Doing yoga with a stuffy nose

It's kind of hard to feel on top of things when you wake up to your spouse saying, "The alarm didn't go off," and you thought he was saying, "The dog has to pee," so leaping from bed is the only sane option.

I dragged on my comfy clothes and ran out front with the dog (who did, in fact, very much need to go) and then watched as Eric almost sprinted out of the door, on the way to his new year.

Even though we were later than we'd hoped, it was early enough to feed Mikey in his crate and use that relative peace to do some yoga. Kristin is my inspiration here. I don't have a fancy yoga/honey house like she does, but now I am the proud user of a deck of yoga cards. Nothing quite like easing into a down dog and realizing that there needs to be a box of Puffs as part of your practice.

Waking up is hard to do. . .

Darn you, Neil Sedaka. What else, I ask you, fits this kind of morning?


I've learned that making children go to bed early is relatively useless, but waking them up early eventually works on the other end. They think I'm cruel, and they might be back asleep, but baby steps will do us all.

At the halfway point?


The second first mitten is now halfway done. That has to be some kind of milestone, right?


Breathing in the wave

Just before I woke up, I was finishing a long dream about being at the beach with the homeschoolers. I know I was with them because there was much discussion about which glass lasagne dish was whose, and we hadn't even started with the Dutch ovens. I finally announced that even if no one else was, I was going swimming. The water was perfect -- still and clear, and there was another shore across from us. It was some sort of bay!

I struck out across the water, and then a giant wave rose up under me. I could feel the power as I kept on swimming. Looking at where the wave was going to land after it crested, I knew I was in trouble. Growing up in Southern California, I spent a lot of time riding waves, and landing this one was going to be a doozy. However, in the dream, I had my face right at the level of the water and kept breathing in and out, deeply and calmly. I thought, "As long as I can breathe in the wave, I'm okay."

Since we can't predict the things that happen, it seems as good a way to proceed as any.

As you mean to go on

Resolutions and new beginnings just seem to go together, as do the concomitant disappointment when keeping them is more difficult -- the pounds won't come off, the photos don't get organized, those pesky weeds just keep coming up, and who said twelve pairs of mittens in a year was doable?

I've managed this in years past by not making resolutions, other than the most general: "Eat breakfast. Walk occasionally. Eat kale a lot."

This year, though, I'm brimming with them. Maybe it's tipping well into my final half of life; maybe it's not having a truly little child of my own any more (thank goodness for a new niece!) that's freeing up some space in my head. And this blog is part of that. While researching when we got the cats for a pet insurance application, not only did I discover when we got the cats, thanks to the blog, seeing the pictures of the kids and reading about what we were doing was so pleasurable and not having it was an actual ache. So I resolved to post at least one picture of one kid per day and blog something. Alas, that's only one thing I want to do.

Some of my plans involve the kids in other ways:


And, as any parent knows, rearing kids means limits. Screen time is an ongoing struggle here -- in fact, many things about this child are struggles. Rarely do parents blog honestly about their challenges with their children, and the line between exploitation and sugar-coating isn't easy to find. I hope that this year, we're going to unlock some of the more difficult puzzles with our son, even though paying for the professional help to do so is going to be painful.

I'm also embarking on a self-taught course of dog training. Mikey, who recently joined our family, was trained to be a show dog and not much else. He's big, and mouthy, and not quite sure what's expected of him. He's also very lovable.


I love the look he's giving the kid here. "Squirrel? You call that a squirrel? Take me outside!" In researching training methods, I've fallen completely for Karen Pryor and her positive reinforcement classical conditioning clicker training. Her Reaching the Animal Mind book provided hours of entertainment for us, and then gave me a place to start when Mikey came home. As I've delved more into training, I'm feeling overwhelmed, so finding this website with its structured instruction has been a boon. I think it might also save me a few hundred dollars in private training lessons.

So what else? Um, study Italian, teach my courses, keep homeschooling as effectively as I can, walk briskly a few times a week - that leg is still not at all run-able - do some yoga, keep decluttering the house, and oh, yes, knitting.

I started working on the second of the Norwegian Snail Mittens a few days ago:


This would be great almost-two-years-to-a-finished-object stuff if I didn't also bite the fit-bullet and do this:


And it's not done. That "first" mitten was just enough too tight around the thumb area to make it not up to snuff. In a moment of strength, I figured, "I can do this" and just started ripping. When I get down below the tight part, I'll set it back on the needles and start over. By then the "other first" mitten will be done, and I'll be halfway to the first pair done.

As I mean to go on, I mean.

Finding Balance

I woke up this morning from a baroque dream which segued from a documentary/participatory drama about a buffalo hunt featuring someone like a Sioux and then ended up being a lion doing the hunting, then to a bizarre golf tour/decorating tour during which I realized that what our house needed, in terms of decoration, was bunches of crystal-bedecked chandeliers mixed with found objects (one of which was a black and white picture of a very elderly, seated, Winston Churchill). Apparently that is all it's missing to turn it from the "Daily Chaos" style we feature now into something really. . . different.

That taken care of, I realized that there is one very good reason for Thing 4 to not have a cup of blackberry tea with honey before bed. I'll be doing a load of my sheets and blankets and pajamas this morning as soon as she realizes it, too.

Since staying in bed wasn't an option, I got up and did some yoga. For this morning's practice, I decided to focus on breath. In on the extensions, out on compressions/folds. I can seriously call what I do a "practice," because I'm so very very inexperienced. But I did what I could think of, and near the end decided to throw in some Tree Pose.

One of the things that stunned me when I began working out again, a year or so ago, was that my balance had somehow gone missing. Not my metaphorical balance -- no one with four children under the age of, say 35, has that -- but my literal, physical balance. I guess I'd been used to moving so fast that I never tried to stand on one foot or turn while keeping my feet together, or anything. And somewhere along the line, I'd lost the ability. Go figure.

So I've kept that in mind as something I'd like to improve. There's nothing like imagining oneself as a little 65 year old woman with a broken hip to provide motivation for working on improving one's upright-ability.

The first tree pose I tried got wobbly, rapidly. Fortunately, in my living room, the only living thing around was the fluffy cat, and he can get out of my way. So I did some thinking. In balance poses, it's all about the foundation. Hey -- metaphor! So I breathed in, thought about rooting my base foot down, slowly raised my other one, hooked it into my thigh, exhaled, looked through the window at my focal point, breathed in, and raised my arms.

And darned if it didn't stick. Really stick. I thought, "I could do this all day!" Of course, I couldn't, but I could repeat it on the other side. And I did.