Rita's Last-Minute Primp-stravaganza

Don't forget to check out the latest giveaway - you've got two more days to enter, so click on over to the "Giveaways and Reviews" tab!

Did I mention I go to Mexico in just under a week? For seven days, my friend Denni and I will be hitting up the buffets blissfully lounging on the beaches of Puerto Vallarta. I still can't believe it's actually happening - and y'all know how much I need a vacation. (If you're not sure I'm deserving, just read a few past blog posts.)

But there are two things about going to Mexico. One is that I will be wearing items of clothing that bare certain parts of my body that haven't seen the light of day in months. And two is that I will be seen, for the first time since 2008, in my bathing suit in public. I'm in such avoidance of my bathing suit that I don't even know where it is, and I only have a few days left to find it. (It's probably buried somewhere in my festering abyss of a closet.) I wasn't all that comfortable with it in 2008 ... and that was five years and two pregnancies ago.

Rita: Now With Extra Skin and Further Deflated Boobs! Bonus NEW Purple Stretchmarks!

I'm definitely not the most out of shape I've ever been - I've been teaching Zumba for nearly two years, after all - but let's just say that of the fifty pounds I gained from Corbin, at least twenty-five or thirty are still hanging rudely around. Mostly in the hip and thigh area. And in that weird  flap of my lower abdomen that just appeared since my emergency C-section. *shakes fist at baby* I don't exactly have time to drop said baby weight. So body flaws be damned, I'ma have to work with what I've got.

First up: my hair. I tried to dye it over the weekend. When I was in high school and college I wasn't even sure what my natural hair color was, but this time around, I hadn't dyed it in like five years. (Though I'm pretty sure I've threatened to do it more than once.) My hair is naturally a dark boring brown, but I was blonde until like first grade - so I thought I'd go lighter for the trip. I bought a box of dye called "Crystal Brown" (coincidentally, also the name of one of my very best friends in elementary school - so how could I go wrong, right?). It was supposed to look like this:

Unfortunately, even though I deliberately chose a neutral shade, it turned out with a huge reddish cast that I hate. Nothing against redheads, I just don't look like I'm supposed to be one. I'm not posting a picture because they don't do it justice - but trust me - it's more ginger than I care to go.

So I have an appointment at an actual salon on Friday to get that shit fixed. As someone who was cringing at the thought of paying $11 for a box of hair dye, you can imagine how that feels.

Ugh.

And speaking of ugh, there's the other end of me: my feet. Seeing as they're going to spend a week in flip-flops, I'm thinking I need to whip them into shape as well.

Now if I weren't so cheap frugal, I would have been treating myself to regular pedicures and they'd look great. But. I am cheap thrifty and I think the last (and only) time I got a professional pedi was in 2007 or so. Yes, I could have done something at home, but it's winter, y'all. I barely have time to shave my legs in the winter, let alone pay attention to feet that nobody's going to see for months. Therefore, they are a hard, crusty, callused mess. Leathery enough to make Fred Flintstone jealous.

So I have this little egg-shaped foot-filer-thingy. And a few days ago I was sawing on my feet like I was trying to cut down a redwood tree. But what I didn't think about was that after you file off your calluses, there's, like, new skin underneath there. And it hurts when it rubs up against your shoes and stuff. So I've been hobbling around, teaching Zumba with sore feet, and by the time I go to Mexico they'll probably be all toughened up again.

I'm also exfoliating in the shower. Slathering lotion on so my skin looks decent. Deep-conditioning. Waxing. Tweezing. Using my awesome homemade aspirin mask. Basically scrambling to make up for all the beauty regimens I so often neglect in favor of, you know, cleaning up messes and cooking and doing laundry.

All to make myself look like I do this stuff all the time (kind of like the mad dash right before a visit to the gynecologist). Like I just look effortlessly gorgeous.

Ironic, no?