Exercise For Alcohol (A Year Of Awesome)

On our wedding anniversary last month, I declared this year The Year Of Awesome. Since then, our grand plans of a week away in New Zealand in March have been cancelled. Instead, Mike’s going to tack four days onto the end of his work trip and do something he’s always wanted to do—hike the Routburn Track. Alone. While I stay with the kids.

And last weekend I was in Australia, hanging out with college friends I haven’t seen in years. Alone. While Mike stayed with the kids. We seven girlfriends stayed in a big old creaky house on the North Shore of Sydney, walked down to the beach, ate lots of seriously amazing food, drank unusual wines from Sardinia, and talked ourselves hoarse. It was epically awesome.

Maybe Mike and I should re-dub this year The Year Of Awesome Things We Do Apart.

No, it doesn’t quite have the same pithy ring, so I’m going to keep scheming to get some awesome togetherness on the schedule (although not this week, because Mike is in the Solomon Islands). Maybe in the six days before he leaves for New Zealand

So what have we done in the awesome vein since the kids and I got back to Vanuatu?

The awesome adventures are supposed to be fun, adventurous, delicious, extraordinary, or magical. Well, we’ve gone to Eton Beach and hosted a couple of very fun pool pot-luck parties at our place. Alex has embarked upon the adventure of two mornings a week at a preschool/playgroup. I’ve made some yummy bliss balls and truly delicious coconut-crab-green-curry using my new food processor. And it’s been incredibly, extraordinarily hot here.

This is all well and good (mind-melting heat aside), but nothing we’ve done all together quite ranks as truly awesome in my books. Not to mention we’ve also had to farewell Harry for seven months to go fruit-picking in New Zealand, which was decidedly un-awesome!! This weekend is still February, though, so I’ll keep you posted.

In lieu of awesome we’ve been doing something, well, disciplined.

Over Christmas, Mike and I instituted a star chart system for our beloved eldest tyrant child. Around the same time, we decided that we could both possibly benefit from drinking less alcohol and doing more exercise. So we made ourselves a grown-up star chart, and dubbed February the month of “exercise for alcohol”. 1 drink = 20 minutes of exercise. I would venture to say that the star chart for the elders is so far working better than the star chart for the littlie. Maybe we should put alcohol on Dominic’s rewards schedule.

Isn’t that just the best idea I’ve had all day? Amazing I can even come up with something like that after being up half the night with a two-year-old with a raging fever, only to be woken up at 5:30 to wipe someone else’s bottom. And the previous night both kids were up at 4:30 because the winds from the outer edge of Cyclone Winston were so strong the noise was freaking them out (Winston turned south yesterday, so we are all clear on that front for now).

Ah, solo parenting. I love it so. Come to think of it, maybe I should get 1 drink for every 20 minutes of solo parenting I do in the next four weeks.

And on that classy note, I’m off to do some work and figure out what to do with all the ripe avocados that are on our tree (best problem ever!!). Catch you again soon from the land of tweedle dee and tweedle dum, who regularly manage to melt my heart and melt my brain within the same five minutes.