Don't Do That...Er...Wednesday

Yeah, yeah it's Wednesday. I meant to blog yesterday but yesterday was one of those days when one's husband works from 8:30 a.m. - 9:30 p.m. and one's children are afflicted with teething, flu recovery, nap boycotting and general bitchiness (let's just be honest here) and one is still barking like a flu-ridden seal and starting on a lovely pressure headache from impending thunderstorms that one is really, really pissed aren't snowstorms because hello it's friggin' January for God's sake! Why the hell is it 70 degrees?!

Yeah, so "one" wasn't really in the blogging mood.

Anyway, I'm pretending it's Tuesday and y'all can pretend along with me. Without further ado, here is my don't do that for this week:

Don't do yoga with toddlers. Just don't.

Really, I could stop there, but for those of you who don't have toddlers or an imagination, let me elaborate.

So, as I'm still recovering from the flu, I've abandoned my regular workout routine in favor of gentle, "healing" yoga. Generally, I try to get up early enough that I can get 30-45 minutes of exercise in before S gets here so I only have to contend with two small folks clamoring for my attention instead of three. Two out of the three rarely nap and if they do nap, it's a guarantee they won't do it at the same time, so I don't have a whole lot of kid-free time which is why I shoot for mornings. Today, however, I was running a little late and S's mama was running a little early and so he got here before I could get my yoga in.

"No problem," I thought, "I'll just do it when Dylan takes Ry to therapy. I'll only have two kids around at that point. How hard could that be?"

Ha.

Here is a list of what happened during the 30 minutes I was "doing yoga":

Pippa brought a toy bus out from her room, sat on it and proceeded to scoot it across my yoga mat, and my toes.

S stole the bus out from under Pippa, who then fell to the floor and began screaming.

I stopped the video and blathered ineffectually about gentle touches and sharing while they circled each other and gave each other the stink-eye.

S wiped his runny nose on my cheek.

Pippa pulled up my shirt and attempted to nurse.

S put a ball of cat hair on a toy fork and stuck it in my mouth yelling, "Eeeeeat! Eeeeat!"

Pippa brought out a self-propelled inchworm toy and launched it at my head while I was in a backbend.

S grabbed the inchworm toy and Pippa found that to be the worst thing that had ever happened to her. Cue screaming, flailing tantrum inches from my head.

S became perturbed by Pippa's display of awfulness and threw the inchworm toy at her head. It missed her. It hit me.

I stopped the video and blathered ineffectually about gentle touches and sharing while they swore at each other in toddler gibberish and retired to separate corners to fashion separate homemade toddler weapons.

Pippa hit me in the head with a toy hammer.

S hit me in the elbow with a toy spatula.

Pippa jumped onto my chest and then slid down to my neck yelling, "I pooped! I pooped!"

Pippa threw a toy onion at S. S screamed.

I stopped the video and blathered ineffectually about gentle touches and sharing while they insulted each other's mothers and retired to separate corners to write separate anti-S/anti-Pippa manifestos.

Pippa spit milk in my hair.

S slobbered all over the toy spatula and rubbed it on my face.

While I was in corpse pose, they both decided they wanted to sit on my chest, discovered they couldn't both fit there and got into a screaming, pushing, shoving territory war while I quietly suffocated under 55 lbs. of militant, raging toddler.

I stopped the video and blathered ineffectually about gentle touches and sharing and hey, how about we don't sit on people when they're trying to RELAX while they calculated how much biting force it would take to chomp off each other's toes.

I finished the yoga video namaste-ing over two angry heads that blamed me for absolutely everything that has ever gone wrong in the world.

Here is a list of what didn't happen during the 30 minutes I was "doing yoga":

Relaxation

Rejuvenation

Stretching

Energizing

Yoga

So, if you have toddlers and are contemplating practicing yoga when they're around, let me just say emphatically and with much gusto: DON'T DO THAT!!!