Skip to main content

A New Groove

I worried about a lot of things while pregnant. In fact, I mastered borrowing worry. My child was going to be colicky - I was certain. So I read books to prepare. Charley's not colicky. According to my sister, she's the most well-behaved baby ever. (That's an overstate, but she is pretty darn good.)

One of my biggest worries was how I'd get my workout groove back. Husband and I had a nice little system pre-baby. We'd alternate gym days with dog walk days and on weekends I'd swim and yoga while he hit the trails. We each got workouts in about five days a week and felt relatively fit.

While pregnant, I wracked my brain to come up with a system that would work with a baby and dog. I'd get up an 4:30am to accommodate exercise. I'd go to the 8pm swim practices. I'd do extra long workouts on the weekends.

Sometimes good intentions remain intentions.

Getting up at 5am gives me time to feed the baby, get ready for work, pump and get baby to day care. Saturday mornings are such a luxury now. Coffee with my husband, Baby C in her sleep sack until 10am, taking Trudy on a long walk. The last thing I want to do is bust ass to the gym and miss this family time.

To my friends with kids, I owe you a huge apology. I remember one friend bemoaning how hard it was to get to the gym with a kid. My callous response was why don't you go after you pick her up from day care?

Really? I told my friend to take her baby who had been in day care all day to put her in a gym day care for another hour afterwords? I would have smacked me.

I race to get C from day care. This is no reflection of the facility, but I can't get her out of there soon enough. Then I get her home and just want to feed her and look at her and sing to her. Leaving her to go to swim practice doesn't even cross my mind.

A friend asked if I'd start training again for triathlons. I laughed. Training for one sport is far-fetching enough. Trying to do three would make my head explode. For now, my sport is composing jingles that make her smile.

Things will eventually change and she won't be so needy. I'll start running with her in the stroller or Husband will put her in the burley. Maybe she'll swim and I'll train while she's at practice. But for now the sport of being a mom is pretty awesome.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Get This Party Started

So what do you do when you're reclining in a hospital bed, Olympic beach volleyball on the TV and watching petocin slowly drip through an IV into your arm? You blog. As of 3:32pm, all is manageable. Ask me in an hour or two and the tune will most likely be different. Petocin scares the crap out me, but as long as it gets the baby out of me, I'm trying to not freak out. I woke up this morning and greeted the day as a normal Monday. After walking Trudy a few miles and spending 40 minutes on the elliptical, it dawned on me I felt a little crampy, for lack of a better term. And without getting too graphic, I started to wonder if my water had broken. (It was nothing like it's portrayed on television.) So I called a handful of friends and my sister to get some feedback. All signs pointed to yes, so I called my doctor's office which said just go to the hospital. I took Trudy for a second walk while waiting for Husband to get home and try not to overreact. At the hospi...

Adding Some Color

I distinctly remember my first encounter with food coloring. It was love at first chemical-laden sight. Mom and I were icing sugar cookies. We'd made a bowl of white icing. Then she broke out the food coloring. I was memorized by the bright colors and giddy at the thought of mixing them. Like most six year olds, I believed more was better. So the icing started a lovely pink after a few drops of red. Next came lavender with some blue. Then Mom turned her back just long enough for me to reenact the movie Cocktail with food coloring. Every color was going in and hell with a few drops, more is better. This is fantastic, I thought, as I created a rainbow in the bowl. I stirred with glee until I realized the rainbow was disappearing. The icing was turning a disgusting shade of gray-brown. This was terrible. No one wants to eat icing that looks like poop. So you're thinking, nice little story Jen. Way to point out that more isn't necessarily better. But that's actually n...

The Softride Has Left The Building

Today I bid adieu to my first triathlon bike – a Softride Rocket TT named Sally. (“Ride, Sally, Ride...”) While technically still mine until the ebay auction ends tomorrow, she has been dropped off at the bike store for clean up and packing. We’ll ship her off to the new owner this weekend and that will be the end of my beam bike era. A Softride is considered old school in the triathlon world and is mocked mercilessly by roadies. Sally has a carbon beam, no down tube and 650 wheels – basically the low-rider Cadillac of bikes. While it doesn’t have a stiff suspension or a brag-worthy weight, it has one thing – comfort. This is something I desperately needed when training for my first Ironman. Sally raced at Kona in 2001 and Wisconsin in 2003. She was dependable and attention-getting. Like riding a motorcycle, Softride enthusiasts also offered the casual hand wave when you encountered another one on the road. However, there are fewer out there these days. The Softride...