Husky Baby

Welcome to my blog!

Crap. I had this idea that a blog would be a fine activity for me and that maybe my struggles with motherhood/marriage/depression might be relevant to someone other than myself.

In my head I had these brilliant topics lined up. I am really, really pithy in my head. I'm freakin' Anne Lamott.

And now I sit down and I am reminded that my life is excrutiatingly boring. That, and I have only a very tentative idea of what a blog is.

So, you know, welcome and my apologies.

Here's me on a wild Friday night: On my ass, on the couch, trying hard to focus on writing instead of researching Aspberger's Syndrome because my 2-year-old son, Henry, has an obsession with auto insignias.

Henry's asleep. Simon, my husband and sometime nemesis, won't be back from his business trip until past midnight. It would be silent if not for the clothes drier that's almost always going.

This morning I had the horrible realization that my son may be fat. Not just chubby, but actually overweight. The light first flickered one when I slipped the 24-month T-shirt over his 22-month head, and it barely fit over his belly. Then, as he ran around with his buddies at baby gym, it occurred to me that he looks like a linebacker. As I mulled this over, I mentioned to my friend Susie that Henry stepped on my mom's scale the other day and it read 31 pounds, and Susie said, "Oh my God!"

Sure enough, I typed in his weight and height into a BMI calculator and it says he's overweight.

This is probably not a big deal in the scheme of things, but I have no job besides this, and so I take it as a failure on my part. I always thought fat kids just ate crap and watched too much TV. Henry eats berries and yogurt for breakfast! He eats raisins instead of candy! He spends half the day running laps around our house or our yard or the park.

The worst part is I wrote a column about childhood obesity back before I had kids and it was all know-it-all-y. It's so easy to give advice when it's purely on a theoretical basis.