Yoga with Olive

It has been YEARS since I did yoga regularly. Since I have recently been diagnosed with high cholesterol, and I personally blame it on stress, I decided to try to do some yoga again. (I am also trying to eat LESS ice cream and full-fat dairy products, more orange juice, and multi-grain delicacies...)

I pulled out my 22-minute Rodney Yee Power Yoga tape, and put it in my daughter's VCR, b/c it is the only one in the house, and proceeded to do yoga in her bedroom.

She stood next to me in Mountain Pose, hands in Namaste pose, wearing her tinkerbell dress up. She did pretty well following, hands up, down, forward bend, plank, cobra, dog pose.

As I continued to do variations of the Salute to the Sun Series, Olive ran back and forth underneath me while in dog pose, ran around me in circles during lunges, tried to OPEN my legs so that she could go through, during mountain pose, and then tried some poses herself.

I could hear her exhaling every once in awhile, when she heard me do it. During the pigeon lunge, she popped a squat on my back leg, making it most difficult for me to return to downward dog. I didn't mind all of this, I actually found it to be funny. The problem is that it is difficult to do yoga while giggling.

About halfway through she started demanding PEACHES in her soft and delicate (sarcasm) way: PEACHES! PEACHES! PEACHES!

I told her I would get her some when my yoga was over.

Next came: NO DANCE. STOP IT. NO DANCE, as she tried to get me to stop yoga-ing. While I did my sitting forward bends, she climbed on my back, which actually was ok too, because it deepened the stretch.

I just found the whole thing to be quite hilarious as I tried to connect with the earth, find a calm and happy place, and Olive was running around as the anti-yoga-tinkerbell-ite. NO DANCE!