plus Shopper's Card. That is some powerful desire! Well, the American Culinary Institute was right to award these cookies the Best Taste Award 2004. They were just what the craving ordered that night.

Practicing conscientious restraint, I retained several of the cookie squares for the next time I crave chocolate chip cookies. But tonight my mind knew they were in there waiting to be cooked. They were in there calling out to me! I had to cook them! Is this how men feel when they just can't shake the desire for sex, no matter how much they think about baseball instead? Now, I have warm, chewy, delicious cookies to eat. Every bite is a party in my mouth! There's just nothing like satisfying a craving. Now if only I could tweak my hormones to want sex this badly and this often...

Displayed Taxidermy

There are some things you think but just don't dare say out loud for fear that it will one day come back to bite you in the butt. You know, the "I would NEVER..." statements. I am an opinionated person with a tendency to say what I think right when I think it. Knowing this, I try to avoid the "I would NEVER..." sentence structure altogether.

I saw an ad on television the other day offering cash for outdated fur coats or some such nonsense. Several young women were parading around outside in obnoxious (er, I mean, "luxurious") full-length fur coats with a TV-announcer-man voice over appealing to those of us who keep outdated fur coats hanging around begging to be traded in for more modern fur coats to trade said coats in now. Now, I have several problems with this. First of all, does anyone know a young suburban-mom-type woman who wears a fur coat? Where are these women!? And for the love of Pete why, WHY, would they own a fur coat, let alone wear one? What on earth do you wear a fur coat to in 2004 anyway? Maybe I'm just not in the right echelon of society to get it. Secondly, how does a fur coat become outdated? Isn't it just "fur coat style" in the first place? How many ways are there to fashion dead animal skins around oneself anyway? All fur coats just look like long straight pieces of dead animal skin hanging from an otherwise reasonable-looking woman, sometimes with small dead creatures "stylishly" affixed to the lapel. I nearly fainted one day as I thumbed through my baby's clothes and saw a bug-like figure on a shirt (turned out to be a 3/4 inch beetle); if my coat ever had a dead animal hanging from it, I'd be so freaked out by it while rummaging through my closet some day that my husband would seriously have to have me committed! What is the appeal, people!? I have never fully understood the appeal of any kind of displayed taxidermy, but I have always assumed that is because I am female, and females just don't have the need to display to our manly friends just how many "points" were on our latest "kill" or whatever. Obviously these fur-bearing women didn't hunt down these coat critters, but wearing them still seems like a prudish taxidermy display to me. I digress...

By the time that fifteen seconds were over, I felt confident that I could say aloud to anyone "I would NEVER buy a fur coat." EVER. (And I'm not even vegetarian.)