walk it off

when I was a little girl, I had to wear an eye patch, pirate style.

Thanks to a little thing called strabismus, I had (and still have) a lazy eye. Don't worry, I don't walk the streets looking like a crazy, thankfully contacts and glasses set my eye straight. When I was younger, I would wear an eye patch over my strong eye to strengthen the weak one.

And I hated it. When I was really little, the eye patches were pretty much big sticky band-aids, which hurt like a mother to take off. And then later, there were these neat felt ones that slid over my glasses (making it easy to cheat). Because the big sticky ones were so awful, my mom made a calendar, put it on the fridge, and every day that I wore my eye patch she would place a sticker on the calendar. When the calendar was full, she'd take me out for a prize, like a Barbie. It worked. Like a charm.

Fast forward almost twenty years later. For years my mom has been complaining about weighing more than she'd like. But she never does anything about it. She doesn't like to buy new clothes, because hopefully one day soon she'll magically shrink and then they wouldn't fit. A few years ago she and my dad bought a treadmill. That I've used more than her. Problem is, I've probably only used it ten or so times.

I've begun to realize how much my mother and I are alike. We need that push from someone else, and, I just realized, we're not self starters. Bummer.

I guess this means I need to be the one that pushes this time. So yesterday, I made a calendar. Put in on the fridge. Got some cool stickers.

And this morning (because she kept putting me off yesterday) we got up (way earlier than I'd like) and went for a walk.

A forty minute walk. The compromise we made because she didn't do the twenty minute walk yesterday.

I hope my mom will keep with it so she can get her barbie.