Baby love and the "Functional Season"

I have a friend and a past client who has just had a baby – McKenna Lauren. In fact I got her in shape and fitting nicely into her wedding dress a little over 2 years ago. I also worked with her for about a month toward the end of her pregnancy. We had decided that Madame M (as I have deemed her) thought that her mother’s ribs were like monkey bars because she always seemed to be “climbing” into them during the workouts. Well, about 3 ½ weeks ago, Madame M made her debut and mamma is finding out how challenging it is to be responsible for a little princess. I liked the first text message she sent out after she had given birth. It ended with something like “I can’t believe how much I love her”. I thought that was the sweetest thing I’d ever read! She apparently has long hair already that she loves to have washed. Daddy says it’s an early sign of high maintenance – a certain payback if you will! I recently sent an email to ask how things were going and she replied that they were surviving, but McKenna had started crying more (another sign of high maintenance?) and “woo – this is tough stuff”. My response was:

That's what I hear about babies! You think you know 'em, they're all quiet 'n stuff then - !WHAM! - they start crying like somebody set their feet on fire or somethin'. Woo is right!

I did get to babysit my 1 y.o. nephew, Reid, for a few hours recently and I gotta tell ya he is the BEST baby. He's usually smiling and when he's not, he's asleep. The child will eat ANYTHING you set in front of him and A LOT of it! I gave him some bread with peanut butter on it and you would have thought he hadn’t eaten in days; his eyes got really big and he was reaching desperately for the rest of it. Chris and I are fully convinced we can turn him into a pro-triathlete. He is so much different than my other nephew, Graham. He's 5, a little taller than waist level on me (yes, that's tall for a 5 y.o., no short jokes) and weighs about 40, maybe 45 lbs. at the most. He is a string bean because he's a very picky eater. He will eat oatmeal, mac-n-cheese-spaghetti-o’s, chicken nuggets and chocolate milk and he loooooooves mochas. In fact his Thanksgiving dinner was spaghetti-o’s and chocolate milk. Aaaahhhh to be 5! Then you have my brother, James, and sister-in-law's, Lisa, child they just adopted from China, Avery. She is 5 as well and even taller than Graham. My sister, Terri, said she walked into the airport on the night they arrived and saw Lisa’s entire family hovered around the screen that shows the escalator in the Starbuck's cafe. Apparently they were a little eager to meet Avery because no one was speaking to each other. They all swooped on her when they arrived. Terri said Avery just kind of tucked her arms in really tight and braced herself. She recognized Terri and Lisa's sister, Suzanne, from pictures. At least she had a couple of familiar faces. I got to meet her on Thanksgiving; the first thing she says to anyone is “Hi! Bicycle.”. All she wants to eat is watermelon and Pringles (although she is expanding her diet little by little) and detests brushing her teeth. In her defense though, I'm pretty sure that tooth brushing wasn't encouraged in the orphanage or her foster home. Lisa has told her that the only way Santa will come to their house is if she brushes her teeth. Obviously she wants a bicycle for Christmas after seeing Graham’s and now she is brushing her teeth about 15 times a day.

I haven’t been blogging lately partly because of being busy and partly because I’ve been battling a hip issue. The last time I ran was over a week ago and it’s absolutely killing me, but it kills me more if I try to run. Chris and I tried yesterday and oooooh-weeeee, it hurt. I’ve been doing a lot of swimming lately, but it seems to be working just as well. I just love to run and when you aren’t able to do what you love it’s like someone has you tied down. I’m going to try again tomorrow and I’ll let you know how it goes.

So now it’s the season of giving. Giving rude people the finger in traffic, giving up your sanity when you know exactly what you want in the store and there are people standing exactly where you need to be not moving when you say “excuse me”, giving stuff you have around the house as gifts because you don’t want to leave your house (just kidding about that one). I like Christmas, I just hate traffic and don’t really care for crowded stores. Thank goodness for online shopping. I don’t like the whole gift exchanging idea though. I always have a fear that I will open a gift and have “that” look on my face. I know you know the look I’m talking about. I suck at buying gifts so I have a tendency to buy people what I would like to receive - functional and practical things (I’m pretty partial to pens and paper). Not because I want them to think of me each time they use it, but to make their lives easier. If your life is made easier because of something that is as simple as being easier to carry then that makes you just a little less stressed. A little more happy even. Happy is gooooood! I’m very into making people happy and being happy myself. Of course you can’t be happy all the time; you would lose appreciation for the times when you are on some level. I personally like running the gamut of human emotion and it seems like I run through them all at some point every single day. I like to think that I am happy for the most part, though. I had a friend tell me that they had told someone that I laugh more than anyone they know. I think that was one of the nicest compliments I’ve ever gotten.

Well, I’ll get more into training and really make an honest effort to blog more often even if it’s just a paragraph. I know, I know! Promises, promises! People start to talk about you if you have a blog and it lays dormant for awhile. I just never realized that my life was so darn fascinating. I just appreciate that people like reading my blog and find it interesting. Come to think of it, I really like reading other’s blogs and I’m sad when they don’t update it. I think that’s part of my problem. I’m so busy reading other blogs I run out of time to blog. Maybe I’ll just take a speed reading course…