Long December

J and I both grew up in North Little Rock; to be honest, our families lived about two or three blocks apart when we were growing up. (Cue cliche about growing up in a small town.) In some ways, this complicated the holidays when we lived out of town, because we would be fitting in two Thanksgivings, two Christmas mornings, etc., usually in a fairly short visit home. Both families were always really good about accommodating schedules, but it still made for a hectic holiday and visit. However, since we're here now, it's not such a big deal. Yesterday we did Thanksgiving at my parents' house, today we'll do it at J's, and tomorrow we'll wonder how long it will take to undo the damage of two straight days of eating. Well, for us, it's actually more like a solid WEEK of heavy eating, since we spent the first part of the week in Houston. I'm feeling the damage this morning, and we still have another Thanksgiving dinner to go...Ugh.

Funny enough, I normally don't worry too much about over eating, gaining weight, etc. I'm blessed with a fairly fast metabolism (thanks mom!), I eat fairly healthy (although there's always room for improvement) and I enjoy being active, so it's not something that is usually on my mind. The one time I am guaranteed to gain weight is when I increase my exercise frequency dramatically, perhaps by starting an exercise program after being sedentary for a while or maybe by ramping up a running schedule. My body goes into crazy-eating-mode for a few weeks, and then calms back down when it figures out what is going on. But for that first week or two, I notice a pretty big difference and often see my available wardrobe shrink for a few weeks.

The idiot part here is that I decided to greatly ramp up my running about a week or two ago. A week before Thanksgiving. Yeah, great timing - do the thing that is guaranteed to make you gain weight the week before the holiday centered around eating. Brilliant. So today, after a week's worth of running and heavy eating, the only thing I want to do is find my loosest pair of jeans and chill on the couch (even though that is certainly a pipe dream unless I want to watch Sponge Bob with the kiddos). So I guess I'll go out and do my run instead. In the 32 degree weather. Yay.

On the plus side, the holiday so far has been wonderful, although I think my kids are about to go out of their minds batshit crazy that Christmas is coming. They've been pinging off the damn walls like pinballs since Wednesday, and the chaos is driving me nuts. I'm thinking that the songwriter for the Counting Crows must've had young kids when he wrote the song "Long December" - 'cause that's exactly how I feel. It's gonna be a long December.