You know how you don’t get any sleep, and then your cold turns into a sinus infection/bronchitis mixture, and you spend your Saturday afternoon sitting in the cold watching an endless, sixth grade, softball game, which really wasn’t endless, but it WAS three hours, which is the same as endless, and the girls on the opposing team scream and chant the entire time, “We’re going to rally, rally, rally!  We’re going to rally, rally!” and you feel like you should go to confession because you wished they would lose their voices, then you take your obsessive and compulsive son to a monster truck show, and his latest tic is to sniff, sniff, sniff, SNIFF, SNIFF, and you take his noise-reducing earphones off to adjust them and he starts sniffing harder and completely freaking out that you are GOING TO MAKE HIM DEAF, and then he starts gagging, but you can’t go anywhere because you’re smack-dab in the middle of the row of seats and there is a wall behind you, so you do what any mother of an almost-nine-year-old would do, which is to put your hand under his chin and catch his vomit in your bare hand, but that’s okay because you have TISSUES and your friend has hand sanitizer, and then the young child in front of you stands up and yells, “Screw you!” to the announcer, and his parents LAUGH, and then you spend all day Sunday coughing up a lung because after you caught vomit in your hand, you sat in that closed arena and inhaled exhaust fumes all night and that goes really great with your asthma/bronchitis, sinus infection?

Yeah,  me too.

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1. When it’s almost 100 degrees and your son wants to walk around wearing nothing but underwear all day, you might just let him.

2. And, you might join him.

3. Which can be awkward when the Fed Ex guy rings your doorbell.

4. The row of zits across your hairline caused by perpetual sweat beads will try hard to outdo the mosquito bite on your forehead.

5. Then you may find yourself wishing you still had bangs.

6. Two panting dogs can make a real mess.

7. It’s possible to drink 10 glasses of ice water in a day and still feel like there is sand in your mouth.

8. When it’s time to leave your son’s baseball game and you see everyone stand up and do a little shimmy, you may think they’re dancing.

9. But, they’re really just trying to dry out their crotches.

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My eight year old son has, undeniably, struggled with everything he has ever tackled. Nowhere has this been more evident than in the sports arena.

We tried soccer, but he was only about the size of a three year old at the time. A 35 pound kid with a heart defect and reflux does not a soccer star make. When the coach would put him in, he would simply run across the field to where we were sitting and ask, “Can we leave now?”

Last year we tried t-ball. He liked it. Mostly, he enjoyed the free snow cone at the concession stand after the games and watching the trains that run on the tracks behind the field, but whatever. Progress is progress, people.

Now that he has reached the soaring height of a four year old he has moved on to coach-pitch baseball. This seems to be an ideal sport for him. There isn’t too much running and sometimes there is bubble-gum in the dugout.

However, that doesn’t mean it has been easy. Although he has a great swing he only had two hits in the first two games.

But last night he hit the ball every time he was at bat. He even had a double. Okay, it was a single with an overthrown ball so he was allowed to advance to second, but again…whatever.

During that inning, he scored his first run. The parents from our team were cheering so much when he reached home plate that he was positively beaming with pride. He waved at everyone as if we were his adoring fans and, at one point, I thought he was actually going to bow.

After the game, one of those parents congratulated him by saying, “Hey, buddy! You played great tonight!”

Then we realized that even modesty comes hard for him when he replied, “I know.”

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I like to run.

Don’t get the wrong idea, I am not an athlete. I don’t run long distance races or have anything that remotely resembles a runner’s body. I have been away from running for many months and I look more like a blob than something long and lean. I want to get back to it.

But, in recent years I have dealt with a lot of pain in my feet when I take to the streets (or the treadmill, for that matter). I have spent many mornings hobbling out of bed, reaching for my dresser to lean on so I can stretch my calf to alleviate some of the tightness.

The best solution was to ice it, but if you have never rolled a frozen water bottle around under the arch of your foot, you don’t know what uncomfortable really is.

A couple of months ago I read an article in the newspaper about running barefoot. It intrigued me. The proponents of barefoot running say that it’s how humans were meant to run, which makes perfect sense to me.

When you run barefoot, you are forced to stop slamming your heel into the pavement because it hurts too much. You compensate for the pain and shift your landing to the forefoot. While researching it further, I read that the technology in today’s running shoes simply hides the pain of a shoe-wearer’s heel-strike.

I thought about it more. All of my friends who are distance runners have had injuries. Plantar Fasciitis, Achilles pain and aching knees are the norm. I even know someone who lost all of his toenails. Back in the 70’s, when shoes were minimal, I never heard of those things happening.

So, I tried it. Not on the open road, but on my treadmill. My foot fell at a completely different spot, my stride was altered and I had a lot more endurance. After a while I began to feel blisters forming on the balls of my feet, so I stopped and put shoes on. And with shoes on feet, just like that, I went back to firmly landing on my heel.

After my barefoot run I was sore…in a totally good way. My calves hurt because I actually used them, but other than the blisters, my feet were in pretty good shape.

Now my husband would probably rather die than look like a barefoot hippie running down the road, but I don’t care about what people think if it means I won’t be in pain anymore. Unfortunately, I can’t imagine running without shoes on outside. It’s not the rocks that scare me, it’s the roadkill. For real.

So I started looking into barefoot, or minimalist, running shoes. Something without the shock absorbing heel so I will be forced to land the way a human should. From what I read, the best shoe for this is called the Vibram Five Finger.

Only, it’s not five fingers, it’s five toes. Remember how I said that I don’t care what I look like? Yeah. Scratch that. I just don’t know if I have enough self-confidence for these.

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