600 calories a day!

I am about five pounds below my pre-pregnancy weight and all my pants are now dumpy in the butt. Don't get all jealous about that. There's five pounds less of me, but nothing is where it was or the same consistency as before I got pregnant. Things are a lot more squishy. Now that I'm nursing, I am an eating machine. I'm like a hobbit going from breakfast to second breakfast to elevens. I read somewhere that nursing burns 600 calories a day. I'm having a hard time finding things other than a pan of brownies that use up those calories. Who knew this could be so hard?

My rough estimate is that I've had about 1200 calories so far today. People say that 2000 calories a day is normal, right? So if I'm supposed to get an additional 600, I'm not even halfway to my goal. No wonder I'm always hungry!

All of your suggestions for lunch were super helpful and I've been rocking the leftovers this week so far. While the Healthy Choice meals are tasty, I felt like I needed to eat two so I could fill up! I never thought I could be sick of brownies, but it's coming true.

And all the things that fill me up are typically things that I would never normally eat. Fettuccine Alfredo? I've avoided it for years because it normally sends my blood sugar into orbit, but now here I am stuffing my gob with it. And whenever Rich looks at me in wonder as I shovel more food in, I just blurt out, "600 CALORIES A DAY!"

Too much information overload

I'm having a bit of a blogging crisis. Ok, fine, that was a little melodramatic. But I'm having a really hard time figuring out what I should be reading and when.

Kim mentioned all this the other day when she talked about her audience and blog fame and it got me thinking. My Google reader is out of control. When I find a new blog, I scoop it up and squirrel it away in a folder where it languishes. I'm suffering from social overload. Just look at my list of feeds.

I have Flickr contacts that may not match my Twitter contacts that may not match the folks in my RSS feed or those on Facebook. And don't even get me started about LiveJournal. I can't make heads or tales of any of it.

Should I just trash all these people I've collected? What if one of them is a gem and I'm missing out? Should I read all these hundred of personal blogs from people I hardly know? Or should I pare my list down to a dozen or so folks that I really love their writing?

There was a blog that I read in my giant "parenting" category. Some mommy blogger. Honestly, I got her confused with other mommy bloggers in that folder. I must have heard her blog name at a BlogHer once. And for the most part I skimmed her entries. Blah blah kid said cute thing blah blah daughter growing up so fast blah blah husband never does the dishes blah blah. But one entry stuck in my head as she talked about trying to explain right and wrong to her son and how this was much harder than she thought it would be. Rich and I still talk about this entry and she wrote it in November of 2008, before I was even pregnant with our first child. So this random woman who I could have forgotten all about affected me. It would be a shame to miss that.

But wow there's just so much! It's too much to read! I'm still missing out on stuff regardless of if I have the blogs in my feed reader. Ironically, I never told that mommy blogger that wrote such a great entry how much I like it. So I'm not living up to my part of the deal in this whole community thing either.

Are there people that you read online that you don't have a personal relationship with? Do those people outnumber your friends? At what point do they become a friend versus some random person you're reading about? Are you content to read about the lives of strangers or are they all pathways to meet people that you'd invite over for dinner if they were in town?

I should have it so hard that there is so much good writing out there for me to scoop up. I just need a way to better digest it all.

Living Out Loud volume 14: Gone fishin'

My mother is 72 years old and still works full time. When I told her I was pregnant, she claimed she was going to retire, but that hasn't happened yet. I'm not sure it will any time soon. She told her friends (who are all retired) that whenever she sees the old lady working at Hardee's she thinks she doesn't want to have to come out of retirement to work at a place like that. My father, on the other hand, still talks about getting another job driving a cab or the like. I'm not sure he understands what retirement means. When Rich was in the Army, he had a first sergeant who had joined when he was 18. His plan was to put in his 20 years, retire and drive a beer truck. He had it all figured out. That was his plan. We're not really sure if he fully understood that driving the beer truck doesn't mean you get to drink the beer in the truck.

If you've seen the E Trade baby commercials, I'm sure you've noticed that planning for one's future is important. Everyone talks about making sure you have what you need for retirement. But most of what they're talking about is just the money part.

This brings me to our Living Out Loud theme for the month. Tell me what your retirement plan is. Do you even have a retirement plan? Do you figure you're just going to die at your desk? Do you want to travel? Do you plan on starting a side business? Do you think you'll be a Wal-Mart greeter? The point isn't really about the money. It's more about where you see yourself when you're in those "autumn years" or if you plan on getting a head start on those in the summer years of your life. Do you have ideas of what you'll do in the next phase of your life?

Details include:

• Write something personal about yourself using the previous paragraphs as a guideline. Do not feel that you have to address each issue above. The spirit of this project is to share something about yourself; I'm just throwing out ideas.

• Once you have completed your entry and posted it, please email me the link at genie [at] inabottle [dot] org. Remember, if you don't email me, I'm likely to forget to include you in the recap!

• If you do not have a blog to host your story, you can email me the story directly and I will add it here as a guest post giving you credit. The more the merrier!

• The due date for entries is Sunday, March 7th (the first Sunday of the month) at 5pm Eastern.

• Once I have collected all the entries, I will post a wrap-up to list them all and announce a winner. The winner will receive some sort of prize to be determined but all participants will receive fame and glory and a link on our Living Out Loud blogroll.

Because it took me forever to pick a theme this month, you've got less than two weeks. But if you're like me, most of you wait til the last minute anyways. I look forward to hearing what your plans are!