Hey! How How High is This Thing Supposed to Jump??

Every job is stressful. It doesn't matter if you have to run reports by the fifteenth or if you just have to make it to work in time to start the coffee pot before your meanie head boss gets there. For me, it got real during the end of instruction tests. It doesnt matter what job you have, you get stressed and you have to find ways to cope. 

Glass of wine?

Long run?

Calling a friend to gripe?

Leaving your headlights on in your car so your battery dies before four o'clock when it's time to leave..? 

Unconventional I know, but apparently that's how my mom would..uhh...settle her nerves? 

Anyway, you could count on my mom's car battery needing to get "jumped" once a week. 

Sometimes a friend would help her out, especially if my dad who worked out of town was going to be late. Other times though, we would wait for my dad at the school. I would work on homework or watch a movie while my mom graded the perpetual stack of papers that all teachers have....there was one particular time that I remember the latter senario happening.

The First Time. 

Dad showed up. We packed up. We all went outside to the elementary school parking lot where mom's car was like the Lone Ranger in one of those John Wayne westerns. There was probably a tumble weed rolling in front of us as we walked out the double doors to see the ONLY car left out there. 

Of course it was the ONLY car out there. I had been waiting forever. All my homework was done and I had made it through almost an entire game of Oregon Trail....which took at least 45 whole minutes. (I'm trying to approximate it now in my big-kid brain because in my little-kid brain it was the longest game ever. With Mary getting dysentery and someone stealing all your supplies and THEN running out of food before the winter was over, it was a long and stressful game!)

So, (finally) we get out to the car. Dad's truck was already parked right up next to  mom's LeSabre...okay probably not a LeSabre but I can't remember...Anyway, dad was pulling out the jumper cables and I was watching him like a hawk. 

As a part of my "daddy's girl" responsibilities I had to be completely in his way, all up in his business, and ask him at least twenty-five questions..a minute. 

He hooked up the clamps on his truck and started it. He popped the hood on mom' car and attached the other end of the cables. My dad then explained to me more about the process of "jumping" a car to stop my questions before they arose. 

However....I was SO not listening. I was running around the car and hopping into the passenger seat of the car and buckling up and I was doing it all fast! I grabbed onto the door handle with my right hand and the shifter with my left. This was intense. My knuckles started to get white as I gripped my makeshift handles just as tightly as I could for a few more minutes. I was wishing more than anything that I had my bicycle helmet with me. Had I known, I definitely would have grabbed my bicycle helmet! 

I waited. 

My joints were starting to get sore. 

I waited more. 

The anticipation was killing me! 

I waaaaaaiiiiiittttteeed more!

I couldn't take it anymore. 

I opened the door. I leaned my head out just as far as I thought was safe given the risky circumstances and hollered, "Hey!! How high is this thing supposed to jump?? Did I miss it?"

After some chuckling under their breath, one of my parents started my mom's now "jumped" car much to my dissapointment I found out later that I didn't miss it. The once in a lifetime car-jumping experience I thought I was privy to was really as mundane as watching a baby dirty a diaper. 

Lesson learned: Never take thinks for face value 

 

Or: Don't trust your parents

Or: Don't ever get excited about anything because you will always be diassapointed. 

Whatever you take from this please note that "jumping" a car is really not that exciting and if you haven't witnessed it because you have a fancy car with fancy automatic shut off lights....you aren't missing anything and you definitely don't need a bicycle helmet! 

(This is how I wish I would have looked that fateful day that I learned to not trust anything that I hear.)

This isn't me...in case you were confused. If it makes it better, I didn't grab this kid off the internet. I know him in real life. 

I Wanted to Become a Teacher for Two Reasons....

God gave me a mother. God didn't just give me a mother to bathe me and clothe me when I was little, He gave me a mother that could teach me things. I think He gave me to her so I could teach her some things too.

You see, my mother and I are what are called "polar-opposites." Where she is whimsical; I am rational. Where she is creative; I am organized. Where she is irrational; I am logical. We love each other more than life itself, but we make each other CrAzY! To be fair though, for every ounce of crazy she has ever made me, I have done at least twice as much to her. (I was the spawn of Satan. Really. I was terrible. Ask around, it's the truth and ain't nobody gonna sugar-coat it for you to save my reputation.)

One thing that we have in common though is the love of a new chalk board eraser, a heart that races as we walk down the office supplies aisle at Wal*mart, and an uncontainable squeal of joy as we open up a new 64 count box of Crayola crayons. For the first seventeen and three quarters years of my life I stifled these feelings. The LAST thing (that I would ever admit) that I would chose to be as an adult is a teacher....my mom is a teacher.

However, she is not JUST a teacher. She is the best teacher. She is the teacher that literally REMEMBERS every student, not just the smart ones or the ones that smell nice. She is the teacher that ten years into their successful career, students can still remember their favorite teacher and without pause say that the ONE teacher that told them that they could do anything and meant it was Mrs. Walton. My Mom guys! She's THAT teacher. A life changer.

She taught at an elementary school and when given the classroom combination of a severely disabled, a non-reader, an abused, a fostered, an attention deficit, and a learning impaired child in a classroom full of others wonderfully high and desperately low she could turn them into the highest readers and the most improved statistically. She taught second graders to believe in themselves, how to laugh at their mistakes, how to set goals and reach them, but most importantly that that are what THEY believe and not what someone else thinks of them. In her classroom students were no longer described by a disability but by a personality or a smile.  They knew that. They KNEW that they are different in her eyes.

Now back when I was in high school I tutored a little girl and after a few weeks of working with her after school, she ran to me with tears in her eyes saying that she had gotten the highest grade on a math test...ever. She was so proud that she had done it herself. She had learned that math didn't have to be the boss of her. She wanted to tell me that she had done it, but it was only after I believed in her. My mom was there for that experience. She told me later that she knew I had "it" all along, the passion for teaching. I knew she meant it and from that day forward I pursued Math Education as my career.

I teach high school math, 9th through 12th grade, at a small school now. I try to instill the same lessons into their hearts as my mom did to so many of her students the thirty some years that she taught. When my students complain about an assignment (because I KNOW that math is the single most hated subject since the dawn of time) I simply respond, "I wanted to become a teacher for two reasons: The second one being that I like to torture high school students." (A joke, of course) The number one reason though will always be that I am trying to one day be half the teacher that my mother was and that I am only striving to change one life like she changed so many others.

(Here we are together after my college graduation. I love this picture of her and even though I don't love me it the picture I cherish this photo because it's one of very few of us together.)

Being Happy with Yourself Isn't Brought on by Comparing Yourself to Others..

Let me tell you a secret... I have a sister. Not just any sister, but one that I sound like, I walk like, I act like, and I look like. A sister that I am enough like that we often get confused for each other by people that we have known our whole lives despite the fact that she is five years older and has a wonderful, beautiful son.

Aside from all that, there is one thing that separates us. We have the same parents, but very different genes. (Hers are size four and mine are size ten, punny..right?) Don't get me wrong a size ten is not huge. It's not even big. In today's society though women are taught to compare ourselves to others, and without exception I do this to just about every woman I see from age 16 to 60, ESPECIALLY my sister.

Growing up, I was always a little bigger than my sister. I'm an inch and a half taller, my feet are a size bigger, and my pants were always a size bigger or more. Being 5'8'' in the sixth grade is enough to give any little girl a complex and it was only salt in my wound knowing that my high school sister even weighed less than me! Even when she was nine months pregnant, I could still tip the scales more than her if she was sopping wet. Oh how I hated her for it. It is also no secret that the shining moment of glory in my life was when I witnessed someone call her "hefty!" (It didn't matter that she had JUST had a baby or that I was still bigger than her or that she has never once made a joke of my size. It mattered that I wasn't the "hefty" one for once.)


This blog isn't about my sister though, its about my constant struggle to maintain my weight. I literally do not put anything in my mouth without thinking about how its going to affect my body. The fact that if I just want to stay the size I am (not to lose weight, but just to maintain my weight) exercise has to be a fairly regular part of my lifestyle. Through many years of self-coaching and great friends I have learned to be "okay" with my size and to strive to be healthy rather than skinny. I am now more okay myself than I ever have been, not because I think I am in great shape, but because I have literally worked my rear off squeezing back into a size 10. (For one glorious summer, I stopped worrying about what I ate and only worked out when I felt like it!   .....and by August I was thirty (YES THIRTY POUNDS IN ONE SUMMER) pounds heavier.)

(On the right is me at my heaviest.)

 I have made a few poor choices in diet lately and have not been working out three or more times a week like I should and I have gained enough weight to make me start worrying about how I look in my formerly favorite outfits, but instead of griping about it or blaming my sister for my jealousy issues I am starting a workout plan. Every day that I workout I get a reward (not food because that is SO counterproductive) and everyday that I skip $5.00 is going into a jar and being donated to charity.

Today is Day #1 and I hope that I can make it to Day #45 so that I can by myself a watch that I've had my eye on for a looooong time now and I promised myself that I would get it guilt-free! So come on Day #45!!

So PLEASE join me in a workout, ask me for my updates, ridicule me if I skip, and make a HEALTHY choice for you and your body today. Being happy with yourself isn't brought on by comparing yourself to others, but earned by knowing how far you've come in your journey! Now, since my road is muddy and I can't run outside I am going to do a Pinterest workout in my living room!