a bat, a ball, and thou

The Bee and I went out into the backyard today and practiced baseball. We couldn’t find the bat, so we just used a cardboard tube. In my first at-bat, I hit the ball so hard that the tube broke, which the Bee found hilariously funny. We fixed it with some strapping tape, and headed back out into the yard, where she ‘beat’ me, 12 to 5.
I hate exercise, but the one thing I can’t do is have my kids grow up knowing that. The down side of being a lifelong reader is that I find it really hard to motivate myself to exercise, because it’s just so damn boring. I’ve never been able to read while exercising, and I find that so incredibly disappointing that I almost never do any.

I struggle to find ways to exercise with my kids, so that they will think of it as something important and fun. It’s hard, since I don’t find it fun at all, but I don’t want them to know that. And it’s more fun to play with my kids than to ride on the exercycle, or do wretched exercise tapes. I tried to get the Bee interested in doing yoga at one point, but it didn’t really work out.

It’s funny, because my dad was one of the original runners. Before people ran, before jogging was a common form of exercise, my dad was a runner. My dad always ran in the morning, before he went to school. He’d get up at like 4 a.m., put on his clothes (including some amazing ensembles in the winter), and run for miles. My dad always went to work really early, but on weekends, he’d run later, and he’d come back when we were all sitting at the kitchen table, eating breakfast. He’d be all sweaty, no matter the temperature. In the winter sometimes he’d have icicles on his mustache.

All of my brothers were distance runners, but I was only ever a sprinter. An early case of asthma kept me from cross-country (and just might have something to do with my lifelong aversion to exercise), but I was decent at the 50- and 100-yard dashes (yes, they still measured in yards, back in the day). I did a lot of field events, particularly the long jump. As a kid, I played softball and basketball, and my brothers played soccer.

I’m thinking about asking the Bee if she wants to play tee-ball this spring. It’s only a matter of time till she’s actually better than me, and she might as well use that to her advantage.

Advertisement

February 19, 2006. random other things. 9 comments.

Anne at the Barely Attentive Mother has an interesting post up about an experiment she’s trying out called The Momorandum. Basically, it’s an attempt to track the many posts out in the parenting blogosphere that overlay politics and parenting. Go on over there and check it out, and if you like it, link it.

Those are some of my favorite moments in reading other people’s blogs–the conversations that go on about things like the domestic politics of how housework gets divided, or who still takes off the most time with sick kids. If you’re interested in those topics too, check out Elizabeth at Half Changed World, Chip at Daddychip, the writer mamas of MamasInk, Miriam at Playground Revolution, and the eponymous writer of Bitch PhD (although I find it hard to believe that you’re not reading her already, given her ability to get hundreds of comments in the space of hours).

February 19, 2006. meta. 1 comment.