Ok, I have a confession to make. This past Saturday, my son asked me if he could have one of the leftover cupcakes from last week’s Halloween party that my friend down the street baked. They are adorable. She even cut some out in the shape of ghosts and put little candy eyes on them…which would have tipped anyone else who entered my house off that I did not bake them. I’m ok in the baking department, but I’m not that good! Back to my little guilty secret. Granted, I really don’t mind my son having a cupcake. I am not one of those moms who won’t let her kid eat sugar. This was yet another thing I boasted about while pregnant and threw out the window the first time my kid was having a hissy fit and I popped a dum-dum in his mouth to reclaim my sanity. My confession is that the real reason I let him have a cupcake just a short hour and a half or so before dinner is because I was hoping that he would follow his traditional pattern of licking off the frosting and leaving most of the cake behind, which means that I would just HAVE to finish that cake to avoid being wasteful. I mean, there are people starving in this world and that would just be a total slap in the face to them if I didn’t eat the remnants of that poor ghost.

The stage was set perfectly. My husband was in the family room happily being occupied by his girlfriend, (a.k.a. I-pod touch) and I figured he wouldn’t notice if I jammed the rest of that cupcake in my mouth once my son was done with his share of it. To my complete and utter dismay, things didn’t go according to plan this time. Instead of licking the frosting first, my son bit the head off that damn ghost and just dug right into that cupcake…and the next thing you knew he had dropped it frosting-side down right onto the kitchen table. If I was the Martha Stewart type I would’ve immediately ran for a paper towel, wiped up the frosting, and gotten him a fresh cupcake, but again, I didn’t want to be wasteful. He looked at me as if to say, “What the hell do I do now Mommy?” I told him to do what I would’ve done in this exact situation. I told him to lick the frosting right off the table. Who are we kidding? I told him to lick the frosting off because I was jealous and wished that I was the one licking that frosting off the table. Since I couldn’t lick the frosting off the table, I figured that I might as well watch him enjoy it!

As I watched him lick away with delight, I sat there and thought about how many times I have cheated on my diet by polishing off the leftover food on my son’s plate. For the most part, I am a pretty healthy eater and I try to avoid processed foods and all that other junk that is supposed to completely clog up my system and speed up the aging process. I don’t avoid these foods because I’m making a healthy lifestyle choice. I avoid these foods because I have come to accept that I will just never be one of those women who can eat whatever they want and not gain an ounce. Whenever someone asks me how I dropped all of my baby weight, there is only one truthful answer I can give: hard work and sacrifice.

After I had my son, I was under the impression that I would be back in my size 27 Seven Jeans about 2 weeks after giving birth. I don’t know what planet I was living on at the time, but I can remember being completely dumbfounded when the first 20 or so of the 50 pounds I gained fell right off and the last 30 hung on for dear life. To all of the mommies reading this post, isn’t losing baby weight a real bitch? As if nine months of having a human being living inside of you, soaking up all of your energy, giving you hemorrhoids, and making your boobs leak isn’t enough, AFTER the kid is out, these horrific fat deposits just take up permanent residence on your hips. Can’t a girl catch a break??

I was hell-bent and determined NOT to be the girl who completely let herself go to hell after having a child, so I got my fat ass off the couch and got out the door at 7am each morning with the stroller. It took me a good nine months of walking for an hour and a half a day six days a week to finally take off every last ounce of that baby weight plus a few extra pounds, which put me below my pre-pregnancy weight, which then put me back at my wedding weight. I had never been so proud of any other accomplishment in my life up until that point. I mean, the 27s were actually getting too big at that point! I couldn’t believe it…I had pretty much achieved my post-baby dream of becoming a MILF. If for some reason you don’t know what a MILF is, go rent American Pie. It’ll clear things up for you!

I kept my MILF status right up until about the point that my son started eating solid foods. And yes, I’ve just figured out this correlation. You see, when your baby is eating pureed chicken and vegetables and GOD knows what out of a jar, it is easy to just stick to the salad that is on your plate. When your baby grows up a little, however, and moves into the toddler phase, things start getting a little tricky. Before you know it your little bundle is munching on grilled cheese sandwiches, chicken nuggets, pizza, and all sorts of other delicious things that you usually swear off eating, but now can’t seem to resist sampling off your little one’s plate.

When my son turned about 18 months old, that is when I noticed “the layer” starting to form again. All of a sudden, those size 27s were getting a little snug…actually they looked more like they’d been painted on. I wound up buying a couple pairs of “fat” jeans and just attributing my new layer of love to the fact that the weather in Connecticut just wasn’t as good as the weather in Colorado, so I couldn’t walk as much until it got warmer. It is funny how I’ll make up excuses like that just to convince myself that the layer is perfectly normal and acceptable to me. I’d love to say that the layer magically disappeared again once the weather got warmer, but it didn’t. It wasn’t until I got out there with that stroller again, and started paying more attention to exactly what I was eating that it finally started to retreat a little.

The problem is that whenver I diet, I diet hardcore. I get really disciplined about everything that I put into my mouth, which usually leaves me starving by the end of the night. When I am completely ravenous, I just can’t seem to resist whatever is leftover from my little man’s dinner. We don’t have a dog in our house and there is no need for one. When I’m in a diet phase, you can find me sitting on the floor under my son’s chair waiting for scraps of food to fall off. I swear that I just sit there and stare at him and watch him eat in complete anticipation of what delicious morsels he is going to leave behind for me to gobble up. I’m ashamed to admit that it got so bad one time that I actually ate macaroni and cheese off the little guy’s shirt. That’s right! I ATE food off my CHILD! Now that’s a hungry mama!

I’d love to sit here and tell all of you that I finally have things under control and that the layer is gone for good. It isn’t. It is definitely on it’s way out again though since I’ve cut out a lot of crap from my diet these days and I’m really trying to avoid every temptation of licking my son’s plate clean. If I keep it up, things should be back under control by Thanksgiving. Perfect timing! That’s not to say that the temptations aren’t lurking around every corner. The other day I took my son to McDonald’s after preschool for a happy meal just like I do pretty much every Tuesday and Thursday after I pick him up. They gave me fries instead of apple dippers by mistake. I went back through the drive-thru and they wound up giving me the missing apple dippers…and they let me keep the fries. My son gags on fries, so I found myself between a rock and a hard place. Let’s not get crazy here though…they WERE McDonald’s fries and it would be a complete disgrace to throw them out. I just couldn’t bring myself to disrespect Ronald McDonald in that manner. I ate the fries.

Today we went out to lunch with some friends of ours and their kids. I ordered the grilled chicken salad and my son had the grilled cheese. I can’t lie, I was incredibly disappointed when his meal came out with chips as a side-dish instead of french fries. I mean, somebody would’ve HAD to eat those fries and they would’ve made such a nice snack on the car ride home today. He ate the grilled cheese, but not the chips. They were Cape Cod chips and I felt bad for those chips, so I had a few. Uh-oh, the cycle is starting again. I’d better not take him out for pizza this week or else I’ll have to dig out the fat jeans.

The Mommyologist’s Last Word: “To all of my friends with little ones, you’d better check your kids’ shirts if they are around me during a diet cycle. I won’t hesitate to step right up and polish off whatever goodies they leave behind!”