I Will Blog... I will practice... I will blog about practice...

um, yeah right.

But seriously, I will. And if Julie can make it back, so can I.

I’m not going into all that happened in the past 6 months, just believe me when I say that we’ve been busy. Busy, happy, and well.

Well, maybe I’ll add just a little. Ash got his first pumpkin on Halloween.

He was dressed as a penguin, and seemed pretty happy to be one. See for yourself:

He learned to crawl, he began pulling himself up on things, he “creeps” but isn’t walking on his own yet.
He said his first words, “Mama” and “Hi.” He’s added a few others since then.

We picked out our first Christmas tree.

We threw Ash his first birthday party, a week early. He ate his first cupcake.

Ash’s first cupcake from Jenna Cox Congdon on Vimeo.

I go back and forth about whether I should do all my blogging here, or start a new blog over there, and I think I’ll just keep it all here. There’s just too much history to leave it all behind. And I fear that starting a “non-yoga-blog” will allow me to slip even farther away from my yoga practice… In some strange way.

So now that I’ve mentioned it, the almost-non-existent-yoga practice, the elephant in the room, at least for me, I guess I’ll muse about it just a bit. Now that my yoga studio is a baby’s room and the rest of my house is littered with baby toys, laundry, and other evidence of the life that I just can’t shut out no matter how hard I breathe or how focused my driste is, I have a tough time making it on to my mat. I’m squeezing in about one practice a week, and most of those are not Ashtanga, they’re just quick little vinyasa practices or focused yoga “workouts”. In between all those, I’ve begun running again. It’s an exercise I can do with my son, thanks to the Bob Stroller a friend gave to us. I’m enjoying it, for now, but I’m committed to someday making it back to a daily Ashtanga practice…

I know that it will have to be an early morning practice, something that used to be so easy but now seems completely out of reach. 5:00 am. Ouch.

But for now, baby steps. Today, sun sals, standing, finishing. By January 1st, I hope to phase into full-primary 3 days/week.

And have I mentioned how much I hate backbending? Can you believe I just said that? Me? The one who would come over to your house, have a glass of wine, and end up somehow in Vrischikrasana or Kapotasana “just for kicks”? It’s true. I can now relate in some small way to Julie and Lauren and I can tell you that surgery changes everything. Yes, that’s me up there in that photo in Kapotasana. Before the C-Section. Now? I can barely scrape my toes with my middle finger in that pose. Ankle grabbing, something that I’ve been able to do since the day I was given the pose, is worlds away, in any pose whether it’s Kapotasana or Urdvha Dhanurasana. Every backbend feels like my midsection is going to split open. Not only that, but my sacrum is set differently somehow after the pregnancy. So there’s that too. The days of busting out exhilarating ankle-grabs and shin-grabs and relishing every moment of drop-backs are gone. Even just a simple Urdvha Dhanurasana is an exercise of panic-control. I expected to feel different after child-carrying and birth, but I figured it would be in my hips. No big difference there, except for some mild shortening of my IT bands due to the running.

I look back on the days of my daily self-practice with wonder. Who was that person? How did I do that? Can I ever get back to that place? And while part of me beats myself up over wandering so far from that place, another part of me accepts it, relishes the fact that I’m able to let go of it all in order to enjoy the other facets of my life that I feel deserve my focus so much more right now. And maybe that’s part of it. I tend to be a little single minded and obsessive about things, as you all know. So my current obsession is… being a mom? Hope that one’s not a passing phase…

Other than all that, I don’t have much to say. I’m out of practice, in more ways than one. But I have a good excuse. And speaking of my good excuse, I have to go wrap his Christmas presents now…