Getting in Shape

I haven’t gotten on the scale recently. Seeing the numbers rarely change is more discouraging to me, but when my clothes start to get loose, then I am happy. But I know I am motivated to workout if I am able to be social.

A couple of things that I do is meet a friend once a week at the gym. We are lucky enough that a local gym (with childcare) offers a punchcard (in addition to a monthly rate), so I don’t have to feel pressured to go more often to make it worth it. And I pay for the childcare as we use it. And at the first of the year they decreased their punchcard rate by almost half. Awesome! It ends up coming down to $4.33 for me to workout with a friend and our kids to be in childcare. That’s actually cheaper than paying a babysitter. So, we allow ourselves to splurge on that for ourselves once a week so we can get in a long run w/o interruption.

And I do yoga with 3 other moms once a week. We switch between a couple houses that have enough room for us, but we all contribute our different yoga videos we have, so the routine gets mixed up all the time and we don't get bored. It’s nice. We do this while our kids are in preschool and the ltl ones are either napping or playing.

Usually I make myself workout once a week by myself, either a yoga video or get on the treadmill. I try to workout 4-5 times, but the other 2 times I try to make it fun with the family. So, my daughter & I try to get out sledding or ice skating (all free) or we go swimming as a family at the community center ($3/person and my son is free). Or I try to get out to do some other winter sport with a friend like cross country skiing (which I bought on ebay for hardly anything) or snowshoeing (go to the nature center when they have the rental free or discounted for members).

As soon as daylight savings starts & its warmer, my gym/running partner & I will go running outside in the evening after the husbands are home and can be with the kids. I think we will get a couple other moms to join us as well. We set a goal to run a 10K in April (ran our 1st 5ks this fall), so we’ll need to pick up our running more in March.

And I can’t wait for summer when we get a family membership to our city’s community outdoor pool, which is an affordable $75 for the summer. And we are at the pool ALL THE TIME! And we’ll start hiking at the nature center more once it warms up. And the my daughter really wants to go geo-caching. And since I have the smart phone now I can download a good android-based free app to do this. I'm hoping that this summer my daughter will be able to bike faster and we can do more bike riding around the town. And of course, we'll have some fun playtime in the yard and at parks that will help keep us in shape.