My Hair is Frozen

And I feel like I've been beaten with sticks.  All over.  Really.  After a crazy week at work, marathon Christmas shopping (yes!  I am done!!! hahahahahaha!), I got to be solo parent for the weekend, while the Jedi went to an annual Thanksgiving Harvest Festival for our business.  I'm always suspicious of this one - despite me knowing that it is a lot of hard work to sell to customers, there is just no way around the fact that he gets to hang out in a barn by the fire listening to live music and drinking craft beer.  Sounds pretty good to me....

Two cuties munching our cake pops by the fire at Red Apple Farm

 Saturday I had planned and ready.  I always have a plan.  Mealtimes, weekends, christmas presents - I like to be prepared.  Compulsive?  Yes.  Absolutely.  But also the secret to success, greatness, world domination, and general lack of freakouts and breakdowns when you have a job, a business, two kids, yada yada.

So after the Jedi set out on Saturday morning, I packed up the munchkins and went to that glorious place where strangers will watch my kids for free.  My gym.  Our family membership is a little pricey, but MAN it is worth it on weekends like this one.  Kids get to go bonkers in the kid gym for hours, and I get to workout and even hang in the sauna afterwards.  Pure gold.

My workout was the first of Week 3 of Cast25K.  31 minutes consisting of 3 minutes walking and 90 seconds running.  Painfully slow.  Have I mentioned I lack patience??  Having finished my Christmas shopping, I now cannot wait to give everyone their presents.  The only thing holding me back from putting up the tree is the turkey.  Oh my.  So yeah, 6 more weeks of this program is killing me.  The running intervals feel just fine - I just want to RUN ALREADY!!  I was running 6 and 7 milers two months ago for goodness sake!!!!  So I silently repeated my rehab mantra - this will pay off later, this will pay off later.... and dutifully made it through.

I know - it's a sickness.  Don't hate me.

Torture device.
Complete with Awesome Person

While being bored beyond belief, I did what we all do.  Compare ourselves to others nearby (bad, bad - don't do it).  I'm usually pretty good about this - I'm just demented enough to not really care what I look like in spandex, and I am always giving the chunkier women mental high fives for being there in the first place.  But there is one girl that I see often, because she drops her seemingly 4-7 children off at kid watch with mine.  She is super small, runs at a 7 minute pace on the treadmill, and is generally in my mind, awesome.  She and other Awesome People I've seen often finish their running set and then hit the stairs stepper.  Where they immediately go from sweaty to drenched, as they put in an extra few minutes climbing straight, and then with each side leading (side stepping) for a while.  Hmmm... I think.  This must lead to greatness as well.  So I did.  10 minutes.  Wow.  Then a strength workout and stretching (more patience required).  I was sore before I even left the gym.....

Ironically, the next stop was Papa Ginos where I ate easily three times the calories I burned in pizza and soda, and then the movies to see Free Birds.  A movie about two turkeys who go back in time to try to get turkey off of the Thanksgiving menu, but strangely bore such similarities to Avatar that I have to think the writer(s) were just as geeky as I am.  Protagonist travels an impossible distance, falls in love with mysterious girl who saves him from hunters - she takes him to a giant tree (that is later burned by the bad guys) and introduces him to her chieftain father (who later dies saving his flock during the burning trees incident) and disapproving brother.  Yeah.  Anyway, the kids liked it and I would have rather snuck over to the theatre next door to see Catching Fire.  The sacrifices we make for our children....  I did sneak in homemade popcorn, pretzels, and M&Ms rather than pay top dollar for movie snacks.  My little girl wanted to tattle on me so badly that the effort to not do so (which would make her lose the coveted snacks) was actually making her shake on the way in.

Kid Heaven.  They never get soda.  It's like crack.....

Jedi texted me from the fair that we sold out, so when I got home I immediately hit the kitchen.  Six hours, several dozen cake pops and even more dozen cupcakes later and we passed out around eleven.  I even made a healthy dinner with food groups to balance out the PG lunch and subsequent movie snack binge.

This morning I woke up way too early and way too sore and had to make good on my early promise to take the kids back to the gym so that they could swim. And play video games all afternoon.  (I would have preferred to just skip to the afternoon).  Understand this it is in the 20s with a wind so fierce it is taking down tree limbs and feels like negative zero out.  But off the Jedi went to fair, and off we went to the gym.  I deposited them in kid watch again (love those people) and went down to the pool for my workout.  

I met a nice guy (wait, that sounds wrong - Jedi is away and I meet a guy) that coaches triathletes - we talked about what my A race is next year (uh... Cranberry I guess?), injuries, and the fact that I have the attention span of a gerbil in the pool, thus the need for my waterproof headphones.  Which I still love.  Then he was gone and I had no excuse but to doggy paddle through my workout.  Sore muscles and all.  Have I whined enough about how sore I am?  Really.  Starting over is hard.

I finished up, went back into the freezing family locker room, threw a towel around my waist, a sweatshirt over my suit, and stuffed wet feet into my sneakers to walk up the stairs and down the halls to Kid Watch to collect the munchkins.  Which I did - back downstairs through the getting-colder-every-minute halls back to the locker room, where I wrestled them into their suits and dutifully made them shower.  We went into the pool, where we immediately bumped into another family with crying children coming back in.  The life guard heatedly informed us that, despite the fact that there was plenty of room in the pool, that the five curmudgeonly seniors doing water walking had dibs for the next hour, and would not sharing with my cold, disappointed, and crying offspring.  Now, I understand that everyone has a right to their space, and that rules are rules for a reason.  And that I should have interpreted the pool schedule correctly when I read it this morning.  But none of that reasonableness presented itself to me as I took the kiddos back into the locker room, dried them, comforted them, and then desperately tried to find enough money to get them a snack from the vending machine.  Which I didn't, so another mom who saw my distress did.  And I love her for it.  Pay it forward moms, we are all in this together.  In fact, I'd like to remind those grumpy seniors that they might have been parents once too.  I hope to still be active when older, but if I ever turn into that.... rrrrrrr..... I should stop.  I'm still mad.

Get out of my pool you dang kids!!!!

Deep breaths.  And I'm centered again.  No more ranting about the elderly.  Santa's watching.  Ok...

So the kids did swim.  Little Dude showed off his mad jumping in, swimming with no bubble, and back floating skills, while the little girl paddled around perfectly happy and still refusing to get her face wet.  Which is totally cool.  She's got time.  Ironically, my gym is putting on their first USAT sprint triathlon this coming summer - the Greendale Triathlon, in which there is a kid race.  You have to be six years old, be able to swim with no bubble and bike with no training wheels.  My six year old can't do those things, and my four year old can, but it too little.  Ah well.  They'll both be ready next year.

We did make it home (after my hair literally froze going to the parking lot), hot baths, lunch, and the promised video games.  While I cleaned, did laundry, made dinner, wrapped the Jedi's Christmas gift (that I am so excited about I want to give it to him and/or tell you all what it is but can't in case he reads this), and did other mom things.

Tomorrow I go back to work for one day, then off for the holiday.  Bring on the turkey, and pray that is is a lot warmer for the Thanksgiving 5k than it is today!  Both kids are declaring they will run the whole thing.  If its like today, I'm thinking they'll be bundled within an inch of their lives in the double stroller with hand-warmers stuffed into every clothing orifice we can find.  

All that stands between me and spending Black Friday on the couch in my pajamas is one work day, 600 mini cupcakes, three miles, and one big dinner that my mom is cooking half of.  Bring it on!

Are you racing for Thanksgiving?  What's your best cold weather tip for kiddos or yourself?
How do you stay on track food-wise during the holidays?