Buying the Bathing Suit

Like most women, I HATE buying a new bathing suit. It's one of the few shopping trips I loathe having to do each year. I spend hours searching the racks for right "style," which of course means the ones that flares away from the spare tire that hangs around my stomach just enough to make the bulge look a bit smaller. Also, it must have just the right "colors" to match my skin tone, which are the ones that use abstract color splashes or large print flowers to mask the previously mentioned excess mass.

Once I've spent 45 minutes looking and have a grand total of 3 to try on I make my way to the dreaded dressing room. This part is torture as well because I somehow always go when there several cute, tall, thin, tanned high school girls or college students trying on bathing suits as well and doing a little fashion show using the dressing room as their runway. They sit and talk in front of the mirrors about which ones they can't get because they don't have enough money to buy them all. Then I come out to the mirror still trying to cover my stomach with my arms and showing off my white ankle socks, feeling TOTALLY HOT! I mean....who wouldn't want to see that?

Finally I decide on the one that does the best job at making me appear closer to what I actually want to look like and make my purchase feeling worse then ever.

Well, today I started to let some of those neurotic tendancies go. Today, my bathing suit shopping trip took a total of 30 minutes. I searched the wildly scavenged racks and found a few tops and bottoms that I could mix and match. I tried on 2 suits and picked one. I feel more confident and satisfied with my purchase than previous years and it only cost $38.00. There's no magic bathing suit out there that will give me the perfect figure, and that's okay. Although I still want to improve my figure, I'm okay with where I am. I'm actually a little proud. I have a beautiful six month old daughter and I have made it back to my pre-baby weight. (Everything didn't go back to where it was before, but the actually weight is the same as it was.) I'm no Heidi Klum, but I feel good about my bathing suit this year.