600 calories a day!

I am about five pounds below my pre-pregnancy weight and all my pants are now dumpy in the butt. Don't get all jealous about that. There's five pounds less of me, but nothing is where it was or the same consistency as before I got pregnant. Things are a lot more squishy. Now that I'm nursing, I am an eating machine. I'm like a hobbit going from breakfast to second breakfast to elevens. I read somewhere that nursing burns 600 calories a day. I'm having a hard time finding things other than a pan of brownies that use up those calories. Who knew this could be so hard?

My rough estimate is that I've had about 1200 calories so far today. People say that 2000 calories a day is normal, right? So if I'm supposed to get an additional 600, I'm not even halfway to my goal. No wonder I'm always hungry!

All of your suggestions for lunch were super helpful and I've been rocking the leftovers this week so far. While the Healthy Choice meals are tasty, I felt like I needed to eat two so I could fill up! I never thought I could be sick of brownies, but it's coming true.

And all the things that fill me up are typically things that I would never normally eat. Fettuccine Alfredo? I've avoided it for years because it normally sends my blood sugar into orbit, but now here I am stuffing my gob with it. And whenever Rich looks at me in wonder as I shovel more food in, I just blurt out, "600 CALORIES A DAY!"

Ex-boyfriend Guacamole

I went to get a massage on Sunday morning and as usual it was 60 minutes of chatting with my massage therapist Laura while she worked. The subject of food came up and her hands starting working overtime as she enthusiastically explained how to make the best guacamole ever. The recipe came from her ex-boyfriend Chris and her dad would request it every time he came over. I intend to give it a try this week. It comes highly recommended! 1/4 of red onion, finely chopped 1 tsp salt 2 cloves garlic, minced 1 Serrano pepper, minced juice from 1 lime 2 avocados 2 Roma tomatoes, chopped 1/2 bunch cilantro, chopped

Combine red onion, salt, garlic and serrano pepper in a bowl. Squeeze lime juice over mixture, cover and refrigerate for two hours. Remove from fridge and add contents of avocados, tomatoes and clinatro. Add any additional salt to taste. Mix and enjoy!

Too much information overload

I'm having a bit of a blogging crisis. Ok, fine, that was a little melodramatic. But I'm having a really hard time figuring out what I should be reading and when.

Kim mentioned all this the other day when she talked about her audience and blog fame and it got me thinking. My Google reader is out of control. When I find a new blog, I scoop it up and squirrel it away in a folder where it languishes. I'm suffering from social overload. Just look at my list of feeds.

I have Flickr contacts that may not match my Twitter contacts that may not match the folks in my RSS feed or those on Facebook. And don't even get me started about LiveJournal. I can't make heads or tales of any of it.

Should I just trash all these people I've collected? What if one of them is a gem and I'm missing out? Should I read all these hundred of personal blogs from people I hardly know? Or should I pare my list down to a dozen or so folks that I really love their writing?

There was a blog that I read in my giant "parenting" category. Some mommy blogger. Honestly, I got her confused with other mommy bloggers in that folder. I must have heard her blog name at a BlogHer once. And for the most part I skimmed her entries. Blah blah kid said cute thing blah blah daughter growing up so fast blah blah husband never does the dishes blah blah. But one entry stuck in my head as she talked about trying to explain right and wrong to her son and how this was much harder than she thought it would be. Rich and I still talk about this entry and she wrote it in November of 2008, before I was even pregnant with our first child. So this random woman who I could have forgotten all about affected me. It would be a shame to miss that.

But wow there's just so much! It's too much to read! I'm still missing out on stuff regardless of if I have the blogs in my feed reader. Ironically, I never told that mommy blogger that wrote such a great entry how much I like it. So I'm not living up to my part of the deal in this whole community thing either.

Are there people that you read online that you don't have a personal relationship with? Do those people outnumber your friends? At what point do they become a friend versus some random person you're reading about? Are you content to read about the lives of strangers or are they all pathways to meet people that you'd invite over for dinner if they were in town?

I should have it so hard that there is so much good writing out there for me to scoop up. I just need a way to better digest it all.