Absolutely Bananas: Seattle mom blog

Hot Yoga

Her breath smells of onions and she’s breathing in my face. Which makes it hard to find enlightenment or even breath through my nose.

“Breath in!” she shouts at me, “LIKE THIS!”

She snorts in through her nose and raises her elbows, her hands clasped below her chin, and I mimic her.  If I do it right, she’ll go back to the front of the class and leave me alone. I hope.

“Now OUT! Through your mouth!”

It’s New Year’s Day, and I’m trying Hot Yoga. Also known as Bikram, which always makes me think of Vikram, which is Pheobe’s made-up boyfriend in that one episode of Friends.

But it’s not Vikram, it’s Bikram, and it’s serious. Seriously HOT. Bikram yoga is done in a studio heated up well over 100 degrees.

I bend myself into a sandwich and huff through my nose, fighting down the urge to run screaming from the room.

When you heat up a room to unreasonable temperatures a funny thing happens to the time-space continuum. Time stretches out like a shimmering heat wave with no clear middle or end. It slows and stretches and goes on forever. I check the clock. What feels like an hour has only been fifteen minutes.  Can I make it? I’m running out of air!

I can breath. I CAN. I am not going to suffocate. Everyone else is doing it. It’s just HEAT.

While hot yoga does give you a good whole body workout, it’s even MORE rigorous as a mental workout. If you can make it 90 minutes you come out the other end a stronger person.

A dripping-wet-with-sweat stronger person.

The truth is I have never sweated so much in my life. There’s hot and then there’s HOT and then there’s HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO STAND ON ONE LEG WHEN MY FEET ARE SLIPPERY SLITHERY COVERED WITH SWEAT- hot.

I hear the fans come on and with them a fluttering of hope. But no, these are a different kind of fan. These fans circulate the freshly heated air to make sure that no one in the room is cooling off NOT EVEN A LITTLE BIT.

Finally a woman in the back stumbles out. The cool draft from the door makes me shiver with pleasure.

“It’s normal to feel nauseated! Dizzy! Light headed!” the instructor is saying, “Just stick with it!”

I know she’s a trained professional but I also know that THERE IS NOTHING NORMAL ABOUT ANY OF THIS.

I tuck my elbow under my arm pit, press my foot into my stomach and breath in through my nose.

Only 70 minutes to go.

Birthday karma

It’s my birthday. And- it’s raining.

No, POURING.

It’s like the gods have decided to turn their bathwater upside down on my head.

With wind. Gusty wind.

On my BIRTHDAY!

Life is so unfair. Especially in Seattle. In January. Ask anyone… they’ll tell you.

I trod steadily toward the bus stop. My left arm is becoming increasingly damp. Somehow, no matter how I angle my umbrella, my left arm always gets wet. It’s enough to drive a good woman mad.

I cross the street and then… as if in slow motion… I see it.  The gutter, overflowing with muddy water.  The truck, barreling towards me, gritty spray spewing from its tire like the wave behind a water skiier cutting hard across the wake.

This muddy gritty wave is pointed right at me.

I leap sideways, in my heels.

And somehow, miraculously, the wave of water passes. Only a few droplets on my shoe.

A man at the bus stop applauds.

Is it birthday karma? I wonder, grasping the handhold and trying to catch my balance. The bus is standing-room only and fogged over with the mouth-breathing of too many commuters on a cold, wet day.

It must be birthday karma.

He sees donkeys

We’re sitting at the dinner table when Jay says, “I see something in the kitchen but you can’t see it because it’s INVISIBLE.”

CJ looks over his shoulder. “I see it,” he says matter-of-factly, “It’s a donkey.”

Jay snorts spaghetti out his nose and turns slightly green. ”It IS a donkey!” he exclaims, “When I said that something was in the kitchen I was thinking of a donkey!!”

I turn and look but I don’t see any donkey.

CJ looks smug. “I can see it,” he tells me, “I can SEE things that are INVISIBLE.”

It’s one of those moments when I have to wonder…

can he?

What happened to Absolutely Bananas?

A few weeks ago I logged into Google Analytics to check my stats. Don’t ask me why- I blame a severe case of not-wanting-to-go-to-bed.

So I’m scanning through the usual suspects of keyword searches that led people to my blog.  And then I see it, number three on the list:

What happened, indeed?

A lot has happened since we last spoke. For example last year we pulled CJ out of public school and enrolled him in private school and then I got pulled into seven thousand committees and then there was the trip to Disney World and the trip on the catamaran and then I tried out boot camp and then hired a personal trainer and STILL I don’t look like Jennifer Aniston (can you BELIEVE IT!) and then I went back to work FULL TIME and Jay quit his job and I started hot yoga and oh yeah Christmas, New Year’s, and the trip to Palm Springs.

So we’re caught up.  Good.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my blog. Specifically: am I done blogging? and also: if yes should I close it down and IF NO when will I start blogging again and what will I blog about?

I notice that as CJ gets older our trials and tribulations and funny stories all circle around topics that are really not bloggable like that one annoying kid or the reeeeally annoying mom or a million other things that I can’t write because someone might read them and then I’d be in hot water.  And CJ… as he grows… his stories feel more and more like HIS and less like MINE. And is it ok for me to share his struggles and deep-dark secrets with the whole entire universe even if no one reads it?

Then there’s the teeny-tiny issue of Time (haven’t got any) and Energy (have even less) and without either, how do you blog?

Still, I’m not a giving up kind of gal, so I hang onto this desperate hope that I can pick up the blogging string again and turn it into something that I do for fun and that isn’t a burden. Because the truth is I love blogging. That it makes me write. That it makes me look at life through a little different lense. That it’s MINE and mine ALONE bwah ha ha ha ha.

(and how will I get a book deal and become wildly rich and famous without it?  I mean SERIOUSLY)

So I’m going to try again. Today is a fresh start in which I will post REGULARLY and I will NOT OBSESS and YOU WILL LIKE IT.

Ok maybe not the last part. Unless you’re my mom. (hi mom!)

We’ll see how it goes.

Dear Santa

“Mommy, what do you REALLY want Santa to bring you for Christmas?”

CJ sits up and look at me with an expression of great seriousness.

“Hmm… well… I guess I don’t really know,” I say. “I’ll have to think about that.”

“Maybe a new house?” CJ asks.

“No, I like our house.” I say.

“Me too.” CJ pauses. “But maybe a clean house. I know! Maybe Santa could clean our house!”

I bust into great peals of laughter even while feeling the weight of my inferiority.

There’s no way around it; when your six year old wishes Santa would give him a clean house, you KNOW you’ve failed as a housekeeper.