The newborn’s parents took their exercise routine as seriously as a heart attack that could only be staved off with kettleballs and ankle weights. Throughout the pregnancy, the mother- and father-to-be worked out daily. The mother’s fitness of choice was long-distance jogging, an activity that she didn’t relinquish until the 8-month mark. The father preferred doing video aerobics from the comfort of their condominium. He frequently joined his partner on the living room rug for two-hour sessions of prenatal yoga.
So it was no surprise when their baby emerged from her electrolyte-fed chrysalis with peak levels of cardiovascular endurance. Her lung capacity was in the 99th percentile. She relentlessly screamed her head off. And for the first few weeks of her life, her parents could not mitigate her despair no matter how tightly they swaddled her or how sweetly they sang over her crib. Their round-the-clock exertions were yielding no positive results whatsoever and the situation was becoming dire. The mother and father were not only sleep-deprived and quarrelsome, but they were losing muscle tone as well.
One afternoon when he hadn’t slept for 48 hours and his newborn was still howling on his chest with the strength of a thousand angry kittens, the father remembered something that a woman in spandex had once said on a workout video long, long ago. “Fitness,” she’d huffed between reps with her barbells, “knows no age limits.” Could it be that their baby was missing her parents’ workouts as much as they were?
He rose from the couch with his child in his arms, then executed his first deep squat since he’d became a father. The baby immediately quieted. Again, he lowered his butt to the floor, feeling the burn along the length of his weakened quadriceps. His daughter smiled up at him through her tears. “Honey,” he shouted to his wife, “you have to come see this!”
The mother roused herself from the toilet, where she had dozed off minutes before. She thought that something awful had happened because she couldn’t hear the baby crying. But her panic turned to joy when she entered the living room and saw her husband doing lunges while holding their elated child triumphantly over his head like a jungle cat in a Disney cartoon.
“It’s a fitness miracle,” she said.
From then on, the baby whipped her parents back into fighting form. They now recognized that their daughter would never be content to lie still on a blanket wearing an adorable onesie. She would not fall sleep unless calories were being aggressively burned. She would not be soothed until both her parents had reached their target heart rates. She was like a diminutive drill sergeant in a newborn boot camp. Soon her parents were in the best shape of their lives. They took turns doing crunches on the play mat, using their baby as a counter weight.
“They say it gets easier around three months,” said the mother, her nursing bra soaked through with sweat. She wondered if this was what Jackie Stallone had to endure with Sylvester. Her abs were on fire. “Subbing out,” she said. The father took the baby and immediately dropped into a warrior pose.
“I think she’s almost asleep,” he said. “One more set of side kicks and we’ll be home-free.”
“As much as I like squeezing into my pre-pregnancy blue jeans,” said his wife, “I think I’m going to take it easier on the second go-round. Like, just watch TV and drink milkshakes on the couch for nine months so we’ll have a less vigorous baby. Because this is really hard.”
The husband was torn between his inclination to be sympathetic to his wife and his passion for exceeding personal fitness milestones.
“What about if you just focused on the upper body with our second-born?” he said. “And maybe bounced on the exercise ball now and then?”
“Okay,” said his wife. That sounded like a good compromise. And at least they could start a college fund with the money they’d save on gym memberships and personal trainers. They’d already bought a treadmill for the nursery.
“I just never expected motherhood to be so…grueling,” she said. Her husband kissed her, suddenly overcome with love for his wife and child. Not only were they the two most amazing women in the world, after his mother and perhaps Michelle Obama, but they’d also helped him conquer his fitness plateau.
The baby whimpered and began to stir in his arms. “I know that cry,” he said. “It means that she’s ready for lateral lunges.”
“Let me,” said the mother, limping to her feet. And sure enough, the baby dozed off again, as her mother lunged her back and forth, back and forth, with her husband spotting them every step of the way.