“I need a personal trainer,” I told David.  “Can you show me which exercises work for which parts of the body?”  I knew David and his friends were always going to the gym working out and comparing six packs.  (Muscularly speaking that is!)   I was fast approaching my mid-fifties and knew I’d better get serious about exercising and keeping fit, so I got a pair of three-pound dumbbells and my personal trainer began to show me all the different exercises. “You’re doing great, mom!” he applauded.

After a couple of weeks David said he thought I could graduate up to five-pound dumbbells.  I considered the cost…  And then I got a brilliant idea!   Instead of going out and buying another set of dumbbells, why not buy two jugs of laundry detergent – the kind with the handle on the side.  I could pour some detergent from each of the bottles into a third empty bottle until I had two jugs that each weighed five pounds.  Perfect!  Talk about killing two birds with one stone!

So I smugly graduated to my new advanced regimen with my cleverly calibrated five-pound weights.  Up, down, in, out, back, forth…slosh, slosh, slosh, slosh…  The noise of the liquid in the jugs was a little irritating, but I was proud of my thriftiness…at first.

Then David came home one day. “How’s the exercise going, mom?”

“Oh, it’s going okay,” I replied, “but I’m about to give up on this five-pound weight idea.  I really can’t stand the sloshiness.”

David looked at me with earnest compassion, considering his words before he spoke. Then he very tactfully said, “Mom, you know there comes an age when you just have to put up with a little sloshiness.”

That’s when I wished for really big muscles to give him a smack, but I was laughing too hard!