Why yes… you have been neglected.

I’ve been so busy lately, that I haven’t been able to take the time to really enjoy the little things that make life so grand! Instead, I’ve been doing school work, mounds and mounds of school work. On top of that I’m working around 9 to 10 hours of day in the classroom… for free.

If I get a free moment I spend it trying to catch up on sleep. (Which is boring.) So, basically I’m either passed out or stressed out.

Therefore, when I got a three day weekend, I completely ignored my obligatory weekly blog post and chose to spend the day playing outside with my family.

I took the time to workout, take a few long showers, paint my toenails and read a book. I also went grocery shopping and picked out lots of fresh fruits and vegetables to enjoy. Penelope chose to eat an entire carton of raspberries as I shopped instead of the cookie she got from the bakery. So, I made a mental note to add more raspberry bushes to my garden this summer.

In fact, I’ve been thinking about my garden a lot lately. I’ve even been dreaming about it. I’ve been dreaming about enormous multicolored heirloom tomatoes, giant pumpkins and sunflowers that flourished in the shade.

I made a pot roast for dinner on Sunday and went out to my shriveled up garden to see if there were any remnants of herbs left to include in my meal. That’s when I found a little thyme that had turned purple but was still fragrant waiting for the weather to get warmer so that it could come to life once again.

It turns out that my garden isn’t the only thing I’ve been dreaming about lately…

I’ve also dreamt about how out of shape I have gotten. I had a dream that I looked in the mirror to find that my hips and thighs were unbelievably lumpy. I couldn’t figure out what would make them look like that so I just assumed that I had apples in my pants.  I was sorely disappointed when I reached in my pants and there were no apples to be found.

When I woke up I walked straight to the mirror to see how lumpy my thighs were. Luckily, they weren’t lumpy, rounder and softer maybe, but it definitely didn’t look like I was trying to smuggle fruit in my pants.

That dream is what convinced me to refocus on the kind of foods I put in my mouth. I can’t control a lot right now due to my time restraints but I can always make time to eat fresh healthy foods that will nourish my body.

I was stunned to see just how much processed crap we’ve let enter our pantry since I’ve started student teaching. I’ve slacked on the kinds of foods I’ve allowed my kids to have too because I was too tired of fighting them on it. That’s the worst thing I can do as a mom.

The things that I feed my kids today sets the standard for what they will choose to eat when they grow up. I want them to be healthy happy adults… so that means I have to raise the standard for myself and set that example.

After I woke up from the lumpy thigh dream I weighed myself to see what kind of damage had been done during a week of not caring what I ate. The scale said, 186.6… not what I expected at all. I thought surely the scale would say that I had gained weight. My body is so unbelievably mushy these days. So even though the scale is being kinder I know better.

The down side to having already been an athlete is the all or nothing mindset you can find yourself trapped in. I think athletes suffer from this because they go super hard during the season and then lay off a bit during the post season. There’s never any balance about it. I’ve actually found that my friends who never played sports at all tend to have a healthier mindset when it comes to exercise. They just plod along fitting in exercise when they can, no ego involved.

The athlete in me feels like I’m not accomplishing anything if I’m not murdering myself in the gym. I feel so defeated if the only workout I can fit in is a walk around the block. What I forget is that any exercise is better than none. I think my pride gets in the way if I can’t workout the way that I want to.

“If I can’t be a badass then I’ll just be a couch potato because I’m way too cool to count an evening walk as my main source of exercise.”

How dumb is that?!  If I can’t make it to the gym because I feel the need to spend quality time with my girls at the end of the day then I need to be active with them…. play at the park, dance in the house, jump on the trampoline. And if I find an opportunity in which I have the time to workout then I need to pounce on it and fit it in when I can.

I still have ten more weeks of student teaching to undergo and I’ve decided that I can’t wait another ten weeks to be proactive about my health. I may not be able to do everything that I would like to do but that shouldn’t prevent me from doing what I can.