One of my responsibilities each morning is to exercise the kids. As soon as breakfast is done, we head outside to shoot baskets, run races, kick a soccer ball, or whatever other bit of physical play I can dream up.

Except for this morning. This morning, the termperature outside was 41 degrees. That’s too cold for us poor shivery Florida folk. When you add in the nasty cough I’ve been fighting for the past two weeks, it was enough to keep us indoors.

Fortunately, our kitchen has two different openings connecting to the dining room. These openings allow the kids to run a circle from the kitchen into the dining room and back again. They have to be careful on the turns, but that just makes things more exciting.

That was this morning’s exercise: running circles around the house. We watch one of the neighbor’s kids in the mornings, so there were three of the little guys running around.

As boring as this may sound, it’s really not. The three kids love making up impromptu races, jostling for position, bouncing off walls, and having the freedom to run inside.

At one point, the three kids were jogging in a cluster with my oldest in back. As they ran past a mirror, the big guy stopped and looked in the mirror. He smiled at himself, then posed, then did a weird little hip thing.

I couldn’t believe my eyes. He’d never struck me as being that vain. Before I could say anything, however, the other racers came around the corner. They’d done a full circuit. My oldest stopped posing and started running.

“Aha,”: he shouted. “Now I’m in front! Aha!”

It was actually a pretty clever ploy – if that’s what it was.