Things I've Learned - April 2010

I am often inspired by Amber Strocel's writing at strocel.com. Every month she puts together a review of what she learned during the previous month. What a fantastic exercise in recognizing your trials and triumphs on a regular basis - a sort of personal inventory-taking. So I am unabashedly copying her with my own look back today.

Things I learned in April:

1) How important exercise is to my emotional wellbeing. After exercising almost daily in March, getting back into a routine of good self-care, the days that I missed in April really drove it home for me how much regular activity has a positive impact on my outlook. Action begets action: when I'm taking the time to exercise, I'm getting more done in all areas of my life.

2) That I'd forgotten how great riding a bicycle is. I feel like a teenager again, pedaling my way through the streets of Vancouver. And I'm ecstatic to model a healthy, active, eco-friendly lifestyle for The Imp. I actually resent having to drive my car now.

3) That connecting with other moms in person is always a good time. Also, green shoes!

4) That if I blog regularly, I'm more productive. For several months, I didn't write anything in this space. I always felt like there were more urgent things that needed doing, that time to blog was a luxury I couldn't afford. But the not-writing had me mentally stuck, so most of the other things didn't get done anyway. Now that I'm blogging more regularly, I'm more productive at work, and more patient in parenting. And apparently, others like that I'm blogging too!

5) That my love for good food isn't just about eating, but about creating and sharing.

6) I love taking photos. Love. I'm not creating art (far from it), and I have a lot to learn from a technical perspective, but following through on my commitment to myself to post a photo of Vancouver every single day has made me ridiculously happy. I've especially enjoyed being more aware of and engaged with my surroundings, and finding things I never noticed before. Researching links for the paragraph I write to accompany each photo has me discovering a ton about Vancouver that I never learned in my 17 years of living here. And getting to photo locations by bicycle kills two birds with one stone. Photos + exercise = a really good use of an hour a day.

7) That I had no idea how spoiled I was with regard to The Imp's sleep habits, which went all to hell in the last few weeks with the introduction of the big boy bed. And I am a zombified version of myself as a result. Will happily accept toddler-sleep-inducing advice. At this point I'm on the hairy edge of locking him up in a wooden crate until he's old enough to leave home.



It's so easy with the busy-ness of living to forget to stop and look at what's been accomplished with all that activity. Do you ever take a step back and really look at the aggregate of all that daily "doing"? What have you learned this month?


I've been shortlisted for vancouvermom.ca's Best Vancouver Mom Blogger. I'd be ever so grateful if you'd swing by the voting page, tick my name, and click submit. Thanks!

Things I'm Learning - Crafting My Life

Even if I haven't been posting much here, I've been busy. I've managed to keep the resolution of posting daily at Vancouver Daily Photo. Yay for resolutions! (In fact, I've managed to keep all three of my resolutions so far - a first for me.)


And, drum roll please, today Amber Strocel (who I've mentioned before here) has been kind enough to let me guest-post for her fabulous "Crafting My Life" series on her blog at Strocel.com. If you like what you see there, she's also launching a Crafting My Life e-course about living with intention, which promises to be seventeen kinds of awesome.

Now, I'm off to find something to get rid of today. 

Things I Love - Adding to the Blogroll

Some new names added to the Blogs I Love list on the right:

Pregnant Stephanie, no longer pregnant, has set up shop at The Tsunami Mommy. I'm keeping the link to Pregnant Stephanie up because there's lots of great stuff there and as far as I know she hasn't moved it over to her new home. Her twitter handle has changed too.

More Yummy Mummy Club: Sharon DeVellis at The Inside Scoop writes like I would like to write, only funnier. Which is to say, she's funnier than me, not that I want to write funnier than her. Er. Well maybe I do. I'm making a mess of this - just go check her out.

And Amber Strocel. Her twitter updates are always wryly amusing, and I really enjoyed her recent Carnival of Maternity Leave posts.

That's a good start - there are many more to come. There is an astonishing wealth of really talented women writing about their lives. I plan to add a few to the blogroll every week.

What I'm Doing - Fit by Forty: Rules

Yesterday I wrote a little about the reason I started my quest to get into better shape physically. It was my most visited post since I started this blog - clearly reclaiming your physical self post-baby resonates for a lot of us. Amber over at Strocel.com wrote a great post today about making peace with your mama body, and Gwen at Left Coast Mama wrote a heartfelt piece about having an ugly day.

Let me be clear - as I wrote yesterday in response to some great comments, this is more about improving physical fitness than losing weight. Don't get me wrong, losing the extra padding I'm carrying around feels great, and I won't pretend my vanity wasn't thrilled when my mother-in-law asked me, "Have you lost weight?" at a family dinner a couple of weeks ago. But my primary goals are to a) feel better and stronger and b) model healthy active living for the almost-two-year-old Imp. I hesitated to include numbers in my post, for fear of placing inadvertent labels on people who weigh more or less than I do, or who want to weigh more or less than I do. In the end I did include them, because numbers are simply the easiest and most tangible way I can think of to measure progress.

On to today's post:

So, I knew I wanted to lose weight. Like everyone else with these first-world problems, I resolved to get into better shape starting January 1st. Like an idiot, I went crazy and managed to injure myself, introducing my left shoulder to the fun factory of bursitis. That was an interesting visit to the doctor.

Dr: You have bursitis in your left shoulder.
Me: Wha? Isn't that something your eighty five year old grandmother has?

Apparently it's just as common in overzealous yet seriously out of shape 39 year olds too. Damn.

So I fell off the exercise wagon, and reverted to my ice cream eating, television watching ways. Again.

I knew this time I'd have to be more strategic, think things through. Have a plan. So I came up with some ground rules for my Fit by Forty efforts:


1) It has to be realistic.

Rule: No extremes, in terms of means or ends. No crash diets, no skipping meals, no denying myself everything that tastes good. No exercise until I puke. No trying to fit into a size 4 in six weeks. Nothing ridiculous. If it's not realistic, it's not realistically achievable.

Implementation: I set myself the goal of eating mindfully, making healthier choices, and adding exercise to my daily routine. You know, the stuff that actually works. In terms of those dreaded numbers, I set the weight loss goal of 1 pound per week.

2) It has to be financially viable.

Rule: There's no money for gym memberships, personal trainers, fancy pre-portioned food, or loading up on the latest equipment. These changes have to be on the cheap, using what I already have at my disposal or can buy inexpensively.

Implementation: I already own a yoga mat, some 5 lb weights, and a couple of workout DVDs. I have a bicycle, which I took in for a tune-up and bought new tires. I spent $8.99 on iTunes and downloaded some yoga workouts. And living on the 21st floor affords me ample opportunity for stair-climbing any time I can convince myself it's a good idea.

3) It has to be easy to do, time-wise.

Rule: I run my own home-based business. I parent a very busy almost 2 year old little boy. There's no time for me to go to classes on any kind of regular basis. Or maybe I should say that I'm not willing to take time away from other things in order to go out for instruction. Either way, time's at a premium. Exercise and healthy eating need to fit into my daily routine, or I know, despite the best of intentions, I won't do it.

(Aside: I used to think I wanted, on my gravestone, "She had the best of intentions." Now I've decided cremation is the way to go, so no gravestone. But maybe a nice park bench somewhere with "She always did everything the hard way.")

Implementation: I've started using the bicycle instead of the car as much as my loathing of rainy weather will let me. For short trips in the downtown core it's almost as fast as taking the car, and no looking for (or paying for) parking (or gas, come to think of it). Having 30 pounds of Imp (who loves the bicycle so much he wears his helmet at breakfast most mornings) in the child seat does wonders for increasing resistance levels too. I've also been using the bicycle to get around and take pictures for my new Vancouver Daily Photo blog, which guarantees I get out for a ride several times a week. I take the stairs up to the apartment any time I'm not dressed up, carrying a ton of stuff, or with The Imp. All 21 floors of them. I try and fit in video workouts a couple of times a week. Given that I used to exercise, uh, not at all, this is progress!

4) It has to be flexible.

Rule: We all lead busy lives. Plans change, children get sick, or climb out of their cribs and fall on their heads and then refuse to sleep in their new bed. (Imp, I'm looking at you.) I need to be able to adapt my efforts as I dodge the sucker-punches that get thrown in my general direction.

Implementation: One of the benefits of not relying on scheduled classes or appointments with a trainer is that when my plans go all askew, I can still take the stairs and get in a workout. Although I discovered that my self-care takes a nose-dive when The Imp gets sick. Gotta work on that.

5) I have to somehow be accountable.

Rule: In the past, I've let deadlines slip and not met fitness goals, and nobody knew so I could pretend it didn't matter. I need to do this in a public way.

Implementation: And here we are. I've been on twitter with #fitbyforty updates at least once a week, and this week I've put it out there in this very public space. I've meant to write about it here since the process started five weeks ago, but something always got in the way. (*cough* fear *cough*)

So here it is:

I started at 149 pounds on March 1st, 2010 and I turn 40 on August 24th. I want to lose a pound a week.

Goal, measurable: 25 weeks from A to B means a goal weight of 124 by the time I hit the big four oh.

Goal, intangible: As much as I've talked about numbers so far (it's hard not to get fixated on them) the name I've given this process is Fit by Forty. What's most important to me is fitness, which as a subjective term is much less measurable. When will I consider myself fit? When I no longer have to get off my bike and push it up the hills close to my apartment. (Downtown Vancouver has more hills than you'd think!) When I can run across the playground with my son and not feel too tired to keep chasing him. When I can see an improvement in my posture because my core is stronger. When I can go on an hour-long bike ride and not feel too sore to move for days afterward.

And most importantly, I want to model a healthy, active lifestyle for The Imp. I'm mounting a pre-emptive counter-offensive for the years of junk food advertising, and the sedentary nature of spending hours a day in front of a screen (TV, computer, video game, any kind of screen) that are sure to come.

Anyone care to join me on my quest? Any advice? What are your fitness goals, and how are you working toward them?

Things I've Learned - October Review

So October kicked my ass. It knocked me down emotionally and physically. It was a hell of a thirty-one day stretch.

I spent more time than I would've liked doing the angry cry. I wrote and I wrote and I wrote. And I crossed things out and scribbled out entire lines in my notebook. And I hit the delete button on this blog a lot. But what survived the edits is, while respectful of people who might not appreciate our interactions splashed all over my little corner of the internet here, a pretty good distillation of my insights and struggles this month.

So, October then:

I learned about the power of muscle memory. Sadly not in the service of improving my tennis backhand, but in finally recognizing the backhanded way the past can mess with the present. And I learned how the power of that insight has improved my parenting, my patience, and The Imp's reactions to my reactions immeasurably.

I had the plague aka The Cold Virus of Doom That Would Not Die Or Go Away Ever. Or maybe it was just my body's physical interpretation of what was happening emotionally. The fact that neither HWSNBN nor The Imp have gotten sick despite how ridiculously ill I've been for almost three weeks makes me lean toward the latter, frankly. But what I lost in productivity this month, I've gained in quiet introspection and a silent sense of reclaiming my confidence in my decisions.

Photo by Gwendolyn Floyd taken at this year's Northern Voice conference back in May. You know you're at the start of a great friendship when you can ask someone you've met like twice to take a picture of your breasts and it's not weird at all.

I took my forty year old boobs in for a screening mammogram. They may be saggy, shrinking, and occasionally leaky, but they are not harbouring anything that will try and kill me. So that's good.

I missed Blissdom Canada, but I got to host the cookie-bearing Karen Humphrey on her way through Vancouver as she headed to what, by all accounts, was seventeen kinds of awesome. So I ate cookies and watched the Blissdom stream on twitter and tried not to die of envy.

I'm marginally more aware of what to do with pumpkins. We carved jack-o'-lanterns. We roasted pumpkin seeds. We trick-or-treated in our neighbourhood's shops, and The Imp made me proud by saying thank you every time someone dropped something in his bucket. He didn't really get the whole "trick or treat" thing, but he knew all about "thank you." Heart: swell.

I was bowled over by the generosity of my peers. I put out the call for donation items for a BC Cancer Inspiration Gala silent auction, and the call was answered and then some. The Gala was very successful, raising a record $2.69 million for lymphoma research at the BC Cancer Agency. And I'm told by someone who was there that the basket we contributed to the silent auction was a hot item and went for well over its value. I am prouder than I can express to be a part of this amazing community.

And I learned that maybe, just maybe, it would be okay if every now and then I gave myself a little bit more credit. It wasn't until I saw the comments on my blog post about the silent auction basket that it even occurred to me that I had made a valuable contribution too, by pulling it all together. Which correlates with a tendency I have in general to discount my own abilities and achievements. While I don't want to get carried away with how awesome I am, it's probably okay if I stop and recognize my own efforts once in a while.

This post is part of Amber Strocel's monthly review linkup.

Things I'm Learning - Assumptions

When I was eight, my family went on a grand adventure. We sold or packed up everything we owned, said goodbye to friends and family, traveled across most of Canada by train, then flew away. Stops in Frankfurt, a week and a half in Israel, an unexpected three days in Greece, then on to Nairobi where we almost missed our flight to Antananrivo. A few hours there in an airport under construction*, and then a quick Air France flight to our destination, the place that would be our home for the next two and a half years: Reunion.

Map scanged from www.mapsofworld.com

We went there because my parents felt it was their duty to be of service to their religion. I also think it was a balm for a marriage in trouble - they were always at their best when it was the two of them against the world. I suspect also that they just had itchy feet. It was not the first time they'd done that kind of thing - but it was the first time with children. And, I'm sad to say, the last.


Reunion was both literally and figuratively the polar opposite of my hometown: Watson Lake, Yukon. The two are exactly twelve time zones apart. Where Watson Lake was sparsely populated and surrounded by miles and miles of nothing but miles and miles in every direction, Reunion was a small space, crammed with crowds of people everywhere. Watson Lake was in Canada's cold north, Reunion was tropical. Spindly gray-green pine trees traded for lush vegetation and palm tree lined beaches. Where Watson Lake was culturally homogeneous (if you ignored the First Nations population, which, let's face it, was pretty common nation-wide in the 1970s), Reunion was a mix of African, Indian, Chinese, and French influences. Where English was the only language spoken in Watson Lake, Reunion was politically and linguistically French. In the entire time we were there, outside of my parents' religious community, I recall meeting one other person who spoke English - a tourist who approached us when he overheard us speaking.

Left: downtown (I'm not kidding) Watson Lake, 2004   Right: typical St Pierre street, Reunion, 1979

Being in such a foreign environment challenged everything we thought we knew. I was a kid, I rolled with it. I showed up my first day of school with my Sesame Street French and my trusty Larousse pocket English-French/French-English dictionary, and I figured it out, as kids do.

My sister (left) and I (right), dressed up for our first day of school, knowing nothing, 1979. This was the last time we would wear socks for 2 1/2 years.

 But I was always aware of how different we were, how much we stood out. How different every minute of our day had become. Reunion had no tv to speak of then: a three hour broadcast every evening, which only mattered if you had a tv, which we didn't. No one we knew had one. At a time when peers in Canada were getting telephones in their bedrooms, we knew one person in our whole village who had a phone - and it didn't always work. Coming from a place where we thought nothing of leaving the tap running while we brushed our teeth, in Reunion we had running water only three days a week, and woe to the family that forgot to fill their cistern for the days without. Compared to the neighbours up the hill from us who lived in a corrugated tin shack without electricity or running water of any kind, we were considered wealthy beyond imagining because we had a refrigerator.

Everything was different; everything. Yet old habits die hard. In Canada, official language laws decreed that labels on food packaging be in both English and French. In the store, if the French side was carelessly left facing out by the shopkeeper, all you had to do was flip it over to see the label in English. In Reunionese shops, time after time, upon seeing the French label, we would turn the can around, only to encounter more French on the other side. For months and months (years, maybe) we did this - my mom, my dad, and I. (My sister was four and not yet reading when we arrived there.) Despite knowing intellectually that the labels were only in French, still we did this, and were jolted every time there was no English on the other side.


There is a powerful life lesson there. At the age of eight, my behaviour was already that ingrained, despite overwhelming evidence that it made no sense. Can it be any different at forty?

Maybe that's why I find it so difficult to make changes in my life - even positive ones. Because there are decades of ingrained behaviour - subconscious assumptions that inform every choice I make, every action I take. (Every smile I fake, every cake I bake...) Things I'm not even aware of trip me up.

And I think that's what our inner you-can't-do-that-and-who-do-you-think-you-are-to-even-try voices are. (We all have those, right? I'm not alone there?) Unexamined assumptions that hold us back. We've been listening to those voices droning in our ears for years, and they're a lot louder than the realities we encounter. Like the habit of flipping the package to find the familiar - except without the jolt of finding the unexpected on the opposite side. Since we're rarely jolted that way, brought face-to-face with these assumptions, we don't see them. And how can you change what you don't see?

I learned from comments on my post over at strocel.com yesterday that I'm not the only one who struggles with judging myself too harshly. Why is it so easy to show compassion for friends and strangers, and so hard to be that kind to ourselves?

Because we don't have the same kinds of assumptions about other people, that's why. We take their words and their behaviours for what they are - not what they appear to be through that lens of judgment we turn on ourselves.

So my question is, how can we jolt ourselves out of our everyday way of thinking, to see the reality of who we are, and how we appear to others? How can we change the assumptions we have about ourselves - hell, even figure out what those assumptions are, so we can work at changing them? So we move forward? So that we can, as Thoreau said, go confidently in the direction of our dreams?



*Aren't all airports, everywhere, at all times, under construction, or only when I'm traveling through them?