Learning to Love My Body

So I love my body. And I'll tell you why.
I first started hating my body in high school, because that's what teenage girls do. My body looked like this:

Disgusting, right? The picture is cropped severely so you don't have to see my cankles, but you can pretty much count my ribs where my cleavage should be.
In college I was preoccupied, so I didn't spend too much time hating my body, but once I graduated I went right back to hating on it. Here's another picture of my horrible horrible body (I'm the one on the far left, "Posh Spice"):

Look at that. No boobs at all, all hips and thighs. Who could love a body like that? Time passed and I gained weight, and when I got married my dress was a size 10. Size 10! I couldn't believe it. Here's a picture of my hideously huge body in my wedding gown:

What a horse! Over the next few years I faced many challenges and a lot of stress, and I gained weight. But I also went on a journey of self-discovery. I faced my fears and anxieties about my body and learned to appreciate it. And I had an amazing epiphany. Whenever I looked at old pictures of myself, I longed for that skinny body. The very body that I loathed when I had it. My epiphany was this: no matter what I looked like, I hated the body I currently had and wanted the one I had had two years before. That was when I decided to just love the body I had. Because in 2 years, I would love it anyway, so why wait? I got pregnant and didn't watch my weight. When I went into deliver the baby and the nurse asked my weight, I honestly didn't know. I didn't weigh myself until my baby was 9 months old, and I weighed around 170. Keep in mind that in high school I weighed 105. Here's a picture of that 170 pounds:

So yeah, I'm done. I'm done falling into the trap of wanting the body I used to have. I'm not 100% thrilled with my weight (currently in the 150's), but I've never been happy with my body or weight, so why let that stop me? What about you? Are you ready to love the body you have today?

Learning my own lessons.

I've been writing more lately. I'm going to write every day during Tori's nap (or while I've got the babysitter) for the next 21 days. I hope that will develop the habit. I had forgotten how difficult those first few words are. I just grit my teeth and do it, forcing myself to type the awkward embarrassing first sentences until my momentum carries me forward.
Today I worked on the proposal for the book my mom and I wrote, Daughters of God. We are still looking for an agent, and having a proposal will help. So I wrote, wincing at every sentence, because it was all horrible! As Anne Lamott would say, KFKD was definitely playing in my head. But because I read Bird by Bird and took it to heart, I wrote on. Whew, what a relief!
My next task for the day is prioritizing. I can't do everything, and yet I thought that with 12 hours of babysitting a week I could! What a shock! I need to coach myself a little more often, perchance.