Mother of 10

No, not me.  But it is someone that both my sister-in-laws know.  This woman has 10 kids and gets them all up at 6am to run with her. 

I've been really struggling finding a good time to exercise. Now that we've moved, my gym membership doesn't help and I have a goal to really work on my running, but Nate leaves at 5:45am each morning and Eden sleeps until 9am. By the time she's up, Brigs goes down for his first nap.  I would try to go at night, but something always came up so I wasn't very consistent. Mostly all of that was just excuses.  The second I heard about this exercise-is-my-priority mom I knew that I had no excuse.

I now wake the kids up at 7:45, give them each a piece of bread to eat in the stroller and head out the door.  It's been so good in many, many ways.  We take a different path each day and just explore our new neighborhood.  We've already found 2 jogging trails that I didn't know about, a shortcut to the elementary school (that only requires the kids to cross 1 road which happens to be the road our house is on and has next-to-no traffic) a duck pond about 1/2 mile away in the middle of a neighborhood (what the awesome!?) and a new park.  We've found some gems and it's only been 3 days since we began.

Eden also yells "faster Mom!" when I start slowing down from getting tired.  Sometimes that kicks me into gear and sometimes it doesn't, but it's appreciated all the same. I love that my kids are seeing me exercise.  I thank them each time for helping me exercise and I talk to Eden about how my goal is to be a fast runner. It's opened up the conversation about having to work really hard at something if you want it.  She encourages me and tells me I can do it.  I also think that there is probably no better way to train than to push about 65 pounds in front of you.  I went running by myself the other night and was amazed at how far I could run when I wasn't pushing anything.

So thank you; thank you Mother of 10.  Some would call you super woman-but I've been a mom long enough to realize that you have your struggles too.  Regardless, one of your strengths has helped push me to stop making excuses and get to work on something that really makes me happy.