Author Archives: amyreinink

In my early 20s, when we were still light years away from being ready to introduce an additional human to our home, I had a conversation about body acceptance with a friend who’d recently had a baby.

“I have jeans that don’t fit me anymore, and they’ll probably never fit me again,” she said with a shrug.

This was before I understood the blessing of a new, precious human life (I’m sorry to sound so cliche, but I feel like every parenting cliche is absolutely true), and I’m kind of ashamed to admit that this statement haunted me. I’m sorry, but did you just say that my jeans might never fit me again? I wondered how I’d handle the challenge of trying to maintain some sort of fitness level postpartum.

The most amazing thing happened while I was pregnant with Henry, and after he joined us: I learned that many of my closely held beliefs about what it takes to be strong, fit and capable as an athlete and human were wrong, or at least kind of misguided. Here are a few of those false beliefs.

Our first of many walks. This one was about a week after we brought Henry home. I’m doing my best to impersonate a sane person.

4. Exercise classes geared toward new parents will be good place-holders until I can do my “real” workouts. What made me think I had a monopoly on good ideas for my exercise regimen? And why was I so snobby about parent boot-camp classes? In this day and age, many of the other parents in the parent boot-camp class I take at my local YMCA a few times a week are former college athletes who also want to get in shape to hike, bike, run and ski, and the instructors tailor workouts to this crowd. That class has reminded me of the painful efficacy of tuck jumps, and has introduced me to inverted mountain-climbers. Guess what I wouldn’t have been doing on my own? Those exercises.

H before our first parent boot-camp class at our local YMCA back in August. Now, he prefers to scoot around on a blanket while mama works out.

5. I will really miss the freedom to do whatever workout I’d like to do on a given day. I only make it to a formal yoga class once a week at best, and I can’t even imagine when it will seem worth it to spend an hour or two of my free time swimming in a pool. But in the biggest surprise of all, I totally don’t care. No workout is quite as much fun as blowing raspberries at my little man and watching him giggle in response. I feel so strongly that have my whole life to train for distance races, but only a brief period of time to snuggle a sweet baby.

If you’ve been down this path, I’d love to hear about your lessons learned about postpartum fitness!

In early 2015, I was ecstatic to find out I was pregnant. In June 2015, during a routine ultrasound during an otherwise healthy pregnancy, I learned my baby had no heartbeat. Doctors induced labor later that day, and on June 19, after five months of pregnancy, I delivered a perfect baby girl, Susannah Grace.

I didn’t know how to write about it, and I didn’t know how to not write about it. So I kind of just went missing, and posted vague mentions of finding peace amid grief and loss by connecting to nature.

One of many healing hikes.

When I learned I was pregnant again, I was gun-shy about sharing the news. I didn’t feel comfortable posting here about pregnancy workouts and using yoga and meditation to find a sense of ease during pregnancy; I didn’t even share the news with some close friends and family members.

My son is now here, safe and sound. He is curious and smiley and strong, and is the absolute embodiment of joy and awe. He is also the best personal trainer a girl can ask for—at 3.5 months, he won’t nap unless I take him for a walk in the stroller or a hike in the Ergo. He requires fresh air and movement to relax. I wonder where he gets it?

One of many calming walks.

I want to tell you about squeezing in strength workouts while your baby naps, and about how meditation can help you find peace, calm and presence when your baby’s been screaming for hours in the middle of the night. I want to tell you about becoming a yoga teacher and meditation facilitator. But first, I need to tell you about Susannah.

She was much-loved and much-wanted. The nausea I felt early in my pregnancy with her was ameliorated only by chicken wings and Polar seltzer water, so we celebrate the mark she made on our lives by dining at our favorite chicken-wing restaurant. She sent me down a path that was different than the one I was on. I embarked on a 200-hour yoga-teacher training after yoga helped me to reconcile my grief. She also inspired me to begin volunteering with Angel Names Association (ANA), a Saratoga Springs, N.Y., based nonprofit that provides a variety of supportive programs for the families of stillborn babies nationwide.

On Oct. 8, we will be participating in ANA’s annual memorial walk in Saratoga Spa State Park in Susannah’s memory. The walk aims in part to raise awareness about pregnancy loss and stillbirth, and it’s in that spirit that I’m sharing my experience here. When I lost Susannah, I felt so isolated—I had never knowingly met another woman who’d lost a baby so far along in a pregnancy. By sharing my story, I hope that someone, somewhere, feels less alone.

Help me help the families of stillborn babies here —> www.firstgiving.com/fundraiser/amy-reinink/ana-walk

The walk also raises money for ANA’s programs, including one which provides financial assistance to families who can’t afford a funeral or headstone for their stillborn babies. I hope you’ll consider making a small donation toward my fund-raising goal via my Firstgiving page. In doing so, you’ll not only provide a bright spot to families in their darkest hours, but will help me to honor and remember my daughter—the ray of sunlight who illuminated my desire to be a mom to a baby who could love me back here on earth.

I brought my cap and goggles everywhere we went in Hawaii, dutifully scoping out currents and waves and weather conditions to find the perfect open-water swimming spot.

From Barking Sands to Poipu, the cap and goggles stayed in my bag. I tried to be a good, safe swimmer by opting out anytime I noticed a funky-looking current, or anytime the waves seemed more conducive to surfing—which turned out to be just about everywhere on Kauai.

Don’t cry for me—I sat on the beach and watched waves like these, at Poipu, crash onshore. 

By the time we landed on Oahu’s North Shore, famed for house-size waves that challenge the world’s best surfers, I’d accepted that I wouldn’t be doing much swimming this trip. Oh, how wrong I was.

Rough surf for swimming = great conditions for watching pro paddleboarders catch waves.

Our Airbnb host in Waialua told us about a beach near our rental cottage, saying it was “really mellow” and “mainly a park for moms to bring their kids to.” As soon as we arrived at Aweoweo Beach Park, I noticed a several swimmers doing laps around the gorgeous cove, which was as mellow as promised thanks to a reef that protected the area from offshore waves. I took a quick dip to literally test the waters—no funky currents, and no waves to speak of. I ran back to our rental cottage to grab my poor, neglected cap and goggles for some playtime.

Aweoweo Beach Park in Waialua, on Oahu’s North Shore. 

I swam along the shoreline for a bit, in awe of the visibility in the crystal-clear water. I saw a few big iridescent fish and a few tiny, colorful striped ones.

The water was so perfectly clear! 

Then, I swam out toward the coral reef protecting the rest of the beach from the waves crashing out at sea, and I saw a turtle with a blackish green shell eating barnacles off a pyramid-shaped concrete structure underwater. I floated around him in total awe. I picked my head up to breath, and he picked his head up, too! Pure magic.

The tiny speck in this zoomed-in, grainy iPhone photo is me, planning to stay in the water forever. 

If we hadn’t had a flight back to the mainland that afternoon, I may have never left that beach. Consider this blog post me paying it forward to any other swimmer vacationing in Hawaii who happens to Google “best open-water swim spot on Oahu.” I’m no authority on which spot is actually best, but if there’s anything better than this one, I’m not sure I want to know about it.

How can I even begin to describe the first 90 hours of my 200-hour yoga and meditation teacher training?

Amazing. Intense. Life-changing. And, well, like, really hard to describe.

Our teacher is big on Yoga with a Big Y, which means de-emphasizing asana or hatha yoga (the poses we all know and love) and focusing instead on the spiritual practice described in texts like the Bhagavad Gita and Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra. We spent lots of time in meditation, and a lot of time talking about the ego, nonattachment to outcome and the practice of realizing that we are not our thoughts, our worries, our fears, or any of the other things we often identify with.

Are you still with me? If so, just think about the bajillion ways we can apply these principles to everyday life. How much happier would your next marathon be if you trained your hardest, yet wed yourself to the process, not the outcome (i.e., “I will complete X training schedule over Y weeks with the hope of running 26.2 miles in 3:39” versus “IF I DO NOT BQ THIS RACE IS WORTHLESS”)? How much better would your Monday morning be if you learned that you could watch rather than identify with the crazy to-do list loops running through your mind?

Like I said: Amazing, intense, and hard to explain in words.

Although the physical practice was deemphasized, we still learned a totally incredible amount about alignment and anatomy from two 1,000-hour certified teachers who have each studied in various schools of yoga. Over the course of 10 days, I realized that I could likely spend years just trying to perfect my downward-facing dog (or my mountain pose, for that manner). I also learned to see this fact as exciting rather than discouraging. As one of our teachers put it: “That’s why we call it a yoga practice, not a yoga finish.”

I have 110 hours of training left over three long weekends between now and May. Stay tuned!

I signed up for yoga and meditation teacher training last fall, committing to 200 hours of instruction come springtime. Springtime is here, and the training actually begins on Saturday (gulp). There’s not much more I can do to prepare for the 90 hours of training that will happen between March 12 and March 20 (again: Gulp).

A few of the books assigned ahead of my yoga-teacher training.

Photo credit Acyuta Gopi, from a kirtan in New York City.

What’s a skier-girl to do when winter takes its sweet time arriving? If you’re me, you try snowshoeing (have you ever heard a snowshoer complain about trail conditions?).

Snowshoeing at Ski de fond Mont-Tremblant, a cross-country ski and snowshoeing center. 

I’d always assumed snowshoeing was basically plodding: A good workout and a good way to get outside if you can’t ski, but not something you’d necessarily do on purpose. I am happy to admit that I was wrong.

I borrowed a friend’s pair of snowshoes before a New Year’s Eve trip to Mont Tremblant after hearing that skiing conditions weren’t super-ideal yet. I wasn’t prepared to love it. But on an outing at Ski de fond Mont-Tremblant, a cross-country ski and snowshoeing center, I changed my mind. The snowshoes provided a mechanical advantage that made it feel like I was floating above the snow, and I felt like an intrepid explorer venturing through the snowy woods. By the end of the trip, I began to see snowshoeing as another way to go places outside you couldn’t comfortably go otherwise—and who doesn’t love that?

Don’t get me wrong—I’m as pleased as the next skier-girl that winter has, in fact, decided to arrive on the East Coast. But that’s in part because I plan to get some more mileage out of my new snowshoes. Yep—I liked it so much, I decided to buy my own pair.

I’ve become a bit of a Gretchen Rubin fanatic over the past few months after picking up The Happiness Project, her bestselling book on how to build a happier life within the framework of the life you’re living right now. I was instantly hooked, thanks to Rubin’s simple, clear writing and her engaging personal journey.

She starts with a simple concept: To be happier, you have to think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, in an atmosphere of growth. When I read the last item on the list—an atmosphere of growth—I sat up a little straighter in my chair. It’s so obvious—it’s kind of the whole point of this blog, after all—and yet most of us spend almost no time consciously trying to foster it in our own lives.

We don’t wake up at 6 a.m. on Saturdays to train for distance runs and open-water swims because we enjoy hearing our alarms go off before the sun rises. I didn’t sign up for ski patrol training or run my first marathon because I figured the process would be an ego-boosting hedonism fest. We do these things because they create an atmosphere of growth, which is truly a necessary ingredient in a joyful, meaningful life.

A couple years ago, my breakfast life changed forever. I made yogurt at home, and I’ve never turned back.

In fact, if anything, I’ve leaned in, and have developed what I’m pretty sure is the simplest and most foolproof method for yogurt-making aside from buying a completely unnecessary yogurt maker for $300.

It’s basically the same method I used back in 2013—but using a slow cooker rather than a stovetop.

First, go buy some milk. I’m lucky to have access to fancy local milk from Battenkill Creamery, which I’m convinced tastes better than any other (but I’m sure your local milk will be delicious, too).

Heat the milk until your candy thermometer tells you it’s 180 degrees. In my slow cooker, this takes about seven hours. If you overshoot that and get it closer to 200 degrees because your afternoon hike takes twice as long as you expected it to, or because your 4 p.m. meeting runs long, no harm, no foul.

Cool the milk to 110 degrees. You can use an ice bath, but I find it easiest to just pop it in the fridge for a few hours (about four hours in my slow cooker). This is the only step that’s kind of a pain to overshoot, as you’ll need to reheat the milk to 110 if you do.

Gently stir a few tablespoons of plain yogurt into the milk. Your new batch of yogurt will take on the taste and the cultures of this “starter” yogurt, so choose wisely. Wrap the pot of the slow cooker in a beach towel to keep it warm, then place it in your oven with the pilot light on overnight.

After taking it out in the morning, I strain mine with a muslin cloth and colander to make Greek-style yogurt, but this is a nice-to-not-need-to step.

Et voila—breakfast for the week (plus some snacks)!

Let me know if you try making yogurt in your slow cooker—I’d love to hear how it works for you!

Also, let me know if I can provide any tips on food photography. I’m happy to share my secret techniques that enable me to take photographs that are both harshly lit *and* blurry.

Not pictured: A comfy couch. A warm blankie. And SO much pie. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!