Mommy, you're so ___________

My kids are smart. Almost 4 and 6 now, they're getting pretty, pretty good at lots of things.

Including buttering up mommy when she's mad.

This morning, after a nice, slow and sleety run with friends, I came home very hungry. I made the kids and myself eggs and beans and tortillas.

It's all my fault -- maybe it's those years I worked in restaurants -- but I find myself constantly fetching things for them as their demands rolled in one after another.

Mommy, can I have more eggs and tortilla? Mommy, I don't have a drink. Mommy, the beans are falling out of my tortilla. Mommy, the eggs are too hot. Mommy, I burped. Mommy, the cartoon stopped working!

(Yes, shamebag on my head.  I let them watch cartoons on the computer during breakfast. It buys peace, people.)

Hungry and annoyed that I was not getting to eat, I barked at them that this was not a restaurant, yadda yadda blah blah blah.

"You're the beautifulest, mommy!" C-girl, my 3-year-old daughter, chirped. M-man, not to be outdone, said "Mommy, you're so beautiful!"

Hambones.

But it works. Little monkeybutts. Maybe one of them will hold political office someday.

In a funny, unrelated story: Before breakfast, my son burst into the bathroom as I was turning on the shower. "Mommy, C-girl pushed me and said a bad word!" he said, tears running down his cheeks.

"Should we sell her to another family and never see her again?" I asked in a serious tone.

He solemnly nodded his head yes.

"Dude, we're never going to sell your sister," I told him. He was like "eh" and scampered off.

Getting back to my kids' kind adjective -- I don't know if other people think like this, but sometimes I like to define things in the world by parts of grammar -- sometimes nouns, sometimes adjectives.

Maybe it's because I freakishly LOVED diagramming sentences in 7th grade English.

We lived in Germany then, and I had a humorless, 150-year-old teacher named Miss Latham. She was ancient and didn't like anyone.

I was scared of her, like I was pretty much scared of everything at that age.

But she taught us the art of diagramming a sentence. And it made sense, weird, but it made English understandable in a mathematic kind of way. And she asked me to eat lunch with her one day, which I remember being oddly thrilled about.

(I have a hangup of trying to win people over who I don't think like me. It's somewhat of a character flaw. I'm better about it the older I get. I think.)

So maybe that's where my proclivity to think in terms of one component of grammar or another. I'm a woman, mom, daughter, sister, runner, flack (slang for PR professional -- it's just too pretentious-sounding to say "PR professional"). Nouns are easy.

But get to the adjectives? That's harder. Because that's where I secretly worry that maybe I have no idea how others regard me and I'm terribly not self-aware. I like to think I'm certain kinds of adjectives, good, strong, adjectives. (But what if I'm wrong? Eep.)

So if my kids want to give me an easy, softball adjective? I'll take it.

As adjectives apply to running, I've been feeling, well, lazy lately.

I have no desire to run long distances right now.

I can't get jonesed up to sign up for another 50K. Though I will.

Just a couple of months ago, seeing some folks on Facebook complete the 100-mile #worldslongestturkeytrot trek from Milwaukee to Chicago, I was getting kooky ideas in my head about 100-mile races. It sounds so appealing.

But now, nothing. I haven't run more than 8 miles at once in weeks.

What's the adjective for that?

Some of it is related to a big fat ache in my hip. After my November race, my hips and back were tight. OK, they're always tight.

By Christmas, my lower back ached chronically. A massage and getting back to some kind of yoga once a week only provided temporary relief.

I dropped in on my physical therapist (yes, runners say things like "my physical therapist". We see them far more often than our regular physician and we know that they just moved to a new apartment in Evanston, went to their sister's wedding and got a dog.)

She poked around. Though my right hip is what has ached for a month or more, my left SI joint wasn't moving. She did some stuff to it, and for about six hours my hips felt like they were on a fun vacation.

Then back to the reality of stiffness.

A friend recommended a chiro who wouldn't try to hustle me like an Amway salesman. I've seen him twice. and he's great.

Within the first 20 minutes he told me he was a multi-time Ironman. (Ironman types always tell you they are Ironmen. They can't help themselves. I guess if I were an Ironman and had done 140 miles of swimming, biking and running, I might do the same.)

He did some ART (Active Release Technique) on my hip and a new pinching sensation in my back. ART is a scientific term for "now you are really gonna feel pain!". I haven't yelped like that since I was last in labor.

During today's run my hip felt better. And maybe I will feel less "lazy" and more "motivated" as the hip feels better.

Maybe I will just try to turn off the adjective part of my brain and stick to nouns.