Solutions All-Around

It has been an exciting week for me. I took a brief moment of inspiration and decided to make it happen.

It's been a long-term challenge for me to figure out how to get into an exercise routine with these kids, but one I haven't taken seriously until realizing I'm done having babies now. An idea I had quite a while ago was to teach fitness classes as soon as I was ready to work again. That was not assuming we would need the money, just that we would get a discounted gym membership and I would be accountable for working out.

That idea got pushed aside when we realized that we DID need the money, and fitness classes through my available workout gyms just didn't pay enough. Then I got excited about waitressing again, thinking it would be easy to find a job.

Since I don't want to "have" to work I found myself putting off applying at additional restaurants. But our already super-tight budget hasn't been able to handle the last year, with an unanticipated escrow shortage driving our house payment up and gas prices costing us almost double our "gas budget".

This week I remembered "oh yeah, I have my own business" and decided to teach classes independently. I brainstormed a fitness club that would meet in a local park with regular exercise classes for Forest Lake moms, especially geared towards exercising with baby. My flyers are ready to go and will be distributed to at least 250 homes in my immediate neighborhood. I'm hoping to have time to distribute them to other neighborhoods as well. This will be a 4-week pilot program, and has a great income potential, but only if there's enough interest, so it's a "maybe." I was too late to get this in the fall community ed catalog for the Forest Lake district. I was NOT too late to get in on some action in the Centennial District. So here's what's for sure:

In the last 2 days before the Centennial deadline the coordinator and I arranged for me to teach 2 rounds of these twice-a-week "baby and me" fitness classes, one outdoors in the mornings and one indoors at night, later in the fall. In addition she needed an instructor for some of their regular classes, which I was willing to do only on Saturday mornings back to back. So for 10 weeks I'll also be teaching "exercise ball" and "women on weights" in a middle school weight room. I talked her into giving me their top instructor pay, even though I'm new to them! So for now I'll be teaching 4 classes a week. What a great workout plan! It will be 6 classes if my "Mommies in Motion" club turns out to be a hit.

Thank you, Lord for providing answers even in ways we don't anticipate. Your plans are even better and I'm grateful for the many times in life you've shown me this.