Celebrating Mom and Disneyland

Sunday November 18th is Mickey Mouse Day.  Yes, this is apparently a real thing.  So in honor of this day, here’s a throwback post to the time we took a family vacation to Disneyland four (4) weeks before I had a bikini competition.

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August, 2015

This has been a really odd year for me.  My mother passed away, I was involved in several car accidents and it seems everyone I know either lost a parent, child or friend this year.  (I don’t wish to be morbid, just honest.)

Life is constantly reminding me that Time is Limited.

It seems like I’ve been playing a balancing act, juggling delicate eggs labeled “family,” “fitness,” “blogging” and “work,” and some days I just felt like all the eggs dropped to the floor and cracked.  And then I looked around to see if anyone was juggling a “maid service” egg to clean that shit up, but I guess I was supposed to juggle that too.  Oops.

That’s why vacations are helpful.  Vacations let you take the eggs you want to take with you on your travels and leave the rest behind for a week.  Family was my main focus this week.

As I mentioned, my mother passed away earlier this year and I modeled many areas of my life around ways that she did things.  Like the fact that she took care of her mother when I was a child, and dealt with the slow suffering of dementia over the course of four years. When my grandma passed away my mother took some of the inheritance and paid for us to go on a trip to Disney World, our first vacation in years.  She said that life was for the living and her mom would have wanted us to be happy.

So when my mom passed it seemed like the appropriate thing to spend some of the inheritance she left me to have my own family go to Disneyland this summer.

Oh, but wait!  Did I mention that my next bodybuilding competition is in a mere four (4) weeks and I will have to stand on stage in a posing bikini against other women who did not take a vacation to Disneyland?

What about that pesky fitness egg that I was juggling? Did I completely leave that behind and party like it was 1999?  (For all you Millennials – that’s a reference to a song from the movie Purple Rain.  It loosely translates to acting like there’s no tomorrow and eating whatever I wanted.)

I’m happy to report that I ate healthy and exercised all week.  Here’s a blog about my diet:  How To Stick to Your Meal Plan on Vacation.

My kids helped me choose the hotel.  My only criteria was that it had to have a pool and a gym.  Mission Accomplished.

The gym had treadmills and dumbbells, so my trainer sent me a circuit workout, which I did every day.  I also went with the idea that the world is my gym and used my kids as sandbags for squats and lunges while I was in line for Space Mountain.  I know some muscle gains were going on because my legs were killing me.  (My kids are 45 lbs. and 65 lbs.)

I also practiced posing while in line, since my next competition is in 4 weeks.  At first I was a little embarrassed doing poses and lunges in public and eating turkey and veggie meatballs from home while everyone else ate ice cream, but my mom always told me to stop caring so much what other people thought of me and just do what made me happy.  So I did.  Also, the bulk of these people were wearing rodent ears on their heads, so who were they to judge me, right?

***If you’re my trainer reading this, fasten your seat belt, because you might fall over.***

The self discipline paid off because I actually lost a pound while on vacation and that happens never.  (And, yes, hardass trainer, I know you would say, “it needed to be lost,” but that’s not the point.  The point is I juggled vacation with show prep for my next bodybuilding competition and survived.)

Back to my mom.  Want to know another thing I learned from my mom?  Never work on your birthday.  She always planned our vacations for the first week of August so she didn’t have to do the dishes on her birthday.  (Seriously, the not working on your birthday thing is a really good idea.  If you remember nothing else from this blog post, remember that gem.)

Mom’s very favorite thing to do was to go to the shore.

So in honor of her birthday, we fought LA traffic and drove from Disneyland to Muscle Beach. Yes, time was limited and we needed to drive home.  But there is always enough time to do what is important to you.  You make the time for it.

Ending the trip at Muscle Beach was the perfect way to focus on my family, celebrate fitness and honor my mother.  I may not always balance everything in my life, but that moment felt pretty close.

How about you?  Are you focusing on the areas of your life that are important to you?

Lisa 😉

Lisa Traugott is a Mom’s Choice Award winning writer, fitness blogger, wife and mom of two.  Her book, “She’s Losing It!”  is available at Amazon.com.

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