…begins with one step. In this case, one little walk with my daughter and my dog. We decided to take the dog for a walk because I was sick of being asked “what can we DOOOooooo?” Like I’m a wizard who conjures up things for us to do on a whim. The key words in there are we and us: she is a really social girl who wants to be doing things with other people all the time, and when all her friends and even her brother are not around, then I become the go-to companion.

That is actually really cool a lot of the time, but sometimes I just want some down time and I don’t want to have to do anything or think. That’s the paradox of parenting: it’s the greatest because you have a buddy there for almost anything and you get to watch them grow up and do all sorts of great stuff, but the flip side is they are always there and you are 100% responsible for them all the time, even when you’re exhausted or sick.

So we went for a walk. We exercise the dog mainly by playing and running around the house and yard, so we haven’t actually been on a real “walk” for no reason in quite a while. We went about a mile, maybe a bit further. Both Perry the dog and I were pretty much tired by the time we got back to the house.

Perry has never been an athletic dog, aside from jumping from couch to chair and back. He’s always gotten tired from walks, sometimes to the point that he needs to be carried. He likes to go on the leash, but mainly because he wants to go in the car with us. When we walked by the car today, he was pretty puzzled.

I was kind of excited to go, but it didn’t take longer to realize just how much I’m out of shape. We were walking at a pretty brisk pace (Annika was actually running with Perry, then waiting for me), but still, I shouldn’t have been that tired by the end.

Maybe it’s time for a full physical again. It’s been about a year, I suppose. I should probably make sure nothing is wrong.

But I’m going to try to take more walks and try to bike a little too. Annika was super supportive of Perry during the walk, saying “come on Perry, I know you can do it! This is a good walk! You are doing good!” At the end of the walk, she said “we should take Perry on more walks. That was good.” She’s right. We should. Maybe that will be our goal this summer: more walks, more health focus.