The ladies locker room at the YMCA is not for the faint at heart.

Consider yourselves warned.

I keep finding bruises in strange places. This one is on the inside of my knee.

Is it from little feet stepping on me? Did I run into something in the middle of the night? Do I have some kind of dread disease? 

Feel free to diagnose.

OMG, I am so excited right now I can’t even stand myself.

I joined the local Y today and I plan to go there EVERY day I possibly can. Childwatch is even available on Saturday, which is awesome because Husband always works on Saturdays and some of them are painfully long. There is an indoor pool, a sauna and a hot tub that I can use right this minute. There is an outdoor pool we can use every day this summer.

I may have given my tour guide crazy eyes. Also, I have a vague recollection of screeching “IT’S LIKE CHRISTMAS!!!” when she showed me the sauna.

Although weight loss was not my primary concern … my sanity was … I don’t see how it would be possible for me to NOT reach my weight loss goals between working out regularly and caring for my exhausting family. I also wanted to put off this extra monthly expense as long as possible, but I had a little bit of a meltdown this week that forced me to face that fact that if I don’t do this for myself IMMEDIATELY, I may stop getting out of bed in the morning to take care of anyone. 

I have allowed myself to get burned out. It snuck up on me all of the sudden-like. Like one day I was just overwhelmed and then a little later I was absolutely exhausted and then suddenly I started to despise my family. Sudden-like.

So here we go.

Spinning. Tomorrow. And then … a shower. Oh yes.

Look out.

I’m joining Pinterest.

I took TWO to the doctor today for his 2-month checkup. He weighs 13 pounds and is 2 feet long! I was feeling pretty beat down when we got there. Probably because I am pretty sure my children are trying to kill me.

Anyhoo … things started looking up once we arrived at the doctor’s office and I dragged my kids into the biggest stall the women’s bathroom had to offer. ONE loudly proclaimed, I like your polka-dotted panties, Mommy!! They are sooooo nice!!! much to the delight of the other women in the bathroom.

Our pediatrician must have seen it in my eyes — that look of exhausted desperation — and she sent us home with this:

This stuff is like gold. $30-per-tiny-can-that-lasts-two-days gold. This is the only kind of formula that seems to work for TWO. And I am willing to pay almost anything to make his colic better. I told her it was like Christmas come early. Thank you, Dr. Denton!!

Now I’m going to check on my trial run cheesecake. So far it’s smelling divine.

I need to go to the store. Badly. But Husband is at work and won’t have a day off until Sunday. It is now Tuesday. So at some point, I’m just going to have to suck it up and haul a sick child and an infant into public so I can get children’s Tylenol, canned pumpkin, and chopped pecan pieces. Because I have to do a practice run on the cheesecake I’m planning to bake for Thanksgiving. Priorities, people. 

I was beginning my descent into self-pity (why does he have to work all the damn time? oh yeah … so we can pay our bills) when I made the conscious decision to stop my inner complaining and NAMASTE.  

30 minutes of yoga later, I have a whole new outlook. I may not eat my young after all. At least not today.

So … I’m in the market for a new stroller system. 

The handle snapped off mine today, randomly, in the middle of a major excursion at an outdoor mall. It may or may not have been caused by the overly-large, overly-heavy diaper bag that has been hanging from it since 2008.

Luckily, I was with my friend Anna who also suffers from the same Curse of Weird Things that has seemed to plague me since birth. She thought nothing of it. 

In fact, she loaded her daughter (pictured here) into my dilapidated stroller and rolled her … how I don’t know … so that I wouldn’t have to. 

With a baby strapped to my chest, completing simple tasks is a challenge. Maneuvering a handle-less stroller would not have worked for me.

I can barely maneuver a fully operable stroller, on a good day. I think we can all agree it’s best to know your limits. 

All I have to say is, if me, ONE, and TWO make it through the next year without one of us getting seriously injured, I will consider myself a mothering success.

I didn’t mention Husband, because if he is seriously injured it will have been my doing. Probably because I punched him in the face in the middle of the night. Or maybe in the kitchen.

Against my better judgment, I bought ONE a pair of kiddie scissors. Because there aren’t enough hazards in my house. And because I wanted to have yet another reason to worry about leaving him in a room by himself.

While I wrote this, he tried to sneak them upstairs to his room not just once … but twice.

I’ll let you know how this turns out.