Lent Day 36

Better in every way.  When I said I wanted to give up laziness, it was more than physical.  I wanted to make myself do those things that I don’t do for whatever reason.  Sometimes it’s that thing I don’t feel like doing and sometimes that excuse is simply that I don’t have enough time in the day.  Tragically, this even includes being a Dad.  When we came home from baseball last night, Tyler really wanted to go outside and play catch with me.  Unfortunately, it was too late.  It was time for prayers and right to bed.  Every night we have so much to do with baseball and church and homework and . . . I know, it sounds like excuses, right?  And then life happens.

Today was a really productive day at work.  For some reason my Blackberry has started dying each day around noon.  I have to go outside and plug it into the car charger.  I lock the car and go without my Crackberry for a couple of hours.  From 1:00 to 4:00 today I got a lot of stuff done with little to no interruption.  Then it hit me, uh oh, I better go check on my phone.  I feel the vibration on my hip and it’s not even there; must be phantom “phone” pains.  Yeah, a bunch of missed calls, text messages, and those dreaded voice mails.  Oh well, the time at my desk allowed me to have a steady productive pace.  That felt good to get so much accomplished.  I know what some of you are thinking, “Did I get any joke emails from Ben during that 3 hour window . . .?” J

I had to hurry home for exercise time tonight.  We decided to skip church and exercise was going to be special.  We had to rush to get done with dinner so that we could go outside and play catch.  That is one way to get Tyler to eat his dinner quickly, including the vegetables.  We played catch for over an hour.  We would pretend someone was running to 1^st base with each catch and throw.  We tagged them out most of the time, but there were a few that got past us and even made it to home plate.  This additional aspect of getting the other team out made the pace really fast.  It wasn’t running but it was aerobic exercise. 

When we got done playing catch, Tyler and I ran one lap around the property.  I explained that we were going to race from the back yard to the garden, right turn up to the road, right turn down the road, then right again for that last stretch down the paved driveway and back to the porch.  Immediately Tyler took off running full speed.  I quickly started teaching Tyler about pacing yourself to win the race.  I explained that you never win a race at the beginning because the finish line is at the end of the race.  You want to pass them at the end.  Steady jogging and then he exploded into a sprint down the paved driveway.  Blake was standing at the finish line with his arms wide open.  I yelled, “The first one to touch Blake wins.”  Immediately, Blake looked terrified and ran for his life into the house.  We took off after him right into the kitchen.  Christy didn’t have a clue what happened when we all came crashing in the back door on her.

It doesn’t matter what kind of exercise you do, but if you do it with people you love, then it is so much easier and really fun.