Back in June I started doing yoga. I’d backed the Gathre yoga mats on Kickstarter in like… February so I figured I should actually start doing yoga, right? It was the logical thing to do. So a few times a week in the afternoon when the kids were napping I’d put on a Yoga With Adriene video. This was when I was having a lot of anxiety after Georgie’s attack and doing yoga really helped with that. I wanted to keep it up over the summer but unfortunately with Sym and Gwen off school it just didn’t work out. They would be out in the living room during nap time because little kids were sleeping in their rooms, and the constant commentary and need for attention was just not conducive to yoga.
Thankfully they are back at school now, and my kickstarted mats arrived the first week of school so it was like… serendipity! I figured I could do yoga three afternoons a week (Monday, Wednesday and Friday) and still have time to do all the work and housework and everything else I need to do each day. Usually I’ll do a video that is 30-40 minutes, but yesterday someone’s child (cough*mine*cough) dumped out a ton of milk all over the dining room at lunch. I had a bunch of extra cleaning and mopping to do so had less spare time during nap and chose a quick, 15-minute workout instead.
Now recently I’ve been making a real effort to go to bed at a decent hour instead of staying up late and falling asleep on the couch watching Unsolved Mysteries. As it turns out, if you go to bed earlier it’s easy to wake up earlier. WILD I KNOW. So I figured I could get up 15 minutes earlier in the morning and do this quick, 15 minute flexibility workout every day. Every day! (Every weekday I mean). I was getting up at 7… ish so even though I’m really not a morning person 6:45 wasn’t outside of the realm of possibility for me. I went to bed by 11:30 last night and I was so confident that I’d wake up early enough I didn’t even set an alarm. And I was right, I woke up on my own at 6:05 this morning. I thought that might be a little TOO early so I stayed in bed until about 6:30… and that is when it all started to go wrong.
Last night before I went to bed I’d rolled up the living room rug so all I’d only have to unroll my mat and I’d be ready to go. HOWEVER my dog sometimes has overnight accidents in the house, so I had to walk out slowly and carefully in case of dog messes on the floor. Also, Gwen and Nicky were awake and playing in their room with the door slightly ajar so I couldn’t turn on any lights that might shine down the hallway. So. Hunting for dog mess in the dark. Cool. I used my phone to remotely turn on the lights in the playroom, which shone enough into the dining room to illuminate a scattering of poops on the dining room floor (the one I mopped yesterday afternoon…).
I hopscotched over them to get to the foyer, grabbed a poop bag and quickly picked up the mess. Of course now I had to get back to the front door to throw it out, but I couldn’t exactly tell where the poops had been and I didn’t want to step on any poop remnants before mopping. I had the brilliant idea of walking around the other side of the dining room table and cutting through the living room to get to the door, so I did just that. Which is when I stepped in a puddle of piddle.
I had to wipe my foot dry with my pajama pants, strip them off and hop to the door to toss out the poop bag in my underwear, and then hop back to the bathroom to wash my foot. I wiped up the pee and put on some clean pants, and then I had to mop the dining room, still in a mostly dark apartment because I didn’t want to alert the kids to my presence. They are basically like the ear monsters in A Quiet Place so this all had to be done in silence as well.
Finally at about 6:50 the floors and myself were clean and ready. I put out my mat, turned on the video, and that was when Nicky started screaming. I don’t know if the low volume of the video was enough to let him know I was up, or if he’d just had enough of playing in his crib, but his yelling was not conducive to a peaceful yoga experience so I had to pause the video, get him up, change his diaper and plonk him and his sister on the couch because I was GODDAMN DETERMINED TO DO MY FRIGGING YOGA OK. So I did, and it was not great, because Nicky kept sitting on me and bringing me objects (he says “here you go” and then he throws a phone or a jar or a pair of underpants at me) and Gwen, bless her heart, always wants to gives hugs and kisses. But in the end I still did it, and I’m gonna do it again tomorrow, although I think I should probably get some headphones.
I was having a ton of trouble finding a basket to hold these mats that met my exact specifications for height, size and price, and then I realized I ALREADY OWNED IT. This used to hold the wooden blocks in the playroom, so I moved them to a shorter, wider basket and now everything has a place. I LOVE things having a place.
Ol’ Milky Eyes. This guy is getting pretty old, we thought he was like 14 but he’s really almost SEVENTEEN which is very ancient for a dog, even a small one..
Part of the reason I have trouble getting out of bed is because IT IS A LITERAL CLOUD. I finished up painting my bedroom a few weeks ago (well, mostly, I skipped the wall behind the bed because I didn’t feel like unscrewing my headboard from the wall and anyway the whole thing has curtains covering it) and it is SO NICE no longer having a half-painted space (which it has been since we had the floor replaced like a year & a half ago? YIKES).
I did a quick refresh to this corner of the playroom recently; I switched out the black brackets on the mattress shelf/Moomin poster with some white ones, painted the wall behind the left side of the kitchen (actually only part of it because I ran out of paint after finishing my bedroom), put some long Ikea picture ledge shelves on that wall to hold wooden puzzles and other ~aesthetic~ toys, and also screwed some pieces of foam core board painted to match the walls behind the two open arches of the play kitchen to stop Nicky from throwing literally every toy in the house behind it. His jumpsuit is a hand-me-down from Gwen, it’s completely impractical but completely adorable.