It's just a dummy, dummy

Today is my last day off and sometimes I almost don't enjoy the day off knowing that tomorrow it's back to the same old same old. But today Adrien and I went shopping for dummy materials. Adrien wanted to make a grappling dummy to practice techniques on. It was actually kind of fun and it took about an hour to make a somewhat lifelike practice dummy. As soon as the kids walked in the door from school they pounced on the thing.... I almost feel bad for this inanimate object. Half the time they want to pretend it's a prince or their future husband and the other half they're kicking him in the head and doing body slams on him. What a life. I feel a little sorry for myself too. I walked into the computer room to blog and my heart jumped into my throat because the stupid thing is sitting in the computer chair with it's bag glove hands on the keyboard "typing". Adrien just killed himself laughing and says he's been sitting there with butterflies in his stomach waiting for me to go in there and have a heart attack. He's having way too much fun with this thing! Cheers till next week.

Unexpected hiatus

So I am taking a break from sparring for awhile. I did something gnarly to my leg in San Shou and I guess I've finally realized I need to let myself recover. It's so easy to tell someone else that there is no shame in taking time to heal and not to worry about what other people think when you can't do everything that the class is doing or to train as hard as everyone else. It is so darn hard to take my own advice it's literally painful. I had high hopes to spar in the upcoming tournament. I love sparring, and I work hard at it but I just don't know if I'll be ok by then. I always have the idea that I'll go and just take it easy, but that never happens. I feel like a horse, chafing at the bit, I just want to go but I can't.

Most boring post ever, no really.

As always, I have been sitting here trying to think of what to blog about and I still haven't come up with anything, so I'm going to talk about my feet. Feel free to stop reading now, I won't be offended.
The sad condition of my feet has further deteriorated over the past two or three weeks, culminating in me roundhouse kicking the plastic base of the heavy bag with a good amount of force last week. I should add that I didn't do this on purpose, in case you were wondering. Of course I was kicking with the top of my foot in order to save my injured toes and ball of foot. So my entire foot is now a mess. I am pretty sure I have plantar fasciitis in both feet, so I'm wearing my runners to work instead of steel toe boots. Hopefully that won't backfire and the title of next weeks blog won't be I got stepped on by a 1300 pound horse. I finally broke down and bought some martial art type shoes to wear while I'm training. They seem OK, except I have a tendency to trip while walking on the mats. I'm sure in time this will be funny to me and not just other people. So here's hoping the shoes help, and I apologize for such a lengthy blog about my feet.

The old weight on your shoulders

So it's the beginning of the fourth month into 7. It has become a way of life for my whole family. I was walking to the park with my kids and my older daughter spotted litter on the side of the alley and without missing a beat grabbed it and threw it in the trash. I know this is because she sees me doing this and it's nice to see such concrete evidence that they learn from what they see us doing.

In the past few weeks I have realized that I tend to hang onto negative thoughts or things that happen throughout the day. For example, I was at a store and there was a woman on a cell phone trying to get her shopping cart through a door with her kids in it, the door was slamming shut on her cart so I ran over and held it for her. She in no way acknowledged me and I thought to myself that that was kind of rude. Then I told my sister about it and we ended up talking about rude people. It ended up being quite the discussion about all the people that do things like that and how horrible they are. I don't want to be the person who's always whining about the people who don't say thank you etc. Negativity breeds negativity.
My kids had a book from the library with a bunch of short stories in them. One was about an old monk and a young monk walking in a busy town. A young lady dressed in her best and carrying many shopping bags runs into a large mud puddle. The old monk runs over, puts her on his back and carries her over the mud. She sticks her nose in the air and walks away with no word of thanks. The old monk and the young monk finish their business and continue walking. Young monk is fuming at the behavior of the young lady and finally says, aren't you angry that she treated you that way after what you did for her? Old monk says I put her down hours ago, why are you still carrying her?
So here's to putting down the things that I don't need to hang onto anymore. Cheers.