It all started with a blown tire...

Actually, Hayward adventures; i.e. crazy experiences in my life, started long before a blown tire, but that was the first time I really coined the phrase.  Let me take a step back, I am almost 40, mother of two very active boys, Thing 1 is 11 and Thing 2 is 8, and wife to an amazingly, funny, kind, loving and intelligent man.  I have a great family.  They make me laugh every day.  And I mean that.  Do they drive me crazy? You bet! Do I get mad at them? Absolutely! But at the end of the day, we have a pretty great family that I love and adore.  When people meet my family, my oldest son is always compared to me and my youngest is always compared to my husband, and on the surface, that would be an accurate observation.  But the great thing about watching your children grow and develop is you learn that they truly are a great combination of both parents, and that makes them individually unique.  Thing 1 may be a lot like me, but I see so much of my husband in him too.  And Thing 2 is so much like my husband, yet there is some of my genetic code in there too! One way Thing 2 is just like me, his desire to control all situations.  And when he can't control the situation he has a pretty short fuse, also like me.  It's something that I am working on for myself and trying to help him with as well.  It's hard for personalities like ours to come to terms with the idea that you can control nothing but yourself.  But we're getting there! One thing I have been working on a lot this year is staying positive.  When a controlling personality feels out of control, you can get negative pretty quickly.  I read some different things about the Law of Attraction and Positive Psychology and decided to put it to work.  If I could focus on the positive aspect of things, I still may not be in control of everything in my life, but I could still find ways to look at the situation as funny, an adventure, or a life lesson and keep things positive.

My reason for creating this blog stems from a new adventure of my own in which I am embarking.  I recently enrolled in a program through the Institute for Integrative Nutrition.  My primary goal of the program was to learn nutrition theories to help me sort through all the hype out there and figure out what was going to work for me to be healthy.  I like the set-up of this program as it is online, one year, a very thorough curriculum and I can earn continuing education credits for my CHES status (Certified Health Education Specialist).  What I have come to realize in this short month since enrolling is this program is going to open my eyes to so many things and really be a positive experience for me.  I wanted to blog about it with the hopes that it will continue after the program is over.  I had actually started a blog several years ago about cooking that I post on very sporadically.  I could have just used that blog for this, but it was called "For the Love of Food" and I wanted this blog to evolve to something more than just food.  Additionally, if I ever do decide to make something out of this like part of a business, I recently discovered that there is a cooking school called "For the Love of Food" in my geographic area and I thought that could get complicated.  So I have been wracking my brain for weeks trying to come up with a name for my new blog that accurately summed up what I wanted to talk about and was a reflection of my personality.   And then it hit me.  The kids and I had a saying all summer that was perfect! And it all started with a blown tire.

The beginning of this summer, we took the kids on vacation to Bermuda with my parents.  It was amazing! We had a great time.  Our first full day there, we decided to rent mopeds to travel around the island; non-residents are not allowed to rent cars.  So we take our lesson, strap on the helmets, my husband and my dad each take one of the kids on the back of their mopeds and away we go.  I was nervous at first, but was doing well.  We were about 20 minutes into our ride to our first sightseeing spot, St. George's Parish and Fort St. Catherine, when I felt my moped slow down and wobble, then there was a loud POP!, followed by more wobbling and me not being able to control the steering.  Luckily, we were not on a busy street, I didn't panic; I quickly pulled over and started blowing the horn to alert the rest of the family.  My husband was behind me so he pulled over right away and my parents quickly realized something was wrong and back tracked to us.  The only bad thing in the entire experience was that the boys got pretty freaked out by it.  In order to convince them that everything was fine and we would all be okay, I said to them "Guys, just think of it as another Hayward adventure!" And really, that is how I looked at it too.  Everyone was okay, the company we rented the mopeds from sent us a replacement and 30 minutes later we were back on track.  We saw a really cool naval fort, drove around St. George, had a nice lunch, and then headed back to our hotel and the kids hit the pool.

The next day we head out again, this time a shorter ride to the Botanical Gardens and the Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art.  It was a beautiful morning and a nice ride.  The whole time though, Thing 2, on the back of my husband's moped, which is right in front of me, is constantly looking back, checking on me.  When we got to the gardens he told me he was worried about me, and wanted to keep an eye on me.  My heart melted, but I assured him I was fine.  After our morning at the gardens and the art museum, we thought of heading to the aquarium and getting lunch but decided the skies were looking a little dark and maybe we should head back to the hotel as the aquarium was in the opposite direction.  We weren't 2 miles down the road when, you guessed it, the heavens opened up.  I am not talking a light shower, I mean we were drenched to the point that it looked like we went swimming in our clothes.  We pulled over for a moment, but decided, either way we would get wet, so we all agreed, take it slow, mind the turns and get back to the hotel.  Again, I told the boys, "Just look at it as another Hayward adventure!" It changed the attitude from one of worry, to one of laughter and ease.  Everyone made it back, we were fine and we all had another great moped story to share.

Our third day brought yet another adventure, one wrong turn, a trip through Hamilton, another wrong turn and all of us getting separated from each other with my mom and my husband with Thing 1 getting lost.  Luckily, the island is pretty small, and when this all happened we were close to the hotel.  My husband and Thing 1 quickly found their way back to the hotel and then my husband and dad went back out and found my mom within 15 minutes and again we were all safe and sound.  As my husband left Thing 1 and Thing 2 with me at the hotel and headed out with my dad, Thing 1 turned to me and said, "Well, here we go, another Hayward adventure!"   By the end of day four, when we had to turn our mopeds in, we were all sad to see them go.  We knew we only had one more day on the island and had so much fun.

When I tell the story of our Bermuda vacation, several people respond with something like "if that had happened to me, I would have been terrified to get back on, if I had been stuck in that rain, I would have been miserable, etc." But what I learned is that things happen that are completely out of our control and how we choose to react to those situations are what we have control over.  I wasn't going to stop the rain from coming, I wasn't going to stop the tire from blowing, and I wasn't able to control the confused sense of direction that seemed to ail my family by driving on the other side of the road and their protective nature that made them want mom and I in the middle instead of letting me lead as I did know where I was going! But what I could control was how I reacted to it.  It was an adventure.  And yes, things could have gone terribly wrong in all of those situations, but they didn't.  And had I reacted with negativity while my kids were watching, they would have likely reacted the same way.  So now, instead of looking back on a trip that really did have a lot of mishaps as "that terrible trip to Bermuda", they look at it fondly and say laughingly, "oh my gosh, remember when we were riding the mopeds in the rain in Bermuda? That was so fun!" And "another Hayward adventure" has become the catch phrase of the summer.  Every time we went somewhere this summer, if a situation presented itself that was a little outside of Thing 1 or 2's comfort zone, I would hear one of them say, "Well, it's just another Hayward adventure." And if both of my boys can go through life looking at new experiences in that way, I think they'll do just fine.

I hope that I will be able to share all sorts of "Hayward Adventures" here, large and small.  I also hope that our adventures, whether they are a traveling adventure, trying a new food, experimenting with a new cooking technique, life experiences, new fitness experiences, etc. that I will be able to look on them positively as "Just Another Hayward Adventure!"