Finding Time To Exercise When You Have Young Children

As most of you know, I have seven children. Three of them are teenage girls, so they don't hinder my exercise time in any way, other than trying to talk my ear off occasionally while I am concentrating on a complicated move. But finding time to exercise with small children in the house is a lot more complicated.

My younger four children are aged 6 years, 3 years, 2 years and 10 weeks. I find that I often have to wait until the evenings to do my workouts because that is when the teenagers and my husband are home. But the teenagers usually would rather be playing video games in the other room and the husband sometimes has to work late (or also would rather be playing video games in the other room), so there are times I have to be more creative with my workouts.

Last night was one of those times. The baby started crying while I was exercising. And nothing calmed him. His diaper was dry and he didn't want to eat. He just wanted to fuss. I had been exercising for about 20 minutes, and I wasn't getting much of a workout because I had to keep stopping to try and calm the baby.

I finally gave up and came up with a different solution. Here are a couple of photos of my solution.



Yes, my hips look enormous, and yes, my my workout clothes are very baggy. (I've dropped a few sizes since I bought them.) The toys in the photos are not as close to me as they look, and I had a burp rag over my shoulder because the baby spits up often.

The really great thing was that Cameron stopped crying while I exercised with him this way. And when I stopped for a moment, he started to fuss again. When I started to do the stepping exercise again, he fell asleep. After 25 minutes of doing Wii Step Aerobics with Cameron in my arms, my back was killing me! The workout did become a lot harder though and I built up more of a sweat, so that was good. I might have to do this form of exercise more often!