Doing well by getting by…

For some people, just making to the next day is a win. If that’s the case than I am winning every damn day. I may be barely scraping by, but I have my health and my amazing kids. So, as long as I have clothes on my back, food to eat, and a place to live… what more could I want? There are literally billions of people who would want the life I’m living… so rather than resent what I don’t have, I choose to be grateful for what I’m lucky to have. All my kids are doing well, and are quite healthy. My brothers are still around and doing their thing. I’m losing weight, getting fitter, and stronger to keep doing my thing as a parent of six amazing kids. Life is perfect, but I am doing quite well. That’s good enough for me right now.

Work has been slow, as the kids have been keeping me quite  busy. Owen is cutting teeth, so we’re lucky if he sleeps more than 2 hours at a time. Charlotte and Emma are doing better at sleeping through the night, but they have their bad nights too. So mom and I have been doing shifts to make sure that everyone gets enough sleep to at least function through the day. Four kids is tough enough, but dealing with three that are at or under the age of three has been a marathon of long nights, but I happen to think we’re handling it rather well so far. There is going to come a time when all the kids slip into a bedtime routine and then there will be easier nights, and a lot more sleep to be had. It will just take time, patience, and will power to get there.

Needless to say, these nights have made it a tad difficult to get work done but I’m alright with that. With the new Vampire book online, I needed to take a break and this lined up pretty well. I’m back to writing a new novel, a sequel to a detective novel I did a few years ago. There’s also a modern magic novel that I’m working on as well, and it’s slowly approaching 300 pages. This novel is looking so good that I might skip the self-pub route and actually try the traditional publishing gauntlet again. I also happen to be working on a few poetry books and even a new atheism non-fiction book as well, so the plate is a tad full. The plan is to get all of these projects finished by the end of the year, and while that does sound a tad ambitious… even getting just half of them finished by January would be considered a big win for me.

Last month I went to visit my Rheumy, and for the first time in a while I stepped onto a scale to check my weight. I knew I was going to be down as I had lost more than a few inches and I had to buy new belts as the ones I had were not fitting either. Turns out my current weight is hovering around 250 lbs, which is pretty amazing. I’ve always had issues with my weight, but I’ve been doing a fuck ton of walking, especially when walking Katherine to school and home from school everyday, and carrying around kids that are between 20-30lbs is a work out in itself. I haven’t been this low in weight in a very, very long time and the plan is to keep going. Combined with a better diet, and my subscription to DDP Yoga, I want to get down to a little under 200 lbs, which would be the ideal weight for the kind of body I have. If I keep doing what I’m doing… it is a realistic goal considering how much I’ve lost already. 

Check out this picture to see how far I’ve come over the last several years:

I used to weight as much as 385 lbs… and a lot of family members were worried about my health during those times. My wake up call came in March of 2018, when I had a stroke. While the actual cause of my stroke was thought to be the biologics I was taking for Ankylosing Spondylitis, my weight clearly wasn’t helping in that regard as well. 

While I was in the hospital for over two weeks that month, it became clear to me that I needed to do better. I promised Ethan that I would make an effort to eat better, exercise and lose weight to lower the risk of something like this happening again. Based on the picture you see here, I have kept that promise. In the years since the stroke, my waist has lower from size 46 to 36 and I am now wearing size XL shirts instead of the 5XL shirt you see holding up in the picture.

While I am quite proud of the progress I’ve made, I need to keep the pedal to the medal and keep working on it. I really want to get my weight down a little more so that I can hang around and be with my boys and girls for years to come!

That is my ultimate goal, to hang around long enough to see my very little ones make it through high school. I don’t want them to go through those difficult years without a father, and the fact that they all love me to pieces is reason enough to want to stick around and take in as many hugs and kisses that I can collect. Based on that alone, I am a very lucky man.

So, that is my current status in a nutshell. I keep promising to come back and update often and then never come back for a month or so at a time. I don’t do it on purpose, but as I said before the kids are making the nights hard, and that has an effect on all creative outlets… this diary included. When I have more time, and more sleep, I will make the effort to post more and keep everyone up to speed on what going on in my little world.

Until then everyone, take care and I’ll see you around.

Peter