10.09.2012

when i'm on my knees i'll still believe

(Please excuse the quality of the above photograph, as it was taken on my phone. And I don't have a fancy phone capable of taking decent photographs because I have an irrational fear of touchscreens. I wish I could say I was joking but that's neither here nor there.)

Ever since that article spread like wildfire across the internet recently -- you know the one -- I've been trying to make an effort to be in pictures with Ethan more. I've been half-joking and half-complaining since Ethan's birth that to a stranger thumbing through our photo albums, it would make sense for them to assume that my husband is a single father. For every one hundred photos of him with Ethan, there might be one of me. There's likely an album that I'm missing from altogether. My husband likes to say that I'm just picky about the photographs that I am in (let's be real, I am human) but I don't think it's always irrational for me to expect that the left half of me makes it into the picture, too. Regardless, I've been trying to make more of an effort to say "take a picture of Ethan and I" and know that it's not strange for me to do so. Regardless of whether or not my hair has been washed in the past three days (it wasn't) or if I had the time to at least apply mascara (I shockingly did), these are the memories that one day my son will cling to with the intensity that I associate with my own childhood photographs with my own parents.

I begged, bribed and pleaded for my teenage sister to sign out of Twitter long enough to snap the above photograph of Ethan and I before we headed off to our first yoga class. This "being in the picture" thing is quite new to me but yet not nearly as new as yoga. Before taking this yoga class, all I knew about yoga was that it is spelled Y-O-G-A. This class was also a mixture of pilates and, well, I wasn't at all sure what that was (nor was I entirely sure how to spell it, either). The class was a "mommy and me" version held at a local hospital in the afternoons, just before dinnertime. I'd been toying with the idea of taking this class because it seemed interesting and something good for the mind and body that Ethan and I could do together. Today I was inspired to actually go to the class because Ethan has learned to open all of the doors and I needed some zen thrown into my frantic day of door closing, cat wrangling and general "oh, Ethan, please don't pour the rice all over the floor" exasperation.

The class was comprised today of just myself and a friend (and our two toddlers). The yoga and pilates room for the mommy and me classes was filled with toys of all shapes and sizes -- and even a slide, which Ethan made sure to fall off of -- which was wonderful when the kids decided they had little to no interest in the toddler-sized mats given to them if they wanted to have a go at baby yoga. And, really, if you're wondering, I figured out what both yoga and pilates were -- and they are basically hard in the "wow, I'm pretty sure there are little razors sawing my thighs off as we speak" sense. Naturally, I bought a punch-card and will be there next week to give it another shot because if I was so relaxed and enlightened that I contemplated laying my head down at the dinner table and going to sleep, well, I like yoga and pilates and even the little razors and hacksaws having a go at my thighs.

And, really, I liked sitting on the driveway with Ethan after we returned home from our class, watching him try to figure out why the blue sky was fused with shades of pink and orange. We paced the sidewalks, watched the lizards and ducks make their way home for the night, and waited for my husband's car to pull up the driveway during a time of day we're usually already inside eating dinner. I never would have known that putting dinner off for ten minutes would mean opening up our nighttime to a whole new realm of nature's magic and soothing evening air. Yeah. I think I'm a fan of yoga and, hey, I might even come around to pilates...once I regain feeling in my abdomen.

3 comments:

  1. Hi from Cali! I am a new follower via the guest post on Wifessionals. I SO KNOW that article you are talking about and I too have to drag myself to get in the pictures more. Way to go mama!

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  2. You must try a yoga class at a gym which older folk frequent. The flatulence that are released during the class will cause for a great ab workout (for you) from the laughter it will cause. Or maybe I'm just really amused by things middle schoolers find amusing.

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  3. Ah. The article6. Also, I'm one part jealous of your mommy and me yoga class and one part envisioning myself trying desperately to get into a zen frame of mind while Liam scurries around the room trying to greet the other kids. I hope it continues to go well.

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