Just as I feared

None of M's friends showed up on Saturday. It is understandable. As I said before, most of her classmates live in the same city as the school while we live about 30 minutes away. I think I erred by not calling each girl's parents and emphasizing that while this was not a party, it was her birthday present.

I'm not sure that it would have made much of a difference, though. People around here are weird about gatherings. I don't know if it is a black thing or a southern thing, but people rarely have parties and they don't RSVP when they are invited to one. I wasn't surprised to find out that all the girls invited to the twins' birthday party came from non-Southern families (they were all white, too, but we aren't going to dwell on that). They all showed up on time and brought a gift even though I was trying to play down the fact that it was their birthday. I marvel at people who get together with friends once a week to play games because ABM and I can't manage to get our friends together more than two or three times a year.




Today's Exercise: Tae Bo Kicks

I've gotten off to a good start this week. Tae Bo Kicks is a Billy Blanks exercise video for kids. He doesn't exactly have the fun, bouncy presence that you expect in a kids' exercise instructor but the workout was easy enough for me to make it through the whole 35 minutes. I feel like I got a good workout and (so far) my back isn't bothering me. He doesn't work evenly on both sides of the body but that isn't much of a problem; I just stopped when he instructed them to do an extra rep on one side. The other benefit besides it being a workout I can do all the way through is that he kept all that "communicating with your body" stuff to a minimum. All the exercise philosophy between reps is what turned me off when I tried the basic Tae Bo video years ago. Although in most things I want to know the reason why I am doing it, with exercise I just want the routine.