Now I belong to a different kind of gym…the kind with brightly colored soft steps and ramps and scarves and shakers.  That’s right, the only regularly scheduled class I attend is my daughter’s and the running I do is after her!

That doesn’t mean I don’t work out, but when I do, it looks a WHOLE lot different these days…

Most of the time I used to spend working out, is now spent rocking out to toddler tunes, attending story times and play dates, making messes and cleaning up.  I no longer have the luxury of multiple workouts in one day, so I have to be more strategic.

Now Parker and I workout together, we go to mommy & me exercise classes or take advantage of the rolling hills where we live and the invention of jogging strollers!  If the weather’s bad (seemed like every day this winter) we use the stairs in our home for cardio and I use her (plus some free weights) for strength training.  Lifting 20 pounds of baby weight is a nice challenge…add the wriggly instability of that weight and I’ve got a fantastic workout.  I hold her for squats, I chest press her little body and give her kisses with each rep, and bicep curls with a baby are a real challenge!  Why do I do all this?  Because it’s important to me to set an example of active living and it’s always been important to me to move.  I get cranky when I don’t get to exercise!  YES, I’ve had to adjust what exercise looks like for me these days, but I have a toddler.  I’ve had to adjust what a lot of things look like for me these days.  That’s part of motherhood.  The important thing to me is that I don’t abandon exercise entirely because that’s abandoning a part of who I am and what kind of example does that set for my daughter?

-Jolynn Baca Jaekel has been a fitness professional for more than a decade. Her first child, Parker,  just turned a year old this January. Jolynn, her husband Rob, and Parker recently relocated from NYC to Washington D.C.