We’re talking about “Growth” this month.

It seems like 2010 is the year of change and growth.

Personally, Room 704 has gone through a lot of changes:

A change in format from daily blog style to a monthly magazine.

We now rely on our wonderful staff writers to produce the majority of our content, even though the founders (usually) write every month as well.

We have a brand spanking new logo and overall social media design thanks to Laurie Smithwick (@upsideup) from Leap Design & the EVO Conference, which so graciously offered us a free makeover (THANK YOU!).

As individuals, many of us have had earth moving changes, which of course lead to growth.

Leslie changed jobs, moved into a house with her husband and two kids from a small condominium, and had a mid-life crisis (though I seriously hope you live long past 70, woman).

Dawn started blogging about how to get her groove back, and in turn found that the elliptical machine isn’t evil, life in Missouri is HOME, and being a single mom might just be where it’s at.

I have healed a broken ankle, given up life as a Californian by moving 800+ miles North to Seattle with my husband and son, and found myself knocked up once again, seemingly with better results than the time before (fingers crossed).

Growth, by definition, is “progressive development” or “the process of growing,” among other things. Through changes and growth, we continually develop our selves, our relationships, our being.

Join us as we explore growth in its many different facets.

x’s & o’s

Victoria
for Dawn, Leslie, Lotus & the Room 704 crew

photo source: Some rights reserved by Lel4nd

We love growing our knowledge about wine and sharing what we learn with you. We will still be doing monthly vlog features here at Room 704, but between features you will find us at our new blog: 2hotbloggersandabottle of wine.

Thank you all for participating in our first giveaway! We had 80 entries, but only one of you could win:

CHEERS! See you all next month.

“Hey come feel my boob!”

“What?!”

“There’s some kind of growth in it!”

(silence) “Um..no thanks. That’s…gross.”

I was standing topless, gazing in the bathroom mirror. Never one to do a breast self exam, I was busy playing with my ever-changing boobs as I had just dried up from an awful few months of breastfeeding. For the first time in my life, I had been the proud owner of some amazing titays and I was terrified that they would disappear completely. This irrational fear had me daily studying my rack in the mirror for signs of shrinkage. That one day I happened to feel a pretty substantial lump that worried me. Thus began the whirlwind.

(How I imagined the growth looked, all scary and mean)

Doctor’s appointments, a mammogram, a needle biopsy, an ultrasound showing many more growths I couldn’t feel and a far more involved biopsy all happened in the following months. All of the tests made me scared and I would spend the evenings clutching my baby to my chest and sobbing. Always one to imagine the worst, combined with a bad case of post partum depression meant that I was a wreck. When the results came back, I was able to breathe a sigh of relief. A fibro adenoma. Non-cancerous. *whew*

I named the growth: Leopold the Lump. I was told to keep track of his size (yes, it’s a “he”), as he would have to be removed if he got much bigger (at 3 centimeters around already, he was a whopper). Thus began my compulsive groping. Every day I would feel it, certain it was getting bigger. I asked my husband countless times to feel it and he finally told me that he had no desire to feel it again and would I please stop asking. I hung the ultrasound photos of Leopold and the gang on our fridge, just to annoy him.

(Leopold wears a cowboy hat because he is a nice, southern gentleman)

It’s been almost 4 years since this experience, but it changed my thoughts towards breast cancer. Up to that point I thought I was invincible. Having a scare like that made me realize just how important it is to stay on top of such things. I regularly examine my rack and have had follow up ultrasounds to check on things. I do what I can to convince others to examine their fun bags and be knowledgeable about their boobs, but I think I sometimes go too far. I apparently got drunk a few months back and made a huge group of people feel Leopold, some against their will…oops.

The bottom line is that I love you ladies and I love your bewbies and I want you to take care of them. So feel yourselves up or grope one another (I prefer the buddy system, myself), but just know what’s going on. And to those of you who are breast cancer patients and/or survivors, you are all my heroes.

In this process of rebelling, I still somehow managed to believe that good things happened to bad people, but it was all apart of some master plan. All apart of God’s way to help each of us grow. And since this belief was so strong, I decided to give church a chance again. And over time I began to attend church because I wanted to, I prayed because I felt that it was the right thing to do, I read the Bible to grow closer to God.

Then the rebellion crept it’s way back into my system. It infected the strong hold of my faith. My beliefs were shattered and I became lost. I was broken. My one constant that we were all apart of God’s master plan was altered. I became angry and my love affair with Jesus was over. We split ways, we broke up.

But Jesus being the shadow that He can be, is everywhere in my life. He’s in TV advertisements, He’s in books I read, He’s even in the new people that I meet. Trying to bring me back into the fold. And I resist. I resist the invites I get to attend church, I resist the need to pray when I’m feeling happy, angry, sad, or a bit of all those, I resist the desire to dust off my copy of the Bible and read a passage and see what emotion it evokes.

I resist going back into this fold because I don’t know if I can handle falling in love again with Jesus and breaking up again. So what remains now is uncertainty.

Does this lack of nothingness sustain me? No! But this is where I am in my life and I’ve learned to accept it no matter how poorly it may make me feel, because this is what I understand growth is about.

My ass.

Here’s the backstory for those of you who don’t know me (which I’m guessing is probably a lot of you). I was a fat kid, fat teenager, and a fat adult. In 2002, when I was 26, I had gastric bypass surgery. I lost 100 pounds. I never got exactly skinny, per se, but I was down to a size 10, and that was great.

I maintained that weight loss for several years. Then I got married and had a baby. I was still fine even after pregnancy. (For the record, I don’t recommend my particular weight-maintenance strategy; basically, I got really really sick while I was pregnant, and by the time my daughter was born, I had gained all of one pound. I also lost a hell of a lot of muscle tone and almost landed myself in the hospital for dehydration a few times. So it’s definitely not the ideal way to handle it! Even though, yes, I was one of those bitches who was back in my pre-pregnancy jeans by the time I was about a week post-partum. I’m sorry. Please don’t hate me. Trust me when I tell you that it was really unpleasant.)

So, I was cool with my weight until 2008, around the time my daughter turned a year old. Something about that transition to toddler food… oh, man. You know how when you have a new baby, people tell you to sleep when the baby sleep? I took that to the next level. I ate what the baby ate.

Now, I’m not talking about baby food purees (bleah), I’m talking the real deal toddler foods: chicken nuggets, mac & cheese, mashed potatoes. All that comfort food from when I was a kid, that I still loved.

Say, for example, that the kiddo only ate half of her PB&J sandwich? What am I supposed to do, throw it out? No way! I’d wolf that sucker down. It was just to tidy up, I told myself. Don’t want to be wasteful, after all!

The upshot, of course, is that in the last 2 years, I’ve gained close to 30 pounds. My size 10 jeans have been traded up for size 14s. I’m not huge, no (especially not compared to my weight pre-surgery), but I’m not happy either.

I’ve tried several different diets over the past year or so, and I haven’t really been able to stick with any of them. I think it’s because I tried to go back to my old dieting patterns – i.e., low-carb diets – and that doesn’t work for me now. Before I had a kid, I could just ditch all of the bread and crackers and chips, and I’d lose weight because it wasn’t around to tempt me. But carbs are the primary staple of my kid’s diet (hell, it’s probably 90% of her caloric intake), so that old trick of “don’t have it around and you’ll be fine” doesn’t work. The temptation is always there, in my face, and so I keep failing.

I’m trying a new tactic now. I’m simply tracking my calories, and I’m exercising every day. I know, it’s totally old-school, but it seems to be working. I’ve lost 9 pounds in the last two months. I know that’s not much to brag about, but I’ll take what I can get. Slow and steady wins the race, right?

One way or another, I will find a way to stop my ass from any future growth.

photo source: dearoot, CC2.0

These days, we have conversations about Degrassi High and how George Clooney is hot for an old dude and OMG Taylor Lautner put on 30! POUNDS! OF MUSCLE! For the Twilight movies. And can she and her friends go the mall for sushi and a movie?

This…TEENAGER whose iPod ranges from Soundtrack of Mulan to Pearl Jam’s Jeremy (which, is one of my all time favorite songs and I have to say I am totally impressed by this), who makes dinner, who helped sew her own costume for Anime Expo last year.

Not a baby. I remember bringing her home from the hospital and inhaling that new baby smell…I remember letting her sleep in the bed with me because she didn’t want to sleep “by her ownself”. Now she’s spending the night with friend and asking me about going to school out of state, or studying abroad (SOMEBODY. Shoot me now).

She’s growing, but she’s still my baby.

And thus began my first foray into the world of therapy.

Admittedly, it didn’t last long.

I sat in the dark office not ready and unwilling to share my feelings. I didn’t want to talk. Only weak people needed help. I didn’t want to burden people with my problems. My problems weren’t really problems. When the therapist asked me, “What color would your feelings be if they were a color?” I decided maybe this hippy-dippy color-your-feelings bullshit was not for me. I never went back. Instead I learned the give and take of a healthy diet and exercise and letting myself indulge sometimes and making up for it later in the gym.

Years later, I found myself hiding in my laundry room crying day after day. Overwhelmed, unappreciated, unable to figure out what was making me tick, how to fix it, what my problem was. I was mad and sad. I wanted to hit things. My marriage felt shaky, but we weren’t talking. Something felt wrong but yet, I didn’t know how to ask for what I needed, how to say this wasn’t right. I am a strong woman, I thought. Strong women don’t ask for help. Strong women don’t need help. Strong women don’t lean on people.

Strong women can be stupid.

One morning, after many tears and stops and starts, my husband and I realized that for two smart people, we were pretty stupid. For two people that are good at so many things, we royally sucked at communication.

And thus my second jaunt into the world of therapy.

It’s been a year. It’s been a hard year. There were sessions where I spent the entire hour with tears running down my face, one hand buried in the box of tissues. There were sessions when we would leave and ride home in terse silence. A year of active listening, of tortured convoluted “when you x, I feel y” statements. We got to a point when I finally realized that I didn’t spend entire days wanting to punch him in the face – I remember  saying, “You don’t even realize how angry you are until that anger ISN’T sitting on your shoulders.”

So, growth is a reality.

Growth is a possibility.

And growth has a price. And that price is roughly $120 an hour.

And it is SO worth it.

As most of you know I just recently had weight loss surgery.  It’s only been 3 weeks since my surgery date and I’m happy with my decision and have no regrets.  I’m doing really well and even though I’m still in my same pants, I can tell that changes are happening.  I’ve had to get accustomed to how my body now takes in food.  What I can and can not eat has changed, and I’m becoming healthier.

With so many good changes there has only been one unhealthy addition added to my routine.  I’ve become obsessed with the scale.  I’ve gone from cringing at the thought of stepping on a scale to stepping on the scale EVERY DAY, sometimes more than once!  I know it’s a horrible habit, but I’m afraid  it’s too late.  The obsession has grown into a full on epidemic, and I’m not proud.

I’ve always been an advocate of limited weighing.  When friends would become obsessed I would be the one trying to talk them down off the daily weighing ledge.  I’ve always suggested monthly weigh-ins because you will never get an accurate vision of your weight loss when you weigh yourself daily, or even weekly.  I know this…I preach this…so why can’t I follow my own assvice?

I know that weighing myself daily is unhealthy, not accurate and will not end well.  I just can’t seem to stop doing it.  Please send re-enforcements and possibly a scale-napper, otherwise I might end up in the crazy house…and we definitely don’t want that!!

In looking back over three years, I realize just how far my family has come.

My Drummer Man, now 29, is celebrating three years of his relationship with the Fabulous Girlfriend. I have watched them develop into an amazing, loving couple. Can I have grandchildren now, please? Thanks.

The Drama King, 26,  has had the most personal growth in his life. Before I started my blog, I had thrown him out of the house in a stunning moment of vileness on his part. But since then, he has found his soulmate. The difference in my pre-Rocky and post-Rocky son is more like the difference between night and day — as my proverbial dark child becomes a ray of sunshine and delight. His boyfriend has become like a son to me. In fact, we joke that if he and DK ever break up, I still get custody of Rocky.

Z-man left home for the first time three years ago to start his culinary school career. Now, mere weeks from his 21st birthday, he is re-prioritizing his life. Instead of the chef’s life he dreamed of at 18, he now looks forward to finishing his bachelor’s degree in nutrition and looking into ways to move out on his own.

Oh yeah. And he came out in a pretty stunning revelation.

J-bear? Well, J-bear was still a little bit of a scared bunny when I started blogging. She also has created a successful life for herself, with a high school diploma, a black belt in karate, a career as a dog groomer and her own apartment. My husband’s daughter has had the most dramatic change in physical appearance, cutting her hair short, adding multiple tattoos and piercings … oh, and coming out as a lesbian.

And then there’s the Roo-girl. As a newly minted teenager three years ago just finishing her middle school career, she was a never-ending source of blonde’isms and drama. Today she is sweet 16, a junior in high school, looking ahead to college, in her third year on the school’s varsity competition team, driving. (DRIVING?????? Noooooooooo!!!!)

As the last of the Mohicans, her every moment with me is a precious one. I hang onto each milestone tightly as I come to the scary realization that my child-rearing days are coming to an end.

So far, I have sent four children out of the nest to fly with their own precious wings. This last one has me looking at my own life to see where I have been and where I am going.

As my children grow up — and out — the next chapter is ahead of me, as well.

I don’t think I’ve done so bad.

I really only have a rotation of 3 drinks on my list, two of which I kind of created-ish. I’m not a bartender, so I don’t know the ratios, but I don’t like the kick of alcohol, so usually one shot of the heavy stuff is enough.

1) Margarita on the rocks with sugar instead of salt
Self-explanatory. You best recognize.

2) Mandarin Madras
Absolut Mandarin Vodka
Orange Juice
Cranberry Juice
IT’S PRACTICALLY HEALTHY, DAMMIT.

3) Heaven in a Glass
Three Olives Root Beer Vodka
Cream Soda
I made this one up at my aunt’s wedding last year, and to say I drank enough of these is an understatement. Now that I’m on the wagon and haven’t had soda in 9 months, I’m regretting my decision to give it up as I type this. It’s totally OK to have soda if it’s mixed with alcohol, right? RIGHT?