Through the years, I’ve had subscriptions to many of the major women’s fashion magazines at some time or another: Cosmopolitan. Marie Claire. In Style. Glamour. In the past year or so I’ve switched to fitness-related magazines instead: Shape. Fitness. Oxygen. Women’s Health.

It's time for me to follow in the footsteps of many intrepid BlogHer editors before me, and take on the torch of the Letter To My Body initiative.

I have to tell you -- I've been dreading this day.

I get to step out of my news role today for BlogHer.com and participate in the "Letter to My Body" initiative.

This"Letter to My Body" thing is tough. I say that having spent the past few weeks reading letters to bodies across the blogosphere from women like myself struggling to make amends or remembering to praise this vessel which encases us.

Spring is a time of rebirth. To many of us mammals, birth is equated with smooth and naked. According to Sheep 101, sheep are sheared once a year, usually in the spring before the onset of warm weather. Like sheep, us human women who avoid shaving our hairy legs and arm pits during the winter because we claim that the minimal extra body hair helps keep us warmer in the cold winter months, find ourselves exposed. Spring and summer practically beg for skirts, shorts, and tank tops. It's harder to hide our woolliness.

What do you think of when someone mentions school lunches? The first word that comes to my mind is...Yuck.

I will admit when I first started to see the links coming in for the new "book" My Beautiful Mommy, I thought it must be a hoax. Certainly, no one would put something like this out there and be serious. Well, serious it is. It is self published by the vanity publisher Big Tent Books and written by a Florida plastic surgeon and father of four. He says he wrote the book because many of his patients are having "mommy makeovers" to fix saggy
breasts and slack tummies a few years after childbirth and they were concerned about what to tell their kids.