On being injured...

When I was on the high school swim team, I loved to practice. I hated to compete. At the end of each season, we'd have a big conference-wide swim meet-- the biggest meet of the entire season. My freshman year, I came down with bronchitis and got out of the meet. I wasn't thrilled to be sick, but it felt like a huge weight had been lifted off my shoulders. The next year, I was sick again. By my junior year, I found myself standing outside, shivering in a wet bathing suit, hoping that I'd get sick again. I didn't want to actually come out and say I didn't have the chops for the meet, but I didn't have the chops for the meet.

One summer, also in high school, I enrolled in a dance camp with the Connecticut Ballet Theatre. It was several hours a day, four or five days a week. For the first few weeks, it was really fun. Then it got kind of hard. Then my knee started to hurt, and I realized that with an injury sidelining me, I could watch all of the other girls busting their butts, without actually having to do it myself. I even had my mom take me to an orthopedist, who looked at my knee, proclaimed that nothing was really wrong with it (I was hoping to need surgery, which would ensure me a guilt-free break for at least a couple of months), and sent me on my way.

So I guess what I'm saying is that when the going got tough for me, I used to fake injuries or fake sickness. I knew I could probably push myself harder, but it was an easy way to take a break when I couldn't mentally deal. Right now, I'm in a pretty good place mentally, as far as exercise goes. In fact, with everything that has been going on with Isaac, I've really needed the exercise and both the stress-relief and the accolades I get from it to keep me going with a smile on my face.

But as I've mentioned a few times over the last few weeks, my knee has been bugging me. It felt great during the half-marathon last Saturday, and then started hurting on Saturday night, leaving behind a nagging pain. On Monday I tripped over a bicycle helmet in the garage (yes, I was carrying Isaac, and thank goodness he is fine) and twisted my ankle, smacking it into the concrete of the garage floor. It bled and swelled up like a balloon. But it's fine. Well, mostly fine. It's still too swollen to fit into a running shoe.

So I rested. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. This morning, I went swimming. I hate being injured, really hate being injured twice over (three times if you count the sore hamstring), and especially hate the fact that the injury falls at a time that will likely make it impossible for me to do the full marathon at Country Music in April. But over the last few days, I've come to appreciate a few things. This time, I'm not faking it. I'd be out there if I could. I probably should have rested six weeks ago, but I couldn't bring myself to "wimp out" enough to do it. I've also mentally adjusted to the idea that I won't become a gordita overnight, even if I miss three days in a row of exercise. And in a couple of weeks, when I come back recovered from all of my injuries, I am going to be invincible.

Roar for Powerful Words

Despite owning and wearing this shirt, most days I don't feel like a great writer, or even a good one. In fact, you'll notice a lot of my posts lately have been heavy on the pictures and light on the words. I'm an absolutely horrible photographer, so maybe I should stick with writing. Anyway, Cyl from The Muppet Show bestowed this task upon me about two weeks ago, so here are three bits of writing advice, from me to you, many of them hearkening back to the days when I actually got paid to teach people to write. Incorporate them or mock me as you wish...

1) Consider Your Audience
I've been blogging for several years, but about a year ago, I came out to the people who know me in real life when I put a link to my blog in my email signature. Suddenly my aunts and cousins and godmother were emailing me about things I had written in my blog. Friends in town would refer to things I knew I'd written about, but I hadn't ever talked with them about. It was kind of eerie. Over the next few months, I realized that my writing changed. I could no longer complain about how my mother is ruining my life (not that she is, at least not right now) or about how much I hated the dreaded preschool co-op (not that I'm in it anymore). My grandma wanted to see pictures of my kids, so I gave her pictures of my kids. But people who come to my blog for reading and running ideas don't want too see too much of my four favorite smiling faces. So I feel a need to find a balance for all of my audiences. Gone are the days when I can whine and obsess for four months about trying to get pregnant, but I like the feedback from a real audience instead of just a virtual one.

2) Write when you don't feel like writing
Today, I'll admit, I don't feel much like writing. My knee is still bugging me. Isaac still isn't walking. It's 10:18am and I'm sitting in my pajamas. Eddie worked all night last night, which means that he'll be a fantastic romantic partner for Valentine's Day this year. At times like this, when I just want to complain, sometimes I feel like I'd rather not write (in the old days of the blog, when I didn't think people I knew would read it, I didn't care so much about complaining). But in order to keep an audience and in order to keep up the habit, it's still good to write every once in a while when you don't feel like it. Sometimes you'll be surprised and realize that your juices really get flowing once you park your butt in the chair. Other times, well, other times you might not feel so inspired. But don't give up.

3) Strike a balance between finding your unique voice and making your writing readable
My dad has commented several times that he hates to read my writing. "It's so casual," he complains. I know, I break a lot of rules. I start too many sentences with "and" and "but." I split my infinitives. I use way too many exclamation points and tend to overload the parentheses. But (see, I'm doing it!), I like to write this way. In my blog, I want to sound conversational, so my writing, for the most part, mimics the way I talk. However, I also think that the basics of capitalization, paragraphing, spelling and punctuation go a very long way in making a blog readable. I am guilty of not proofing as closely as I should (I often don't proof at all), but I try to make sure that I don't turn away my audience with a jumble of words that takes so much energy to find the meaning that they get lost.

I'd like to pass this award along to three of my favorite bloggers who are all prime examples of how my real and virtual worlds have collided in the last year. I knew all three "in real life" before I knew them as bloggers, and I've loved getting to know them better through their writing:

Lyn from Greetings From Texas-- I love Lyn's blog because she does what I aspire to do-- make my mommy blog more than just a mommy blog. She's got it all in Greetings from Texas-- family journal, delicious recipes, discussions of thought-provoking articles, as well as some random thoughts.

Courtney at 5 Under 5. Courtney has done a great job of creating personas for her children in her writing. I really feel like I know her five little ones. She's also a much better photographer than I am!

Sarah at Sarah's Quilt. Sarah and I bonded over reading, and she's one of the few people I know who reads as much as I do and whose book recommendations I really trust. She's also mastered the balance of how to talk about her kids in a positive way without bragging. And she's just about to have a baby, so maybe this will distract her.

And finally, if you want to read wickedly funny, intelligent mommy blogging, go back to the source and read Cyl's.

Look Ma, no cast!

See the wet hair? He had his first bath in two months! Doctors say it might be up to a month before he walks again, and there's a possibility he may need surgery down the road to lengthen the femur, but getting the cast off is the first step (get it?) in the right direction.

Somebody in our house had a birthday!

My sweet Annie turned six yesterday! Here are some pictures of the big day (unfortunately none of her opening her presents because she opted to open them while I was off racing), but we got some great shots at her cake decorating birthday party!

Every good cake decorator needs an apron

Isaac decorated his cake with worms and sprinkles

Annie, her friend A, and Bryce all go to work on their cakes

S and B concentrate on theirs...

Here's the one I did

Singing "Happy Birthday"

Blowing the candles out

Sweet bliss (she gets her sweet tooth from me)

My faith in running has been restored

I did the Surfside Half Marathon this morning. I had really, really low expectations for the race, considering that I've been hurt for six weeks and hadn't done a training run longer than 10 miles. As I was walking up to the registration area, I ran into my stake president, who is my age, lives in my neighborhood, and is the husband of a good friend. Anyway, he said he was shooting for a 1:45 and if I wanted to, we could run together. So we did, for the first five miles, when he told me I was too fast and I broke away. It was a gorgeous race! The entire thing was on the sand, three miles in one direction, six and a half in the other, then three and a half more in the first direction. After I left Jon behind, I just kept passing people. It felt so good not to hurt! The race tends to be kind of slow, because the sand slows you down (30 seconds to a minute per mile, according to those in the know).

Anyway, I finished at 1:45.03. I was the second woman overall, and about the 12 or 15th runner overall, I'm guessing. I got interviewed for the paper and got a really cool glass plate for the second place finisher, lol. They had a big bbq afterwards, and if I hadn't been so worn out and kind of sick feeling, I think I would have enjoyed it. Actually, it's the first time I've felt like I really loved running during a race in I don't know how long. Usually I love the training, but hate the racing. The two main guys organizing the race afterwards pulled me aside and asked me who I trained with. When I told them "my jogger and my treadmill" they said I needed to have a coach and a training group, because they thought I would benefit from it.
Anyway, sorry to be a braggart, but I'm still on a high. My knee felt great the whole time too, so that was really encouraging. But, as always when I finish a half, I couldn't fathom doing 13 more miles when I got to the finish line. Maybe the half marathon is really my distance.

The race is so beautiful on the beach too! If anyone wants to run it next year (they have a full marathon too) you know where you can stay!

Sometimes life just isn't all that interesting...

Not much blog-worthy going on in our lives right now. Here's a list of the minor highlights of the last ten days or so:

• Isaac goes back to the doctor in four more days and we hope he be broken free from his blue prison.
• Maren answers every question with "yeah."
• Annie is turning six on Saturday. She decided she wanted to have a cake decorating birthday party. I have six cakes in my freezer waiting for her to decorate with her brother and her friends (she could only invite three-- and even still, I think I'm a little bit crazy).
• Bryce's school had its big reading night last week. Bryce won the biggest prize of the night-- a new bike. Then the kids started to play bingo and Bryce was the first person to win at bingo too. Unfortunately his lucky winning streak didn't extend to the Pinewood Derby two days later. He's trying to learn to both win and lose with grace.
• Eddie's awesome nuclear rotation, where he only had to work one or two mornings a week, came to an abrupt end on February 1st. I don't think he's seen Maren since.
• I'm getting ready to run a half-marathon on Saturday morning. It's on the beach, and I'm just running it for fun and for the experience, not for a time. I keep having to remind myself of that. I also got my knee injury diagnosed and have been working on rehabbing it, so this race should be a good litmus test for whether or not I'll be healthy enough to run the marathon in April.
• Only seventeen days until we go to Mexico! Not that I'm counting, or anything....

Book #11: Then We Came to the End

Title: Then We Came to the End
Author: Joshua Ferris

Workers at a Chicago ad agency try to keep their jobs through an economic downturn.

This novel made me really, really glad I don't work in an office. Though Ferris did a great job of creating characters, the novel, as a whole, didn't move me. I thought of it as a strange mix of The Office (same zany kinds of office workers, and Tom Mota is a dead-wringer for Dwight Schrute) and Tova Mirvis's wonderful novel The Ladies Auxiliary, in the sense that both use an unidentified first-person plural as the narrator. While I felt like the narrator enhanced the story in The Ladies Auxiliary, it really bugged me in Then We Came to the End. After reading so many really good books in a row, this one was quite a letdown.

Book #10: The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible

Title: The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible
Author: A.J. Jacobs

AJ Jacobs spends one year growing a beard, wearing white and trying to follow all of the rules of the Old and New Testaments, all while living in Manhattan, maintaining his day job, raising a young family, and searching for faith.

Whoa nelly, all I have to say is that Julie, Jacobs's wife, is a saint. Jacobs admits that even before the biblical experience, he was kind of a weird guy (he elaborates on his many OCD tendencies), but I'm guessing Julie didn't know that she'd spend the year pregnant with twins and married to a crazy-bearded, robe-wearing freaky dude. At the beginning of his experiment, Jacobs went through the Bible, wrote down all of the rules, and tried to live as many of them as possible. He also studied the Bible intensely for the year, and consulted several religious advisors. He writes the book in monthly chapters, and in each chapter, takes on a different aspect of the Bible (creationism, for example). He begins the year as an agnostic, a Jew in name only, and ends as some sort of a faithful, hopeful believer. It's an interesting read-- and it makes me glad that I don't have to follow all of the rules of the Bible.

Book #9: Brother, I'm Dying

Title: Brother, I'm Dying

Author: Edwidge Danticat

Memoirist Edwidge Danticat discovers she is pregnant with her first child on the same day that she learns that her father is dying of lung disease, which causes her to look back on her childhood in Haiti and her experiences living with the uncle who served as her foster father.

Delving right into Brother, I'm Dying immediately after finishing The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao made me feel a little bit like I was doing a survey course on literature from immigrants from the island of Hispaniola, which, from these two books, seems like both a beautiful and a terrifying place to live, where dictators run amok, and the regular folk live in terror. As Edwidge Danticat carries her first child, she reflects back on the lives of the two men who raised her, her father and uncle and recounts the way that death took both of them. It's sort of a weird subject for a book-- part pregnancy journal, part international news story (the uncle's death), part hospice memoir, part coming-of-age story, but it really works here. Hats off to Edwidge Danticat for making a subject that sounds really nebulous on paper work out to be a beautiful, cohesive homage to the important father figures in her life.

Book #8: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Title: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Author: Junot Diaz

The life story of Oscar Wao, a fat Dominican nerd who lives in Jersey, anguishes over the honeys, and tries to reconcile his complicated family history.

In many ways, this book reminds me of Absurdistan, which I read and reviewed last year. In both cases, the tone is light and filled with pop culture references, and the protagonist is an overweight misfit living in an immigrant community. But while Absurdistan left me feeling like I couldn't get into the jangly-cool of Misha's dialogue, Diaz made me feel like I knew Oscar. I read that the book is an immigrant saga for people who don't read immigrant sagas. And it's a good one.