Exercising With My Little Ones

A few weeks ago, my friend sent me an exercise video for a very belated birthday gift.  The video was Jillian's 30 Day Shred.  I immediately called her and told her thank you and asked if she was trying to kill me by sending me a Jillian workout video.  She just laughed and said that she thought it would work well with my schedule to only have to exercise 20 minutes a day.  Let's just say it sat upon my shelf for a few weeks because I was too intimidated to even give it a try and I did not own any dumb bells.

After thinking about it for sometime, I thought that I could at least give it a try and use what I had for hand weights- pint size jars of honey!  Don't laugh they work :)  So, this past Saturday I popped the dvd into our player and proceeded to exercise for 20 minutes with my honey.   You may be saying that 20 minutes is easy, but I beg to differ- it was a WORKOUT!  However, I still did not let that intimidate me, I continued on to day 2 and two of my boys decided to join me.  They, too, went and picked out jars.  One of them picked out 2 quart sized jars of peanuts and the other picked out 2 spoons.  At this point, I found it hard to stay focused on my exercises because I was laughing so hard!  If only I had a video camera in the background recording all of this I could have won a million dollars on AFV.  After laughing so hard, I pressed on and so did they.  They received LOTS of praise from me the whole time since they were supporting their momma exercise pursuit.  Today was day 3 and they were begging me to put in the dvd so that we could all start exercising just after family worship this morning.  Believe it or not, this time I had all of the children trying the exercise.  The two little boys stuck it out the whole time. My oldest girl joined us a little way into the routine and so did our oldest son.  My oldest son dropped out because he said that it was way too hard for him.

In the beginning, I wondered if I really had the endurance to stick this thing through for an entire 30 days  straight in a row.  Each day I am feeling it more and more.  It is hard and my whole body hurts, especially my legs.  However, I think that I will be able to stay with it.  I have cheerleaders!!!  They motivate and encourage me.  Who says that exercise is impossible with 5 children?  Not me any more!