Of Birthdays and Bowling

We had C's "friend" birthday party yesterday (she'll be 5 on Friday). We discovered that the four invitations I sent to school with her never made it home with the kids, so our party attendance was rather sparse. Two girls showed up and, after we called the neighbor and found that the invite had never appeared at their house, two more came over. C didn't seem to care much, but I was rather annoyed. I sent them with a note to the teacher explaining that I would have mailed them but didn't even know the girls' last names, let alone their addresses. I don't know if she set them aside and forgot about them or threw them away, but I plan to ask about them when I go help with the halloween party next week. I would hope that she would have called me, emailed me, or sent me a note if she didn't want to send them home with the girls!

Last night I bowled a 56, 58, and an 87. I only had one frame out of all three games with two gutter balls, so I was actually content with those pitiful scores. I refused to allow my nervousness about bowling get to me, and I ate normally all weekend. I had many "not a normal eater" thoughts, but talked sensibly to myself and moved on. I even managed to stick with one small piece of cake and smallish helping of ice cream yesterday. Yes, I wanted more -- but I really wasn't hungry and knew there'd be more ice cream and cake coming up next weekend at C's "family" birthday party. It helped that it was store-bought cake since she wanted a "My Little Pony" cake. Homemade cakes are much more fabulously delicious and hard to resist.

I've been listening to Martha Beck's book The Joy Diet on CD, and parts of it are really resonating with me. She talks about achieving your goals and how to go about it. One of the things she says is to do things differently periodically to kind of "shake things up" -- to help you see things from a different perspective. I was reminded of my therpist telling me "do something different" when wanting to binge. I thought of that several times this past weekend and took the paper into the living room rather than reading it at the kitchen counter, took the dog for a new route while walking, instituted a new rule at our house for dessert-eating (we don't eat dessert right after dinner but wait until we're in our PJs and ready for bed), and tried to change up my routine at work a bit. I felt really good about my weekend, and I'm going to try (as Martha also says) to "do one thing differently". This week my different thing is to eat slowly. Really.