THE WHOLE 30

 It would be nice to fly on a private jet to a spa for a week or so where people could prep all my meals.  A housekeeper and tutor could come in and do all the dishes and laundry and teach the kids.  Ok, I am dreaming.  Life goes on, diet or no diet.  

When is the right time to start a life changing way of eating?  My life is always busy just because we have so many children but, some weeks become like a circus juggling act.  I just happened to pick a start date without considering what was going to happen in the weeks ahead.  It is very easy to look at the calendar and put off a diet.  Who wants to go to a bridal shower, wedding, party, dinner date etc and not eat?  This is not a diet where you can just eat less than everyone else, you basically cannot eat anything that everyone else is eating.  

This diet requires planning and preparation and a laser like focus..  I am not very good at planning or having any kind of focus let alone laser like ( I blame this on my artistic brain.  Right side brain people are creative, messy creatures).  

 During my second week in I helped at a library book sale.  This was not unexpected as I have volunteered for years at this sale.  
Book sale week means slight chaos in my house, well I should say more chaos than normal.  The kids forage for food. We all forage for clean clothes in the massive piles of clean laundry that gets dumped in my room waiting to be put away and the dishes well, the dishes......

The dishes at my house pile up on a good week.  We cook most things from scratch, sorry, I cook most things from scratch.  Four of the  kids are home for school, two are at high school which means they are never home and two are working and doing online classes. This means than when they are home they are too busy to do dishes.  This equals four helpers ages 13, 10, 8 and 7.  We can cancel out the 8 and 7 as they make more mess than they clean up, use about ten glasses a day to drink from and when I say they "help" me I spell it "H I N D R A N C E".   

I get them to do small stuff like gather dishes and cups and glasses from people's bedrooms.  I normally do this by standing at the sink.  hands covered in soapy water and shout. 
" Bring out your dead!".   
 During the Bubonic Plague in London they would say this while pulling a cart through the streets each morning.   So many people died each day that they did not have time for funerals.  You might have seen a scene depicting this in a Monty Python movie ( no the kids haven't watched it!).  Being that I seem to have more dirty dishes than there were plague victims a little history lesson added to home ec seems quite appropriate here. 

Now, if you add in a week where the chief cook and bottle washer is out most days and exhausted when home you get a kitchen that looks like dinner prep on a Friday night at a popular restaurant. This would normally work itself out by Wednesday of the next week.  The little issue this time was that I was hosting book club at my house on the Monday immediately following the book sale. What are the chances of this?  I get to pick a book about once a year and the book sale is twice a year.  The stars aligned and created a perfect dish storm.  Add to this hubbie had his 50th birthday the day before.  This meant the book sale ended on Saturday, Daddy's 50th on Sunday and book club Monday.

Monday arrives and I groan as I really need to get back on track with the school work and somehow make the house appear clean and tidy for the 7pm arrival of everyone.  Did I mention that the host supplies dinner too?  No, I forgot that.

If it was winter then it would be dark when they arrive and easier to hide stuff as I could just dim the lights.  I commandeer the smalls (my little kids) and we do another home ec lesson ( we do a lot of them around here) which translates to:  
"everyone down stairs now! grab anything that doesn't belong down here and get it upstairs", said in my commando mum/mom voice.  

While they are busy doing that I go in the kitchen and open the fridge and let out a big sigh.  My fridge.....how do I explain my fridge!  I cannot see a spare inch of space.  I have no idea what is actually in there.  Who knows we could have a pet of some kind that I do not know about.  I have small boys you know.  It is a heaving large horrible mess.  There must be 50 meals worth of leftovers back there ( somewhere)......

I know that if I leave it this way one of the book club ladies will try to put something in there at which point I would die! 
 I turn around and look at the mountains, not mountain, mountains of dishes.  Piles and piles and piles.  Big pots and pans, plastic storage pots.  It is all the stuff that does not or cannot go in the dishwasher.  No one wants to touch it, let alone wash it.  I take a big breath and decide that the only way is to start with the fridge and gradually get to the dishes.  I skip the garbage can and go straight to a contractor bag.  What is the point of putting all this heavy gross oozing mess in the garbage can.  It will only leak and then I will have another mess on my hands.  I start my excavation.  I then wash each shelf one by one during the process. 

I finally finish.  I now have another mountain of dishes and a contractor bag so full and heavy that it looks as if a mafia hit has taken place. The phone rings just as I am thinking of sitting down for a nice cup of tea.  That is what Brits do in a crisis.  Tea is the panacea for all ills.  My landlord wants to know if the plumber can stop by in half an hour to install the new kitchen tap.  Now, I have had that tap sitting in my kitchen for a month and the plumber wants to come on the very day when I am on the verge of a panic attack.  What is the point of fighting this?  I raise my hands and surrender.  Why not?  I am sure this is not the worst mess the guy has seen in his career.   


The plumber is done in under 30 minutes and as I walk him out through the garage I notice the 2 plastic tubs that I had left over from the book sale.  An idea pops in to my head.  I will take all the dirty dishes outside on to the deck at the back of the house and then do them tomorrow and no one will be any wiser.

The book club ladies always come in the front door so they will never know that they are there.  I grab a small child and they help me to take the piles of dishes to the tubs that are now placed on the benches on the deck.  10 minutes later the kitchen can be seen.  I scrub down the counters, prep some food, put out pieces of hubbie's left over cake and then I hear a knock and "hello, hello".
The knock is not the front door.  I know this because we have a door bell and people do not knock when you have a door bell.  

NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!! My facade is shattered.  Two of the ladies are tapping on, you guessed it,  the back door on the deck.  I groan inwardly as I let them in.  I explain my ruse and we all laugh as they really do not care if my kitchen is a mess anyway.
By the end of book club the dishes have mounted up again and I go to bed determined to work on everything the next day.

The next morning turns to afternoon and then early evening.  The dishes are still on the deck.  I have just kept my head above water and fed the little locusts and worked on school and loaded the washing machine about three times.  (twenty to go).  One of my teens needed to go to work so I go through the garage to the car. As I was walking out I heard a very loud crashing sound.  My immediate thought was the dishes.  Being that we live in the woods and the bears are up from their winter sleep I retreat though the house rather than go around the back and possibly meet a 500 pound bruin ( big male bear to you townies reading this) on my deck.  As I look out the door to the deck I see a morbidly obese raccoon waddling off to the steps.  A large plastic bowl of dishes was now all over the deck, knives strewn everywhere and a small glass dish shattered leaving tiny shards everywhere.  Well, no time to clean that up so it had to wait again.  I guess the shards of glass kept the wildlife at bay over night as it looked the same in the morning.  Hubby decided to bring it all back to the kitchen before we did get a bruin visiting and so the dish saga continued.

The moral and point of this story as you are probably wondering if there is one is that there will never be a perfect time to start a diet.
If you are going to do this then just jump in.  Do not wait for a perfect 30 days because it will never happen.