I look forward to Tuesday mornings. That’s because Tuesday is when I do the 200 situp challenge, the 100 pushup challenge, and the 200 squats challenge. I make Imani, Joy and Esteban do it with me. Sometimes Xay will join us, usually just to critique Imani’s form, and sometimes I insist that Yanni join us.

The babies’ favorite part is when I go off the grid and put up the chinup bar. You see, I went to a website about the situps, pushups and squats, but I challenged the children to do as many chinups as possible, without internet input. Last week Joy asked me to look up a real chinup challenge, but we can’t begin to do reps of chinups yet. Some of us are lucky to pull out 1!

Xay is quick to point out that I can’t even do 1 legal chinup. That would be a chinup from a hanging position. I can do one from a standing position, but Xay calls that cheating.

We usually start out with the situps, followed by pushups, squats and chinup/bar hang. But today Imani suggested we do our chinups first. Surprisingly, we all did worse in this order. And I got a head start on the workout by doing squats while the little girls were preparing to workout. Double mistake! I got sore doing those squats. My legs are still sore. That affected my pushups, which were monstrously hard today, after having tried and failed to do chinups. . .

Moral of the story? Don’t mess with order. Order is a powerful thing.