We can breathe again

We are all healthy. We are all home. We are all (relatively) happy. Finally!

After Jeremy got home from his second trip, I went away to Moab for the weekend with some friends from church. It was like an extended high school slumber party, except with no parents nagging us to go to bed. Which, I know I'm getting old because I went to bed by midnight both nights even though I could have slept as late as I wanted.

Arches National Park. Is stunning. Lodging is really cheap in the off-season, especially if you go with some friends. You can look at pictures on the Internet all day if you want to, but nothing even comes close to the real thing. I got some pictures on my phone, but I haven't looked at them on a computer yet. My camera is not the most fanciest ever, so they might be garbage. If not, I'll post some.

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I'm so tired I could probably pass out right now without any Ambien. To illustrate: I typed "assistance" four times before I got it right.

I did a longish workout video this afternoon, and THEN I went to the pool and swam 1700 yards. Okay, no, that's not very much. Not at all. In high school, we'd swim three times that in one practice.

But now? Well, six months ago, I could barely swim 100 yards at a time. Tonight I made up a workout as I went along, decided to do my cool down when I started feeling lousy, and then my cool down turned into 700 yards of nonstop swimming. A month ago, I got all excited when I finally broke 500 yards at the BEGINNING of a workout.

I love feeling strong and energetic again. I don't feel like I'm constantly lugging an extra carcass around on my shoulders. There's a long way to go yet, but I crossed some kind of threshold in the last few weeks. A little more muscle, a little less dead weight, and all of a sudden I have enough energy to get through the day, keep the house clean, be nice to the kids, and then voluntarily go work out at the end of it all.

My sister has been helping a lot. We post our respective weekly schedules on each others' walls on Monday, and then hold each other accountable. Or, rather, she holds me accountable. She doesn't appear to need quite as much motivation as I do.

And on Mondays and Wednesdays, I do water aerobics with a church friend. It's actually pretty hard work, if you push yourself. It's also way more fun than swimming laps, if you're a social person.

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Speaking of my sister, a friend of hers works for a cloth diaper company (Sustainable Babyish). My prefolds were starting to get ragged (thanks, hard water, for requiring me to launder the snot out of my diapers), and I was thinking I'd have to buy more, but hey, my sister says, I have a gazillion of these diapers to give to you for free. Merry Christmas!

And they are so great. It takes them a while to get to their full absorbency potential, but once they do, you could just about soak up a small pond with one. I really recommend them, if you have the funds. I'm thinking about getting some REALLY good covers and giving nighttime cloth diapers another go. It's been a complete failure with everything else we've tried except for Huggies Overnites, which pretty much cost as much as the kid itself does, and that's pretty annoying.

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Emmy turns two in four days. Yes. Emmy. THE BABY. I don't know whether to be excited or to sob. She still has the baby face, which Grace never had. This helps. But still, she's much more little girl than baby.

We want at least one more, badly (once we sell that house), but I love that I'm getting to enjoy her personality coming alive instead of having just enough mental and emotional energy to get through the day with a newborn and a toddler. She is so willful and such a clown. It's a terrible combination, since she comes thisclose to adorabling her way out of almost everything. But I thoroughly enjoy her even as she's trying to manipulate me.

I need to go to bed. But that is our life during the last few weeks. Mundane, but overall, pretty good.