Other. I would say that most likely none are completely correct, but all aren't equally wrong. Some worldviews are more valid than others, but all likely contain some truth and some error.

After the new baby was born, DH was home the first week, and my parents were here the second week. So, I really didn't do much but care for the baby. I think that really helped because by three weeks after I gave birth, I felt about ready to go back to normal.

:iagree::iagree::iagree:

But that's true of people, period, not just Americans. I think the difference is that we have a very infantilizing medical system, and our doctors treat women like idiots rather than responsible adults, and so they think that, 'Oh, if we tell those stupid women they can have one or two drinks, they'll go out and get drunk every night, so let's just tell them it's not allowed at all.' Although my OBs have always taken the attitude that an occasional drink isn't an issue. I'm not a drinker generally, so it wasn't really an issue for me. I did have one or two drinks during my first two pregnancies, though, on special occasions when I would have drank anyway.

I agree, but I'd consider the possibility that the comments were also intended to be humorous. It is so hard to read tone online. I tend to be kind of hopelessly optimistic about most things, but I'd probably err on the side of assuming they were just trying to be funny.

Right. We've had times, with our son, when we've let behaviors slide that I'm sure other parents would have disciplined for because we were working on other, more serious behavioral issues. Because working on too many things at once is overwhelming, we decided to let some less-serious stuff go. Somebody watching us might have judged us for letting inappropriate behavior go, but they had no idea of what our situation was or why we were making the choices we were making. I can't decide if my DS7 is God's gift to me or God's joke on me. Probably both. :) I was THE MOST obnoxious, judgmental person toward parents before I had kids (I was also, I must add, a fabulous parent back then;)). If parents had just given me their misbehaving kids, I could have turned the whole situation around in hours, I was sure. Then I had my DS, and I've spent the last seven years learning humility.

My MIL found out, after her father died, that he had a second family. It was pretty traumatic for her. AFAIK she hasn't had any contact with her half-siblings.

Speaking of being real... This homeschooling-with-two-little-ones stuff is hard, y'all. I know most of you know that, but I needed to say it. It's really, really hard. DD is getting in her molars, and the baby is just getting over a really fussy phase. I feel like DS7 is really getting short shrift right now. It's hard for me to not feel like he'd be better off in school, when he's stuck with DD crying in the background while I'm trying to read and my always seeming to be burping the baby and changing diapers when he needs hands-on help. I know this will get easier. I know that DD's teeth will come in at some point. I know the LOs will grow up. DS tells me how excited he is about getting to do preschool with them when they get old enough. I know that this is the best place for DS to be right now. But I feel like I'm engaging more in chaos management than actual education right now. It's been a long week, and it's only Wednesday!

Yeah. That was exactly my thought. That said, I probably am an arrogant idiot, at least most of the time. But, I don't think that makes my schooling choices wrong.

I have loads of people that I'm friendly with. I'm a very friendly person. I'm not lacking for what I'd consider pretty superficial friendships. I have people I can go over to visit for a light chat, or go for a walk with, or enjoy a lunch out with. And, I value that. It's nice to have people I can spend time with. But I feel like I'm lacking people I can be real with, you know? I have so much trouble moving from having light, superficial interactions with people--which I can do all day, with pretty much anybody--to having a close friendship where I'm really sharing my life and my struggles with another person. I want that, though. My best friend moved away almost six years ago now, and I haven't found anybody in real life that I have the kind of relationship with that I had with her. When I found out I was pregnant with my new DS and was not at all happy with the news, she was the person I called up crying and saying that I just didn't want to be pregnant and didn't think I could do it. I don't have anybody around me now who I can do that with. With my friends in the neighborhood, it was all, "Oh, yeah. I'm pregnant again. Well, we didn't plan it, but I'm sure it will be okay." It was tiring doing that, though, especially since at that point I didn't feel sure it would be okay. I wished I had somebody I could cry with and be a mess with and have them let me know I'd be okay. I feel this pressure--not from them, but just that I put on myself--to always have my happy face on and to not bother or bore other people with my problems or my dreams or my feelings or my struggles. But I miss that. I miss being able to sit down with a friend and talk about the stuff that really matters to me or that's really on my mind or that I just need to vent about. I also really hate confrontation, though--yes, you wouldn't know that from my online communications, but IRL I'm like the most easygoing, non-confrontational person you'd meet--and so don't want to ever say anything that might make somebody dislike me or get upset with me or even argue with me. I just don't know how to get over that, and to take the steps I need to take to move some of my friendships to a deeper level. It's not my friends, I don't think. I know there have been times, when I've been talking with them, that the door has been opened to move in that direction. But I tend to slam it shut with a change of subject or a joke, because I get so scared to go there with another person. I don't know if I'm afraid of rejection or afraid of confrontation or maybe am just afraid of taking on the responsibility of being there for another person (because if somebody's the kind of friend whom I can call at 2 a.m., then I'm going to have to be that kind of friend to them, too, and then we're really in it). Maybe I'm afraid that if they really know who I am--if they really know what I think about and what I believe and what I feel about things and what my dreams are--they'll think I'm completely weird. Which is probably true, but I'd hope they'd like me anyway! ;) So I keep my friends at arms' length, and I really, really want to stop doing that. Any advice? Commiseration? How do you create the kind of friendship where you can just be who you are with somebody, without feeling like you need to edit or censor or stay on the surface?

I generally go with, "I don't know what happened, but let me apologize anyway for whatever my son did, because I'm sure he did something." ;) My poor DS is a good boy with a good heart, but, man, he's a troublemaker. At this point, if we're hanging out with friends and somebody yells, the other moms will tell me right away that it wasn't my DS if he wasn't involved, because they know my first response is always "What did you do?!"

Other. Stomach and side. I used to be a tummy-only sleeper. It made my first pregnancy miserable. I never got used to sleeping on my side, and tossed and turned every night the entire time. Now, after two pregnancies in two years, I've actually gotten quite comfortable sleeping on my side, as long as I have a body pillow to put between my knees, although I still sleep on my stomach, too.

I know that a big thing for me has been not thinking about food in moral terms. Foods aren't good or bad. I'm not good or bad for eating or not eating certain foods. If I eat a cookie, it's not a sin, it's not a moral failing, it's not a screw up; it's a cookie. I can eat one cookie, enjoy it, and move on. I know that, for me, when I've dieted, I get into a really destructive mindset around food. Suddenly, there are foods I cannot eat ever again, or at least not ever again until I've lost x amount of weight. So, there's the pre-diet period where, for a day (or a few days or a few weeks), I eat as much of that "bad" stuff as I can, since I'm never going to be eating it again. I mean, if you're facing the prospect of starting a life without cheesecake, then you're obviously going to eat as much cheesecake as you can, while you still can. And then there's the times when, while on the diet, I'd give in and eat a brownie, feel like I screwed up, and then take the "well, since I already blew it, I may as well REALLY blow it" attitude and have several more brownies. And then there's the post-diet disappointment when, after I either fail to lose weight or lose it then gain it back, I decide that since trying to eat well didn't "work" (in terms of long-term weight loss), I may as well not bother, and just eat as much junk as I want. I've found that giving up on dieting really took nearly all of the unhealthy patterns I had with food away. When a brownie is something that I can eat any time I want a brownie, I don't want brownies all that much. And, when I do, I can just eat one of them, and be happy, because I know that the next time I want a brownie, I can have one. It also means that, if I'm offered a brownie, and aren't hungry or just don't feel like one, I can turn it down; when I really do want one, I know I can eat it. I make better food choices when I'm not dieting (or, maybe more accurately, either planning to diet or "recovering" from a diet) because there just isn't all of that emotional baggage attached to food and I'm not craving things because they are off-limits. I'm sure some people can diet well. I can't. I get completely obsessed, I think about food all the time, I get moody and tired and headachey, and my mood ends up being based on what I did or didn't eat or how much I weigh. For me, that's not a good place to be. And, it doesn't lead to making good choices about food or exercise. I'm much happier and healthier when I decide that nothing is off-limits and that I'm going to treat my body well.

My best friend is very large, about 350 lbs. She had some issue with the blood vessels in her eyes that was discovered when she got an eye exam. She was referred to a neurologist, and of course he assumed it was because she was fat. He told her that until she got down to 150 pounds, he would not even consider looking for another explanation. She saw him for a few months and the problem didn't get better, and began to progress. She finally decided to get a second opinion, the new doctor asked if she was on birth control pills (which she was), told her to get off of them, and as soon as she did, the problem resolved itself. She was fine. It absolutely infuriates me that the first doctor put her health and life at risk because he was so tied to the idea that, if a fat person has a health problem, it must be caused by being fat. (I assume the first doctor didn't ask her about the bcps because he assumed that a fat person wouldn't need them.) I do have to wonder how much of the "poor health" of fat people is due to either their not seeking treatment as early as they should because they are afraid of the way the doctor will treat them (my friend gets lectured, sometimes cruelly, about her weight every single time she sees a doctor, even if she's in for something totally unrelated, like strep throat) or because their doctors won't look for causes/treatments beyond their weight. And, I know people will say that of course a doctor should mention somebody's weight every time they go in, the same way they'd tell somebody to stop smoking. But, smoking is a behavior; being fat is not. Telling somebody to eat more vegetables or less junk or to exercise more is one thing: those are behaviors, and you can tell somebody to stop/start a behavior. But, telling somebody to stop being fat is a different thing, and not particularly productive or helpful.

See, that's why I like Hitchens: he's a pompous blowhard, but he knows it. (FWIW, I recently read his brother's anti-atheism book, and it turns out that being a pompous, arrogant blowhard runs in the family. I got about halfway through and had to put it down, because I could not take any more.) He recently had an essay in Slate about the horrors of having the waitstaff refill your wine glasses during a dinner out. His agenda: #1 Rid the world of religion; #2 Stop waitstaff from automatically refilling wine glasses. He's such an arrogant, elitist neocon, and so completely and totally unapologetic about it, that I can't help but kind of like him. I feel like Dawkins doesn't recognize his own biases, the way that I think Hitchens does. Dawkins just seems like he cannot fathom how any person who wasn't completely deluded or ignorant could even toy with the idea of transcendence. He seems incapable of inhabiting another worldview, even for a moment. So he frustrates me in the way that religious fundamentalists (who also often seem incapable of inhabiting another worldview) frustrate me, whereas Hitchens just amuses me.

:lol:

I generally assume that I'm the most irresponsible parent I know.

I'm 5'8" and my weight fluctuations between about 185 and 205 pounds. Has since I was about 18. So I tend to be right on the border between overweight and obese. My weight settles around 170 if I'm off of Zoloft, but then I start having multiple severe panic attacks every day, and the toll that takes on my emotional and physical health (as well as the fact that I get really phobic about exercise at that point so stop doing it) is much, much greater than any impact my weight might have on it. I actually only have people tell me I'm fat on the internet, when I say that I'm fat. In real life, I don't have people coming up to me with concern for my health. I look pretty normal, I think, and I'm healthy and active and happy. But even though I'm not taking up two seats on the bus and dragging around an oxygen tank, I'm one of those "overweight/obese" Americans the news warns us about, and I have no problem identifying as such.

I always feel like, if people are really so concerned about the health of random people on the internet, maybe they should be advocating for UHC. We know that that results in much better health outcomes. Poverty has a far stronger association with health than body size. We could work on eliminating poverty if we wanted to see health improved, before we wage war on obese people. Being male has more of a correlation with poor health than being fat does. We could wage war on maleness, to create a healthier society, but I don't see that going over very well.

Actually the same study that found that overweight is associated with the lowest mortality found that, when you take into account only obese people who have a BMI of 30-35. That includes most obese people. The problem is that "obese" includes everybody with a BMI from 30 to infinity. There are indeed big increase in health risks at the very high end of the weight spectrum. But, most obese people aren't there. Research tends to lump together people with a BMI of 31 and people with a BMI of 70; that's a problem. When research breaks the "obese" category down into subcategories, you tend to see very few if any elevated risks for those with a BMI of 30-34.9; some increase in risk for people with a BMI of 35-39.9 (although for some groups, like black women, you don't even see that); and then a significant increase in risk for those with a BMI of 40+. My concern with dieting is that, for most people, it wouldn't lead to weight loss, but weight gain. So, you take a person with a BMI of 32, who at their current weight actually does not have significant increased health risks, scare them into thinking that they will die in five years if they don't lose weight, and get them dieting, and it's far more likely that, rather than ending up with a BMI in the "normal" range, after a couple of decades they'll diet their way up to a BMI of 36 or 37, at which point they may indeed see increased risks. Take the person with a BMI of 36 or 37, and it's far more likely that dieting will result in them becoming morbidly obese (BMI over 39.9) than becoming a "healthy" weight. Dieting not only doesn't work in most cases, it actually results in weight gain. So even if it were unquestionable true that having a BMI over 25 caused health problems (which it isn't), weight loss still couldn't be recommended responsibly, because in the vast majority of cases weight loss efforts will result, in the long term, in somebody either returning to the same weight but in poorer health (as Bacon's study found) or being heavier than they were to start with (as is the case with most dieters). I do find it troubling that there can't be a thread about accepting yourself at the size you are without people immediately jumping to "But what about diabetes?! What about the fact that you are going to die?!" Nobody has recommended eating junk all day or never exercising. This is why I generally try to keep my mouth shut around these issues, because it's nearly impossible to say anything about the possibility of being fat and healthy, or of health at every size, without people assuming that you're advocating an unhealthy lifestyle or consigning people to an early death. The whole point of HAES is instilling healthy habits in people.

Actually, studies have found that people who are in the "overweight" category have the lowest mortality rate of all groups. People who have a BMI of 30-34.9 have mortality rates equivalent to those who are "normal" weight. The highest mortality rate is in the underweight category. And, when you control for activity levels, weight has very little impact on health. A good deal of research seems to indicate that being fat doesn't cause diabetes; instead, the insulin resistance that can lead to diabetes causes people to be fat. The point of HAES isn't for people to eat poorly and not be active; it's to adopt healthy habits for the sake of health, not weight. And, you can see dramatic changes in health indicators--blood pressure, blood sugar, etc.--by changing your habits even if you lose little or even no weight. High blood pressure runs in my family on both sides. My blood pressure used to run on the high side pretty much all the time. Since I started exercising regularly, it now runs on the low side of average. I haven't lost any weight. My mother had her blood pressure drop into the normal range after years of being high when she began to exercise daily, even though she didn't lose any weight. HAES is based on research that has indicated that when people focus on making healthy changes for health's sake, and don't focus on weight loss, they have more positive changes in behavior and health than people who diet for weight loss, and end up being no larger than the dieters, since most dieters gain back all or most of what they lose within 2-5 years (and often more). http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/AR/archive/mar06/health0306.htm

We have a two-hour nap time here, too. It's a lifesaver. It seems like every day either DD is having a rough day and needs me all day, the baby is fussy and needs me all day, or both of them take turns being fussy all day. And on some lucky days both are in a bad mood and need my attention all day. And then DS needs me for homeschooling and at night he likes time with me and DH once the babies are settled in. Right now the baby isn't going down for the night until 10 or 11--although he's already sleeping a 6-7 hour stretch once he does get down, so I can't really complain--so I don't get much alone time at night, but I do make sure the two littles go down for a nap each afternoon. I usually try to get the baby settled so that he'll at least be fed and happy during DD's nap, if he's not sleeping. DS can read or write or play quietly or, if he's been really good or I really, really need to rest, he can get some extra screen time and play a video game or watch TV while the babies and I lay down. I can usually manage to have the two littles quiet simultaneously for at least an hour, and sometimes I luck out and they're both quiet for two. The thing I need to be careful about is taking that time to actually do quiet, refreshing things, like reading or napping. No chores, no going online. Otherwise I get caught up doing things, lose track of time, and then the babies are up and I'm still feeling overwhelmed.

And the bras. I do not understand why U.S. bra companies make bras in, if you're lucky, about 6 cup sizes, whereas European bra companies make bras in about a dozen cup sizes. Apparently U.S. bra makers think that women who need larger than a DD either don't exist or don't deserve bras (or should just keep upping their band size until the cups finally fit, which is a recipe for poor support and back pain).

:iagree: You said it just as I was about to type it. In our marriage, it's a big, big no-no. But, I don't think it must or even should be that way for every person or every couple. It just really depends on individual personalities and past experiences and the beliefs of both people in the relationship.

Another happy fat person. I'm generally really consistent about exercise, because it's good for my mental health, and I make sure we get in fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, but I don't worry about weight. I didn't start exercising regularly until I was in my mid 20s, and even though I was heavier than I was when I was younger, I've felt a lot better since then. It's definitely activity level that makes the difference for me in terms of how I feel. I've never been thin. Even as a young teen, when I went through a phase where I ate very little and exercised a lot for a long period, I never got skinny. And, I take a medication that generally causes me to be about 20 pounds heavier than I am when off of it. So, it would generally be an exercise in frustration and futility to worry about losing weight. I figure that, as long as I'm active and eating well, I'm the size God intended me to be. I recommend Linda Bacon's Health at Every Size to anybody who will listen. ;)