Brian, Ashna, and Mael

We celebrated the 50th birthday of the Stainless Maestro with our own little birthday challenge, suiting the magic number to various efforts that would challenge each of us.

A birthday challenge for a 7 month old baby you ask? Why not? Never mind that little Maël is already a zinger. ZINGGGGG!

We figure he has been doing birthday challenges from about 6 months before he was born, and this is a modest assessment. For at least 5 months of Ashna’s pregnancy, her tummy looked like Harry Houdini trying to push his way out of the inside of a medicine ball. Yep, he is the boss.

But nothing doing, he is just a psyched little Matador ready for any sort of challenge. For Le Stephanois 50th, he even dug up this peculiar muscle vest somewhere:
Now compared to the Zinger, Ashna and I have been lacking the time to take proper care of our bodies, so this was the perfect opportunity to start a program to be finished on November 22nd, the birthday of El Grande Hombre.

Obviously, one of the first challenges for a baby is: standing! How challenging would that be? After all, as Maël told me the other day, “You know, it’s not birthday “pretty hard,” but BIRTHDAY CHALLENGE!”

His first effort at standing lasted for 1…2…seconds, then a forward faceplant into the bed.
Distressing….

Guess we found ourselves a pretty good challenge for Maël. Could these burly but untrained muscles really stand for a full 50 seconds by November 22nd?

The training begins…

In other challenges, could Ashna edit and publish her novel in the next 50 days? She set to work.
And how can one write well without a scintillating body to fire the pen? 50 days of morning yoga…

and evening Freeform dance odyssey began…

(pic censored by Govt. of West Bengal)

Ahem…could Brian write 50 lines of poetry by the Big Man’s birthday, the muse had been quiet recently…
Attempting to awaken the muse, Surge began a vigorous physical regimen, aiming for 50 pushups and 50 pullups in one go by November 22nd:


Those muscles don’t work that way anymore!


Good God Jim! This man needs a hypo!


And the yoga continues apace…
Wait! What’s this? Maël doing yoga?!
I guess he could not help being a cobra, as he is growing fangs.
All in all, it should be an interesting 50 days. We will all be a lot fitter by November 22nd, and I can feel that is making Manny Varjak smile somewhere.

Ha! 3 more lines of “poetry.” Do Haiku count?

Challenge be our food
And our neverending mood
Course you do dude!