Out for a walk

I made a tactical error today. Or rather, a series of them.

First, I didn't get up until 7:30am. See, if I get up at 7:00, then I have time to eat breakfast, get dressed, and walk the 1.5 miles to Mass. That way, by the time I get home from Mass, I'm done with my exercise for the day before it gets too hot/humid out. If I sleep in until 7:30, though, I don't have time to walk and I have to drive there. Which is fine, it just means that my walk will have to wait until later.

My second blunder was giving in to my usual morning tiredness. With no urgent appointments or demands on my time, I sometimes succumb to the exhaustion you might expect from a pregnant woman who can't manage to sleep through the night to save her life... and I take a nap. Or in this case, sit and read for a couple of hours. Thoroughly delightful, mind you, but a mistake I would later regret.

I did dredge up the discipline to clean the apartment before eating lunch (after all, I had to do something to "earn" my next meal, right?), but then puttered around for awhile before I actually put on my shoes to go for a walk. The problem was, by this point it was 1:30pm and approaching 80 outside. Too hot for me to get away with wearing long pants, which meant going out looking semi-ridiculous in "athletic" type clothing for a walk. Funny, I didn't use to feel ridiculous in those clothes (not completely, anyway). But now that I've got a 4-pound little munchkin crawling around in my belly, it's a bit different. Just a few weeks ago, I could go for a walk in jeans and a t-shirt and I actually had guys honking at me when they drove past (true story... happened at least 3 times). Now, I'm more likely to have them offer me a ride home because I must be lost and miserable (also a true story... but at least then I was walking on a road with no sidewalk and where a pedestrian of any variety must have appeared out of place).

Despite how I looked (don't even bother trying to imagine it... I tried to take a picture, but it just looked silly), I felt pretty good. I have this one pair of athletic shoes that I got before going into my freshman year of high school and they are still my absolute favorite pair of shoes to go walking/running in. Just putting them on my feet gives me a burst of energy. And so I walked for a couple of miles and felt ok upon coming home. So I folded the laundry and did the ironing (including cleaning the calc out of the anti-calc iron). And somewhere along the way, it all caught up with me. I had zero energy left, and it was approaching dinnertime. Sigh.

I need to remind myself that during the summer, it's best to do all things requiring energy in the morning and to relax in the afternoon. I think the next 8 weeks will be much more bearable if I can keep this in mind.

In case you were worried about the state of dinner: I resisted the urge to begin cooking as soon as my husband walked through the door (half an hour before I expected him). Instead, I got a snack, took a shower, and relaxed for a while before returning to work and cooking a much simpler (but still yummy) meal than I had originally planned. All was not lost. :-)