International Blog Swap Day - Introducing Polly

Today is a very special day on my blog as I'm hosting my first guest post from Polly, the creator of the UK lifestyle blog This Enchanted Pixie as part of the International Blog Swap Day. I am also featured today over on her site if you want to take a look. So without further ado, I hand you over to Polly ....

Hello!! I'm excited to be blog swapping with the lovely Lizzy today!
 
My name is Polly, and I'm wife to a bearded man and Mama to three girls - Lola who will be 11 tomorrow, Kiki who is 7 {and a very important half} and Baya who is 5. We live in a little town in North Wales, close to the sea and the mountains. We live in a 200 year old house right next door to a beautiful church. Our house is always full of noise, mess, glitter and most importantly, laughter. I started my current blog when my youngest was a baby, as a way to document our days, to meet other mama's and to give myself a little creative outlet.
 
I've been a stay-at-home mama since my eldest was born. These days I'm also a professional blogger and indie business owner. I run two businesses - a jewelry shop and a bath + body shop. We also home-school our three daughters, and have for the past seven years. It's been a fantastic journey, we have a lot of fun together, learning about the things that grab their interests, exploring the world around us, making and creating every single day. You can read a FAQ post I wrote about Homeschooling here, and I have just started a new series entitled 'Homeschooling looks like..."
 
Aside's from writing about homeschooling, I also blog about Things I love, bits + pieces of our daily life, crafts, recipes and inspiration! We just got a new kitten called Olaf - an addition to our two other cats, two guinea pigs and four chickens! I dream of living on a small holding and having a whole menagerie of animals.
 
You can read more about me, and find some of my favourite posts here. Thanks so much for having me Lizzy!

The Five Most Memorable Pieces of Advice My Mother Gave Me

I'm joining in the Finish the Sentence Friday today, where the sentence to finish is "Dear Mom ..." I'm going to have to take some poetic licence on that one though because if I wrote 'Mom' my mother would fear I had up and fled to the US of A overnight. So being Aussie, I'm going to have to make it 'Mum' :)

Dear Mum,

This Mothers' Day, I want to thank you for all the advice you have given me over the years. We both know that most of it went in one ear and out the other, but I suppose we can both live in hope that it's all there rattling around in my subconscious and one day I will actually start putting it all to good use.

You set such an amazing example of work ethic, organisation, thrift, routine and all-round domestic order. You always got up at the crack of dawn, ironed everything including underwear, without fail wrote down every cent you spent in a little book, never burnt the dinner or forgot an important date, never made lumpy mashed potato and never sunk into any of the domestic disasters that I did, like running out of toilet paper when there were guests in the house. Despite being a perfectionist, you always had a wonderful sense of humour and sometimes, even when you were being serious, you ended up being funny. You know I love you dearly, but if you need a reminder, please go and read this post again. Today, my Mothers' Day message is not quite as sentimental, but just as special to me: it contains the five most memorable pieces of advice that you imparted to me. Now I did warn you that one day I would have to write these down and that they may even end up on the blog.  I hope that reading them makes you smile as much as I did writing and remembering them ...

The Five Most Memorable Piece of Advice You Ever Gave Me 

1. Always do the grocery shopping first thing in the morning as soon as the supermarket opens to avoid any hold-ups by bumping into anyone you know (but don't really like) and having to waste time chatting to said people. This is very good advice indeed - except, of course, if all the people you want to avoid bumping into have the same idea!

2. Wind up the hills hoist (a height-adjustable Australian version of the clothesline) as high as you can so that you have to stretch up to hang out the clothes - this will ensure you are regularly giving your abdominal muscles a workout. Now if that isn't the ultimate in incidental exercise, then I don't know what is, but your abdominals were always quite impressive and I never saw you do a single sit-up, so you proved that it pays off!

3. Keep a whistle by the phone to ward off prank callers. In the days before caller ID, we received many a prank call and I have several fond memories of giggling with a mixture of shock and glee when my well- mannered, even-tempered Mother blew that whistle with all her might down the phone at the pranker before hanging up.

4. Always put talcum powder into your bathing cap before going swimming - this stops the cap from ripping, stops bacteria from festering inside it and makes it easier to take it off your head afterwards, thus protecting your hair. These were all very good reasons indeed to put talcum powder in my bathing cap before school swimming lessons. I think, however, that you may have over compensated a bit with the powder because I'm not so sure that you're supposed to put so much in that it leaves your hair ghostly white for the rest of the day. This would have been okay, I suppose, if we'd been allowed to shower after swimming lessons (which we weren't) or if all the other mothers insisted on putting talc in their child's caps too (which they didn't).  I therefore spent a rather large proportion of my primary school days looking like a geriatric. Now I'm not saying there's anything wrong with having white hair. I love your white hairs and I know that I'm responsible for most of them. But it's just hard to be cool at school when you're sporting that look.

And now for the cream of the crop ...

5. Never scream when there is a cake in the oven as this will cause the cake to sink in the middle. If I remember correctly, you explained that this had something to do with physics and you had me utterly convinced of this phenomenon for about twenty-five years, right up until I told a group of adult friends once to keep their voices down so the cake we were baking together wouldn't sink in the middle. When I told them how I knew this, they rolled around laughing. "You're mum just wanted some peace and quiet for half an hour!" they told me. "Oh", I replied, taking a while to process this. "Do you think that might be why she used to bake so often?!"

So Happy Mothers' Day, my funny, clever mum. I promise to make you a cake on Sunday ... as long as you can convince the grandkids to stay quiet while it bakes!

P.S I love you!

It's Official: Pregnancy Attracts Foot in Mouth Disease

A friend of mine told me on the weekend that she and her husband had started trying to get pregnant with their first child.

"I'm not making that common knowledge though", she added, after I'd expressed my excitement.

"It's going to drive me insane if it takes a long time to get pregnant and people keep asking me 'are you pregnant yet? Are you pregnant yet?' "

Wise words, I would venture to say, since as I think you would agree, any pregnancy, or anticipated pregnancy, seems to attract a unwanted torrent of unsolicited remarks even from the most unlikely sources.

After this conversation with my friend, I reflected on some of the comments people had made to me during my two pregnancies. These aren't things that I think about often, but I can't honestly say that they didn't shock me a bit at the time. I've also heard quite a few friends tell me of ridiculous remarks people have made during their pregnancies too. So I've come to the conclusion that it's official: pregnancy attracts foot in mouth disease.

With that in mind, I thought I'd share with you a smattering of some of the comments I received during my own pregnancies:

These little gems came my way when I was pregnant with my son ...

* "Wow! You're big for 5 months!" (This one came from a girl I worked with at the time who was in her early twenties and had never given birth. I'm still unsure why she thought she was the authority on pregnancy)

* "Have you still got 10 weeks to go? I thought you must have been about to pop!"

* "It must be the pregnancy hormones that are making your skin so bad."

And I couldn't possibly forget these either ...

* When I was about ten weeks pregnant, I went into a dress shop to buy a ball gown to wear to a function run by my husband's work. I just wanted to browse and try some things on by myself, but the lady in the shop was very insistant that she wanted to help. So I gave in and described to her what I was looking for. "I don't want it to be too tight though", I told her, "because I'm pregnant". Her plastered smile instantly dropped off her face, she touched my arm and said "Oh my God". Looking back I can't actually believe I went ahead and bought a dress from that shop, but it wasn't a big city and there weren't many other options. I thought later that maybe she thought I'd come in to buy a dress for a school ball. Even so, I hope she has since changed career as customer service clearly was not her forte!

 * I was a third year uni student at the time and one day when I was about seven months pregnant, I was walking across campus to get to a lecture. I passed by two girls who I had never seen before. As I walked past them one of them muttered, softly but quiet loud enough and clearly intended for me to hear: "slut". And no, I'm not joking (although I think this fits into the category of 'downright nasty', rather than foot in mouth).

Here are the pearls of wisdom that came while I was pregant with my daughter 8 years later ...

* "I can't believe you're going back to the baby stage again after all that time!"

* "How come you waited so long to have number two?"

* "I didn't think you were going to have any more children". (I can't remember how I responded to this one, but I'm sure what I would like to have said would have been along the lines of "Really? And what exactly gave you that impression??")

* "You shouldn't be working if you're pregnant" (this one came from a reprobate adolescent who I used to teach - or at least tried to. I will forgive him though due to his tender age).

Oh, and just one more for good luck. During my last pregnancy, I saw many different doctors through the public health system and I only actually saw the doctor who ended up delivering my daughter for the first time while I was in the very final stages of labor. The next day she was doing her rounds of the ward and came to my room. Without so much as a smile, she asked how I was doing and then said "Was it a planned pregnancy?"

Needless to say, I was gobsmacked. I'm still mystified as to her motivation for asking me that. My partner was with me during the birth and my records showed that I already had another child. Plus, the baby was already born so I really did have to ask myself exactly how useful that question was on a scale of one to utterly useless!

Ah, but I suppose all these things prepare us for the onslaught of unwanted opinion that punctuates the rest of our journeys through motherhood: the debate between breast or bottle, co-sleeping or cot, private or public schools, the speculation over the right time to introduce solids and toilet training and all our choices regarding anything from dummies* to discipline to daycare.

Lucky kids are so darn cute, isn't it?


                                                            
* that's pacifiers, for my American friends :)


Did anyone say any rude or ridiculous things to you or someone you know during pregnancy? 

The Alphabet Weekends - G is for Good Deeds

We are well and truly overdue for an Alphabet Weekend update and to be honest, we are running quite behind on our Alphabet Weekend challenge (that was my New Year's Resolution to do 26 family activities throughout 2014, each starting with a consequetive letter of the alphabet). I've decided that I should forgive myself for that though considering that, among other things, we did move to a new house located over 300km away from our old house and what with everything that comes with a move like that, we were bound to have a bit of a hiccup in even our best laid plans!

I had planned on taking Ben and his cousin go-karting for our G weekend. We were all set to jump in the car and head off, but I thought I'd just ring the venue to make sure they could fit us in first. The lady on the phone said they had plenty of room, but were each of the participants at least 145cm tall? I didn't actually know what Ben's current height was so what ensued was a rather dramatic scene in which he, his cousin and I all ran around the house hunting for a tape measure or a ruler with the baby hot on our heels, but to no avail. I then sent Ben next door to ask the neighbours if he could borrow their tape measure (and told the go-carting lady I would call her back). He came back looking very solemn indeed and mumbled "I'm only 141cm".

It took some persuading to convince him that there would be no possible way to trick anybody that he was 4cm taller than he actually is (he did mention the possibility of high heels and spiky hair, bless him). So the go-karting did not happen, but I have decided that I can definitely make this situation work in my favour. For instance, I will now be able to say things like:

"Eat up all your vegetables or you won't grow tall enough to go go-karting!" and

"You'd better go to bed early from now on because people don't grow properly if they don't sleep enough!"

I did take Ben and his cousin for an outting on the train to the city that day instead and we did do lots of fun things, but none of them started with G (unless you count galavanting, gawking and giggling).

So after our false start we went back to the drawing board and decided that for G we would do some good deeds. 

We put our heads together and thought of four good deeds that we could do around our neighbourhood.

This is what we came up with:

First, we went for a walk around the block with a plastic bag each and picked up the rubbish that we saw along the way ...

The funny thing is that I've done that walk at least two dozen times before and had never really noticed how much rubbish is strewn around the streets. Both our bags were full before we'd even been walking for ten minutes. Oh, and I promise I did some rubbish collecting too, there's just no photographic evidence to prove it!

Along the way we saw an adondoned shopping trolley, so we walked it back to the supermarket ...

(and when I say we, this time I mean Ben).

When we got to the supermarket, we bought a Thank You card and went home and wrote a message to a friend of mine whose house we had stayed at for a few nights during the school holidays ...

And lastly, we went through our wardrobes and found all the clothes and shoes we don't wear anymore and put them in a big bag ....

Then we walked back up to the shops, posted the card and dropped the clothes off at the donation bin.

And after that, I was so tired from all the walking that I put my feet up and Ben made me a cup of tea (one extra good deed for him and one very nice treat for me :)

So there it is - our G weekend.Please tell me that late is better than never!

Now you wouldn't happen to have any suggestions about what we could do for H, have you??

.

The Bikini Bridge - and the beauty of hindsight

Perhaps you've heard about it already.

It's the latest in thinspiration, the younger sister of the 'thigh gap' and the current measuring stick - in the eyes of countless susceptibility young women - for beauty.

They call it the bikini bridge. A girl who has one is a girl who, when lying on her back in a bikini, has a gap between her hipbones and her stomach. The 'bridge' is the material of her bikini bottoms that stretches over that gap between her hipbones. All over social media, young girls have sent in their selfies of their bridges in their droves. It seems that everyone who has one wants the whole world to know about it.

But where does that leave everyone else who doesn't? With just one more reason to hate their body and feel horrendously uncomfortable in their own skin?

There are literally thousands of photos of bikini bridges on the web, many of them purporting messages such as these:

                                                                           image source

                                                                         image source


                                                                      image source

                                                                       image source

I first read about this trend in an online article at the beginning of summer. I expected the feminist in me to feel outraged by it. But I surprised myself. What I actually felt was a profound sense of sadness.

I did not feel sad because the article impacted in any way on my own self esteem. What I felt was an aching despondency for the fact that such a huge number of young women were allowing themselves to be objectified in this way and feeling beautiful because of it. Not even realising how they were being used.

Young women just like the teenagers I used to teach.

Young women just like my nieces will be in just a few years' time.

Young women just like my own little girl will be one day too.

No matter how hard to try to protect her, this is the reality of the world she will grown up in: she may grow be the smartest of all the girls she knows, or the funniest, the most talented, the most capable or the kindest, but all anyone will seem to want to know about is what she looks like in a bikini.

And then I realised, with that mixture of regret and sagacity that can only come via error and hindsight, that not so very long ago in the scheme of things, I too was one of those naive, susceptible girls, horrendously uncomfortable in my own body for no good reason, except the fact that I had no understanding back then of the difference between what is truly beautiful and what is, tragically, actually the objectification of women. If I were a teenager now, would I be one of those girls sending in their bikini bridge selfie to Instagram or to Facebook? I would like to think not, but I honestly cannot say. I do know that my teenage self would have believed that having that coveted bikini bridge might have meant that someone would actually notice me and admire me and possible even love me. How many years of my life did I waste feeling miserable and inadequate when all along happiness was so close, waiting patiently for me to befriend it, and all I had to do was say yes?

But I packed these thoughts up and buried them. I had no time for regretting the past or fretting for the future; the present was so intense that it consumed my every moment. I didn't think of the bikini bridge trend at all for weeks. Then a few days ago, I was sitting on a bus, my daughter asleep in my lap, and I overheard a conversation between two young girls seated behind me. One was showing the other photos she has taken of herself showing off her 'bridge'. The other was complimenting her, saying how lucky she was to be so skinny, while simultaneously putting her own self down, saying she'd never be able to have a 'bridge' because she was too fat.

How I would have loved to have turned around to these young girls and gently told them my own thoughts on the topic. But would they have listened to me? Of course not. Would I have listened myself at their age?

So I stayed staring out the window and as the bus drove on, I thought about what I would have loved to have said to them - what I would give anything to go back and be able to say to my own self - if only they, and I, would have listened. I would have said something like this ...

Dear teenage girls, dear teenage Me, 

If you really want to be happy, you must reassess what you believe to be meaning of beauty.

Beauty has nothing to do with the gap between your hipbones or your thighs, or the number of lines on your face. Beauty is not something you starve yourself to achieve. It is not something you can purchase. It is not something tangible that can be weighed and measured. 

Beauty is not about constantly striving to outdo other women or objectifying yourself to satisfy men.

Striving and objectifying are not beautiful.

So what is beautiful? you ask.

Patience is beautiful.

The patience of a mother who moves at the pace of her child, not at her own. 

The patience of a lover who waits faithfully when their love is far away. 

The patience of a mother whose heart has been broken by the cruel words and rebellion of her teenaged child who waits, all the time loving constantly, for those years to pass and the love of their child to return. 

The patience of a spouse who has watched their love grow away from them throughout the years but who waits, with a hopeful and forgiving heart, for their beloved to remember the reasons for their love and to turn their heart back to them. 

Confidence is beautiful.

Not the confidence that comes as a result of make-up or expensive clothes or being thin enough to feel accepted into an exclusive tribe, but the confidence that comes through inner peace and satisfaction; the confidence that comes from a place of self acceptance.

Contentment is beautiful.

A women who constantly strives to outdo others and is never satisfied with her achievements, her body or her face is not a beautiful woman. A beautiful woman is a woman whose soul has stopped striving and is at rest; in her presence you do not feel scrutinised, measured or assessed. You can relax when she is with you. She is not selfish with her beauty. Her beauty make those around her beautiful too.

Courage is beautiful.

The courage to say yes when everyone else is saying no, and the courage to say no when everyone else is saying yes.

The courage to walk away from all the people around you who call you friend, or lover, because you know that their friendship or their love does not  make you happy and does not allow you to be the person you were born to be. And yes, because of your courage, you will be lonely, but that loneliness will pass. I promise you that it will pass.

And I also promise you this: unless you walk away from those who drag you down, who try to change you and turn you into what they need you to be to satisfy their own desires or to lessen the pain of their own insecurities, you will never have the chance to go out and find your own tribe - the ones who were meant, all along, to call you friend, or lover. The ones who want you to succeed; who celebrate your talents. The ones who can help you ignite that fire inside of you.

They are there. Believe me, they are there. But they are not going to come knocking on the door to rescue you. First you need to be brave enough to step away from what is not right for you, no matter how comfortable and comforting your zone of security has become.

That means not everyone is going to like you. That means some people are even going to hate you. But open your eyes: people already dislike you. No matter what you do, there will always be people who dislike you. That thing you fear most? Let it go. It has already happened.

But how do I find these things? you ask

Find your bliss. Your bliss is what you do without counting the minutes while you are doing it. Your bliss is what you would choose to do, over and over again without getting paid, rather than sleep. It took me thirty years to find the courage to start following my bliss, but I always knew what my bliss was going to be since I was a little girl. Sometimes I wonder how different my life might have been had I had the courage to follow it earlier. I have a feeling that most people know in the back of their minds what their own bliss will be, but few actually ever dare to talk about it, for fear of being ridiculed.

Do not underestimate the power of music. Music has to ability not only to lift your spirits, but to heal you on a subconscious level too. You are never too old to gain pleasure from playing an instrument.

Leave your comfort zone. Travel. It could be to the other side of the world, but it doesn't have to be. It could be travelling to the other side of the city to do voluntary work with people from a different background or demographic from your own. When you re-enter your comfort zone again, you will see things from a different perspective.

Listen to old people. They have a lifetime of stories, wisdom and hindsight to share. Savour their wisdom. Learn whatever you can from their hindsight. 

But why should I bother? you ask

To understand that, you need to understand the bigger picture. You need to understand that the media wants you to hate yourself. In fact, they need you to hate yourself. When you hate yourself, you are weak and vulnerable. It is easier to sell things to you when you are weak and vulnerable, when your self esteem is rock bottom. Diet pills, diet shakes, diet plans, exercise machines, tanning lotions, anti-aging potions, the perfect make-up, the perfect tummy-tucking underwear - the list is endless. As long as they can keep you hating yourself, they can keep bringing out new products to improve the way you look and you just keep buying them. An inexhaustible market. 

You need to remember how hard women have fought to ensure that the generations of women who came after them would be given the same rights as their male counterparts. Not so very long ago, suffragettes starved themselves in prison so that someone might actually start paying serious attention to their cause. If you are going to starve yourself. do not do it to make yourself look sexually appealing for the male population. If nothing else, I think we owe that to the women whose suffering pathed the way for the rights we now seem to take so easily for granted. 

You know in your heart that what you really want is a fulfilling and lasting relationship with a man you can trust and who can respect you. You do not want a man who is distracted or tempted by the bodies of other women or by the lure of pornography. To find a man who will respect you with his body and his mind, you need to first respect yourself. You are not a piece of meat to be masturbated over. Throw away the photo of your bikini bridge or your ambition to have one. You do not need thousands of men masturbating over you. You are worth far more than that.

You are a unique, extraordinary and powerful human being. No one other person in the world has or has had or will ever have exactly the same DNA or finger prints or tooth formation as you do. No one person has ever had an identical set of experiences or thought every thought that you have ever thought. There is a purpose in this life for you to pursue that you alone can fulfill. 

And lastly, remember this: You are enough. You have always been enough. But you will only start to feel it when you start to think it. Your thoughts are the most powerful thing you have. Shift them, if they need shifting. Destroy them, if they need destroying and then rebuild them into something mighty and radiant. Let your thoughts radiate the beauty that has always been inside you.

You are as beautiful as you think you are.

This will always be my favourite photo of me in a bikini. I will never feel more beautiful than I did that day.

So what are your thoughts on the bikini bridge?

The Alphabet Weekends - F is for Fremantle

I'm writing this at the computer in the local library, Annalisa asleep beside me in her pram. I have to rush this post because I have no idea how long she will stay asleep. We've recently moved house and I have no internet access. I haven't blogged since my last edition of The Alphabet Weekends. Now we're up to 'F'. How quickly the year is passing.

Last weekend we spent the day in Fremantle for our F weekend activity. Fremantle, for those not familiar with it, is the major port city in Western Australia; the gateway through which thousands of migrants first entered Australia. It's a city that I have always felt drawn to - a touch of Europe just south of the state capital, the most isolated capital city in the world.

I love wandering down its streets and alleys, where aromas of coffee and incense float through the air. It has a strong Italian influence due to influx of migrants in the post-war period and wonderful coffee, pizza and gelato are easily found.

There is also a strong bohemian atmosphere to the city, especially on the weekends, when the famous Fremantle Markets are open. Buskers abound, live music fills the air. Every food place we enter has staff who speak with a foreign accent. The fusion of old and new, historic and alternative is exciting, fascinating, mesmerizing.

Fremantle always surprises me. Every time I visit, it opens my eyes to something new. It is a place that gives me energy and inspires me to be more creative.

But now my time on the internet here in the library is almost up, so I will let the photographs tell the rest of the story ...

With a tired baby girl in tow, we headed home on the train in the late afternoon. We really only scratched the surface of what there is to discover in this place. But they're the best kind of adventures really, aren't they, the ones that leave you with a desire to return as soon as possible to discover more.

Do you feel particularly drawn to any city or town?

Have you ever been to Fremantle? Do you have a favourite place to visit there?

And can you help me think of an activity we can do for 'G'?

The Alphabet Weekends - brought to you by the letter E (and the Guinness Book of Records)

My son is obsessed with the Guinness Book of Records. If you need to know who is the tallest, shortest, fastest or oldest person in the world, he's your man. He likes to remind me often of the woman who holds the record for giving birth to the most children (which, according to The Book, is 69!!) usually followed by the phrase I want more siblings! 

I knew that sooner or later his fixation with world records would make its way onto the blog and now that moment has come. Last weekend was 'E' time on The Alphabet Weekends (that's our challenge to do 26 fortnightly activities in 2014, each starting with a consecutive letter of the alphabet) and although I dearly wanted 'E' to be for eating, we decided to go for the other end of the spectrum and do some serious exercise while attempting to break some of those Guinness Records along the way ...

We decided on four different exercises, which we stationed around the house.

The first was skipping (with a rope).

My memory of skipping was that it was simple and fun. I'd even been on the skipping squad in primary school one year. Twenty-something years later, it was far from simple, but still just as fun.

Now according to the Guinness Book of Records:

• The record for the fastest time skipping a distance of 100m with a rope is 15.3 seconds

• To raise money for charity, a Canadian man skipped an entire marathon with a rope in 4 hours, 28 minutes and 48 seconds

• A freakishly fit guy called Joey Motsay, from the USA, once skipped rope continuously for 33 hours and twenty minutes

As for us - Ben managed to do 15 skips in a row before tripping over the rope and I managed a grand total of six.

Our second station was long jump.

According to Guinness, the record for the longest recorded long jump for a male is 8.95m and for a female is 7.52m.

Ben jumped 3.2m. According to his measurement, I jumped 50cm, although I'm sure that's wrong. It felt like at least 55!

Here's a fact I wasn't expecting to find: in 2012, a British Guinea Pig called Truffles performed a record-breaking long jump of 48cm. I do feel somewhat comforted that I can at least jump longer than a guinea pig!

Exercise station number three was trampolining.

Why didn't anyone ever tell me that after you've had kids, bouncing on a trampoline is never the same again? I am not going to go into too many details here, suffice to say that after four bounces I thought my insides were going to end up on my outsides.

If the GBOR  is anything to go by, people really do all manner of things on trampolines. They don't just bounce on them -  they play basketball on them, they do somersaults while playing basketball on them, they bounce unicycles and they hula hoop on them.  They even see who can cover 100m in the fastest time on them (would that be a very long trampoline, do you think, or lots of normal ones joined together?)

The record for the most seat-drops on a trampoline in one minute is 49, achieved by Oleksandr Nakonechny . I am unsure if Oleksandr is a man or a woman (I'm going to go with man though). I'm also unsure what a seat-drop is. Do you think it might be a fancy way of saying 'bouncing on your bum' by any chance??

Our last station was planking (as in the abdominal plank)

Ben was out to set all kinds of planking records, but he had a little visitor who had other ideas ...

The longest recorded time anyone has ever held an abdominal plank position is 3 hours, 7 minutes and 15 seconds.

Ben lasted 90 seconds.

I lasted 22.

This is my OMG THIS ACTUALLY REALLY HURTS face. 

I must admit though that exercising turned out to be a lot more fun than I thought it would be and I certainly provided Ben with some memorable entertainment.

Originally, I started sharing our Alphabet Weekend Adventures on Wordless Wednesday link-ups, but since I have accepted that I am physically incapable of being wordless, I thought I would link up with Grace instead for Flog Yo Blog Friday.

So what type of exercise do you like best? 

Do you have any thoughts about what we can do next fortnight for the letter F? 

Have you bounced on a trampoline since having kids???