who wants a hug?

we ate some yummy granola this morning to start 2016 with some fibre… I do love the first day of the new year… I’m a goal setter and I love setting completely unrealistic goals that I have trouble even getting through day 1 achieving…

my list of goals:

more fibre (check), consume less/buy less, read more books, write every day, workout 5 days a week, edit my house and get rid of clutter, compliment people more, not lose my temper, become a better hugger…

if you are wondering what I mean by become a better hugger, that is most likely because you have never had to say goodbye or hello to me or comfort me…  you would know that my hugging skills could use a lot of polishing…

over Christmas people hug a lot more than usual… and on New Year’s Eve the hug usually is accompanied with a kiss… which is why I fell asleep before midnight last night…  avoiding the hug/kiss nonsense…

I know I’m not good at hugging so over the years I’ve began to avoid it almost like I’m avoiding getting the flu from someone…  winter is easy because I can quickly throw on a huge winter parka and then it is like hugging someone with a pillow in between you…  I’ve been known to slip out of large group goodbye’s with a fake phone call…  which everyone should know I only ever text… so being on the phone during a hug session is quite suspicious…

if you decide to hug me… these are few of the options I generally go to…

the open faced hug… this is half a hug where you don’t finish it by wrapping both your arms around the other person… just one arm… that way the fronts of your bodies don’t need to touch each other… this is usually what I do with a man heading in for a hug… it can make it seem like you are waiting for a third party to come join your hug… if this happens it becomes more of a huddle and less of a hug…

the shoulder to the throat hug… my older brother is a master at this one… you do this once to someone and they won’t come looking for a hug anytime soon…  and it seems innocent and like a mistake but I know when hugging my older brother it is calculated and he is letting me know ‘you should have known better than to try and hug me’

the ‘are we going to kiss’ hug… this happens to me more than I’m proud of and it is entirely my fault…  I’m so poor at hugging that I enter into them at an irregular speed and this leads to a situation where it seems like I’m waiting for a kiss… when in reality I’m just not sure which of my body parts you want to feel pressed up on you…

the fade-away hug…  in an effort to try to be polite and respectful I tend to curve my body so the only thing touching the recipient is my shoulders… just shoulder on shoulder action and the rest of my body curved away from you at an angle I’m needing pilates classes to help me get flexible enough to pull off…

the Facebook friend hug… so you run into a friend that you have not seen in 17 years but have totally stalked them on Facebook the entire time… and this is a person that when you knew them the thought to hug them would never have crossed your mind… but now so much time has passed and you’ve seen them go through so much on Facebook… and you find yourself heading in for a hug with basically a complete stranger… and saying ‘it’s been so long’…

the wedding/funeral hug… these are times that you are required to hug people that you normally would not hug…  again, I am so terrible at hugging that I did not have a receiving line at my own wedding so that it cut down the number of hugs I had to doll out…

the handshake hug… this is when one party feels a handshake is appropriate and the other party is like ‘nope… come here you’ and brings it in for a hug that has a handshake going on in the middle of it…

the farmer told me there are only three people that he is comfortable hugging… his daughter, his grandmas and yours truly… although he says I could try to make it less awkward…

but there are people out there that love to hug… these are people that volunteer to pick you up from the airport… because they know they can squeeze in a hug there… and they seem to not be able to sense who enjoys hugging them in return… they head in for a hug that often involves an extra squeeze, pat on the back like they are burping you, smelling your hair or making a ‘mmmm’ noise as they settle into the hug…

and even though I’d be perfectly comfortable avoiding hugs for the rest of my life, I don’t want to have my children say it’s my fault they can’t hug properly someday… thus my resolution to improve at hugging…

I started with hugging my 13 year old today and he tensed up like I was going to hurt him… and then he said ‘are you ok mom?’… I replied ‘does a mother need a reason to hug her boy?’ … to which he said ‘usually’

I’m going to hug the farmer today and then again at the end of 2016 and see if he thinks there has been progress…