Manna and Workout Videos

First, manna. We just finished reading about Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt and God giving them manna in the desert, so we decided to see what manna might have tasted like. We being me and all three of the older kids, even Isaac, who generally wants nothing to do with the kitchen. I found a pretty simple recipe that's kind of like sugar cookies, and although I'm not sure I would want to try to live on it alone, it's pretty darned good when you compare it to other stuff that falls from the sky:
Manna Cookies:
1/2 cup butter
1/2 tsp. vanilla
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
2 cups flour
2 tsp. honey
Cream butter and sugar. Add eggs and mix well. Add honey and vanilla. Add flour slowly. Drop by spoonfuls onto cookie sheet and bake at 400 until very lightly browned. And now that it's a day after we made them, I can confirm that, unlike real manna, these do not get infested with worms if you save them overnight.

Okay, now for workout videos. I LOVE workout videos. I have owned dozens of them. Back when we had cable, I also loved the FIT TV channel, and I still love www.exercisetv.tv (check out their free online workout videos - the best free online videos I've been able to find). I have a bunch of The Firm DVDs that I inherited from my sister and stepmom, and I love them too. This is the best way to accumulate workout videos, but EBay and consignment stores are a close second. I was at the library last week and they even had a Firm workout VHS tape on the "free" table. There is definitely no reason to spend a lot of money on these things, especially when you don't usually know what to expect until you watch them.
Have you heard of P90X? It's a 90-day workout video program that costs a LOT of money. I have been drooling over it for months, but it's just too expensive. Here's another 90-day program recommended by Fitness magazine that's only $20: https://www.supreme90dayworkoutdvds.com/?mid=1121222. I think this is going to be my next purchase, so I'll let you know how it goes.

Anyway, compared to an exercise class, videos are cheaper, more convenient, I don't have to buy cute clothes or attempt to look cute to in them while I work out, I don't have to look at other people while I work out or worry about how their abdominal muscles look compared to mine, and I can skip the parts of the videos that I don't like. And I can grunt, sweat, and complain unselfconsciously. And if I have to stop to nurse a baby halfway through, I can pause and go back later. However, this morning, a couple of things were bugging me. The one benefit of a live exercise class is that if something goes weird, like the instructor making a grammatical error or accidentally skipping a step, you hardly even notice it. But if it's on tape, it happens over and over and over again every time you work out, and it starts to grate on your nerves. Here's what has started to bother me about the workout I did today:

1. She keeps using the word "supine." As in, "roll to supine." Can't she just say, "roll onto your back"? Or "lie down"?
2. At one point, she says "remove the body from the box." Um, really? The body? I always picture myself flinging a corpse off of my box...which is funny but creepy and annoying. How about "get off the box"? Or even "remove YOUR body from the box." This is just weird.
3. She tells me not to do a certain exercise "until you be of strength in the legs." I don't know whether that's grammatically correct or not, but it sounds ridiculous. Shouldn't it be, "until you ARE of strength in the legs"?
4. She keeps calling the front of the box the back of the box. Isn't the front the part that's farthest away from you when you're standing behind it? It messes me up even after a hundred times of doing this video.

So my advice for tomorrow morning? Eat some manna with your coffee, then find a couple of good workout videos to try. No hair-combing or cute sports bra-wearing required.