So a couple of months ago, I made a clerical error in posting that I weighed 247. At a recent doctor’s appointment, I checked and discovered that I had been only 242 (a veritable featherweight). The scale at my gym is two pounds off from the scale at the doctor’s office (at said recent doctor visit, I weighed myself at the gym just hours before weighing in at the doctor’s office). So let’s call the original weight 240 because I weigh myself most frequently at the gym, so that’s my benchmark.

Yesterday and today at the gym, I weighed in at 203. I’ve lost 37 pounds. My face is thinner, and jeans that I could barely squeeze into a month ago have spare room in the waist now. Pants I bought a little large a little over a month ago now have 5 or 6 inches of extra room in the waistline and are essentially unusable. I wear a large tee-shirt comfortably now rather than feeling self-conscious about the XLs that looked like tents on me. I still have bulges above my waistline, but they’re much smaller. I still have a little bit of a pot belly, but it’s much smaller. It’s a little speedbump along the trail to heaven (as the line of adolescent hair in the belly button region was called in my youth) rather than a steep dropoff. One can now almost see a layer of abs underneath the remaining girdle of fat.

I’m fully recovered from my gall bladder removal now and returned to my regular gym schedule this weekend. I’m running 25 - 30 minutes and then doing an upper body workout that reportedly has resulted in much greater firmness.

Twentyish more pounds and I will have reached my initial goal of getting back to my college weight. When I set that goal, I figured it was a pipe dream, but almost 40 pounds down the path, it’s seeming downright attainable. I’m healthier. I feel better about myself. I’m a little ashamed to admit it, but I look in the mirror more than I did before, checking the profile, occasionally flexing a bit to see just how firm the old upper body’s getting. It’s a little ridiculous, yes, but let’s try to think of it as if I’ve just gotten a new car and am kicking the tires and sitting in it out in the driveway to experience the pleasure of the new car smell. Eventually, the newness of my (soon to be) hot bod will wear off and I’ll just be your average hunk who’s too cavalier about his guns, his gams, and his gut to bother checking them out every time he changes clothes. In the mean time, if you catch me kissing my biceps, be sure to sock me one and welcome me back to the real world.

It’s been too long since I’ve posted a baby update. I suck. Lennie’ll be 17 months old in a couple of weeks, and it’s impossible to imagine her as a squirmy little baby anymore. She speaks in sentences now. She expresses herself in reasonably complex ways. She plays games and recognizes (and tries to provoke) humor. To use the old metaphor, she’s a sponge.

For example, Mleeka often says “No, ma’am” when being emphatic about telling Lennie not to do something. So now, when Lennie’s expressing her displeasure or disagreement with something, she’ll do so emphatically by saying “No, ma’am” in a clipped sort of tone.

It’d be futile to try to list all of the new words she’s picked up since I last wrote about her, so I’ll go with some of my favorites. There’s “booger” (pronounced “booder”). She’s very boogery right now, especially from her eyes. When I tell her she’s got eye-boogers (and they’re so huge and crusty when she wakes up that I’ve best described them to friends as being cornflake-like), she points to her nose and says “booder.” Then there’s “color,” which she pronounces “tohtah” or something similar that can’t really be rendered using anything but linguistic symbols. She usually says this while pointing frantically at where we keep her markers. She likes to make coloring a team sport, insisting at the least that you watch her color and often handing you markers to help her color with. If you write something (anything) and ask her what it says, she peeps “Lennie.” And lately she’s taken to doing a writing-like stroke, pointing at it, and saying “Lennie.” This stems I guess from the fact that her little red chair has her name embroidered on it, and we’ve always pointed at it and said her name.

She’s got a few phrases now too, the cutest being “c’mere” and “let’s go,” which she says when she sees us getting ready to go somewhere. She’ll head for the back door and wait there impatiently, saying “let’s go.”

For a while, she was doing really well with her shape sorter and her puzzles, but she’s put those aside for now in favor of the keyboard. She remains a big dancer and seems especially fond of R&B.

One of my favorite things in the world right now is our morning routine. I sit here in my big chair working, and when she’s awake, Mleeka helps her down from the bed, and she sort of meanders into the living room, rubbing her (of late very boogery) eyes, still sort of sleepy and dazed. She catches sight of me and I coo at her and talk to her and she grins. We usually play or read a little bit, and I’ll turn on PBS Kids if they’re on, and I’ll try to get some breakfast in her. She’s pretty keen on eggs, and I need to get better about just making it part of the every day routine to make her an omelette. Usually, it’s not terribly long before she’s ready to go back in and wake Mleeka up, but on pretty much a daily basis, we have these few little minutes of good daddy/daughter time.

Of course, most of the rest of the time, she’ll have nothing to do with me lately. That’s not entirely true. I’ll take her out to play at the bookstore or we’ll just dance around and play in the evenings most nights, but she’s very much a mama’s girl lately. For a while, she had been sleeping in her own bedroom for a few hours a night, but she’s insisted on being on Mleeka most nights lately, and if I try to comfort her, she squawls and squirms as if I’m jabbing her with sharp things. It’s all very demoralizing for me and frustrating for Mleeka, who naturally would like to have a little personal space sometimes. This has been going on through what must have been a bad teething bout and lately a cold. Hopefully as she gets over these things, she’ll be a little less clingy with Mleeka and a little more comfortable with me.

I guess that’s it for now. There’s so much I’ve missed reporting.