Hey all!  It's Lisa, the sometime lurker, sometime poster.    I have posted sporadically over the last year, but I'll do one long catch-up.  I, too, have gained back about 12 pounds from my lowest weight.  Like Tori, after my body lift, the weight gain is uncomfortable almost to the point of uncomfortable. 

I am a stress-eater and this past year has been chock-full of stress.  I don't know if any of you remember me saying, but my oldest daughter (Kelsey - 16) has seizure disorder.  Last August we lost control (again!) of her seizures and due to decreasing quality of life for her, she underwent two sucessful brain surgeries in May.  She'll always be an epileptic, but the difference now is that she only take one medication (instead of four) with relatively good control.  With continued success, she'll soon be able to drive, at some point she can live alone and God willing she'll be able to have children one day - all things that before surgery she wouldn't have been able to accomplish either due to seizures or drugs.

I am in school for my Master's in Healthcare Administration and it's an accelerated, on-line program and it is kicking my butt.  On top of that, I'm not even sure the closer I get to graduating that it's even what I want to do with the 2nd half of my working life.

My parents' health is deteriorating and my mom is especially bad.  She has beginning stages of dementia and turns mean and ugly when she is at her worst.  She has COPD and end-stage diabetes and on top of that is suffering from multiple TIA's a month.  Her driving priveleges were recently taken away and the burden on my dad is horrendous.

Just an observation -- do any of you happen to know why they call our age group "middle-aged"?  I have figured out it is because we are stuck smack in the middle between taking care of our children still at home and our parents who are declining.

Anywho -- Hurricane Ike visited us in September and we had some home damage that was just this past week repaired.  Worse than some, LOADS better than others.  My husband and I have just one car (by choice) and up until September we were able to carpool, as he worked about 5 miles away from me.  When Ike damaged the huge Chase Towers downtown Houston, however, he was "temporarily" relocated to an area quite a while away.  Again, with just one car, my commute time between taking my youngest daughter to school, him to work, then myself to work and in reverse in the afternoons is between 4 and 5 hours a day.

Due to everything going on in life, I recently went on Pristiq, an anti-depressant, which works wonders for the mood and irritability, but makes the cravings worse some days.  Maintaining through Dec. is my goal and come January I'll climb back on the wagon and lose those pounds.