Introspective thoughts on why I'm NOT a size 6 (or even an 8 or 10!)

I have assembled my little zippered handbag and have begun the bead work. Beading is a funny process. At first, I always seem to think that I am just going to accent a few details and leave it at that. Then I get into it and I begin to notice more about what my little project is saying to me.

I am hopelessly domestic. I am the mother who brings homemade cookies to the dance recital. I am the one who works two weeks on a knitted scarf, wraps it tinted cellophane and presents it to my daughter's piano teacher at the end of the year. I am the one who writes sympathy cards to the bereaved and then walks down to the post office to choose an appropriate stamp. I make macaroni and cheese for my girls, with a fresh cream sauce, four cheeses, grated nutmeg, and breadcrumbs made from my homebaked bread. I paint portraits of my friends' pets. I am almost ridiculously proud of my children.

What I am most emphatically NOT is glamourous. I have friends who can look like a million bucks as effortlessly as I can patch my husband's jeans. I haven't a particle of sense when it comes to personal elan. I have worn the same hairstyle, if you can call bangs chopped off straight across the brow with a kitchen knife and the rest pulled back into a banana clip "style", since the seventh grade. I have worn the same Doc Marten clunky sandals since I was pregnant with my second child because they are comfortable. I eat delicious food with total abandonment and precious little guilt.

None of these are crimes, I know. In fact, I am happy with the adult I turned out to be. I like NoApologies' statement about herself on her blog. "I am not fat, but certainly not thin." Me, too. The psychic energy that would be required to get me back into my twenties body would be so monumental, I just throw my hands up in the air and enjoy my evening walks instead. I am not saying I wouldn't like to look adorable and firm again. It's just not a priority (or terribly realistic, to be honest). I know women who are hanging on with enameled fingernails, clinging with an ever-growing desperation to the attractive young girls they used to be. But how important is it really to turn strangers' heads? I'll let that fall to the young. I am now at an age where all teenagers are beautiful. All of them.

Gosh, blogging makes me introspective...

Okay, I hate to be one of those tiresome mommies who brags incessantly about her offspring, although I guess you had better get used to it (tee hee). But my five year old just came downstairs with this statement for me. "I was thinking about putting a carnie wheel (she means ferris wheel) in our front yard, and maybe the city WON'T get on us." Can you tell we've had a few tangles with the city? Question authority, I always say!