Before I dive in to that, I'd first like to reiterate that when my husband went to see the cardiologist several weeks ago, they suggested that he suspend any further strenuous workouts (i.e., P90X) until they completed his stress test. They wanted to make absolutely positively certain that his ticker was ticking the way it should be.
Charlie heeded this medically delivered guidance for approximately five days. On the sixth day, he went running. A few days after that, I arrived home from work to see that he had raked our entire back lawn which is situated on a hill with an approximately 18% grade. Perhaps I didn't mention it, but we neglected to rake our back lawn this past Fall.
(See those brown things? They're TREES. Notice how they don't have any LEAVES? That's because they're all on our LAWN.)
So in the course of approximately eight hours, he filled up 75 garbage bags full of leaves.
SEVENTY FIVE BAGS.
That's an ENTIRE box of lawn bags. This past October, I spent an entire weekend raking our front yard and filled up no more than 15 bags. My husband more than quadrupled that.
IN A DAY.
Then, he chopped and dragged up the huge piles of debris that have accumulated in our yard over the winter.
Because their father wasn't supposed to be doing any strenuous exercise, our children kicked in to gear and helped by transporting the leaves from the back of our house to the top of the driveway. Wow, I really love it when they pitch in and help out around the house. Even if they only transported 10% of the bags to their yard-waste deposit destination, I see tremendous potential for the chores that these children will one day be doing around here....
Ahhhh... I'm in a recliner with my feet up, nibbling on grapes and casually flipping through a magazine while the children are scrubbing floors, washing windows, dusting furniture and folding the piles of laundry. A beam of sun shines through the window and I slip in to a happy dream...
*Thump!*
(Sound of my head hitting the keyboard and me, startling awake.)
As it turns out, Charlie's heart is thankfully, fine. And while we are very happy about that, it was a bit discouraging that he was diagnosed with borderline hypertension and put on blood pressure medication that he'll remain on for ... maybe forever.
Alas! Every cloud has a silver lining, and the silver lining to this diagnosis is that "we" now have a medically necessitated reason to drink red wine and indulge on dark chocolate every night.
We're planning to start P90X again, this weekend. We would start it tonight, but I just finished hosting our second Daisy Girl Scout meeting. It was incredibly fun ... but with 25 six-year-old girls in attendance, it was definitely enough exercise for one day.
