The Acceptance (Celebration?) of Failure

So maybe you’ve noticed that I occasionally write about Baby Boot Camp and our MOLO (MOther LOve – what kind of acronym is that?) challenge.  Basically, I work out, and I work out hard, three times a week.  The MOLO challenge was designed to get us all to work out more, mostly at home, and to make good nutrition choices. 

 

I don’t work out at home, mostly because I don’t have time to work out at home.  I wear heels and skirts, or at least night pants, to work, so doing a one-minute plank every hour on the hour at the office is not going to happen for me.  As it is, I barely get dinner on the table, get the chores done, and have time to love my children every day – by the time they’re in bed, I slump onto the couch for an hour and every evening I hate myself for not getting up and going for a run or doing a workout video.  It’s a sad fact of motherhood that I am my last priority, and when I have time to be the top priority, I’m beaten down from a long day.  In a way, MOLO has made me feel worse about myself because here are these lists of things we should do, watch, or read every week, including workouts and movies and articles that I don’t have time to do, watch, or read.  I have spent three months with weekly emails and daily messages that seem to scream at me, “You will NEVER be strong or beautiful or a good wife or a good mother because YOU WON’T SACRIFICE ENOUGH DO THIS.”

 

When we do our fitness assessments next week to see how far we have progressed during the past three months, I have little doubt that I will have stayed static at every metric, save the one for weight.  I am pretty sure I have gained weight.  I’m trying to come to terms with that.  My abs are rock hard, I have strong shoulders and legs and arms, but there is a softness over all of it that is not going to go away unless I starve myself or cook myself separate meals from my family and give up some of the things I enjoy, like wine and cheese and chocolate.  And frankly, I’m not willing to do any of that.

 

Another part of the MOLO challenge was a goal that we each set three months ago.  Or many goals.  I honestly have no idea what goals other women in the group set, I only know that I had but one goal: to do a full, unassisted chin-up.  For various reasons, I felt it was a reasonable goal three months ago.  After all, I couldn’t set a goal for losing weight or working out more often (I’m at my limit for workout time, and we’ve already discussed the giving up food thing – still not willing), but I thought that, with work, I could do a chin-up.  Just one.  How hard could it be?

 

Well, I have failed to reach this goal.  I will keep trying, but I’m feeling rather defeated about all of it.  And when I feel defeated, I start to feel defeated about other areas of my life, too.  It’s a terrible spiral of self-hatred that starts in one spot and grows to include every single other aspect of my life ever. 

 

So how do I come to accept failure and move on?  Even better, how can I celebrate who I am and what I do and everything that I have accomplished?  The landscaping and furniture refinishing that I did make time for this winter?  The bubble-blowing with my kids in the back yard instead of the 15-minute standing ab workout video?  The books I’ve read instead of working out at 9 pm every night?

 

I guess it comes back to the giant struggle in my life: how can I love myself for who I am and what I do?  And if I don’t know the answer to that, how can I teach my children to love themselves?

Ragnar Costume Ideas

I just ordered new running shoes, and I noticed that they’re named “Ariel.”  Which I thought was a bit funny, since I sometimes feel like my feet are so heavy that I’m running through water.  Not because of the shoes, but because I am slow and tired.  Ha ha!  See, that’s funny, because Ariel is a mermaid.

 

Oh, I just suck at jokes.

 

 

 

Aside: Speaking of names, I met a dog at the park named Aria and I asked her owner if she was an opera fan.  She looked at me like I was nuts.  “You know, because you named her ‘Aria’ like the vocal feature of an opera?”  Apparently, Aria is the name of a character on some teen-marketed TV show.  The girl I was talking with totally did not understand my opera reference.  What is the world coming to?

 

So, yeah, I’m running and I’m not getting any faster, though I am going farther.  And I run without music, mostly because I’m paranoid that if I run with earbuds, I’ll not hear a car or a train (which is really crazy, since I don’t run on the tracks) or a mad bicyclist and Ill get run over.  So I have lots of time to think, well, 30-45 minutes of time to think, when I run.  I enjoy running with friends, but I also enjoy the time with myself, especially if I’m angry or frustrated.  By mile two, I’m less angry and frustrated because the looping monologues in my head have sort of petered out from “Damn it, he should just know what I want without me having to say it,” to “I hope the kids are driving him batshit for a change.”  I think we can all agree that the latter is much healthier.

 

The bad part of my Little Mermaid connection with my shoes is that for the past few runs, I have spent the entire time singing Little Mermaid songs in my head and replacing the lyrics with really terrible running references (“Look at these shoes/aren’t they neat?/wouldn’t you say my outfit’s complete?”).

 

I’m going to make an effort on my next few runs to obsess over running costumes for the Ragnar Relay that Tony and some of our friends and I are doing in July.  Help me, please!  So far, I’ve thought of ninjas and crayons.  The outfits must be suitable for running in the heat of July, which means no gorilla costumes, no makeup, no outsized headgear.  What would you wear?  What do you think would be awesome for twelve people with pretty adventurous, “aww, fuck it, let’s run a 36-hour, 196-mile relay” personalities to wear?  I mean, we’re not the truly insane runners, but I can guarantee that we’ll have a good time and that all of us would get behind a costume.  Maybe old-school Star Trek?  It would be nice if we didn’t have to spend an exorbitant amount of money. 

 

 

Jamie just wants in for the shoes (maybe I’ll start calling them by name, my Ariels.  Or I could call them my Little Mermaids).  I’m hoping that when I do my leg of the run by our house, it won’t be in the middle of the night so my kids can come cheer me on.  Then again, if I’m dressed as a ninja, they might not see me anyway!

On Being A Little Less Granola

I remember a college professor of mine saying “In the seventies, we fought for recycling and we never imagined it would be ubiquitous in thirty short years.”  Well, ubiquitous in Washington State, anyhow.  I’ve been to parts of the country that are not so well-versed in recycling etiquette.

 

I’m of the generation that doesn’t even think about it.  I mean, it could be a really inefficient process to recycle everything I throw in that bin and I wouldn’t know.  You just do.  You just recycle everything that can be recycled, and then the garbage is further split into what can be composted and what can’t.  I go to restaurants that compost or recycle EVERYTHING except plastic spoons (to be heat resistant, they can’t be made of plant materials and are therefore not compostable) and I will think nothing of holding onto a plastic soda bottle until I get home and can dispose of it properly if I’m out somewhere that doesn’t offer a recycle bin.

 

I suppose it’s great, in a way, that there’s a generation of kids who have turned what used to be radical into more of a casual environmentalism.  It’s probably going to be the same way with our children: they’ll eat organic, local foods when they can, they’ll use fewer toxic household chemicals, and they’ll yell at me for doing something so thoughtlessly harmful like, I dunno, painting my nails or eating nacho cheese product.  Except for Tony’s penchant for chemical weed-killers, we’re pretty granola around here, without being fanatical.  Cloth diapers, cloth napkins, no soy, natural laundry detergent… the list goes on.

 

But this weekend, we took a step back in the granola world and got rid of our compost bin.  And I couldn’t be happier.

 

A few weeks ago, Tony went to the hardware store to pick up some bark mulch and came back with bags of compost.  Big, smelly bags for $4 each.  Composted locally.  From the yard waste and pizza boxes we put in our Green Bin every week for the truck to pick up.  And we though, “Why in God’s name are we putting our vegetable peels and apple cores and grass clippings in our own stinky compost bin?”  The thing breeds flies all summer and smells terrible, and we could just be putting all that organic stuff in the Green Bin anyhow and then buy a bag of compost whenever we need it.

 

I guess it just goes to show that casually incorporating good habits, like recycling and composting, into your life doesn’t mean you should do them without thought.  We’ll still compost as much, but we won’t be doing so in our back yard.  And I have a feeling that the summer will smell so much better.  I’ll probably celebrate that with a few back-patio margaritas in the evening sun, glorying in the lack of flies.

Clearance Sale on Thoughts! Making Room for New Inventory!

Let’s just call these “random thoughts bumping around in my cavernous head with no real point to them and thus, no reason they each need their own post” so I can clear some brain-space today, hmm?

 

*****

We went out to dinner last night, all the way down to Seattle, to eat at one of my favorite restaurants, Poquitos, and it was fabulous.  I have a new favorite drink that I want to have a pitcher of right now and it’s only 10 am, and I’m kind of having a “friend hangover” in which I am missing the great friends we saw last night (from high school, France, grad school, and cousins!) more acutely now that we’ve spent time together again.  Also, Tony’s cousin bought this car and it is delectable.  Whoa.  I just wrote that it was delectable, then searched out the Car & Driver article, and they call it delectable, too!  I just sat in it, but it was suuuuure nice.  Probably as close as I’ll get to a sports car for the foreseeable future.

 

*****

I made THE BEST brownies this week.  I used this recipe and they are AMAZING.  Fudgy, chocolaty, everything a brownie should be.  Easy, too, since I did the melting butter and chocolate step in the microwave.  I will never make boxed brownies again ever.  Ever.

 

*****

My parents are in town (they had dinner with us last night, too!  My dad and I sampled grasshoppers!  Yes!  The bug!  I ate one!) along with their dog.  I thought this morning as I was getting dressed that their dog must have rolled in something dead.  I thought, “hmmm, something smells terrible, like dead, oily fish at the beach.”  Of course I blamed the dog.  You would, too, especially if you had a dog (or a sister-dog, since it is my parents’ dog) and knew that it liked to roll in smelly things.

 

When I got to work and I could still smell it, I thought, “maybe I stepped in whatever it is that is rotten and fishy when I put the dogs in the kennel before work.”  Seems logical, right?  But no.  The foul odor (which, apparently, no one else can smell, thank GOD) is coming from me.  More specifically, my jeans, which I accidentally washed with a multivitamin capsule in the pocket a couple of months ago.  The multivitamin clearly had some fish oil in it.  Even though I soaked that pants pocket in OxyClean and detergent and washed them over and over again, obviously the vitamin hasn’t rinsed out yet.  And now I smell like rotten fish oil.  No wonder I feel so damn sexy.

 

*****

I’m overwhelmed by love for my kids lately.  They are just so cute all the time and they have been behaving so well the past few days.  Yesterday afternoon, Tony took the boys to get haircuts with him (well, Jamie didn’t get a haircut; he still has baby-fine hair that looks adorable when it’s a bit shaggy) and I told him to get Charles a buzz cut with a #2 guard.  Charles said, “Yeah, mommy, I’ll get a Buzz cut and daddy can get a Woody cut!”  Kid cracks me up.

 

And then Tony came home with a Woody cut and also paint for our unfinished cedar chest and two scheduled and paid-for massages for ME.  That man.  Sometimes he just gets it right, you know?  Tax season is over and, like childbirth, I have already forgotten the agony.

 

*****

There are some busy days ahead at work, but we bought tickets to Williamsburg so now we really! are! going! and I can hardly wait and it sort of distracts from all other stresses right now.

 

*****

Julia had her baby!  I keep waiting for an update, and I’m sure it’s going to be a good story.  But the name, you guys!  They named him Dashiell.  Dash for short!  Oh, I love it so much!

 

*****

Dancing With The Stars

I love to dance.  When I’m in a good mood, nothing else but to dance like a hyper fourteen-year-old darting through the aisles of the grocery store striking poses and flinging her body into innocent bystanders and cereal displays will do (wait, you didn’t do that?  Oh, you were one of the “cool” kids who understood decorum).  The only differences are that now I have music that I can play it as loudly as I want and the cereal is in the cabinet.

 

 

I’m not particularly graceful and I don’t have great balance, despite my enormous feet.  The dog gets stressed out when I dance and nips at my hands when they windmill toward the floor and my husband thinks I’m insane. 

 

 

The kids, though.  The kids love it, for now.  And they don’t yell at me to stop dancing like they yell at me to stop singing.  In their defense, my voice is terrible.

 

 

We need a little more uninhibited dancing in our lives.  We all do.  I can’t hide the tears in my eyes when I read about terrible events in the paper in the morning, and I won’t be able to shelter my kids from those events forever, but I can always show them unfettered joy by dancing like a fool. 

 

 

Hopefully, I’ll be the crazy dancing lady at my grandkids’ weddings, with viral YouTube videos showcasing my awesome devil-may-care moves (or whatever format their space-age media takes) in my sunset years.

 

 

Take the edge off.  Dance like an idiot today.

The Ides of April

It’s Tax Day, and you’d think I’d be grateful to have made it to April 15th alive, with my children and husband and dog alive as well, but mostly I’m just tired.  And tonight we have a tax season party with all the accountants and their under-eye circles and unkempt hair and ten extra pounds and residual stress from the past three months. On the bright side, I’m wearing a cute dress, I recently found out that two family members (one a blood relation and one a family member by choice) are expecting, and it’s not raining.  If I can make it through a very busy but exciting week unscathed and with my liver intact, and maybe even limited resentment on the part of my children for leaving them with a babysitter for three nights out of five, I’ll be content.

 

We spent a busy day in and around Seattle yesterday, and although I haven’t yet processed all the photos from our excursions, I did want to show you this one, may favorite of the weekend:

 

 

Charles took this, of his brother, during one of the moments they wrestled the phone out of my cram-packed diaper bag.  The phone is covered in Top Pot Doughnut goo now, but I think it was worth it.  Light, shadow, blah, blah, the kid is cute.

Reset

The kids and I… well, we haven’t been getting along lately.  Every day, the same old mom, the same old trip to school, the same old routine of rushing around, trying to get everything done, the same bedtime fights, the same, the same, the same.  With brief glimpses of the Fun Man (daddy) to take the edge off.  We play and read and cuddle together, but I am still, and have been, the main parental authority, dishing out directives and discipline for the past several weeks.

 

We needed a change, something to reestablish me as a person they enjoy being around.  Little do they know, they’re stuck with me.

 

So yesterday we played hookey, skipping out on work and preschool, and went to the zoo.

 

 

Jamie, of course, fell asleep 20 minutes before we got there.

 

The first stop is always the penguins.  Woodland Park Zoo has a wonderful penguin exhibit, and the slippery little guys put on a great show for the kids. 

 

 

Speaking of slippery, Charles and Jamie got to toss little fish to the penguins and learn, from a zookeeper, just how fast they can swim (17 miles per hour!).

 

 

I made them both walk a lot.  It might have been our “fun” day, but this mom knows that everything is more fun when sleep is inevitable at the end (plus, then I get to listen to my own music in the car while they nap).

 

After lunch (PB&J, apples, and cheese – we always bring lunch), we escaped the drizzle indoors at the Zoomazium, where the children fell all over the play structures and made some very loud music.

 

My little aquaman was in love with the just-my-size water fountains all over the zoo.

 

 

    

There are quite a few hidden “parks” within the zoo.  I would say that we stopped at every one except that we were there for four and a half hours and probably only saw 50% of the whole zoo.  More to see next time!

 

I am back in favor.  We had a wonderful trip with no tantrums.

 

And they were both exhausted.

 

I would say “The End” but it isn’t.  Next week, when we can finally say we are post-tax season, Tony and I will be taking another day off to spend it at home with the kids.  I hope to do this at least once a month just to keep the balance.  It’s good for them, it’s good for us, and it helps me to really enjoy them.  They get on my nerves as much as I get on theirs, and it is really healthy for us to have a day free of the constraints and demands of mom’s and dad’s jobs.

 

What’s that you say?  What about Saturday and Sunday?  Neither of those days are without constraints.  I sometimes go to work on the weekends, so does Tony, I have Baby Boot Camp on Saturday morning, Tony plays basketball on Sunday before church… it is rare to have a whole day without some sort of plan.

 

I know not everyone has the ability to do things like this with their children, especially not without planning ahead.  We’re pretty lucky.  I have to remind myself that loving this family means more than working and preparing food and cooking.  Maybe they don’t feel loved when I do those things, even though those actions are the principle ways I can show them how much I love them.  Maybe they need more experiences away from the drudgery of daily life. 

 

I think I’ll enjoy cooking up more day trips for all of us.