The recovery process for my wrist surgery involves, of course, stretching exercises. These exercises are quite simple: I move the wrist to what should be a pain free position and hold it there for a count of ten. I do each one ten times.

As you might imagine,  the boys are fascinated by the whole process. This morning, I asked if they could do the counting for me. They were thrilled both to help out and to show off their counting.

N, however, had a little trouble. He’s only 3 and counting to 100 is slightly outside his range. After I finished, he was looking a bit frustrated – so I asked if he could count situps for me.

What the heck, I figured. I had been wanting to start an exercise program anyway. This way it would be a bit more fun.

I layed down on the den floor and hooked my toes under the couch. N stood on the other side of my knees.

“Okay, count when I’m up,” I said, sitting up. “Like this. When I reach my knees. Okay?”

“Okay!” He said, giving me a thumbs up.

I started doing the situps. As I finished my first one, he shouted “1, 2, 3, 4, 5!”

I stopped and explained that the first one should be 1, the second 2, and so on. He agreed. I started over.

“Two,” he said as I sat up, and we were off and running. He counted all the way up to number five, and then, as I was doing number 6, he said “one”

“No,” I said. “That was six.”

“No, I missed one. So I had to go back and get it.”

“But that was six!”

“Okay, okay!”

I sat up again. “Two,” he said.

“Hey! Wait!” I shouted.

“Nope. You’re on number three.”

I’m not so good at situps that I can afford to restart the count every time we get to five. I started counting them out loud. N, of course, started shouting over me. Then his older brother came running in to join the game, shouting random numbers as I did each situp.

I think my exercise program may have to wait a bit.