yoga with a toddler

Assume Mountain pose, heels slightly apart and second toes parallel.  Breath deeply and feel your body lengthen from your arches through your thighs, your core, your neck, the crown of your head.

Begin with your preferred Sun Salutation, moving slowly with each breath.  Perform five salutations, or as many as needed until your mind is focused and any tension has melted away.

With your next breath, move into Downward-Facing Dog.  Press your hands into your mat, extend your tailbone, and lower your heels towards the floor.  Hold this pose for five counts.  With each inhalation, feel your tailbone rising and your spine lengthening.  With each exhalation, let your hands ground themselves and your heels reach further towards the floor.

Lower yourself into plank position, back straight and forearms on the floor.  Curl your toes under and press your heels back.  Hold this pose for two counts.

With your next breath, move into Cobra.  Begin to straighten the arms and lift your chest off of the floor –

“SLIDE!!”

Brace yourself as your toddler lunges onto your shoulders and attempts to slide down the curvature of your back.  Slowly lower yourself back onto your mat.  Call for help, if necessary.  This concludes today’s session.

short story review

I’m going out on a limb here and am recommending both a novel and a collection of short stories that I haven’t read yet.  They are The Children’s Hospital and A Better Angel, by Chris Adrian.

I just finished Adrian’s uncollected short story “A Tiny Feast” in the 20 April New Yorker.  It’s a story about a child with leukemia, told from the perspective of his immortal parents – for you see, the boy is a changeling, and they’ve never had to deal with sickness before.  I don’t want to say anything else; my description does not do this story justice.

Chris Adrian is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, something that I hold in such high regard (only pertaining to short stories, don’t even get me started on the tragic literary disaster that is Thisbe Nissen) that almost nothing else ever trumps it.  However, he also has completed a pediatric residency at UCSF, is attending Harvard Divinity School, and is finishing up a fellowship in pediatric hematology oncology.  All of these experiences have informed his writing; he makes what could be a horrifying and depressing event into something magical and transcendent.

I’ll probably devour A Better Angel this weekend, and then I’ll spend the rest of the month hunting down his uncollected shorts.

If you are so inclined, you can read the version of “A Tiny Feast” as published in the New Yorker here.

This glass will remain half full, dammit

Yesterday was just one of those days, one thing after another going wrong until the only way I can think of to blow off that much steam is to go for a really long, hard run, ticking off the miles and pounding the hills as my mind goes numb and my anger dissipates. Ironically, therein lies the rub. As it turns out, my distance and hill running days are O-V-E-R.

After meeting with multiple specialists, each one better and more knowledgeable than the next, I had yet another consult yesterday with someone who finally spelled things out in black and white, with no wiggle room to form subjective conjectures full of false hope. In addition to some inconveniently permanent nerve damage, I also have multiple pelvic organ prolapse, and am not a candidate for surgery. In a few years I will run out of options and will have to resort to surgery, which may actually worsen my condition. On top of all of that, I was experiencing my third round of unexplained nausea over the past two weeks. I’ve been waiting to schedule a tubal ligation because I may end up having an oophorectomy, but am worried about the side effects of losing my ovaries at the age of 36. Suddenly, the possibility of going through early menopause was looking like the least of my problems.

There are three things that saved the day from being a total disaster. First, the specialist is a runner herself, and instead of sugar coating things and giving me a bunch of bull about cross training, we immediately engaged in a passionate discussion about speed work. Oh, to own a pair of racing flats again! Back when I used to run sub-9:00s, I could justify owning them. But after I developed asthma and then had a few stress fractures and then had Nina and the whole mess of issues that resulted from her L&D, well, they were a distant memory. But believe me, if I have to give up marathons, I will find some new way to focus that running energy.  I spent the afternoon Googling my old race splits and looking at racing flats, and started formulating a new training schedule.

The second thing was that I made the most amazing soup last night (recipe here).

The third? You guessed it – Nina is still an only.  Happy happy, joy joy!