Do It Differently Personal Training

Up until now, we thought we were following the rules and playing the way we were supposed to. Well, I guess if we really think about it, we weren’t doing that at all, but this latest idea really took some explaining! Not to the people that know us best…but to the onlookers who think there is one recipe, one formula, and one way to do it.

We met young, got married young, and even immigrated to be together. We got married while we were still in university, and we moved to a new city without having any jobs lined up. I guess we broke a few rules there!

We waited to start a family…our daughter was still an every-four-hour breast-feeder when we celebrated our 10^th wedding anniversary…in Paris, Ontario, with my mom and our daughter in an adjoining room. I topped her up with milk, and we went for a canoe-ride down river (lunch and guide included) and Mom met us at the end, where my leaky boobs were ready for the next feed.

This latest episode of doing it differently involved selling our house. The house that we actually pined away for, and thought we needed if we were going to raise a family. The 2-car garage that my hobby-mechanic husband so desperately wanted, the spare bedroom that I was sure would make our lives so much easier. Well, we played house for 5 years, and never really moved-in. We hung a few things on the walls, and re-purposed tired décor in the spare room, but it never really felt right. The morning I woke up to the sounds of the neighbors sprinklers, I thought I might implode! The ease of pushing a button to open a garage door, and pull ourselves and our vehicle into a climate-controlled environment was making us lazy. We used to seek out the thrill of finding the perfect micro-parking spot, and edging our way in with parallel parking perfection. We braved the elements, and willingly scraped ice from the windshield while living in the city, in the north, and didn’t realize it was actually giving us grit, and making us feel alive! Lifting one finger to push a garage door opener was actually sucking out our souls.

We’ll save the conversation of never-ending yardwork (not the fun planting decorative accents stuff) for another time.

We are doing it differently by downsizing while are kids are still at home, by seeking out the lock and leave lifestyle, by living authentically (as much as possible…we still like Netflix), and by turning off devices in the presence of our friends and guests. We sit down as a family for dinner most nights, for breakfast almost every morning, and we make eye-contact, talk, play board games, and have one small television with no-cable (not even a wifi signal on this baby), in our basement.

We’ve made career changes, school changes, and summer plans that involve some character building. We are considering a year abroad, which we knew we couldn’t do with the HMS Juniper (what we named our monstrous house).

This blog is a way to share some of our adventures with family and friends…not the 100’s of facebook “friends” who we’ve known for brief periods of time, but the lifers…the people who genuinely wish us well on our quest to get it right, and honor that we need to shake the snowglobe often to re-focus our energy and adjust the lens.

Follow us here to learn more about our past, our present, and our future of how we are doing it differently.