I’d just finished putting the DragonMonkey to bed when I happened to walk by the large mirror we have hanging in the entrance.

What I saw there stopped me in my tracks.

Huh.

Wow.

I looked good.

No, no, I’m not being vain.  You know what I’m talking about.  Some days, no matter how hard you try, or how many layers of makeup you slather on, you just look awful.    Everyone has those days – you got a great night’s sleep, you spent time on your hair, you just finished some disgustingly healthy lunch and chased it with more than enough water, you’ve got your most flattering outfit on….. and yet still look like you just finished three straight days of hard drinking and partying in a dirty section of Tijuana.

Last night I should have looked like that.  I was tired.  The kids have been sick.  I had run a brush through my wet hair twelve hours earlier and not touched it since.  It was late, and I felt beat.  I didn’t have a lick of make up on. 

Yet when I looked in the mirror, my eyes were bright, my skin was clear, and my hair was falling in glorious, luxurious waves around my shoulders.

If I sucked in my belly and twisted my hips juuuuust so, I not only looked good, I looked really good.

Sweeeeeeeet.

Unfortunately, with the kids in bed and The Bean in his night class, there was no one around to witness it.

Well, shoot.

After a few minutes  of preening in front of the mirror and admiring all the gorgeous neat things my hair had decided to do simply because there was nobody was around to witness it, I finally figured out what to do.

I needed a picture of this minor miracle.

I mean, I needed to be practical about what was happening.  By the next morning whatever magic I’d been dusted with would have faded and I will be back to looking disheveled and exhausted. 

I needed photographic evidence.

Besides, if I took a really nice photo, then I could update my Facebook profile pic.  See, it wasn’t just narcissistic.  I was being practical.  Right?  Right.

I had seen those cute photos that girls were always taking of themselves on Facebook.  All you had to do was hold your camera at arm’s length, smile, and voila!  Instant cuteness.

How hard could it be?

Famous. Last. Words.

I grabbed my cherry chapstick to add a little color to my lips, picked up my camera phone, and snapped a quick pic of myself.

It was too dark to see it.

So I turned on the kitchen light and the flash on the camera, and tried again.

In addition to making an incredibly stupid expression, I blinded myself with the flash.  Ow.

Well, that wasn’t going to work.  

Obviously I was going to have to do one of those “I’m looking pensively off in the distance at something that is causing me to appear deep in thought” type pictures if I wanted to be able to avoid permanently blinding myself with the flash.

I took another pic and looked at the result:

Wow.  Uh…… Wow.  That was so not the look I was going for.  I look like I’m about to be attacked by something evil that’s going to try to eat my face off.

I mean, I look pretty calm for the fact that I’m about to be devoured by an evil worm monster, but it really wasn’t what I had in mind to show off to the world.

Obviously I needed to just look kind of forward, and let my face relax.  I wanted a candid, normal looking picture, not something that was heavily posed.

 Okay, maybe I didn’t need to look that relaxed.  I looked like a stoner.  A smile.  That’s what I needed, a nice, normal looking smile.

 

Blurry.

I took another photo.

1. Nobody is making me take these pictures.  I want to take them.
2. There is no time limit on taking these pictures. 
3. From the time I lift my arm to take the picture between the time I actually snap the picture it’s only about 3-4 seconds.  Think about this.  I got bored and distracted in a 3-4 second time frame in the middle of a project I am voluntarily working on.
4. There’s nobody in the house with me except for the two sleeping kids and the sleeping dog.  Who am I even talking to?  What am I saying?  What on earth was so important that I just HAD to start talking to myself right then?   

I took about thirty photos.

Crooked photos.  Blurry photos.  Photos where my glasses are crooked.  Photos of the wall.  Photos of the underside of my chin.

In at least half of the photos my eyes are closed.

The other half of the photos have my eyes open abnormally wide, in a desperate attempt to not have yet ANOTHER photo with my eyes closed.

In each subsequent photo you can see my facial expressions became increasingly annoyed.

By the end of my modeling session my photos were turning out like this:

Just in case you ever get the chance to meet me in person, I think I’ll give you fair warning:  If you ever see this expression on my face — RUN.  Just turn around and run.  That is not a smile on my face.  That is a barely controlled snarl.  This is what happens when I take my “HOLY CRAP I’M SO ANNOYED I’M GOING TO CHEW UP AN INNOCENT BABY KITTEN AND SPIT OUT BULLETS” look and then try to cover it up with a fake smile. 

Thirty photos, people.  Thirty.  I ended up with one semi-serviceable photo that I got by accident when I was testing the different camera functions.

No, I don’t look happy.  No, I’m not smiling.  No, it’s not in color.  But it’s not blurry, both my eyes are  open, and I don’t look like I’m about to leap forward and attack the camera… or worse, run away because I look like the camera is about to leap forward and attack me.  I consider this photo to be an overwhelming success.

So, what’s the point of this blog post?  Well, let me just say this.  I learned a lot about myself last night.

I learned that professional modeling is not in my future.

I learned that I apparently have a deep-seated phobia of cameras – at least, that’s what it looked like judging from my wide-eyed, frightened expression in the majority of the pictures.

I learned that I was born without the “smile for the camera!” gene.  I imagine this gene is paired with the “ability to do makeup“, “put together nice outfits“, “likes to go clothes shopping“, and “do something other than stand around awkwardly when another woman bursts into tears” genes.  Apparently, I am missing that entire subsection of genes.  I think they have been replaced by an extra helping of the the “Must Read Books” and “Look!  A horse!  LOOOK! A HORSE!!!!” genes.

I learned that I have the attention span of a gnat.  I mean, I knew it was bad, but I didn’t know it was quite that bad.

And, finally, I learned that I’m more than a little jealous of those girls who squish their faces together and take easy, adorable self-portraits. 

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go back to the things I’m good at.  I’ve got a half-finished book and an entire Internet full of horses to be looked at and drooled over. 

The title says it all.

Squidgelet is a year old.  According to all the manuals, all the chub you have left on you when your baby hits a year is YOUR fat, not baby fat.

Well, crap.

I mean, there are some good things about being fat.

I never get cold any more.

When I go see a movie, I don’t have to worry about the seat cushion being too hard – I’ve brought my own squishy seat cushion with me.

When I’m out for a walk I don’t have to worry about anybody whistling at me like they used to.

I float great in water.  Between that and the never getting cold, I imagine I could be a pretty serious competitor at long-distance cold water swimming.  

I do know I’d kick some serious heiny at a game of “Who Can Survive the Longest Without Food on a Desert Island”.  Anyone want to play with me?  Winner gets to eat all the losers!  Anyone?  You there, in the back— is that a hand?  No?

At any rate, it was time to do something about it.

I dragged the boys with me down to my local 24 Hour Fitness and got ready to pay the $8 for childcare that it normally costs to work out.  I used to get up before work to work out, but I’ve been pushing so hard in all the other areas of my life, I just feel like I need to get a full night’s sleep.  Living with RA is kind of like living with a really grumpy bear – when it’s in “hibernating”  you’ve got to judge just how much “noise” you can make going about with your daily life.  If you make too much “noise” (stress, exhaustion, stress, over-exertion, stress), the bear comes roaring hungrily out of its cave, and heaven help any helpless little joint that gets in its way.  My “bear” has been tossing and turning restlessly lately, so I’m doing what I can to soothe it back to sleep.  That means that working out before work just isn’t in the cards at the moment.

Unfortunately, at $8 a pop for childcare, working out more than 1 or 2 times a week isn’t in the financial cards, either.

Imagine my surprise when I went to sign in and found out that the gym was having a special – Holy Crap.  $10 per kid, PER MONTH, and I could work out as often as I wanted?

I could feel my thighs getting toned, just listening to it.

Thrilled beyond belief, I reached into my purse to grab my wallet…

Only to discover I’d left it at home.

So I dragged both kids back to the car, loaded them up, and drove home.

“Gym? GYM?  GYM?!” wailed the DragonMonkey, upset at the sudden change of plans.  “Play wif da twuck at da gym?  PLEASE?  GYMGYMGYM?!”

I unloaded them out of the car, searched the house, found my wallet, loaded them back in the car, and drove back to the gym.

“GYM?  We awr going to da gym?  GYM?  PWEASE? GYMGYMGYM?!”

 I pulled into the parking lot, unloaded both boys out of the car, and headed into the gym.

 Life used to be so much simpler back in the days when I hopping in and out of a car wasn’t a 10 minute ordeal.

After checking them in and a fruitless attempt at soothing the Squidgelet’s tears, I managed to sneak out and into the busy gym.

I changed and briefly stretched, then hopped onto an elliptical machine.  Sure, I was sandwiched in between a 17 year old toned goddess and a young Brad Pitt, both of whom were wearing beautiful, expensive workout outfits.  Yes, I was wearing wrinkly pajama bottoms and my husband’s old t-shirt, but who cared?   It was just a matter of time.  With the new workout special, I could afford to work out seven days a week, if I wanted to.  Why, in just a few month’s time, that would be me on the elliptical, flaunting my toned body in a too-tight lycra uniform.  Just knowing I had this freedom was giving me a spring in my step.

I increased the resistance and incline of the machine, legs pumping in time with the bass of the music piped in over the speakers.  Boo-yah.  Less than two minutes into my 30 minute set, and I could already feel my muscles warming up.  This was going to be great.  Feel the burn, feel the burn, feel the…

“Becky Bean, please report to Kid’s Club.  Becky Bean, please report to Kid’s Club.”

With a start, I shut off the machine, grabbed the ratty kitchen towel that I was using as my workout towel, and opened the door to childcare room.

The smell of vomit assaulted me immediately.

“He, uh, he got sick…” the childcare worker trailed off, swallowing a gag as she attempted to do damage control.  The Squid was howling, purple-faced, his entire outfit, the bouncy, and carpet all dripping with throw-up.  It looked absolutely impossible for there to be that much throw-up, and yet… there it was.

“Here, don’t worry about it.  I’ll clean it up.”  I grabbed The Squid and lifted him to me, doing my best to ignore the feeling of his puke-drenched clothes soaking into mine. 

Ten minutes and 3,000 paper towels later, I dragged both kids out to the car again.

“GYM?  No, I wanna pway at da gym!  No, mama!  No, no wanna go!  GYM? GYM?! GYM?! GYM!?”

That was last Monday.  It has now been nine days of coughing, sleepless nights, and puking from the flu.  I have not been back to the gym yet. 

Also:

Dear Flu Bug:

Please go away and quit picking on my two children.  They were both skinny to begin with.  They really didn’t need days of puking.  I’m starting to feel like I’m carting around little Auschwitz babies.  If you wanted to pick on someone, why not pick on me?  I wouldn’t minded having a little bit of the flu.  It might have been good for at least five pounds.

Sincerely,

Becky Bean

http://www.hulu.com/embed/M12h0LZQBaPz9-9y4hzpZQ