Dash

Today my husband had a late afternoon job to do so I was left with a rare night alone with my kids. The weather was gorgeous, so we headed outdoors to take in our share of the sunshine.

My whole family is working together towards being healthy and active. My daughter takes right to fitness and nutrition. Without much consideration quite recently, she decided to start doing 20 sit-ups every night because she wants to maintain a strong core and flat stomach. Quite often she chooses foods based on their nutritional impact on her body rather than just what sounds good. I think that is amazing for a nine year old kid. My son needs a little more encouragement than my daughter, but this year he has gone from fearing jumping or exhausting after a few feet of jogging, to keeping stride with me today as we ran around the blocks.

At first, I had to cajole him along. Gigi and I ran ahead and I hoped that him falling a little behind would motivate him to pick up the pace. It did, somewhat, but humiliation is never something I would want to use as motivation. The next time he started running, I made a really big stink about how fast he was, how he was a blur! How he was just like Dash, the really fast kid from The Incredibles. ‘Dash’ bought in and insisted on being called Dash for the rest of the walk. Fine by me!
We ran about a mile and walked the rest. ‘Dash’ got really into beating me to the next sign and winning, I didn’t care because there we were, my kids and me, running together down the street in the sunshine. I loved being us this afternoon. It felt full of love, sunshine and stamina.