My doctor told me I should do yoga for my upper back pain. She told me this on the same day that she gave me a referral to a surgeon and a gastro doctor. Me not really being the yoga type, I bought Jillian Michael's version. It's a half hour of teeth-gnashing, panting hell, and that is the beginner version. For someone who has been lifting weights for the past fifteen years, Jillian Michaels can be quite humbling.

I had to take about two weeks off from Jillian due to the incisions in my leg. Of all things exercise, I was most concerned yoga would actually stretch the areas so much it would cause problems, so I waited until it was way healed before I tried it again ... yesterday.

I did not realize you could lose muscle strength so damn fast. I took five days off after my surgery before walking a few miles. The minute my surgeon cleared me after ten days, I went back to weighted squats and all that jazz with The Firm. I didn't expect any problems from Jillian, other than you know, her being JILLIAN.

As I was attempting not to fall off my hands during the side planks, the little angel walked over to me. She sniffed and stared at the sweat rolling off my red face as I sucked in air like a vacuum cleaner.

"You know, Mommy," she said. "It's a choice to do that to yourself."

I started laughing so hard I did fall. Off my pride. Ouch.

My Octopony post has found new life at BlogHer now that Nadya Suleman has gone and sold nude pictures and then still gone bankrupt. I resized the pics so it's better now. Something about a stuffed animal close-up makes me laugh really hard. If you didn't see it the first time, please to enjoy Dr. Phooh's interview with the Octopony. For the whole Paging Dr. Arens series, check the link in Categories in my right sidebar. 

Dude, I miss that series.

WHAT WERE YOU THINKING???

I believe the last time I actually showed y'all something I made was the diaper cake. And I just saw that baby last weekend, and she is now two.

However, I tweeted a picture of the little angel's new handband holder and someone wanted to know where I bought it, which was hilarious to me. 

First: The Hair. My daughter has really, really long hair. That she hates to have brushed. But yet, every day it must be brushed, because I have a thing about her going out looking like a member of 1989 Bon Jovi. She screams, even when I use a Blondie-approved amount of conditioner when I wash it.

I've been trying to come up with a way to get her to take more ownership of her own hair. I've also been trying to come up with a way to get the drawers in her bathroom open. They are (were) crammed with hair accessories that she never ever wears.

Then on Sunday it rained.

The culimination of the rain and the hair accessory issue led to the creation of a few items.

First! The headband holder of Twitter fame.

I made mine out of a roll of paper towels covered in scrapbooking paper. I have tons and tons of scrapbooking paper even though I have never scrapped in my life. It's pretty and my girl loves it and it comes in big, yummy books. I love paper, all kinds of paper, I'm sorry, trees. 

The problem was how to get the pretty paper to stick to the paper towels. I tried taping, no luck. Then (and trust me, it made total sense at the time), I tried stapling, with the staple open up like elementary teachers do with their bulletin boards (they do still have those, right?). It looked AWESOME! And then I took the pressure off and all the staples went shooting out. But then I realized I had a hot glue gun! So I hot glued the paper to the paper towel roll and that worked and there was great rejoicing. Unfortunately, I had no cover for the part on top, so I stuck that flower in there and glued the petals down. Then that looked like shit, so I hot glued a pink ribbon around the top. Now, if you are in my house and you look closely at this thing, you will see it looks like a second-grader made it. However, once you load it up with all the headbands, no big. CRAFTS!

Next, I took all the combs and brushes and soft head bands and put them in a box that used to hold greeting cards. I buy a lot of greeting cards in bulk, because I always forget people's birthdays or events until the day of, and then I have to run downstairs and search for something appropriate. I also love the boxes they come in, which are super sturdy and usually pretty, too. This green one was a little blah so the little angel stuck another one of those pretty pieces of scrapping paper to it, and then I hot glued some more junk on the front to bedazzle it.

Finally, I made two of these hairband holders out of paper towel rolls. Since the little angel requires hair bands not only to put in ponytails but also to tie back her tshirts so they look correct with her skinny jeans (don't ask), she needs two a day and we can never find them. Now we have one of these hair band holders upstairs and one downstairs and please stop asking me where you can find a ponytail holder, child.

Of course it is covered with more pretty scrappy paper. Just because!

So this morning, my girl was almost late for the school bus because she was messing with her hair. And when she came down, her hair looked like Marcia Brady had brushed it 100 strokes on each side. She had used two different hair brushes to get out all the tangles. And she was wearing a headband that hadn't seen the light of day in months.

I WIN!

My inner monologue last Sunday while sporting swimwear during a month when it usually snows.

Ninety degrees on a Sunday afternoon.

Lake water, breathtakingly cold.

Trees not fully leafed out.

Four pontoons parked by the not-yet-roped-off swimming area spilled forth dogs and people amazed at the sunshine.

Twenty children balanced on life rafts and screamed with laughter.

Teenaged boys shook off water like puppies.

The radio commercials talked about spring coming soon.

I think it's already here.

crossposted from BlogHer

I stared at the phone in my hand. My sister had texted me two words: MIDLIFE CRISIS. Because I sent her a pic of a convertible I saw while driving home with my seven-year-old daughter. But I bought one, anyway.

A Brief History of Responsible Automobiles

My parents always bought cars with cash. I don't know if they still do, but when we were growing up there were never debts like car payments floating around. Never. I was fortunate enough to drive not one but two used manual-shift Chevy Novas during high school, and when I went off to college, my parents surprised me with a used but still I thought white-hot burgandy Ford Probe. Its doors were tank-like, and it had those headlights that flip up and the seatbelts that move over you instead of you having to buckle them. (If you're under the age of 30, you probably have no idea such a thing used to exist. It did, and it was so awesomely Star Wars I can't even begin to describe it.)

I kept Peg the Probe from 1992 until 1998, when she sadly began a rapid deterioration into Things Were Falling Off Every Day. My father let me buy his car, Priscilla the Prizm, off him for $4,000. At the time, I had this sort of money in my savings account (the young, houseless and childless can be rich) and off I went to move to Kansas City in Priscilla.

In 2005, Priscilla and I were T-boned on a busy street by a SUV that was much bigger than we were. I was pretty distraught, because her axle was bent and JUST LIKE THAT I went from having no car payment to needing a car, stat. By this time, I was married and my husband and I had replaced his Ford Escort with a Ford Explorer, which we owned outright. We liked the Explorer so much we decided to get another one, because the one we had seemed like it would die soon, and then when that car died, we'd just replace it with something more Prizm-like. It made total and complete sense to us at the time -- gas was cheap, we had a baby and a ton of baby stuff and we made road trips up to Iowa at least once a month with all our junk in tow.

In 2008, gas prices did that thing. You remember that thing? When none of us could afford to go farther than two feet? And my husband and I owned two -- not one but TWO -- gas-sucking SUVs. We were spending $150 a week on gas. Ifreaked out and demanded we right our wrong immediately, but when we went to buy a Corolla, the used ones didn't exist. No one was letting go of a small, fuel-efficient car. So we ended up with another car payment and a very sensible, new, very basic Corolla.

Which then got hit by a tornado.

This is what it looks like when the universe is trying to tell you something.

My husband travels a lot for work and has a rental car. We still had the Explorer -- yes, the original one we thought would die. It has 190,000 miles on it, the front passenger door won't open from the outside, the air conditioning no longer works, it's rusting and the leather seats are stained and ripped. But it still runs, so we had lots of time to think about what to do.

Then, last weekend, my daughter and I were driving home when I passed a for-sale sign on a ramshackle midnight-blue Ford Mustang convertible. I stepped on the brakes and whipped the Explorer around. My daughter's eyes widened as I pulled over on the side of the road and called the number soaped across the windshield. Then we drove straight home, grabbed my husband out of the driveway and drove him to see it.

He was understandably flummoxed by my move. Me, who made him return the convertible he rented last year at BlogHer '11 because it was too impractical for all our luggage. Me, who made him give up his beloved, tricked-out Explorer for a teeny tiny Corolla. Me, who once pinned a Debt-o-Meter to the refrigerator to remind us daily of our credit card sins. What the hell was I thinking?

When Someone Almost Dies, You See Things Differently

I was thinking that we were lucky we only lost our car in that tornado. I was thinking I didn't want another car payment, and every sensible, responsible car he was showing me would mean another two- or three-year loan. I was thinking we made so many car-buying decisions in the past based on what the smart, right thing to do was in the case of any emergency, and then along came a tornado to blow up all our best-laid plans.

I was thinking about how we'd already gone through the carseat years.

I was thinking about how many years I have left to have adventures with my daughter.

I was thinking about how much time you end up spending in a car on the weekends getting your responsible adult errands done. And how much time you spend putting off little things that would be fun and not really hurt anyone even if they are a tish off the beaten path.

And I was thinking about my anxiety, and how I always try to plan for every single thing that could possibly happen, and how the older I get the more I realize I can't do anything but pray hard and row for shore. I told my husband all of this on Sunday night.

On Monday morning, he sent me a listing for a 1997 Chrysler Sebring with 71,000 miles on it that we could buy with the Corolla insurance payout, straight-up. No car payment. And the air conditioning works great.

We named her "Vicki."

I'm up again to answer a BlogHer.com Life Well Lived question. This one is pretty great.

How do you put yourself first? How does taking time for yourself help make you happier? 

I don't know what the outside perception of me putting myself first is, but I think I do it a lot. I didn't used to -- I used to do whatever I was asked to do, and then a bunch of stuff I thought I was supposed to do and then maybe at the end something I actually wanted to do. 

About five years ago, I started really examining what I could do to better manage my anxiety. I realized that excercise really helped amp down the adrenaline I can get unexpectedly and for no good reason. Now that I work from home, it's not unusual for me to turn to the jump rope or a short workout DVD or even push-ups if I start to feel my emotions spinning and I need to focus. So after spending nearly twenty years exercising for weight management, suddenly I was exercising to access some good dopamine -- which totally changed my attitude about doing it. I stopped resenting it as something I had to do and started looking forward to the feeling I'd get after working out -- something I wanted to feel, so exericise became something I wanted to do. I now look at that time as me time and putting my good feelings first.

I put a lot of time into my writing, in all its formats. I write fiction, here, and on BlogHer.com. Part of it is my job, but there's such a fuzzy line between work and play when you have a job you really love.

I love to sleep. I sleep as long as I can, whenever I can. Other moms are shocked at how late I will sleep on weekend mornings when Beloved and the little angel let me, and they often do. I make no apologies for this sleeping. It helps me rejuvinate from throwing everything at my work week, and I'm a much more fun person when I'm not tired. We've all made peace with that.

I have one child on purpose. When we first made the decision to have a small family, a lot of people got all up in our grill about it, as though not having multiple offspring was somehow selfish or cruel to our daughter. I felt really insecure about it for a long time, but now I'm as unapologetic about having an only as I am about sleeping. Our family of three is extremely loving and extremely agile, and I relish taking off for the zoo spontaneously and without anything but a wallet. I don't like chaos, and it's easier to avoid chaos without lots of kids. There, I've said it. My daughter has voiced both her love of being an only and her regret that she doesn't have brothers or sisters. I'm sure she'll vascillate on her opinion of it from day to day for the rest of her life, but she'll always know we love her unconditionally. I can't do much more: I've tried brainwashing her that my every decision is perfect, and it's not taking very well.

I don't have a dog. The little angel desperately wants a dog. But even if my mother weren't deathly terrified of all dogs, I still would not have a dog. I don't like barking or licking. Aren't I painting an awesome picture of myself? I adore other people's dogs, but like those who don't want children, I really don't want a dog that will need to be walked and have his poop picked up by me on a daily or weekly basis. It interferes with that agility I so treasure in our little family. Thus we have Petunia the cat, who cuddles and then wanders off to reorganize the library without remark when we leave town for a weekend. 

In the past, when I've thought about taking time for myself or putting myself first, I thought about things like getting a pedicure or going to the library alone. Those things are awesome, awesome, awesome, but anything can be putting yourself first if you're thinking about it that way. Every little thing you do to make your environment more comfortable for your particular needs is putting yourself first. I also think to some extent making your family more comfortable is putting yourself first, because the happier they are, probably the happier you are. Nothing makes me happier than my daughter's joy, so I really like having adventures and introducing her to new things. It might look like I'm doing something for her, but in the end, it's for me, too. I get to see the smile.

What do you do for yourself? Dr. Aymee has some tips over at Live Well Lived on BlogHer.com. Or you can skip straight to commenting to win a Kindle Fire, because I will not rest until everyone has an ereader.

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The folks at Lego reached out to tell me about their new Build Together site. It has instructions for how to build different things with standard lego sets organized by how much time you have and how much skill you have. I thought that was pretty smart, so I'm sharing it with you. I wasn't compensated for that little ditty, I just like legos.

I've always been fascinated by the little angel's skill in balancing and arranging her toys in all manner of Norman-Rockwell-meets-The-Shining scenes: super cute when she's there and super creepy when she's not.

When I got out of bed this morning, I heard the steady cadence of her voice in the next room. I looked at Beloved. "You're missing Story Hour," he said.

But I was late getting up and went down to get coffee and then we scrambled for the bus, and I forgot all about the whole thing until I went upstairs to shower and her light was on.

This is what I found.

The whole gang. She sleeps every night with almost everyone you see pictured here.

Ski Bear (slumped in the middle) is getting plastic surgery over Easter because my girl thinks he looks unhappy and wants him to smile more. SCARY!

Alexandra and Erin and their many pets.

Luv Bear, Sophie and Benjamin

Pink Kitteh and company

Tanya, who is unfortunately always in that hospital bed with tuberculosis, which killed Louis Braille.

(That was her explanation. I don't ask questions any more.)

Totally the best part.

A few miles from my house, there are palm trees. Palm trees are not native to Missouri. When I first saw them, I thought they were fake. Then I realized they were taller than the other, native-to-Missouri trees. That would have to be a pretty good fake. And they moved in the breeze the way real palm trees would.

And when winter came, they were wrapped. 

I drove past that house recently and saw they'd installed carved and painted wooden palm trees with their house number at the base of their driveway.

I also saw the fronds of the unwrapped palm trees. They were still green. It was a very mild winter in Kansas City, but still ... the palm trees made it through the winter.

As I continued on down the road, I saw some wild turkeys, which actually belong in Missouri, and I thought about the plants those same neighbors planted at the base of their driveway a few years ago -- they were palm-like, but they were planted straight into the ground, probably several hundred dollars worth of these palm plants, and in the blazing Missouri humidity, they lasted about three weeks before they dried up and died.

So these people went from a several-hundred dollar failed palm-like-plant experiment to five full-size palm trees and huge carved wood statues. I don't even know how much it would cost to transport a fully grown palm tree from wherever palm trees belong to Kansas City, let along FIVE OF THEM.

And you know what? I smile every single time I drive past that house due to the undying optimism of these transplanted beach lovers.

Optimism: Go hard or go home.

I had this sweater. I loved it. It was v-necked and it clung in the right places and had three-quarter sleeves and a little sweater belt. Soft gray. HAD. I HAD this sweater. Until last Saturday, when it died a very ugly death at The Vine in Iowa City, Iowa ... while I was wearing it.

The Vine is known for its wings. There were fourteen of us, my three college roommates, some of our husbands, all of our progeny. We waited an hour for our food. The children got squirmy. Things were spilled. I was sitting in a booth with my friend Kristin on one side and her daughter on the other side. We barely had room for our elbows, but when the food came we practically shoved our faces in the baskets to get it in our bellies faster.

In the aftermath, baskets and plates covered the table completely -- there were six of us shoved into this little tiny booth in the corner. In an attempt to keep the food away from my pretty sweater, my favorite sweater, I picked up a plate and a basket containing the remains of my SUPERHOT wings, caught an edge, and watched in horror as the basket flew through the air and landed squarely on my right shoulder. 

I was covered in SUPERHOT sauce. The grease and bright-red-and-pepper sauce literally dripped from my pretty gray sweater and one of the pairs of jeans that I had to try on 45 pairs to find. 

I know, the injustice!

Everyone at the table looked at me in shock, then rightly erupted in laughter. I wanted to laugh, but at that moment, I just sat there and felt the dripping and let my mind go 100% blank into my safe place in which I wasn't sitting in a crowded college town restaurant with seven children and six adults looking like Dexter's latest victim and smelling like chili powder. 

After sort of dabbing at it with a napkin, I realized I was going to have to go to the bathroom to at least get it to stop dripping before I got into a car like that. I don't know if anyone looked at me, because I just stared straight ahead. When I got to the bathroom, I realized just how bad the damage was, so I did what felt right -- I braved walking through the restaurant again, got my coat, went back to the bathroom and replaced the stinking, hot-sauce-coated sweater with my winter coat.

We tried. We really did. In the end, the barbecue sauce won. RIP pretty gray sweater. (sob!)

In other news, yesterday I made a guide for not freaking out in severe weather. (I know.) You should go read it.