Before going away I stuck to my core stability exercises with an unwavering determination. For me, acute back pain was the most debilitating thing that I have ever had the misfortunte to endure and I clung to the idea of nightly pilates based core stability exercises as a way to prevent a (4th) recurrance. Every night, as soon as the kids were all asleep I would make the exercises my priority. Often this would be the only downtime I woud get in the day, often I would be interupted by one of the kids not being quite as asleep as I thought, but I stuck to my routine.  I saw Rachel for one on one pilates sessions to make sure the exercises were giving me optimum benefits. I wrote this post talking about the importance of core stability in keeping back pain at bay in the early parenting journey. I even felt strong enough to start a little light jogging, and wrote this post about it. In short, I felt pretty good and very committed to getting stronger and healthier.

Then I went on holiday. A long 5 week holiday to the UK, with Grant and all 4 kids. Ambitious, wonderful, exhausting and over way too quickly. Whole days went by on areoplanes with barely a moment to sleep let alone get down on the floor and contract my core muscles. Moments when the kids were sleeping were spent reconnencting with family and old friends. Somehow the exercises slipped from being part of my daily routine to something I felt guilty about not doing. Oh, how easy it is and how familiar that feeling is.

So this post is a way of taking stock and telling myself to get started again. I have booked in a review with Rachel for 2 weeks time and will get the daily sesssions going again… starting tonight! I’m lucky that I haven’t had a big flare up of pain but I definitely feel creaky and achy and a little vulnerable.. as if one wrong move might carry a very high price.  Definitely time to get my core back on.

In other news; I drank a lot of coffee and gorged myself on chocolate, which is in direct contrast to how I planned to cope with chronic sleep deprivation (a major feature of the trip) when I wrote this post. But here’s the thing; sometimes you do all the wrong things (in theory) and you still feel pretty darn good at the end of the day. Happy times!…..(although perhaps I wouldn’t be suffering quite so acutely with the dreaded jet lag if I had been a little more moderate in my consumption of the dark stuff.)