Michelle Nebel: Words to Spare

Out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks.

Self-Care for Moms

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Self Care for Moms

I woke up this morning thinking about self-care, and how different that looks now than at any point in my adult life.

For one thing, I now know and use the phrase self-care and I don’t even feel too awkward or embarrassed about it. Well. I still feel a little awkward, to be honest. Taking care of my self has not always been easy for me.

Briefly: when I was in college, many of these things came very naturally. Part of that can be attributed to the environment I was in (I was surrounded by friends, literally living with my best friend, and living in the middle of a place where I felt valued and respected. My academic career, my campus jobs and volunteer opportunities, and my sorority all packed those years chock-full of caring for myself – but back then, I didn’t even realize that’s what was happening.

Which meant that as adulting hit break-neck speed (we got married, Chris started chemo, I started my first job, we moved, he started medical school, we had miscarriages and then eventually a baby and another and another), I didn’t realize some of the things I needed to do to nurture my self.

Eventually, I started to realize I needed care because I was starting to crack. And over the years, I have figured out a lot of ways to take care of myself – and over the years, I’ve been all over the board in terms of how much time, money, and energy I’ve had to devote to self-care.

I thought that it might be helpful to share some of what has worked for me, in case you:

  • are pretty gosh-darn broke
  • are a  single mom or a “work widow”
  • are knee-deep in the baby stage with a little one who can’t be left for long
  • are up to your eyeballs with multiple kids at multiple ages
  • finally have a little bit of fun-money to spend
  • just got out of the baby stage and have a few minutes to yourself now and then

…because I’ve been at ALL those places. Each of those circumstances have their own challenges, but self-care can still happen.

**********

What does self-care mean, exactly?

Self-care is anything you do that feeds your spirit. It recharges your batteries and connects you to who you really are. It may involve caring for your physical body, your mental health, your emotional state, or your spirituality.

I think I get it. But I need examples! 

Okay, good. That’s what this post was supposed to be about, anyway! Here we go. A quick guide to the notations:
$ (when you’re super broke)
$$ (when you have a little cash)
$$$ (when money’s no object)
SW – single mom or work-widow mom
NB – newborn nearby
MK – multiple kids
FT – finally have a little free time

 

Coffee/Tea
$ – A quick cuppa can be crazy-cheap if you do it at home. It’s more about the time and the ritual of slowing down and enjoying it.
$$ – With a little investment in a French press and a beautiful mug that makes you smile, you can upgrade those just for you moments with some sparkle.
$$$ –  Get yourself your favorite treat from your favorite place. Bonus points if you manage to go in the coffeeshop and sit down for a few minutes.

Mani/Pedi
$, NB, MK – Grab a new color while you’re at the grocery store, and DIY. With a baby, either schedule your nails for the MOMENT your little one falls asleep, or as soon as they hit that happy spot after a meal and you know you’ll have ten calm minutes. Resist the urge to do something you “have to” do. You know what you have to do? You have to take care of yourself! With multiple kids, try running a bubble bath (or have an indoor pool party – throw them in the tub in their swimsuits, if you’ve got kids spread across genders and ages that don’t work for community baths anymore) and paint your tips while they splash a little.
$$ – A monthly trip to a salon? If you’re the extroverted type, take along a friend or sister and double-up the self-care by getting a dose of chatter. If you’re an introvert, take along a book to your pedi so the manicurist won’t feel the need to talk and rob you of the energy you’re trying to find!

Exercise
$, NB – Try walking in your neighborhood. Bonus points if you get a little vitamin D while you’re at it. This is another option to do solo if you’re introverted and need alone time, or with a pal if you’re extroverted and need to connect.
$$ – Pick a gym or a boutique fitness spot and get a one-month membership. Sometimes new members get great introductory rates, and you might learn a few moves you’ll be able to continue to do at home. If you’re a single mom, look for a place with in-house childcare. If you’re a married mom but your spouse has a challenging schedule, look for a place with accomodating hours (5:30 a.m. boot camp or 7:00 pm Zumba – it’s out there!)
$$$ – Hire a personal trainer, and target exactly the fitness issues you want to focus on and the types of exercises that really work best for you. Because your body is a temple.
Blanche Devereaux treats her body like a temple

(And note: if the idea of exercise is not a JOY to you, but instead is something you HATE, don’t put it on your list. Your own personal list is going to be filled with things that make you happy and cared-for. Don’t write down ‘exercise’ because you have to. Promise? Okay, moving on.)

Professional Care Appointments

$ – Your insurance may cover a certain number of visits with a chiropractor or counselor. That can make those visits free or very nearly so.

$$ – Services like babysitting, hair appointments, massage therapy, or chiropractic out-of-pocket.

 

Hobbies
It’s hard to break these down by the codes, because people’s interests vary so widely, but I’ll say this: what do you like to do, just for fun? Just because it makes you happy? Just because it lets you stretch your creative muscles or feel playful and young again? Find a way to do that again. For example:
-reading (free via library, cheap via e-reader, spendy via hardbacks to fill your shelves)
-sewing or knitting (we all know you can make these as expensive as you want, but if you need to save pennies you don’t have to quit altogther – bargain shop! Thrift stores and garage sales can be your secret weapon.)
-scrapbooking (cheap if you make it all digital, various degrees of spendy if you print an album or do classic albums with pics and ‘need’ a million stickers)
-singing, dancing (cheap via community choirs, churches, and boogie-ing in your PJs, more if you take classes or join performance troupes)

 

Naps
Always free, but I know: challenging if you are a S/W and have NB or MK.
With a baby and being solo, I’ve always loved the idea to make one room in your house totally baby-safe. Close the door, lay down on the floor with a pillow and blanket, and let baby crawl around and explore happily while you doze. It won’t be deep, solid sleep – but it can be surprisingly restorative.
If you have a partner or a pal, asking for help is okay. Someone else can play with your kids (bonus points if they take them out of the house!) while you get an hour’s rest.

 

Bubble Baths
This is the one thing I feel the most stupid about forgetting, back when I was neglecting self-care. When we had no pennies for splurging and I had babies to care for 24/7, I still could have managed to fit in one or two bubble baths a week. If it’s been a long time since you’ve indulged, I beg you: as soon as you finish reading this post (because I don’t want you to drop your phone into the tub!) go have a long, bubbly soak. Chandler knows what I’m talking about:
Chandler Bing relaxing in bubble bath

 

Laughter
What makes you laugh, mama? Good, deep, hard, belly laughs that bring tears to your eyes? Whatever it is, go after that.

I’ve got a “Humor” board on Pinterest that cracks me the heck up. Sometimes I just lock myself in the bathroom for ten minutes and stare at those videos and memes. It lifts my spirit and reminds me that I have a sense of humor – and sometimes that’s all it takes to get through a day, am I right?

Maybe you’re an in-person laugher. You might need a regularly scheduled girls’ night out with your best pal who always has you in stitches.

Or if you like quirky jokes or pratfalls or adolescent potty humor, there’s a Netflix category for that, I promise! Stream a movie or a comedy special. Yuk it up!

 

**********

Okay, hopefully a few things from my list have helped you start to imagine what a life filled with self-care might look like. I don’t do all of those every single day. But, I’m at a stage right now where I have a little pocket money; I have multiple kids but due to school and parent’s morning out I have six child-free hours per week; I’m still a work widow but not as drastically as a few years ago. So I try to do at least three things for myself every week – time with a hobby, time with a friend, exercise, a care appointment, reading a book while ignoring the laundry…. Sometimes I spend money (now that I can) but sometimes the best, most restorative things I do are still the freebies.

 

So how do I get started?

Step One: Reflect

Not all of my suggestions will sound comforting or energizing to you. Some of these would be torture and you’d run away screaming for the hills. That’s okay. A few of these will work for you, and maybe they’ll help you think of other things that recharge your batteries. Craft your own personalized list.

Step Two: Reserve

Your list of things that give you warm fuzzies won’t be worth the crayon it’s scribbled in, if you never make the time to do something you wrote down. Reserve a few minutes for yourself.

Now, it’s a Self-Care Law of the Universe that saying YES to yourself will require saying NO to something else. (Remember that law of the universe from science class about how one bit of matter can’t occupy the same space as another bit of matter? Or something like that. I wasn’t great at sciencing. Anyway, it’s just like that.) The 24 hours in your day can only accomodate so many to-dos. Reserving time means that you have to prioritize. Feed your kids and make sure your house isn’t a health hazard, but let the rest go for fifteen minutes or an hour. It’s okay.

Because! There is a fascinating corollary to the Self-Care Law of the Universe! Whenever you say YES to something from your list, something that only exists because it cares for your self, you will reap energy you were missing before, and that usually means that you can accomplish so much MORE than you could when you were telling yourself no and operating in a depleted state.

Step Three: Review

After a few weeks, check in with yourself. Get somewhere quiet and observe:  do you feel calmer in your own skin? Have you found yourself smiling for no reason? Are you happier and sweeter with your family members? If the answer is yes, then it’s working. Keep doing what you’re doing. If the answer is no, then go back to step one. Maybe the things you picked were self-care tasks that “sound good” but don’t feed your spirit. Maybe you wrote a self-care task on your to-do list every day for a week but never actually got around to it. Take stock and see what you need to change.
I’d love to hear from you. Are you in a phase of life where you’re struggling with self-care? Did I leave your favorite one off my list? Please drop me a note in the comments!

This Ending Is Just a New Beginning

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I’m considering my first round of P90X3 finished. I didn’t officially “graduate” — I let life stuff get in the way and I really lost steam during my third block. When the calendar flipped to a new month, I decided to make a fresh start. Even though it took me well over 100 days, I’m calling these my “90 day” results and I’m starting again with a brand new round of the program!

Day 1 Stats:
Weight: 121.4 lbs
Chest 34″
Natural Waist 29″
Navel 34″
Hips 37 1/4″
R Thigh 21″
L Thigh 21 3/8″
R Arm 10 7/8″
L Arm 10 3/4″

Day 90 Stats:
Weight: 119.8 lbs
Chest 33″
Natural Waist 26 3/4″
Navel 32″
Hips 34 1/4″
R Thigh 20″
L Thigh 20 1/2″
R Arm 11″
L Arm 10 7/8″

So, overall I lost 1.6 pounds and 10.25 inches. I love the way I can tell my face has slimmed down. I’m thrilled with my legs and obliques, especially. 🙂

Fit Test Results
Day 1
Pullups: 0
Vertical Leap: 6″
Push-ups: 5 (standard)
Toe Touch: +6 3/8″
Wall Squat: 2m, 1sec
Bicep Curls: 20 @ 8lbs.
In & Outs: 16

Day 90
Pullups: 1 (it was ugly, struggling, and wobbly, but I did it!)
Vertical Leap: 9″
Push-ups: 11 (standard)
Toe Touch: 8″
Wall Squat: 2m, 21sec
Bicep Curls: 24 @ 8lbs.
In & Outs: 32

For round 2, I’m going to follow the “Lean Program” (it uses the same 16 workouts, but in a different order than the Classic plan). I’m also really going to focus on my abs, and will try to add the Ab Ripper routine a few times a week to accomplish that goal. #journeystrong

60 Days of Crushing It: P90X3

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         I’ve written before about my journey with fitness – finding what worked for me and made me happy, finding time to do it. I spent most of 2012 doing my own little thing: mostly resistance workouts with dumbbells and kettlebells and body-weight moves, and I was really pleased with myself. I know that I feel better when I make the time to invest in myself in this little way.
         At the start of 2013, I was still trucking right along, and in May, Chris took a HUGE step and joined the HealthPark. He signed up with a personal trainer, and today he’s about 45 pounds lighter and in much better shape! As a result, I got a HealthPark membership too (one of those, “add your spouse for only a little bit more!” deals) and started trying to go over there for cardio occasionally. But using a gym just wasn’t working for me at this life stage — there is a charge for the childcare room, and I can’t justify spending that kind of money for a half-hour on an elliptical machine! Only using the HP on days when Chris had time to keep the kids at home meant it was a rare occurence.
      And when school started in August of ’13, my workout time just fizzled and died. Keeping up with a 3rd grade schedule, a Kindergarten schedule, an inquisitive and still-nursing 2-year-old, and a household proved to be too much. By December, I was pretty unhappy with that state of affairs. It’s not that I had gained a ton of weight – I was still hovering around my ‘comfort zone’ in the 120-123 range – but I just didn’t feel as good as I knew I could. My energy level was lower and my stress level was higher. I missed that feeling of strength I’d had just a year prior.
     A friend from our homeschool group, Sarah M., started posting on Facebook about a new daily workout routine she had started. She’s a tall, thin, whole-food-eating kind of mama –so I knew that if she was doing it, it must not be crazy or based on bad nutrition. Curiosity got the best of me, and I asked what the program was.

Okay, I remember hearing about P90X a few years ago. When we lived in Elsmere, our friends Misty & Axel did that. But I had the impression that it was CRAZY and HARD and IMPOSSIBLE for a normal person to do. So I kept asking Sarah questions and reading reviews of this new version, X3. It’s similar to the original: it’s a high-intensity interval workout program. It uses “muscle confusion” by varying 16 different workouts over the course of the 90 days to keep your body guessing – cardio, weights, power, agility, and flexibility are all covered. Unlike the original, though, X3 is only 30 minutes a day.
      That sounded perfect to me! I love weights, yoga, pilates… I need some help with cardio and agility. I had a hunch that the variety would help me to “stick with it” through the stuff I dislike. And I knew that I could carve out half an hour. I’m a morning energy person, so ideally I would work out in the mornings. I decided it wouldn’t kill my children to take a break from school and entertain themselves for 30 minutes; on days when I can’t fit it in around 10:30 a.m., I use “quiet time” (around 1:00 p.m.) as my time.
     I decided to order the DVDs, and then Sarah asked me if I wanted to get Shakeology while I was at it. I had heard of that stuff, too. Another friend had posted lots of photos of shakes and recipes when she was using it a few years ago. But I didn’t think I wanted, or needed, a meal replacement shake. HOWEVER – Chris had been drinking protein shakes for breakfast or as an on-the-go meal ever since he began his fitness journey back in May. I knew that his shakes were better than nothing, and better than some of the food options he used to pick (Little Debbies and chocolate milk, not exactly a breakfast of champions!) but I didn’t love the list of ingredients – like high fructose corn syrup. So I decided I’d order a one-month supply of Shakeology and try to convince Chris to give it a try.

    As it turns out, we love this stuff! Chris prefers the chocolate, and I really like all three ‘classic’ flavors (chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry). We haven’t tasted the greenberry yet. In the beginning, I was very sporadic about drinking my shakes, but around Day 48 of my workouts, I started to use them consistently as breakfast. I know of some folks who continue to use Shakeology as a meal replacement for years; I don’t think that would be a good fit for me, but you never know. 🙂 
    So: the box of DVDs arrived, and I plunged in. Day 1 was called “Total Synergistics,” and I remember feeling supercharged. It was challenging; I could tell I had room to improve, but I was able to keep up with the pace and the moves. There are modifications shown for every move in every workout, so even if you can’t do the “advanced” move, you can keep on doing “something.” My hunch proved correct: the timing & variety is, for me, the key to sticking with it. I really hate cardio 🙂 but it’s only for 30 minutes. The countdown timer clicking along at the bottom of the screen reminds me I’m halfway done! Only eight minutes left! Last sixty seconds! Done! And even when I’ve huffed and puffed my red-faced way to the end, I know that I don’t have to do it again tomorrow. I get a few days of the stuff where I excel, yoga and strength training, before I come back to a cardio routine.
      Today is Day 60, and I still love it! It has taken me about 68 days in reality – travel and illness have made me skip workouts here and there. I have only lost about 2 pounds, but over 9.5″ overall.  See for yourself:
 

We have a week of vacation coming up, and I think I’m going to bring my DVDs with me. I may divert from the written schedule a bit (I’d like to do all no-equipment-needed routines on vacation, so I won’t have to bring bands and dumbbells along in my suitcase), and I may not do it every single day – it IS a beach vacation after all! With 30 days to go, I’m really excited to find out what my final results are going to look like. If you’re looking for a new exercise program to shake you out of your rut, or if you’ve heard about P90X3 and wondered if it was really do-able as a non-gym-rat, busy mama: I’m telling you, this is a good plan and it’s worth the effort.

Baby’s First Sick Day

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Abigail is almost 21 months old, and the poor dear has now had her first stomach virus. 

Last week, she was in the church nursery during Vacation Bible School — only an hour and a half, while I taught the Preschool Bible Adventures lessons, then she was packing it in the Beco carrier — and I’m guessing the sudden exposure to a whole new passel of kids also meant exposure to some fun new germs!
We woke up around midnight last night when she coughed and suddenly my shoulder felt wet.  I was so thankful she was in our bed — she was laying flat on her back, and didn’t know to (or have a reflex to) roll over as she vomited. That’s kind of a scary thought, let me tell you! It’s always so pitiful when a toddler gets sick. They don’t really understand why they feel crummy and getting sick seems to catch them by surprise each time.

She was groggy and sleepy, but moaning a little and while I cleaned her up she kept saying, “Soddy [sorry], Mommy.” Sweet thing. We got our sheets changed and settled back down, but half an hour later she threw up again. At that point after we changed our sheets I just made a pallet on the floor for her and myself, so that Chris could at least sleep and we wouldn’t end up with all our bedding a mess.

Abigail threw up again at 2:30 a.m., and then slept soundly until 6:30. Of course, this is horrible timing — not that there’s ever a good day to puke! — but we were planning to go up to Cincinnati to see friends and attend the Good Sam graduation. When we woke up, we thought maybe if she was alright during the morning, we could still make the trip and I’d just keep her at the hotel during the graduation rather than leave her with my friend Krista, who had planned to babysit.
She refused breakfast, which isn’t like her, and then was standing in the family room watching Disney Junior when — oops, there she went again. 🙁 So we cleaned her up once more, and decided to cancel the visit. (Chris went on to the graduation without me and the kids.)
It was a day of clingy toddler-ness, but she gradually perked up. (Just in time for Mama to start feeling icky, as it turns out….) Here’s hoping it was a 24 hour thing, and she’ll be okay overnight tonight. I sure hate it when my little ones are ill!

What’s Up With the Workouts?

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A couple of weeks ago, my friend Sarah linked to a thought-provoking fitness article. The author wrote about how sometimes women get a little too hung-up on using our bathroom scales. She claimed that we ought to only weigh ourselves once annually at a doctor’s office. (To be fair, she went on to explain that a woman’s percentage body fat was more important than an arbitrary number o the scale, and suggested that her readers should pay attention to how their clothes fit and how their bodies feel during the 364 days of the year they aren’t stepping on a scale.)

Now, I can’t get on board with once-per-year weights. In my [albeit, inexperienced] opinion, while you’re in the postpartum-weight-loss phase, it is reassuring to see that you’re making small progress from week to week. And on the other side of the coin, it’s good to keep an eye out and make sure you’re not losing weight too fast; as a breastfeeding mom, research suggests that 1 pound per week is the safest amount of weight loss.  But I’m at “the bottom of the hill” right now – I’m 3.5 pounds away from my weight when Abigail was conceieved, and that point is about 5 pounds away from what has been my default “healthy” weight over the last dozen years. So the article made me realize that I definitely don’t need to hop on my scale every single day (which I really didn’t do anyway) and I could probably stop checking every week as well (I had gotten a habit of weighing myself on Saturday mornings).

I think it was a commenter on the original article (or maybe it was a subsequent article I read later the same day – you know how internet bunny trails can be!) who suggested a compromise of weighing oneself once a month, at the end of your cycle. That sounded like a better idea to me. And Sarah, my friend who got this whole thought-ball rolling, is a courageous woman who’s been taking her own measurements and posting them on her blog!!! during her weight loss journey… which made me think about doing the same thing. Well, okay, I’m not that courageous: it made me think about taking measurements. I won’t post them on the blog!

Anyway… all of that is a lead up to another update on the workout situation. I chart my cycles, simply because I started doing it in 2004 and it’s a habit now!, so I started noting my workouts on my chart. Those pieces of information don’t HAVE to go together, but it works for me. The nice thing about keeping track that way is that I know that over the last 30 days, I did 11 workouts. 🙂 Since this is still a ‘developing’ habit and not a fully-ingrained one, I’m pretty happy with that. It also gives my type-A, over-organized little heart something to geek out about, because for this coming month I plan to also keep track of which workout I did on each day so I can make sure I’m being balanced… and of course, I get to compete with myself and try to increase my number of workouts for the month.

The last time I weighed myself was February 21, and I also took my measurements. Today I weighed myself again to kick off a new cycle, and there had been no weight loss. Hmmm. Bummer. But then I measured…. and I lost 1/2″ from my chest, 2″ from my waist, 2″ from my hips, and 1.5″ from my thigh. Holy cow! I’m no expert, but it must be a fat-versus-muscle thing — because I weigh the same but I’m taking up less space to do so. Ha! 🙂

And as a really random side-note: found this sundress at the consignment store yesterday (wish Chris had panned back a little bit so you could see my lime-green toenails to match!). I don’t know who  in town is getting rid of all her Ann Taylor 6petites, but I was happy to grab them! 

Workout Resource

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I just found the American Council on Exercise site – it’s a great resource! Their “exercise library” (click on GetFit, then select exercise library) can be searched by target body part, experience level, or filtered by what kind of equipment you have on hand. There seem to be a lot of options for “no equipment”, too, which I particularly like.

I’m intrigued by this Core Workout plan, too… it’s got animated photo examples of each exercise, with good directions. I’ll let you know if I give it a try!

Workout Updates

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I posted a while ago about working out at home.
” If I ever hit on a beautiful, creative, fulfilling solution to the puzzle – where I get to workout, and not feel guilty about it, and not ignore my kids in the process, and not neglect all the other things I “should” be doing too… I’ll let you know.”
Well. I don’t think what I’m doing is beautiful or creative yet, but I do love it. So here’s the update. I posted that on January 20th, and in the intervening weeks I’ve lost five more pounds. Abigail is five months old, and I am seven pounds away from my pre-pregnancy weight, so I’m beyond happy with that. I need to start taking my measurements, because I think I’m getting close to the point where the weight will stabilize but as I tone up hopefully the inches will change.

The issue of timing has just sort of fallen into place. I don’t fit it in every day, even though I think I’d like to. Some weeks I’m managing four or five workouts and sometimes it’s been one, but it averages out to about three a week. The older Abigail gets, the better she’s napping in bed, so that has helped. If I don’t save it for her naptime, Susannah has also started to “exercise” alongside me sometimes, which is cute and funny and actually keeps her out of the way (but I don’t have to ignore her).

And I had an awesome victory moment tonight, when I was stretching after my workout and HELLO, KNEE, this is Forehead, remember ME? Ahhhhh. It feels so good to be getting my flexibility back!

Perk #2

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It can be helpful to have an anatomy & physiology expert close by. (No, I don’t mean it like that!)
Me: Owwww…. my {points}. What are these?
C: Deltoids.
Me: {rubs} Yeah. Owww… my deltoids hurt. But my {points} …um, what are these? Not {points} this part but {gestures} this part?
C: Obliques.
Me: {flexes} Yeah! My obliques are looking good, don’t you think?

Working… Out, On, and In

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Shocking confession time: I enjoy working out.

Oh, I know. It shocked me too, when I figured it out. I was never an active, outdoorsy kind of kid. Exhibit A: my bicycle had training wheels until I was, like, nine. I just hated riding the darn thing and it took me a l-o-n-g time to log enough hours to master the balancing. When we lived in Lawton, Oklahoma… I would have been 7 or 8… there’s this famous family story about my mom demanding that I go outside for some P.E. “Go out there and get on your bike!” she ordered. Fifteen minutes later, she came outside to check on my progress. I was sitting in the shade on my bike reading Laura Ingalls Wilder, with the kickstand down and the basket filled with books. When my flabbergasted mother asked what on earth I thought I was doing, my sassy reply was, “Well, you said I had to get ON the bike. You didn’t say I had to RIDE IT anywhere.” Okay, now you believe me about not being active, and you’re probably also wondering how I survived that day. Ha!

My first foray into anything remotely athletic was the flag corps in high school, and I loved that – but I would have chalked it up to the comraderie and the music and yada yada yada. Not the exercise (although in hindsight, I’m sure that’s from whence at least part of the ‘high’ came.)

And then, yearrrrrrs and yearrrrrs later, I joined an actual gym. We were living in Fort Lauderdale, and my best friend at work was a workout queen. Staci was a ton of fun, and she loved her gym, and when I realized I had slowly gained a few more pounds than I was comfortable with — it was only natural to join her gym and ask her for a little help. And here’s where the shock hit me. I was having fun, laughing with a friend on side-by-side ellipticals, sure. But I really loved how I felt when I was working out. We had a whole routine — well, I should say, Staci had a whole routine worked out in her head, and I followed along. I had taken yoga classes before and done videos at home alone, which was just “eh.” I tried spinning, to keep Staci company, but you know: me and bikes have never been BFF. I tolerated the cardio Staci made me do, but I really got my kicks with the strength training she taught me. I loved it. Who knew?! I lost the weight I’d gained, and started seeing muscles in the mirror. It was awesome.

And then a baby came along. And another, and another. And I wasn’t working anymore. And we moved four times. And there were a million reasons that I couldn’t join a new gym, and there were a million reasons that I couldn’t figure out how to fit in some kind of exercise on any given day.

Over those years, I forgot something: that I actually, really, truly did ENJOY working out.

And that’s the first piece of this puzzle.

***

On my 30th birthday, I had a blessingway. One very precious part of the ceremonies was the reading of a letter my mother wrote (since she couldn’t be present, as she was in the middle of chemotherapy at the time). She gave me advice and encouragement and I will always treasure that piece of her heart… and among other things, she urged me to work out. “Pick something you love to do, and do it regularly. I love to walk and I used to do five miles a day!” There was advice about marriage and parenting and memorizing Scripture, too. But this exhortation to exercise is now in my head as Something My Mom Wanted Me To Do.

So that’s the second piece of this puzzle.

***

Today, I’m a busy busy busy mother of three. I homeschool and I attempt to blog. I scrapbook (I’m a teensy bit behind… but in my heart, I’m a scrapbooker). I read my Bible every day and I waste way too much time on Facebook and I cook and I do laundry. I shuttle us to the library and speech therapy and karate class and Sunday School and pediatrician’s appointments.

But I started working out.

I’m still working on what to do. I don’t belong to a gym here, and I know videos bore me. I’m still not the outdoorsy type, so there is no danger of me suddenly becoming a marathoner or a cyclist. I’ve done a little googling for routines I can create with my little set of weights and resistance bands and good old-fashioned “just use your own body” exercises.
And you know what? Even with my current “making do” setup, I can still hit that point where you’re shaky and hurting and you push yourself to finish that set and it feels AHmazing. Yesterday afternoon, I squatted to zip Susannah’s coat for her and felt the burn from working on my quads in the morning. And this morning, I came downstairs and had to hold the handrails the whole way down because my glutes were killing me. And that feels GREAT. The baby weight is melting back off, and that feels good, too.
And that’s the third piece of the puzzle.

***

But I’m still playing around with working it in. I can’t get up and do it before the kids wake up, because hello, who wants to work out at 3 or 4 a.m.? I can’t do it after I put them to bed, because I am so NOT a night person.
At the moment, I’m grabbing any chunk of time in which the baby is asleep not-on-my-body or happily absorbed in something (like her toes) AND in which the big kids are either outside or resting for quiet time. This usually translates into taking about an hour to complete what I had in mind for the day – which should have been about 30 minutes of actual exercise – because someone wakes up or needs to go potty or needs a snack or hits his sister or or or etc.

Even then – there is a part of me that feels guilty for trying to sneak in this time at all. There are other things I could be doing when the kids are asleep, and if they are awake I feel terrible for trying to quickly handle the immediate need and get back to the sets they interrupted.

But there’s another (admittedly, smaller) part of me that wants to just join a dadgum gym and drop the whole crew off in one of those kid-rooms and wave goodbye with a smile and go focus on nothing more than my delts and triceps and biceps for half an hour. You know? I wouldn’t do it – at least not at this point, with a 4 month old – but that little part of me does fantasize about it when I fix someone a third cup of water in the twenty minutes I’ve been trying to work out.

And that’s the final piece of the puzzle. I want to do this. I like doing this. I need to do this – obviously for my physical help, but judging by that last paragraph, probably for my mental health as well. If I ever hit on a beautiful, creative, fulfilling solution to the puzzle – where I get to workout, and not feel guilty about it, and not ignore my kids in the process, and not neglect all the other things I “should” be doing too… I’ll let you know.

Hospice

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I’ve had a lot of time to get ready to type this.

I’m still not.

My mom is entering hospice today.
I keep trying to write about it, but what comes out is either way too intensely personal to post on the blog, or else is so generic and stilted that it sounds awful. Maybe this horrid numbness will wear off and I’ll be able to write about it eventually. Until then, my dad’s words will have to do.
I’m sure you know we covet your prayers. Thanks, friends.