A Return to Routine

Total steps yesterday:  10,008
Exercise for today:  3 mile run

Ah, it's good to be back to the semi-norm in the W household.  James is still waiting to hear when he can go back to work, but at least he's out of the hospital.  Yesterday was the last day of my four day weekend and the first day not spent at the hospital.  Instead, I spent it running around doing the errands I'd put off the previous three days.

In that respect, I feel like this weekend was probably at least a hint at the adventures of motherhood, in that I spent the entire time focused on others' well-being -- I was either at the hospital with James, running home to take care of Zoe, or sleeping.  This isn't a complaint, exactly, but more led to the realization that within a few months pretty much every waking (and some sleeping) moment will be dedicated to caring for another creature.  Good  thing I count naps as "me time", otherwise I'd have no time to myself.

But today was the return to work for me, a return to working out, and a return to blogging, and it's good to be back.  Well, not necessarily back at work, but back to everything else.  My run today was awesome.  I mean, the run itself was whatever.  I struggled along at 11 minute miles and needed to pee the entire time, but I completed it.  And afterward I remembered how good it was to have endorphins flowing.

A moment of realness here:  something about October is always really hard on me emotionally.  There's no real reason for this, but as long as I can remember, I sink in to some sort of an October funk every year.  It's not even sadness, necessarily, but a combination of apathy and helplessness that leaves me feeling kind of numb.  I try to fight it every year, or tell myself that this will be the year that I actually talk to a doctor about it, but it never happens.  And then November rolls around and I'm fine again.  I think pregnancy hormones, combined with way too much stress over this government shutdown, are making it a little worse than normal this year, which is why those running endorphins were the best ever today.  Just 33 little minutes of exercise and my mood is infinitely better today than it's been in about a week.  And I think I'll actually sleep well tonight, as an added bonus.  Long story short, exercise is the best, even when it's slow and pathetic.

Because I shouldn't be sad.  I should be happy, like this girl was after her dad returned from mysteriously being gone for three days:

It's hard to be sad when that's the face I get to come home to every day.