Other good problems to have:

The fact that my child had no shoes that fit her, and then we went to the consignment store and got her six pairs (two for now, four for growing into until the next time we come “home” meaning Buffalo home).  I came back from the store to try and find out how to clean baby shoes that have been used by rich babies that had ten pairs of shoes per shoe size (because no way would a baby that had just one pair leave them so pristine).  Oh, and to discover a goddamn, motha@uck***, hair-raisingly annoying squeaker set in one pair, which I promptly pried out with tweezers.  When did squeaky baby shoes become the thing? And you mean that, apart from dealing with stretch marks from the pregnancy, chronic tiredness, an inability to eat a meal in peace thanks to her active shenanigans, AND having to keep a clean house for her to crawl in, I must now be tortured (and torture others) one squeak at a time, emanating from her otherwise darling feet?  Nah man.

The fact that my child is adored by aunts and uncles and grandmother, and therefore does not touch the playpen for her allocated daily jail time.  We can’t have her thinking that 100% freedom to roam 24/7 is the new name of the game, can we?  Girl does not have AT & T yet, sheesh.  However, it’s tough to pry her out of adoring hands.  I’ve got to work on a balance on this one.

I need new sandals.  There are too many stores here.  I hate shopping, but I’m cheap and therefore end up price-comparing and buying stuff and taking it back.  This is a problem that I don’t have in T and T, because I don’t shop there.  Sigh, such first world problems.

The half marathon is on Sunday and I think I finally feel ready.  I know rationally that I am physically ready (not to bust out any kind of respectable time–just to finish feeling good and probably feeling halfway decent about my pace), but last night’s awesome eight-miler makes me feel it, finally–despite not having been able to get in a good 11 or 12 mile run during this training cycle and skimping on much-needed strength training.  It’s going to be OK. I think.

I can’t work my mom’s grill. I feel like a wuss.  What will I do if my sister is out and I need to grill and she’s not around to get it going for me?  Sigh, once again.

Who bought the twelve pack of English muffins and put it in my mom’s kitchen?  Did they not know what they were doing to me? How am I supposed to want to eat all the fruit from the market when that kind of potentially crispy goodness is hanging around, taunting me?  There is only so much blaming on the baby you can do when the package starts dwindling and people do the math–because no baby (no, not even MY chompy baby) can have three of them in one day.

Life’s good, as you can tell… and it will be even better when my better half joins us this Friday.

Here’s what I learned about running long distances during that horrid run (which I hope fills the quota of “one hellacious run-that-makes-you-want-to-give-up-this-running-foolishness per half marathon training cycle” this time around):

Putting off the start of the run will NOT make the run be done sooner.

Loading up your iPod with really great podcasts and music will NOT make the run be done sooner.

Taking two bathroom breaks (in which you dawdle and hope that you get some catastrophic-seeming stomach ailment that will make you call off the run… when all you needed to do was maybe pee and blow your nose) will NOT make the run be done sooner.

Maniacally looping around your husband and child as set upon the business of their calm, content walk in the hopes that seeing them will make you be done sooner (with no logical explanation of how that might work out) will NOT make the run be done sooner.

In a corollary of the above, obsessively checking your perfectly-content child in her stroller and looking for signs that she needs her mother imminently and solely, in ways that only YOU can understand (nay, even wishing that she regress to the point of needing constant nursing from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. and trying your best to emanate hormones that will immediately remind her of the delights of cluster feeding thisverysecond) when she could truly care less (because she’s munching on her favorite crackers and you’re just her sweaty boring mother and she just looks at you like, “whatEVER”) will NOT make the run be done sooner.

Hoping that your iPod/Nike +/sneakers will conk out, knowing that you either have extras of these or you can very well run without them, will NOT make the run be done sooner.

Cursing profusely, loudly, publicly (and therefore, for Trinidad and Tobago, illegally) when you find out that your highly-optimistic and totally off-the-cuff calculations of how many times you have to go up and down your damn street to get done with the run were EXTREMELY wrong (and you have to go up and down your street two more damn times) will NOT make the run be done sooner.

And, finally…

Wondering whether laying down in the middle of the street and waiting (waiting for what, I have no idea–the run fairies to finish this shit for you? A car to put you out of your misery? A dog to carry you away, either to be mauled or to live in a land where half marathons don’t exist?) to make the run end sooner will NOT make the run be done sooner.

Hard truths to learn, my friends.  Very, very hard truths.

*By “bad,” I mean my stomach hurt in a vague, unspecific, non-catastrophic way.  It felt off, but not off enough to make me think I couldn’t run with it.  And run I did, without catastrophic effects before or during or after–other than hating every second of every single mile and questioning why I was doing any of this.

__________________

It’s been a while, hasn’t it?  Last time I showed my mug around here, I was whining about a wonky knee and how I was worried it might mess with my half-marathon training plans.

And then… Boston.

I won’t write at length about it because it’s all been said by now.  But I will say that it shocked and saddened me more terribly, and that I felt almost guilty (hear me out) that it did, given that people die every day in this world in horrible and unexpected circumstances, in bigger numbers, in worse ways, and here I was completely shell-shocked in a way that I didn’t expect–how could I hear news about civil war in Syria all day and feel upset, but ultimately move on, and yet get hit so hard by this?  It felt as wrenching as when so much other bad stuff happens, but it also felt so much more real, because it IS that much more real, when you’ve been at the start line of races and when you have spectated races… and, even more, when your family and dearest people have done so for you over and over again.

So it felt silly to pop up, go “hey, guess what? My knee is fine! (Oh yeah, and there was a bomb at the finish line of the Boston Marathon)”  It still does, a bit.  But anyway.

(Is this what happens when I say I won’t write at length about something?  Sheesh).

In other news, my knee is much better.  I think I discovered the culprit of the knee wackiness, and I can lay the blame firmly on one 13-month old child.  Gee, I wonder how carrying 23 pounds of solid delightfulness on my right hip day in and day out (using my left knee as leverage and pivot) could POSSIBLY mess up my knee?  Who’d have thought that keeping a baby from executing kamikaze moves upon my person, moves that could land her on the floor, would twist my knee around?  Who knew, indeed.  I’m now making a concerted effort to be more mindful of how I stand when I’m holding her… and of encouraging this crawl-loving child of mine to take some steps so we can vary the range of injuries I can get while handling her.

Also, I’ve just come to the end of my first stint as the solo parent.  Four whole days–I know, hardly that long, but long enough to make me appreciate how lucky I am that I don’t go this alone.  Let me tell you:  nothing but huge big-ups to the people that parent solo full time (or part-time, for that matter).  It wasn’t as crazy as I thought it would be in some ways, but it was tougher in others.  She was an angel for three whole days and a bit cranky for one of them.  Plus, I managed to do it while nursing a pretty bad case of food poisoning on Sunday and Monday, from which I’m still recovering…

… Hence, no running.  At ALL.  I last ran on Friday, and the six miles went amazingly well.  I was all kinds of ecstatic  and singing the praises of half marathon training when I was done, and I felt so great that I would have happily gone out to run the next day.  But  nope.  Bad belly.  No running.  Gah–and the story of this training cycle so far.

So that’s what happens in between blog posts, at least this time.

____________________

Edited to add: 

I finally got a great long run in again–7 miles.  But it was a pain to get it done as I both pulled a neck muscle the night before the scheduled run and then it monsooned all weekend long.  The second it stopped raining on Sunday, I dashed out the door, completely unprepared for the run and ready to get poured on again.  Thankfully, I managed it rain free.  Scheduling the one this week is proving tough, what with some events for both the husband and me this week, and it looks like I’ll be spending another Sunday afternoon loop-de-looping–which is totally not what I want to spend my Sunday afternoons doing, but whatever.  I’m trying not to take my silly injuries/tweaks and the hell that has been scheduling runs as a sign that I shouldn’t be running this half marathon… but man, I get to wondering sometimes.

On this lovely Friday, instead of doing my long run, I’ll be burning orzo and rice for the baby’s lunches and dinners (done on the orzo, no doubt going to be done on the rice).  I’ll be unpicking triple rows of tiny stitches on stretch fabric, stitches so tiny that I need my reading glasses, stitches so hard to remove that I’ll be doing one foul word per three stitches pulled out.

I’ll be staying home when the husband and baby go for their daily walk–the walk that coincides with run time for me on most days.  I’ll be sulking. I may even sleep a bit during that time; at the very least, I’ll read my book (that book that I was so excited to have started) but I won’t be as absorbed as I was two days ago, because my mind will wander back to sulking.

I’ll be ordering Chinese food, but it won’t taste as good because I think it tastes better after six miles.

I’ll be keeping myself from Googling things like “torn ACL” and “ruptured meniscus” and “half marathon disaster.”  Instead, I’ll ask my husband to Google it for me.  He probably won’t, but he WILL tell me that I’d know if I had any of these on my hands… or rather, in my knee.

Because I won’t be running.

Because yesterday, after a truly awful day of domestic stress and bad moods all around to cap what has been a truly dismal-mooded week around these parts for all, I came back from my three-mile run with the baby in the stroller (the run in which my iPod and Nike+ decided to beef–AGAIN) to find that my knee was not right. Because your knee should not feel like it’s been turned backwards on you, and because even though it’s oddly pain-free to have this feeling, I know that this is, for lack of more cogent and unemotional speech, some buuuuullshit.  Some buuuuulshit I need to now deal with.

It is not the end of the world–especially in a week where things have been, emotionally, kind of rough (for reasons that fall very much out of the purview of my business to tell).  It  means I will climb the walls during daily run time (6-7 p.m.) until this straightens out.  It means I will not be wearing grown-up heels on our first date (baby free!) in AGES, to take place this Saturday night.  It means I will spend the next few days with a bag of peas in a state of semi-defrosting soppiness on my knee, feeling pitifully useless to chase after my sweet little baby explorer as I usually do.

It does not mean that my half marathon is not happening.  That’s what I’m telling myself, anyway.

I’ll be running the Buffalo Half Marathon on May 26!  Wheeeee!!!

I had originally wanted to run the Niagara-on-the-Lake Half Marathon (the same one I trained for and ran in 2011–and which I loved for the race support and the course) but it’s on the same date as this year’s Ride for Roswell, which my sisters and I have tried to do each year (in 2010 and 2011, anyway).  We’re not 100% sure we’re doing it this year (we had the house bikes stolen in 2011 and haven’t replaced them fully since then).  However, I didn’t want to bank on doing the Niagara half and then having to jump ship on the training once we figure out the bike situation to make Ride for Roswell happen.  It wouldn’t leave me enough time to properly train for the Buffalo half as a backup.

I’m pretty excited to run this race in Buffalo.  I get giddy to think I’ll be running around my neighborhood… and then not so giddy to think of all the not-so-pretty areas this race goes through.  It IS, after all, Buffalo–no one can argue that it’s in any way prettier than Niagara-on-the-Lake.  I’ll deal, though. And not having to coordinate stuff to travel at the crack of dawn to get to the race is going to be a real relief.

So.  Onto the training.  This will be my fourth half marathon training cycle (I trained for one I didn’t run because I got horribly sick, I ran one that I made up, and then I ran a real one at the Niagara-on-the-Lake Half) so I decided that maybe the Hal Higdon Novice 1 plan (which used to be the only “Novice” plan and which I used when I trained for the previous races) was a bit too beginner for me.  Instead, I’m going to use his Novice 2 plan (whoa, big departure!), which incorporates a day of pace running.  I’ll be running four days a week (which I’ve been doing since January) but I won’t be running three consecutive days like his plan says.  Running two days in a row has been working really well for me, so I’m not about to mess with it if I can shuffle my running days around.

I’ll be cross training with Zumba or the bike this time (again), and I’ll probably do my long runs on Fridays rather than on the weekend–the weekends are for fun things with family and friends, not for slogging through long runs (if I can help it).  As for the timing of most of my runs, including my long runs, they’ll all be happening in the afternoon (which I did as well for the Niagara-on-the-Lake half).  The mere thought of being a functioning parent / worker / human being after running ten miles at 6 a.m. would make training a non-starter–it was hard enough last time around, minus the baby.  So I’ll be running in the afternoons, mostly without the stroller; that way, there are less hours in the day for me to be exhausted in after the long runs.

I’ll strength train, too.  With squats, lunges, and some core work.  I pinky promise.

I have a loose goal of running it in under 2:30; I’d love to run it under 2:25, to be honest.  Not exactly speedy, I know.  I’ll be happy just to finish, but I can’t deny that a not-so-little part of me really, REALLY wants to run it at what I feel is a fast-ish long run pace for me.  I ran the Niagara-on-the-Lake half at what the Nike+ said was a 10:15/mile pace, but I know that wasn’t accurate–I was probably closer to 11:15.  And while I think I may have been in better shape back then, I know I’m much tougher and grittier now when it comes to running and training.

So:  the A goal is under 2:25 (11:04), the B goal is under 2:30 (11:27/mile), and the minimum goal is to enjoy myself (both in training and during the race). I’m hoping the cool (to me!) Buffalo May weather will put a bit of extra pep in me and help me shave off a few seconds from those times.

And there you have it.  Half marathoning after the baby… like I’ve looked forward to for so long.

I’m so excited I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it–or talking about it–it since I decided to run it.

But man, my poor husband.

Not only does he already support me by walking with the baby during my runs (so I can run in the cooler late afternoon and kinda-dark early evening) but he’ll be doing MORE of it.  And now he’s preparing for the inevitable weeks of pace analysis over fifteen seconds of difference here and there, the endless and pointless comparisons of the merits of all the running clothes I have for each kind of run, and the continual asking of “Am I crazy to be doing this?” while begging him to bring me another bag of frozen peas for my shins at 11:00 p.m.  Oh, and of course, he’ll once again witness the unseemly hanging of sweaty workout clothes over any and all available doorknobs to air before washing.

Heaven help this soon-to-be beleaguered man.  Someone needs to make a trophy for Half Marathon Husbands.  Or I’ll just have to give him mine once I cross the finish line–it’s only fair, you know.

That is Little Child after eating half the brains of her very first Easter chocolate chick.  It was Cadbury’s milk chocolate–which makes me gag–but I managed to truly enjoy this moment (and the ones where she got chocolate in her hair, in my hair, and all over my leg) nonetheless.

We also went to Port of Spain to see all the kids flying kites on the savannah, played with books all morning, and ate like piggies after she “helped” me make dinner.  How young is too young to zest some lemons?

Ah, Easter traditions old and new… We take some, we make some.  Among the old ones:  making black beans and rice with codfish salad on Good Friday–funny that I ALWAYS stick to that as I’m not remotely Catholic.  Among the new ones:  making vegetarian Greek pastitsio (from Moosewood Celebrates; another adaptation of that dish here)–funny that I ALWAYS (for the last three years, anyway) stick to that as I’m not remotely Greek.

And now, I can add “wiping chocolate out of hair” to the Easter traditions list.

Hope you had a wonderful Easter too!

]]> http://www.laurageorgina.com/2013/04/01/easterness/feed/ 0 http://www.laurageorgina.com/2013/03/27/the-fitness-update/ http://www.laurageorgina.com/2013/03/27/the-fitness-update/#comments Wed, 27 Mar 2013 17:41:26 +0000 Laura Georgina http://www.laurageorgina.com/?p=8695 I have a crawling, moving, big-time cruising baby on my hands.  Since she’ll only jail (by which I mean chill in the playpen) for limited amounts of time each day–and I need to save those times for crucial stuff like work, mopping, cooking, and showering–blogging has been taking a hit.  Sorry, guys.

Anyway, this here post is my first experiment in blogging while the baby has run of the living room.  A fenced-in, baby-proofed living room, mind you, but the living room nonetheless.  You know, the one with hard granite floors and plenty of surfaces to cruise along with and a mother that usually follows behind at a distance of one foot lest Baby Madam’s head hits the ground.  She’s getting to be quite balanced and graceful (my child?  Can she really be MY child?) so I’m backing off a bit.  It’s nerve-wracking, but it’s necessary.  The girl needs her space.

Oh, yeah, the blog post!

(And now she’s playing peekaboo from behind my computer screen!)

Back to it.

(And now she’s saying her version of “boo!” Which is like “ba.”)

(And now she’s realized I’m typing and that the computer is way more interesting than her toys and the taped-up AC unit.  And she’s trying to type over my own hands.)

What was I saying?

(And now she’s trying to shut the computer on my hands.  Sigh).

The fitness update… quickly, because this “blog and play” scenario needs some work…

There’s a 10K on Easter Sunday and I’m not doing it. I wanted to do it, but I pulled a back muscle a few weeks ago and, though I’m running again, my back is constantly feeling a bit tight from chasing after S.  That, and it’s at 6 a.m.; while I’m more than happy to get myself down to the race and run spectator-free, Mr. Man won’t hear of me running a race without him there as race crew before and after… and the race crew scenario would involve waking S. up at 5 a.m.  He’s cool with that and though I’m not categorically opposed to it, I AM categorically opposed to being exhausted from a 6 a.m. race with an exhausted baby all day long.  No thanks.  Another 10K will come my way.

I gave up on the barre workouts.  As in, I got tired of waiting for them to load on YouTube and don’t feel like paying extortionate shipping to get some DVDs sent to me.  There’s that, and there’s the fact that I wasn’t convinced twenty minutes of my concentrated attention on eight gazillion moves was doing more for me than well-executed squats and lunges while watching TV. I will sacrifice TV time till the cows come home for cardio, but I’ll be real here:  if I can’t do my strength training while watching mindless TV or listening to the radio, I’m not doing it.

I finished the 200 Sit-Up Challenge.  I cheated in that I skipped over the final week and went straight to the final challenge–and I managed the 200!  I wasn’t sure I wanted to do that, but I’d been doing this stupid challenge since before New Year’s with eight thousand stops and starts and I was getting DAMN sick of it. It was supposed to be six weeks, not three and a half months.  And the entire house was sick of hearing of it.  I’m pretty pleased with the results on the stomach and have kept up with a crunch routine every other day, but I’m DONE with keeping track of eight sets of whatevers.

There’s more, too… I’ve been going to Zumba regularly (minus the bad back week and the baby-and-husband-birthdays week).  I’ve been stretching a lot more (not enough, but more than before, which was not stretching at all). I’ve been consistently running four times per week and upping my minimum distance to three and a half miles.  I don’t swear as much when I run with the stroller.

In other words, the (fitness) life is good.

Gotta run–she’s trying to slink under the playpen and escape from her fenced-in safety bubble.  Man, what will I do when she starts to walk?

Virginia Woolf wrote that all women needed a room of their own.  I don’t think she meant this to apply to sewing, though.  Whatever.  I’ve appropriate Mr. Man’s Old Office, which was later turned into Isa’s room during her visit (and we still call it Isa’s room, though it was his office for four years and her room for only three months!) and turned it into my den of ME.

I’ve spent the last week thinking about sewing, and how much I love doing it, and how much I miss doing it… and then I just shut up and started doing it.  I realized that I have a baby who’s not such a tiny baby anymore, and that while I find great enjoyment in keeping the floor clean and all members of this house fed (read that with sarcasm, folks) and great satisfaction in being back at work (on an even more part-time basis than I was before the baby, but I’m working it!), I need to carve out some me time to do me things.  And sure, I run four times a week and go to Zumba once and I am delighted to be able to do those things… but I MISSED SEWING.

(And I miss having awesome clothes that I love and that I had fun making.  Let’s be real on that).

So the resolution is this:  at least three times a week, I will disregard the dish piles and the laundry basket and let the floor dust be so I can sit and sew for an hour or two.  I can wake up earlier to get my work and the household crap done a few times a week just to make this time happen.  I can do it while S naps, or while she limes in the playpen.  I may even set up a toy area for her in MY sewing room so she can crawl around in the pretty-much-babyproofed-already room while I sew. (This kind of negates the point of having a room of my own, but I’ll compromise for the sake of a few peplum blouses, people).  I just need to make it happen.

But to sew, I need to confront my No. 1 Bad Mommy Fear:  I need to make sure not a single pin drops on the floor.  Pins on the floor are the main reason why I haven’t tried to carve out sewing time since S has been out in the world.  I am terrified of her finding a random pin on the floor and executing her standard item-to-mouth move, and our floor is awesome for NOT letting you see what’s on it.  So I’ve devised a three-prong pin safety strategy: jamming them all the way into the pincushion at all times,  counting out how many I use per piece so I don’t end up losing track of any of them (exciting, I know), or not using pins at all, instead tracing patterns onto fabric (at which I am most certainly not gifted–my meticulous-stitching mother would scream if she saw how badly I cut patterns out this way).

I’ve also finally bought myself a toolbox for my sewing gear (albeit a broken one that I’ll be exchanging for a properly-latching one this weekend–why oh why is everything I bring home from Bhagwansingh’s somehow broken or defective?  And why oh why don’t I already know better than to check every single part before I leave the damn store?  Steupse…) It means I can sock things away easily out of her reach and I can stop wasting time looking for what I need because it’ll all be right there, all pretty and organized (in that ugly box).  I’m so excited about it I could explode.  Yeah, I don’t get out much.

So.  There we have it.  Sewing mania is back.  Now please excuse me while I don’t blog for the next three months because I’m too busy sewing.

(And apologies for the lackluster photo quality.  I somehow managed to leave the camera in S’s room and had to make do with a phone cam shot.  I’m all for good photography, but I’m even more for not waking up the baby when I could be sewing).

To this:

I can’t even write about it because my heart gets THISCLOSE, too close, embarrassingly close to exploding every time I think of how happy she has made me (and her dad, and her entire family) this past year.  I can’t remember life without her and I can’t stop imagining what it will be like in a year, ten years, thirty years… but I stop myself from imagining too much because right now, this second, it’s too wonderful to miss a moment.

She had a wonderful birthday, with a huge clown cake (which took us one week to eat) and a tiny get-together on the front lawn with her Trini aunts and uncles, where she cruised from chair to chair in search of someone who’d let her drink their Pimms (no one) and someone who’d let her try their cake (everyone).  Next year, we’ll have a “party” party–with decorations and more pictures and kiddie friends and the like–but this year, I wanted her to be mine ALL MINE.

So, this is what it feels like I’ve been doing all day, every day:

While that is partly true–and trust me, I could write a full dissertation on the use of a Swiffer vs. a mop, the superiority of Lysol lemon cleaner over Fabuloso mountain scent liquid, and a soot quantity analysis comparing gunk swept up with a hard bristle broom and gunk swept up with a soft bristle broom–other good things have been happening.  I’ve been working more (not as much as I was pre-baby, but still a good amount), cooking more, running and Zumba-ing regularly, and watching movies again (oh, how I missed that).

And the best part?  We actually finally made it to the beach!  She had a brand new pail and shovel set and learned that the water is actually a really great thing–so much that we sat at the edge of the water getting lapped by waves half the afternoon, with squeals of delight and hand-clapping every time the water came (and protests when the waves took too long for her baby patience to bear).

So while these images don’t happen all day, every day like sweeping and mopping the house for S the Explorer…

… They’re awesome enough to make me forget about the damn mop and bucket.  Almost, anyway.

________

I hope to be back later in the week, but we all know how that can go…  In any case, you’re sure to see me back to it again next week.  Now excuse me while I go and spend the week waxing nostalgic and snotful over the last year–Miss Baby turns ONE on Sunday!  If you thought I was in denial about my age, you should see how very NOT turning one she is, if I have anything to do with it.  Just kidding–I’m thrilled, there will be cake for her, and I will get over it eventually… I think.