Jodi, our daughter just called and warned us (that was her word, not mine) that her before and after pics would be put on Face Book probably today of her before  and after she began exercising. She said that she hoped it wouldn’t embarrass us to see her on FB dressed in a bathing suit showing off her new body. I told her that the only thing that would embarrass me would be pictures of me in a swimsuit before or even AFTER an exercise program.  When Randy and I saw the pics she sent, it made me begin to think of what my before and after pics would look like right now. Jodi’s looked so good and made me very proud of her for beginning a healthy lifestyle, unlike her mother, who feels like she is having a “healthy” eating day if I have only 1 cupcake and one hamburger in a 24 hour period. When we asked her why her name was not under the picture, she said that she would just say it was Anon, which reminded me of a story that I have to tell about Jodi.

Some years back, when she lived with us as a single mom, she joined us in the mornings for our devotion time, where Randy or I would read one of the devotions out of Our Daily Bread. Jodi began to notice that several of the readings were written by “Anon” and one day she commented that, “my goodness, I wonder who Anon is, he sure wrote a lot of devotions”. We began to laugh, not knowing whether to tell her exactly who “Anon” was or just agree with her. We couldn’t stand it, we finally told her who “Anon” was and so began the joke that when we didn’t know where a saying or a reading came from, we would just say, “I guess Anon wrote it”. It is just one of the many stories that we could tell of those days when we were blessed to have her living with us.

Back to the Before & After story. I ask Jodi if she thought I should post my B & A pics on FB and she began to laugh. She said that I could post pics of me before moving back to Texas from California, where I had lost about 30 lbs. We then began to laugh, thinking of what my “after moving back to Texas a year ago” would look like. The before pics would show me with a lettuce wrap in one hand and a piece of fruit in the other. Because Pasadena didn’t have a fast food joint on every corner, it made loosing weight pretty easy, plus we lived upstairs so climbing up and down burned more calories than I am use to burning. The after picture would show me in a sweat shirt with a Whataburger in one hand and a taco in the other, all the while trying to balance cupcakes on my knees. If you don’t live in Texas, STAY AWAY!!!! moving here makes you fat. It is either too hot in summer to walk or too cold in winter to walk. We just sit inside and eat the fast food that we picked up on the corner.

We won’t be posting any B&A pictures anytime soon. Maybe if we go back to visit friends in California we will take our pictures out there and they would show some improvement in our body weight, than if there were taking now, after being gone from there a year. But if we every need to embarrass our kids, we know just the way to do it now.