Yoga En Famille

It's late and it was a long day.

I still want to get myself organized for school tomorrow and get a jump on my lesson for Sunday since it's my turn to do Sunday School so I need to sack out pronto and then get up before Julia so I have time to work in peace.

I didn't get to do any of this stuff in the day because while today was one of my days off, I went to school anyway to meet Carla to get on with our clean up mission. We didn't get to do everything we planned, but we got a lot of other clean up stuff done. I woudl love to see us get to the point where the preschool is bringing in enough bucks to hire a daily cleaning staff again.

It was a long day and after we all got home (Paul came home early) we crashed. Long naps til 11 PM! Then it was a scramble for dinner (junk food, ugh) and mopping the gross kitchen tile (ugh) and finally we could spend some time with Julia.

(I need to get ON with cooking ahead and freezing because when I fail to plan dinner ahead of time, I plan to fail at eating something sane. At the very least make the trip to Whole Foods and so on and lay in some frozen food despite the expense.)

We did the Yoga Kids 3: Silly to Calm this time.

This one didn't grab her like Yoga Kids 2 did because it does not have interspersed scenes. Yoga Kids 1 cuts to film footage of the animals described by the poses and then Yoga Kids 2 cuts to cartoons of the letter of the alphabet for the upcoming pose. Yoga Kids 3, while still pitched at kid level, is getting closer to an actual session for yoga practice so I think the older end of the 3-6 spectrum would "get it" better than my 2 year old. Her attention span wasn't as good on this one and she'd wander off or try to sit on us or go play.

Paul and I were struggling to balance in "stork pose" and then "flamingo pose" and finally "tree pose" and she came up and sat on his foot and beat on his leg and he said "Help! My tree is being attacked by a logger! I am being felled!" This started me giggling and then my own tree fell over.

I really hope we can stick to doing these with her on Tuesday & Thursday nights. No, it's not an especially challenging workout for me. But it is an introduction for her and at least SOMETHING of a workout for non-exercising, stress prone Paul. And I really love doing something together as a family that is so peaceful and grounding.

Paul and I both got a kick out of watching Julia running in circles around the room grabbing handfuls of air yelling "Reach for the sun! Reach for the sun!" and then bounding along with "Grasshopper hop! Grasshopper hop!" turning into an impressively fluid downward dog with "I do yoga stretch." Little kids are so supple.

The DVD has the kids "marking territory" when in downward dog as a means to increase the stretch of the pose but I don't think Julia realizes the joke. That when she's lifting her leg to "do yoga stretch" she mimics a dog cocking his leg to take a pee.