Now I Lay Me Down

Recently, I had a week of feeling cruddy -- not sickly enough to race to the doctor, but just way less than great. So I did a lot of laying around, from the bed to the couch and back again. I slept and read and watched TV.

And I came to this amazing realization as I lay there.

My stomach never looks flatter than when I'm flat on my back!

I mean, seriously, no Spanx, no sucking it in, no sit ups, just looking naturally svelte. So now I'm wondering how I can keep this up. Can I cook or craft or clean -- scratch that, don't care about the cleaning -- while I'm laying there all stomach flatty? I was tempted to point it out to Hubby as in, "Hey, look at how flat my stomach is," but I didn't want him to catch on to the fact that I was stretching this laying around thing out to look good.

Louis' stomach looks flatter when he lays on his back, too!

Living in Arizona during the Summer, it's guaranteed to be over 100 degrees every day for months so our air conditioning and ceiling fans run non-stop. But still, even with all the cooled air circulation, every night between 2 and 3 a.m., I wake up hot. Hot as in I'm suffocating, I'm misting (a guy where I worked once told me that ladies don't sweat, they mist), the sheets feel uncomfortable. I have to get up and walk around for a minute, get a cold drink, air off a little.

Sometimes I can go right back to bed. Most of the time, I end up staying awake for hours if I go back to sleep at all. I'll go out to the kitchen and sit right under the a/c vent, reading blogs and emails for as long as it takes to cool down. Hubby will come out and check on me, make sure I'm okay and always asks me to come back to bed. If I'm feeling sleepy, I will, and if I'm lucky, I go back to sleep for a while. He will hold my hand or put his hand on my arm or shoulder in a comforting gesture -- which, frankly, is usually too hot for me and starts the process all over again. I don't know about you, but when I'm hot or having that hot flash kind of feeling, I cannot stand to be touched. I have to throw the dogs off my lap and give Hubby the evil eye. Back off, I'm hot ... Do. Not. Touch. Me.

This morning after he came out to check on me, I went back to bed but then neither one of us could go back to sleep. So we just talked and scratched puppy ears and listened to the monsoon wind blowing around the corner of the house.

And I rolled over toward him and put my hand on his arm in a comforting gesture -- and he screeched at me, "Don't touch me, it's too hot!"

I laughed so hard that I couldn't catch my breath. I do that on occasion. Get the giggles and just lose it. Drives our youngest daughter crazy because if she starts laughing with me, we're done for and it's almost always out in public. Once I was in a water aerobics class with a friend and got started laughing like that -- nearly drowned and disrupted the class in the process. Not everyone thinks it's funny!

So now my quest is to come up with a profession where I can make good money while I lay on the family room couch and admire my flat stomach. They have pens that write upside down. I wonder if I can rig my laptop upside down over me.