Coming Soon: My 40th High School Reunion

I've started taking long bike rides every day, on the brand new "Call the Midwife"-style retro bicycle my husband got me for Mother's Day.  (You know, the one I told you all about in this recent post.)  Tuesday, I pedaled 4.2 miles.  Wednesday, I upped that to 5.4.  Today, I logged 6 miles even. I'm hoping to work up to 10 miles a day in the coming weeks.

The view from my handlebars.  Not too shabby.

Along with this new exercise regimen, I am trying to drastically reduce the amount of sugar and carbs I eat, and to cut all my portions down to the proper size for someone my age.  When I was over in Germany with my youngest son for the month of March, I kind of forgot that a 57-year-old woman can't combine eating as many gigantic Milka chocolate bars and soft pretzels as she wants with going out several times a week and ordering schwein filets and baked potatoes smothered in herb butter and sour cream and expect to stay the same size.  I am aware that it is now May, so the after-effects of my German pig-out should no longer be an issue; but even after I got home, I couldn't seem to get motivated to shake the bad habits I'd formed and get back into any kind of healthy eating routine.  (I mean, chocolate is SO GOOD.)

And let's be honest: I can't even remember the last time I took one of my Beach Body Turbo Jam DVD's out of its case.

But I have a really good reason to get motivated now: at the end of June, my husband and I are going to be attending our 40th high school reunion.  And if I don't reduce my caloric intake post haste, I'm not going to be able to fit into any of my clothes.  It's not that I want to "impress" my old classmates. We're all pushing 60 now; most of us have grown children, and many of us are also grandparents.  But I just want to feel comfortable in my own skin, and to be able to get dressed for the reunion events without tears and a pile of discarded, too-small outfits on the floor around me.

Actually, I did order a new dress for that weekend, even though I have plenty of dresses--because I'm a girl and that's just what we do, right?  I wanted one that was mid-calf length, or at least well below the knee, so that perhaps I can actually wear it with summer-appropriate bare legs and sandals.  (I normally wear opaque nude-colored tights with skirts and dresses, even in the middle of a heat wave; but I'm trying to work on being less vain about my veins.)  I also wanted a dress that had some green in it, since green and white were our school colors.  I found this one on the JC Penney website, and was able to use an on-line coupon code to knock the already reasonable sale price of $49.99 down to $39.99.  What really sold me on this particular dress is the ruching at the waist, though.  Hey, anything to help me camouflage my mom bod (the awesomeness of which, unfortunately, does not seem to have taken the social media world by storm the way the dad bod did).

Just for grins, do you want to see what my husband and I looked like when we were fresh-faced freshmen in high school, just months before we started dating the summer after that school year?

You do?  Well, you'll just have to come back here tomorrow, I guess.  (Ha ha!  I bet you didn't know this post was going to be a cliff-hanger, did you?)  Because I don't have my 1973 copy of our Catholic high school's Aquila yearbook on me at the moment.  It's in the attic at our NH house, and I'll be getting in the car in a few minutes to head back there.  So come back tomorrow, when I'll scan and post pictures of my husband and me when we were 8 years younger than our youngest child is now!!  And 17 years younger than our firstborn!  YIKES!!!  We're getting old!

(But all my high school earrings still fit.  So I've got that going for me, which is nice.)