Evening Observations

I got home from my errands and Hubby announced that he got weighed in for this weight loss challenge at work, and he's starting tomorrow (Friday). Great, I said.

Then I notice a bag of frozen blueberries in the sink thawing. "What are those for?" I ask.

Hubby then tells me he's making a little (remember this for later on) blueberry cobbler. My look of utter bewilderment pushed him on to explain that since tonight was his "last night," he wanted to go out with a bang. All I could do was shake my head and walk away; I didn't feel right berating him about this attitude, because I've definitely taken that "death row last meal" attitude with diets in the past.

So we sit down to dinner, and I pass on the pasta he made and stick with the baked chicken and steamed broccoli. As he digs in to the pasta, Hubby announces that starting tomorrow there will no longer be any noodles or rice cooked in the house. My daughter, known far and wide as the Noodle Queen, looks at me in horror.

"We have to cook some noodles or rice for Mabel," I interject. She's an 8 year old child that needs a well-balanced diet -- which includes carbohydrates. He scoffs, and I can tell he's partially saying it in jest, but at the same time, I know what he's thinking: when he's on his almost no-carb diet plan (some hospital's cardiac patient diet), cooking, serving, looking and smelling those noodles or rice will be torture.

Then dinner's done, and so is the cobbler, which I see when it comes out of the oven is LARGE. I'm talking 8, 10 servings. Again, I shake my head and walk away. There are two options to come out of this: he's either going to gorge himself until he's sick on it, or else there will be plenty left tomorrow, therefore he can't start his diet until it's gone.

An hour or so later I'm on the phone with a friend and the Call Waiting Beep goes off. Hubby's mother is on the phone. She is coming back from town and wondered if she could drop off a "surprise" for us. I say yes, and switch back to my friend, who wants to lay odds with me whether the surprise is food-related. There's no way I'm betting against that one.

In-laws arrive, but I'm still upstairs on the phone. Mabel runs upstairs to tell me that Grandma has brought donuts! I snort and chortle, again shaking my head. Either Hubby told her he was starting this program tomorrow or else her Sabotage Senses were tingling that there was a diet starting somewhere that she had to meddle with.

I finally went downstairs -- Hubby and Father-in-law were just finishing their bowls of cobbler-- and I heard a wonderful story that last week when Mabel spent the day with Grandma, she had asked for donuts, but they didn't have time to stop at the donut store. So, being the good grandparent, she remembered this and brought a half dozen. Meanwhile, it was obvious that two of them were meant for Mabel (chocolate frosted with sprinkles), while the remaining four were Hubby's favorites -- Boston creme, raspberry filled, etc.

I shook my head again and said to Hubby, "How are you going to get all this cobbler and donuts eaten before tomorrow morning? You're going to make yourself ill."

They all laughed, and jokes were made about how grumpy Hubby gets when he's on a diet, la-de-la. As they got up to leave Hubby asked his mother if she wanted some cobbler to take home. "Oh, no! I can't!" she gushed. "I've just about lost the five pounds I gained at Christmas, plus I want to lose 20 more."

Ahem. I'm not even going to go there.

So, this morning, Friday, when I get back from my workout, I find Hubby on the couch eating his breakfast -- of blueberry cobbler. If I shake my head any more my head's going to fall off.