And spring has sprung! Or sorta. In the process in these here parts, I guess you could say. REAL nice day (60 degrees) on Friday, rainy and chilly yesterday, and sunny - or so they’re predicting - today, but on the cool side. I actually went out of my house in a pair of flip-flops on Friday! Flip-flops! My absolute favorite footwear on the face of the earth! Give me a pair of Old Navy flip-flops to trek aound in, and I’m in heaven! That’s the worst part of winter for me - wearing those danged panty hose and boots. Don’t even ask me about the long, heavy coats. The only coats of mine that I like are a couple of faux furs that I have - especially the vintage-look faux racoon. Except I like looking at them more than I like wearing them. They’re too heavy to enjoy wearing comfortably. But all that’s behind us for another six month or so, and in another few weeks, I should be able to pull out my summer clothes and send the winter ones off to the cleaners. Actually, I’ve been gradually doing that for the past month. I shudder to think about the aggregate cleaning bill. That’s ANOTHER nice thing about my summer wardrobe - a majority of my stuff is machine washable. Not too many dry-cleanables in the lot. Okay, well, my ONE little problem going into summer this year is that I WEIGH more than I did at the start of winter!!! I don’t know what hapened to me this past winter. Well, I suppose I do, really. We just had such a miserable, cold, snowy and icy winter that my weight loss motivation gave way to my survival instincts - as in, “Eat as much as you can so you’ll have an extra fat layer to keep you warm!” Yeah. That’s it. And a good excuse it is, too, don’t you think? I mean, everybody heard about our New England blizzards and ice storms, right? Huddled around the fireplace, carrying flashlights - or candles (I still have a few drips of candle wax on the rug in the bedroom) - eveywhere we went, trying to eat up as much as we could out of the freezer before it went bad - how were we supposed to lose weight? Okay, so we were without electricity just for a WEEK - doesn’t excuse my season-long, on-again, off-again dieting. Yeah. No excuses, here. Just no real motivation. And the result is now going into spring looking like one of those marshmallow bunnies they sell for kids Easter baskets. Keep in mind here, too, that “Uma” (which is what my grandkids call me) always fills Easter baskets for the grandkids with arts and crafts, little toys like kaleidoscopes, paddle balls, jump ropes, flower seeds (that I will plant with them in another couple of weeks) and not much candy. ”Uma” believes in healthy eating, after all. Yeah. And what a fine example of it she is these days - NOT.  So, needless to say, I am climbing back on the wagon - tomorrow - and shall remain thereon. I really can’t afford any more of this self-indulgence: I haven’t even done any walking with Leslie Sansone for the past couple of months. I’m embarassed and ashamed of myself. I feel big and clumsy, and my knees and hips are achey. I need to take off this weight, and I need to take it off fast! I’ve actually been toying with the idea of going back on the Atkins diet. I lost all my pregnancy weight and stayed slim and trim for YEARS on that diet. (My son, as many of you know, will be 28 this year. Omigawd.) Only trouble wih that is that in the past few years, I’ve stopped eating red meat - which I ate TONS of on Atkins - and I also seem to have developed an allergy to eggs over the past year or two,and I ate a load of eggs on Atkins. Those were staples of that diet for me. And I was NEVER hungry!!!!!  And there is that glaring lack of fiber in low carb diets, and I am now convinced that fiber is really important to good health. Okay. So I guess it won’t be Atkins. I guess I’ll just have to control my apetitite through sheer will power, eat less and exercise more. What a grim thought. But the alternative - growing fatter and fatter, and less and less active - is even grimmer.

Okay. Well, the young hawks came home on Friday, and are adjusting nicely. They are just the sweetest little guys. I went over to my daughter’s yesterday and got all their laundry caught up for them. Thursday night I took my granddaughter (sister of the young hawks) out shopping for Easter shoes (Her Mom took her out for the dress) and a coat - we ended up with several coats, in fact: a lightweight woolen long one in pink to wear over her new dress for Easter, a khaki trench coat to alternate with on rainy Sundays through the summer & fall) and a cute, fun little jacket to wear with jeans and such. On Friday I did my weekly grocery shopping and then DH & I stopped in to welcome the boys home. Today will be relatively quiet for us, which will be pleasant, although it’s possible that we may need to help out with the boys while my daughter and her husband take turns at church - one will be going for the morning service, and the other will go for the aftenoon program because my granddaughter will be singing a solo with the choir. She has a pretty little voice.

Back to work tomorrow. It’s been nice having three days off.

Have a happy week, y’all…

Hugs,

Z