Exersize

My mom graduated from Ferris State University with a degree in Education. She taught school for a few years and discovered it wasn't for her. Soon after, she married my dad and started having babies but continued to work part time.
By the time I came around, she had found her niche as an aerobics instructor.
Some of my very first memories are of lying on an exercise mat in my pink leotard and black tights, listening to my mom guide everyone through a 'cool down'.
For a long time she worked for a woman named Kris but after we moved from Idaho she did freelance work for different studios/schools. She named her classes Exersize by Jan and even had t-shirts made up.
It was because of this that during a 3rd grade spelling bee I misspelled exercise. I remember the moment very specifically. We were going around the room taking turns spelling the words assigned to us. The teacher got to me and when she asked me to spell exercise I was literally beaming! "I've got this!" I thought to myself. But when I go to the 's' I was cut off and the word was passed along to the person behind me.
I was was upset. Not that people in my class thought I couldn't spell exercise, but because I felt like I'd been mislead by my mom. It took me a long time to realize she was doing a play on words. She wasn't trying to sabotage my spelling abilities after all.