Brittany and Back

Aw, this is the best thing to come home to - 100 followers! You guys are wonderful. Thank you so much for reading and supporting me :)

France was close to perfect. A and I are good at holidays. We were good friends for, oh, ten years before we started dating but sometimes it's all too easy to get so wrapped up in bickering about the minutiae of day-to-day married life and forget that we do actually really like hanging out together. It's kind of sad :| But on holiday, far away from the dishwasher and the cat and whose turn it is to take out the trash, we relax, and revert quite naturally to acting like friends as well as spouses. So during the day we lay on the beach and read, or planned ridiculous, far-fetched names to give our hundreds of future children. We drank cold Breton cider, went on long walks, cooked our meals outside on the camp stove, and hunted for interesting life forms in the tide pools. In the evenings we had lazy, amicable conversations about God and politics and the future, over brie and red wine. The sun shone from 5 in the morning until 11 at night. It wasn't perfect - we did have a big argument one evening, and there were times when I worried too much about having to wear a bikini - and things haven't been perfect since we came home, but I feel like it's getting better. We've started talking through some of our old resentments, and I think we're both really trying to hear what the other one's saying. One thing that's definitely becoming more apparent is that our communication styles are... discordant, at best. A is very reflective, and needs to process things mentally before he verbalizes things, but the things that he does say are generally well thought-out and accurate. I'm more impulsive and either flit through conversations in an excited, absent-minded daydream, or bulldoze through them loudly and with tears. So we still need to figure out a way to reconcile those two approaches.

Anyway. In other news, I came back from France half a pound heavier than I went, at 125.5. Which was better than I'd expected, given that we spent half our time eating, but we also did a lot of walking, so I guess that minimised the damage.

I now need to get serious about losing this, though. I've been too lenient for too long and I need to come up with a strategy for keeping this off. 120lbs, although higher than I'd like to be, is about the highest that I can be at without feeling completely hideous. So, to be safely below that with a few lbs of "buffer", I need to lose about 10 lbs.

We have 2 weddings to go to at the middle/end of August, and I'm going to try really hard to be no higher than 115 by then. Please help me be harsh with myself! I'm too good already at making excuses for slipping up, but I'd really like to stick with this and if you guys could hold me accountable to that I would be eternally grateful.

Am even considering posting pictures just to embarrass myself into action, but not sure yet whether I can face it...

Love to you all,
Sophie