Self Improvements

After the post baby trauma subsided a bit I began to notice myself again. I did not like what I saw. There was/is the baby belly, which is to be expected. The stretch marks. May I just take this moment to say that hardly anyone I know got stretch marks while pregnant. But when I think about it I guess it's one of those things where I say “I have a lot of stretch marks!” to which I get “Oh, I never got ANY!” (which, by the way, ranks right up there with my favorite comments. Such as “Oh, I didn't have any morning sickness at all. To that I say “How nice for you.”) but the moms who do have them don't jump to say “Oh I know, I have them too!”. I always forget I seem to be the one of the few people who voluntarily talks openly about my flaws. (What's wrong with me anyway?) And then there was the hair loss. Man! The hair loss! Good thing I started out with far too much hair because it had even me, the woman with too much hair, worried that I was going to be bald. Thankfully that has now stopped. Here's a weird one. My teeth. They seemed discolored. I had a few of my clients tell me horror stories about how they lost teeth during their pregnancies. That's just nutty. No lost teeth here. I just found them to be a bit yellow. Maybe I'm crazy but I kept seeing pictures of myself with my big ol' smile and I thought “Hmmm. My teeth look really yellow.” After many times of saying that about different photos I finally bought this. I took before and after photos but the before one somehow disappeared from my computer. So that blows my comparison out the window. I'll try it again in a few weeks.

So, I took care of the teeth thing. Or at least I took care of it in a way that I could afford. Going off in another direction, since when did celebrities have to have such white teeth? I own a lot of 80's movies and let me tell you it is weird yet refreshing to observe their less than perfect bodies and normal looking teeth. The baby belly is retreating with every bi-weekly trip to the gym. I'm not sure it will ever be jiggle free. The stretch marks? Well, nothing to be done about them except wait and watch them slowly fade from pink to white. The hair. The good news is I'm not bald. I'm actually enjoying this thinner hair I have. It is almost behaving like I always wanted it to. At it's present length I can wear it wavy or straight. I'm curious what all of you prefer. Let me know what you think. Also, as you can see my hair has gotten longer and I have colored it darker since Baby A was born. Wow! I was just looking at my pictures. Could I be any more pale? Not sure why I appear to have so much color in the first one. I progressively get pastier with each photo. The first shot was taken in September when I still had some 'sun'. Ha ha! My poor daughter has the skin color genetics of two of the palest people on the planet. My teeth seem whiter with every shot too. How strange. Perhaps as the pregnancy hormones dissapate the discoloration goes away?







I don't have the highest self esteem but I do what I can with what I have. My husband loves me and thinks I am beautiful. The funny thing is I actually believe him when he says it. Now that's love.

P.S. I know I'm evil for cropping "the show stealer" Baby A out of my pictures. Really, would you really pay any attention to me if she was in the picture? It's all about me you know.