Excuses are plentiful

I've been debating this one for a while.  I don't want to offend anyone or make it seem like I'm criticizing people. I'm not.  I've been there and I know just how hard it is to find the motivation to get up off my butt and do something.  The other part of the reason I've been holding off on this one....there's a major gross-out ahead...

Leo was born two years ago.  Just after giving birth to him, I started having some issues with my skin.  More specifically, with the skin on my feet.  A dry, hard, thickened patch of skin showed up on my foot where my littlest toe connects.  It cracked.  It broke open.  It bled.  It hurt like hell to walk on.  So I sat on my ass for nearly two years and used that little crack as a reason to not do anything.  I'll give myself a little credit and tell you that it was the mother of all excuses.  It was awful.  I hobbled around the house, limping and in pain.  It hurt and nothing seemed to help.  The doctor gave me anti-fungals.  They burned and made it worse.  Steroid creams...same thing.  Urea cream...oh my goodness, that was a special kind of hell!  We tried pills and creams and whatever they could come up with to give me.  Nothing helped.  And then I started working out.  I ignored it and just kept on with the exercise.  I stopped looking for an excuse and started doing instead.  And would you believe that it actually started to get a little better?  Not completely, it's still there and it still breaks open and cracks and bleeds and torments me.  But, it's not nearly as bad as it was and I'm still exercising, in spite of it still being there.  It's migrated a bit.  The spot by my toe has cleared up and there's a larger area of skin along the outside of my right foot that's affected now.  I know you're all dying to see what I'm talking about right?

What it looks like after working out:

What it looks like right at this very moment:

The skin peels off in strips and leaves open, gaping sores.  The doctor has decided to call it eczema, probably because she just doesn't have a clue what else it might be.  So, it sucks.  But it's not the end of the world and it's not keeping me from working out anymore.

Here's my point tonight...excuses are everywhere.  If you're looking for one, you'll never fail to find it.  There are a million of them....I'm too tired, the kids aren't feeling the greatest, think I'm coming down with something, my body hurts, I don't have the energy, I'll go tomorrow.  The list goes on and on.  The funny thing is, it's not so easy to find the motivation for working out.  There's a lot of those, but they're never so easily found as the excuses.  You have to look harder if you want to find them.  But if you look and seek them out, they'll stick with you and keep you going.

I have to leave you with some more pictures of my children.  Mostly because I think this is the funniest thing ever.  It's like a story told through pictures of what I deal with about 15 times a day, if not more.  The first few times, it's funny and cute.  By the end of the day, it results in tears from nearly all of us!  But I happened to catch these pictures early on this morning and so we were all still in excellent moods.  I've put it on my Facebook profile too and given it the title: How it all goes down....

Aren't they the best?  Seriously, I was on the very end of the last thread of my sanity when I put them to bed, but now that I'm sitting here and looking at those pictures, I can't help but smile and laugh.  I have a couple of the best kids ever and feel so totally blessed!