My daughter got engaged.  Yeah, yeah, yeah.  Woop woop, congrats, yadda yadda.  Great.  It's all great.  Whatever.
We all the know the most important part of Christie's wedding day will be...
me looking good in the pictures.
Mother-of-the-Bride.  Me.
Mother
Of
The
Bride
I'm going to be a mother of the bride.   Um, what??   Everybody will be looking at me.  And probably somewhat at Christie.  So much pressure.  The hair.  The make-up. The dress.  The shoes. The photographs!!
How am I going to get through all those photographs?  There won't be any smoke and mirrors!  There won't be any filters!  What the h@@@ am I going to do?  Maybe I can get her to call off the wedding? Yes, that's it!  That's a great idea.  That can happen.  Shoot.  No, it can't.  Paul's perfect.  He's better than Prince Charming.
Dear reader, let me explain something.  Things...happen...as you get older. Bad things.  Really bad things.  A good friend recently put her arm around me and gently explained, "Petra, your body is changing."  I wanted to punch her in her sweet little face.
  I don't like it.  I don't like it AT ALL!   One morning, not too long ago, I woke up to find myself in the middle of a war.  A horrendous, horrible, hideous war.  A war I wasn't ready for.  At all.  I hadn't even had my coffee yet, for God's sake.  I woke up to find I was in a war with gravity.   Seriously.  I went to bed and everything was fine.  I was normal, I felt fine, my body was normal.  And the next morning, I woke up, looked in the mirror and my 80 year old father was staring back at me!!  I am not kidding.  Gravity is having its way with me.   It is doing what it does naturally...making things fall.  It is making parts of my body fall.  Lots of parts.  All parts.   Sometimes when I look down at my legs, I go to pull up my nylons only to realize I'M NOT WEARING NYLONS!!
And the bat wings.  We've talked about the bat wings before.  I can't.  I cannot even.
THIS is how I'm going to look on the day a bajillion pictures are going to be taken of me?
I DON'T THINK SO.
My sister-in-law is a personal trainer in Atlanta.  She is perfect.  She lives in a beautiful house, has a beautiful family, plays tennis, cooks gourmet meals, and is a size zero with muscles.  I hate her.
Despite (or possibly due to) my abiding envy, I emailed her:
You know how there is an app "from couch to 5K" in nine weeks?  Well, is there an app "from flab to Michelle Obama arms in nine months?"
I needed some direction.  I was looking for an app.  Or a couple of good websites. Or some good YouTube videos I could follow along.  I wanted two or three arm exercises I could do for a few months.
I had no idea.  No idea at all.  No idea how that one little email would change so many things....