We've started to adjust our work schedule to where we have Saturdays off and while this gives us one full day off a week (we clean after church on Sundays but it takes less than an hour) it does make the whole proper meals each night and time to exercise...I guess time to
sleep too...more difficult.
Jabber, do not take this the wrong way. One full day out of seven to live your lives is not enough to live a life in. The time at the end of the day and the food at the end of the day and the taking our mates to bed at the end of the day ~ those things are life, Jabber.
Waking up with our mates in the morning, feeling them beside us in the night. That is the fire that brings our lives to life, and you both need that time, Jabber. There is no time like the waking up when the sun is there before you open your eyes and your mate is in your bed with you and you have the living glory of
time.
If you are really having a great waking up, someone will bring you fresh, hot coffee with cream and the paper.
Ironed.
Everything fresh and right and clean and safe.
Take Lil to a great hotel and have that morning.
Like the president said in his State of the Nation speech: "They were young and in love and living in America."
That's us.
It's like tending a fire, in a way.
Once the fire goes out, once it burns in the same way every time you approach it, there seems no longer to be a need for the fire, for romancing the fire, of our lives. We begin to pick at things ~ ourselves, one another; this, that, or the next momentary diversion. Novelty is an adequate replacement for fire, sometimes.
Punishing ourselves can absolutely become an adequate replacement for fire. But here is a secret. We are the carriers of the fire. All we need to do to rekindle it is decide to do so.
This is not a matter of pounds or inches or even, muscle mass. (Though muscle mass is an excellent, desirable, and gloriously attainable thing, a triumphant "Yes!")
You are a romantic in your soul I think, Jabber.
Courtly love.
Your soul hungers for that degree of heroism and integrity.
Lil is your lady love.
Anybody got a match?
:O)
***
Ok, that's disturbing. Just made a cup of coffee and looked at the creamer nutritional information. I'm consuming almost 200 calories a day of non-dairy creamer. No other significant nutritional value. Disturbing. Time to start drinking it black. Or quit drinking it all together? One thing at a time.
I know what to do, just not how to do it.
Follow the fire.
You have already tried the other ways.
Follow the fire.
However you need to do that, follow the fire, and the other things ~ for both you and Lil ~ will fall into place.
That is something my husband taught me, actually. And he was very right.
It really all boils down to time.
www.flylady.com
She will take you, one step at a time over time, to a level of organization, cleanliness, and joy in yourselves and your home. Later in this thread, the idea of menu planning came up. There is a section on that in Flylady, I believe. The whole idea of this site is time, and what to do with it, and how to be who we intend to be. Food is part of that. Order in our surroundings is part of it.
One extra job a day. You set a timer and stop after 15 minutes.
That's the secret.
That, and starting by cleaning the kitchen sink.
:O)
I DO know that every horizontal surface in our house is dusty, the bathrooms are filthy, I can't remember the last time I vacuumed and I just can't seem to get any ambition to change the stuff I hate.
This happened to me too, Lil. I lost interest. There was no reason to make "home."
It's okay that this happened, and it will pass.
If you two do visit Flylady, there is a section where she walks us through those overwhelming feelings of too much stuff. We are supposed to go into whatever room we chose to do our fifteen minutes in that day with a basket for things we cannot bear to part with, a trash bag for trash, and a Goodwill bag.
Wishing our old possessions well, we send them off to someone who will cherish them. This is about faith. We have faith that our new lives, begun fifteen minutes at a time, will contain only things we cherish.
It turns out that the ways we choose to live our lives have much to do with how we have learned to love ourselves.
I hate to admit it, but I think mostly that carp is mine...so it will be both of us.
You could each do your own things. One works his or her fifteen minutes while the other begins dinner. Begin in faith that we are working toward having only those things in our lives that we cherish. After a time together and then, food, the other person does his or her fifteen minutes while the first person does the dishes.
Set a timer.
No more than fifteen minutes, or you will not be able to stick to it.
There has to be a time for each individual in the marriage and then, a time to come together before bedtime.
That's how we do it, at my house. My husband just got after the neighbors because down here, everyone always wants to stop over at people's houses, disrupting their evenings and their end of the day time.
That time is sacred.
Time is the only irreplaceable thing.
That is why I never come on here at night.
That time is sacred. Even if I hate just sitting there sometimes, I am sitting there with D H.
And so, we made our lives, one sacred, secret thing at a time. And before I knew it? There was a lifetime of sacred rhythms.
Not that I don't hate my D H sometimes. I do. And sometimes, he is actually foolish enough to think he hates me!
But that's okay. Life, married life for sure, is all about the rhythms.
Should I eat first or wait until I've walked before eating?
Walk. Who needs lunch?
On the size issue...Orson Wells. Picture Orson, majestic and authoritative and mesmerizing.
You can do this.
You both can do this.
You love one another so strong, it makes me want to cry in happiness to see it, to see the wonder of it.
:O)
Also, it is the caloric intake over a month's time that defines our size. Where are you squandering calories you don't cherish? Which are the things you cherish so much that budgeting them in is worth the things you will choose to go without to have them?
Remember too that now is the time your brain is adjusting to decreased levels of nicotine. Break through it.
You will not master your body. You will come to celebrate the wonder of the thing, and how it is that it makes it possible for you to experience the richness and over the brim fullness that is life. And if we are very fortunate?
To play with fire.
We need to get our lives more organized first.
I think you need to sleep more, first. Then, you need to sit with Lil near a river somewhere. When our lives are falling apart because our kids are self-destructing, we lose our better selves little by little. It is a strange feeling to make ourselves a priority again.
But I think that is the only place to begin.
Near water.
Let it wash you clean.
It's 30 calories a tablespoon for the sugar free. How many do you use? I figure I'm getting about 60, maybe 100 calories from creamer!
Now, multiply that by the thirty days of the month. Does anyone remember how many extra calories it takes to make a pound of fat? I am thinking 3,000.
I'm wondering if they'd be okay alone in the house for a whole hour? I've never left them alone uncrated for more than 1/2 hour in the past. (They eat anything and everything!)
What about gating them in the kitchen with the peanut butter treat idea mentioned on an earlier post? They would love it, and you would know they were safe.
difficult child son had Rottweilers. He would do that for them with peanut butter. They loved it.
Not the gating them in the kitchen part. One does not gate a Rottweiler.
***
I have told this story before. When things were at the worst of it for us, D H carved out a time sacred to us. He insisted that I give him this time, that I try.
So, I did.
It was the last thing I wanted to do, to spend time alone with my D H.
But I did.
For us, that was meeting in our own dining room at 5:30 every day. No phone. No computer. No television. I could have music. I chose Dean Martin because it set that time aside from anything to do with our daily lives and made it special, made that time a time out of time for us. When we hear Dean Martin today, it calls the (eventual) warmth and (even more spectacularly) the heat of those times for us.
We each had a Manhattan.
Sometimes, we had more than one, but not usually.
And the fire at the heart of our marriage, and the fire at the core of our home, was reignited.
That is what you are after. The fire and the passion and the joy that is married life. I think that if you set your minds and hearts on that, the other things ~ the weight issues, the time and stress issues ~ all that will resolve on its own, step by step.
We are married coming up on forty-three years, I think it is.
And there is still nowhere I am happier than in whatever bed we are in with my face right up next to my D H 's.
:O)
Cedar
The only other thing that I know is that if you go for the joy of the thing ~ the feeling of the sun and the wind on your skin when you walk, the scent and light and color of your home when you walk in (or the joy of the dogs or whatever it is that keys joy for you when you walk into the sanctuary of home) then motivation and discipline become momentary things suffused in joy.
It is true what they say. It is all about perception.
Duty is one thing, and will get you where you want to go, eventually. Joy is a better thing. You are already there, even if you are still making your way toward whatever the goal is.
claims. 
