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Laylee loves it when I work out during the day because she gets to go to the playroom at the gym. In the gym playroom she gets to play with toys that are far germier and therefore much better than ours. She gets to watch movies on VHS and she gets to color with pencil crayons that are far better than ours because they are stubbier and they belong to the gym.

Lately, she's taken to following my example and "exercising" at home. She clears the toys out of the small storage area under the stairs and proceeds to stretch, run in place, and contort her body all sorts of ways to do her workout and yoga. Her favorite pose is the corpse pose, where she lays on her back with her arms along her sides and concentrates on her breathing. It's the pose she saw me doing at the end of a yoga routine that made her decide yoga was SO EASY!

I love how she follows in my footsteps when I'm being a good example but I'm a bit worried about how she'll copy me when my behavior is less than stellar. I thought about this as we were rushing to my yoga class this morning. She had hurried to squeeze in a workout under the stairs before we left so we could both have stronger, healthier bodies. I was late as usual and running around trying to get everyone ready as fast as possible. As I sped along to class, I told the kids that they'd need to get out of the car quickly at the gym and run into the toy room because we were already going to be late.

I find myself saying things like this a lot. "Be extra quiet as we’re walking into church. We’re late and we need to be super reverent so we don’t disturb the meeting."

"Go quickly into music class and sit right down. We’re already 15 minutes late and we don’t want to draw attention to ourselves."

"We need to get better at being on time."

How many hundreds of times have I acknowledged our lateness and told the kids we would do better next time? It seriously feels like we’re missing our lives, 15 minutes at a time. It doesn’t seem to matter what I do or how much I adjust our schedule, I feel incapable of being punctual.

I don’t imagine my kids have a chance of growing up as punctual people. They’ll probably just be more extreme. If my guess is right, they’ll end up being 30 minutes late to all of their appointments. And their kids will just never go anywhere because they have no chance of arriving anywhere before the event they’re trying to reach is over.

Following that line of thinking, since I work out for 45 minutes about 3 times a week, Laylee will likely exercise for about an hour 5 days a week and my grandchildren will be a bunch of Schwarzeneggers.

So my legacy will be to leave behind a generation of buff, late people with very attractive feet … or possibly not. I’m so concerned about the example I’m setting for my kids that sometimes I drive myself a little batty. In the end, I guess they’ll just be who they are and I’ll just keep trying to be better.

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