Mother's Day Massage

I received the most lovely Mothers Day gift from my seven year old daughter yesterday. She gave me a little handwritten voucher to be redeemed for a massage.

She has been learning the art of massage at school as an initiative to promote positive touch by a teacher passionate about the benefits of both giving and receiving massage - benefits that include reducing anxiety, helping with focus and building relationships on trust and respect. 

When I was ready to redeem my massage voucher, I put on some mellow music (a Michael Buble CD did the job) and lit a candle that had been part of a thoughtful gift from my grown up girls that made feel, with every tear that ran down my cheeks, how blessed I am to be their mother.

Scene set, I sat comfortably on a bean bag and let my little girl work her magic on my back, arms, hands, head and shoulders.

The massage was wonderful. I am an absolute believer in the healing power of touch. It was without a doubt restorative but the connectedness with this little human being that I brought into the world (and love with all that I am) was indescribably good. 

As a family, we are no strangers to touch. We hold hands and we cuddle...  a lot. However, I do think that making time for massage could have enormous benefits.

At the end of the session, she thanked me for allowing her to give me a massage as she has been taught to do. Learning to give and being grateful for the opportunity to give is so important and I was glad to be reminded of it.

It really was a very special Mothers Day gift.

Muddy Trainers

I don't tend to celebrate Valentines day. The following week is my wedding anniversary so I put my romantic efforts into that occasion instead. My husband did give me red roses and I gave him and the kids red foil wrapped heart shaped chocolates but my greatest Valentines pleasure is buying reduced to clear merchandise in the days following and using them to set the scene for the anniversary celebration.

That didn't happen this year. Immediately after valentines day, I left my husband and my red roses and took the children off for a few days of visiting with my parents. By the time my anniversary weekend came around I had no '75% off' table confetti/ light up ballons/ cuddly toys/ love crackers etc and no plan.

No plan isn't quite true. I had arranged for the little ones to have a weekend sleepover with their big sister to give my husband and I some much needed time together. I thought about how best to spend this precious 'us time'. I considered a stay at a hotel with a spa or a dinner for two at a nice restaurant. In the end, the most important thing was the actual time together so keeping it as simple as possible was probably our best bet. I tidied the house and we bought a few treats for a special home cooked meal. The one thing that we both really wanted to do was to drive out to some beautiful countryside and go for a run.

When we were planning where to go, we made allowances for the fact that it was a bit wet and windy by choosing a forest run. I imagined compacted forest paths sheltered by trees.  Arriving at our destination, we realised our mistake. The route we had selected was actually exposed heathland with gorse bushes and steep hills. The drive through the forest to get there had been beautiful and now, here we were in this bleak landscape being battered by wind and rain. Oh well! No point turning back. Off we went!

The weather did ease off a bit and we had wrapped up warm so that wasn't too much of a problem. The hills drained all the energy in our legs but we weren't here to set any speed records so we didn't mind having to stop and walk.  The worst part was the mud. So many different kinds of mud. A whole pallette of mud from black through to pale yellowy grey with all shades of brown in between. Sticky mud. Sloshy mud. Deep mud. Vast oceans of mud sucking at our feet with every step. It did cross my mind that we could be in a luxury spa right now having a very different kind of mud treatment. We ran. We trudged. We slipped. We slid. My husband fell over in the mud with fairly amusing consequences. Were we discouraged? No! We were having the best time. We were loving it. 

It took us nearly an hour to complete the 5 kilometer circular route - an hour of torturous bliss!

We had a wonderful weekend. My valentines roses even had some life left in them to provide the romantic touch that I'd failed to do with my usual post valentine bargain hunting. The only slight niggle was the state of my mud caked trainers. I feared they would never be the same agaiin. After leaving them drying for a week, I thought that the best way to clean them would be to put them on and go for a little run in the hope that the mud would just fall away.

Today, the sun was shining. I put on my once purple trainers and marvelled at the little dust cloud produced when I tied the laces. I planned the route in my head - out the back gate, across the football pitch to the path that runs around the hockey pitches, through the car park, into the woods, across the meadows onto the footpath that leads back to the road, down the road and back to my house. It was a perfect plan apart from the into the woods and across the meadows part. My trainers are muddier than when I started.

Plan B. Washing machine?

Giving it up for Lent

I had been drinking too much coffee.

It was the begining of Lent.

I put these two facts together and came to a logical conclusion to give up coffee for Lent.

Had I known how horribly unpleasant withdrawing from caffeine would be, I would never have  considered going cold turkey like that. I would have devised a careful plan to cut down gradually over a suitable amount of time and gently beat the addiction into a manageable habit. I entered into my " give up coffee for Lent" plan with ignorant optimism and found out the hard way how it feels to suddenly be deprived of a substance to which your body has become overly familiar with and possibly reliant on.

The first day without caffeine was absolutely fine. No adverse effects. No cravings. It was day two when the headache hit. The headache could not be ignored. The headache lasted three whole days. The headache was not even the worst of it.

I thought I must be coming down with flu. My muscles ached with a deep niggling ache that made it almost impossible to get comfortable or to have a restful nights sleep. The ache bore into joints as well adding to my misery. I didn't want to do anything and doing nothing was still ridiculously difficult. These symptoms persisted without any other signs of flu developing.

It was during the night when sleep eluded me and I feared I might never be at peace in my own body again that I started searching the internet on a quest for find answers for my malady.

Caffeine withdrawal. It was as simple as that. 

I could have abandoned my self denial plan and launched into "moderate coffee consumption" but I was worried that that might lead straight back to over indulging to a dangerously high degree. I decided to persevere... to remember the relentless aches that had plagued me for days and use than as a deterrent against returning to my old ways.

The aching muscles and joints subsided about a day after the headache lifted. I didn't feel fantastic but I was OK. 

There are still many days before Easter and I am not even going to think about drinking coffee until the period of Lent is over. In the meantime I am drinking occasional cups of green tea or decaffeinated coffee.

I miss the smell of coffee and I miss the ritual of a coffee break  (green tea break just doesn't have that same impact) but I am convinced that what I am doing is for the best.