Project Rules

If I were to find this blog while web-surfing, I would think, "That is so shallow." But here I am, doing it anyway. Why? Because I'm sick of hating how I look in photos. And because I have a New Baby, the First Grandson on Your Husband's Side, I'm in a helluva lotta photos.

I stopped caring how I looked about 20 years ago, when my mother died and my acne flared up. I just accepted that I wasn't one of the "pretty people" and went on with my life. Since then, I've realized two things:

1. Anyone can look better with a little effort.

2. Saying I didn't care, but complaining about myself in photographs is not only hypocritical, but a cop-out.

That being said, I've chosen an arbitrary timeframe (a year) in which to figure out how to become pretty. But here are the things I want to keep in mind:

1. I'm a mom and, while it's important to take time for myself, I don't want to sacrifice quality time with my baby for the sake of beauty.

2. I don't want my own self-criticism to make me more critical of other people's appearances.

So here are the rules. Everything I do or change about my routine has to be:

1. Fast.

2. Easy (is this really 1a?).

3. Cheap.

Those rules are the New Mom's Mantra, but I think they point to something I think it is important to clarify: I believe that anyone can be pretty with a ton of time and money. Why is it that contestants on What Not to Wear get $5,000 to spend on clothes? How many women would volunteer for a post-partum tummy tuck (which, I've heard, also costs about $5k)? I know that my face would look incredible after a series of, say, 5 chemical peels, which would cost around $700 - 1,000.

So here I go. I'm going to loosely assign myself this task from now until my 36th birthday (October 31, 2010) and see how things go.