One year old problems

So first she had a great time unloading all of the dvds and some of the puzzles, books, etc. But then she looked around, and she was stuck. I doubt she learned her lesson.

Design Love

So my friend Joan, over at Bitsy Creations (see the link on my blog list) is a wonderful self employed graphic designer. She did Olivia's birth announcement as a baby gift for me, and I love the way it turned out.
This weekend she made this up, which you can download from her blog in high resolution for free. And I'm most excited about this one: She made this for me to hang in Olivia's room. It's one of my favorite little poems, and I thought it was so appropriate for a little girl's room.

So thank you SO much Joan! You all should run over to her blog and check out her work. She does some really cute stuff, and she loves to do custom orders. I just emailed her and said I had a poem I wanted worked up, and she just went to work for me! :)

200 miles from Cumberland to DC

This past weekend Jesse participated in his Ragnar Relay. 200 miles, 12 people, 3 legs each (well, 3 times running each, these are not a bunch of 3 legged runners, that would be weird.) To get into the spirit of things we reverse shaved the Ragnar logo into the back of his head. We did the reverse shave because well, as of last night, this was gone. Simple as that. He left on Friday morning, he was in van 2, so he didn't have to get up super early to be an hour an a half away at 6am. On Friday we drove out to Hancock to cheer him finishing his first leg. There was an easy spot for us to watch for him about 100m from the finish line. When he ran by, the boys ran to the finish line with him. They thought that was so much fun. :) Unfortunately, I didn't get any pictures of that day, it was drizzly, and we were lucky it was just a drizzle, because it rained pretty hard on and off that day. I felt pretty bad for the runners.
His second leg was in the middle of the night, and we DID NOT go to cheer him on at that point, even though it was the closest he ever got to our house.
His third leg was in Crystal City, right near DC. We were able to be there to send him off on his leg. (That's him running away in the gray shirt with 2 of his teammates in the foreground)

We then quickly drove the 4 miles over to the finish line (which took about the same amount of time to drive as it did for him to run.) When we saw him round the corner and head up the hill, the boys once again joined in with him.

(Although it appears that Graham got left in the dust.)

We then drove over to the National Harbor where the finish line was. We had a bit of a wait at this point, even though the GPS took us on a scenic route of ghetto DC in order to get there. But then the final runner of the team came though, and the whole team

(including Nate and Graham) escorted him through the finish line. And their journey was done. YEA!!!! Way to go team Nerd Herd! We're proud of all of you!

Along the way we saw lots of other team shirts and names. This was my favorite. It says: mormons NOT running for president in 2012. Hee Hee Hee.

The kids were super excited about the Awakening.

It's a statue of a giant coming out of the ground. It made them filthy black to climb on, but it was a lot of fun.
And since Jesse had the cool Ragnar hair, we gave the boys cool hair. Nate had an orange Mohawk. (orange is the Ragnar color) Graham had a Mohawk too, but it didn't last the whole day. And he didn't want his orange.

So good job Jesse. Next along will come my marathon. 3 weeks!

One month

So have I mentioned that I'm currently training for a marathon? I used to blog about running on my other blog, but well, I never update that blog anymore, and I just haven't really talked about it over here. It kind of started as a misunderstanding. One day back in the winter, my friend Cindy and I were running, training for the Frederick Half Marathon, and she asked if I was interested in running a fall marathon. In my mind I heard "Fall half marathon" and so I said, sure, I was totally on board. So I went to go and actually sign up for the Frederick Half, and you get a discount if you sign up for the Frederick, and Baltimore races at the same time, so I texted her to make sure she wanted to do the Baltimore Half in the fall. She calls me back almost immediately, and said that she had meant a full marathon. At which point I just kind of went, "uh" and that was as far as my thought process went. So I thought about it for about 15 minutes, talked to Jesse and called Cindy back and said, sure, let's do it. I then immediately signed up for both races, and after clicking on the little "marathon" button my heart was racing for about an hour afterwards. So that is how I came to be involved in training for a marathon.

The race happens to be in one month. One month from yesterday. Am I nervous? Not really. Whatever happens will happen. If I were interested in winning, then yes, I would be nervous. As this case may be, I am only interested in finishing and still being alive the next day. And that I can do. So far Cindy and I have done one 20 mile run, and one 19 mile run (as well as many many other mid length runs) and we have one more 20 miler ahead of us. More than anything, I'm ready for the training to be over. I'm just tired of it all right now. So. Much. Running.

This is of course the reason why we had a pretty lame summer. All summer long I was running. Every Saturday morning I would get up before the crack of dawn so that Cindy and I could start running the moment that it got light in an effort to beat the heat a little bit.

I'll tell you, weather makes such a difference! In July Cindy and I were supposed to do a 12 mile run, and Cindy mapped out a route for us to run, but either we made a wrong turn, or something, and it ended up being 15 miles. Plus, even though we started at 530 it was during one of the terrible heat waves, so it was about 85* when we started, and about 95* when we ended. We put water bottles at a point that we thought was earlier than it ended up being, and so we had run out of fluids early. It was, without a doubt, the worst run I've ever experienced, and I've run a half marathon while pregnant!

Well, this past Saturday Cindy wanted to tackle it again. This time, we brought money so that we could stop at the little store out in the middle of nowhere about 7 miles into the run. That made a big difference. After making a few wrong turns, some more serious than others, this time the course ended up being on the plus side of 17 miles. BUT.... it was cooler. And we had fluids. We were able to actually run most of it, and we could still run miles at a time towards the end. There was one point from about mile 10.5 to mile 13 that was mostly down hill, and we were clocking in at sub 10 min miles, which is super fast for us.

Anyway, moral of the story, don't run when it's hot, and if you do, have tons and tons of fluids!

So enough of this running post. Sorry to you who are not runners at all. I'm just looking forward to the point when I no longer have to devote every single Saturday to running. Jesse is running a Ragnar Relay next weekend, so it's been both of us getting these runs in each week, and it's all we've been doing for the past 5 months. Oh well, onto the home stretch now!

And after the race, comes Halloween. Here is a preview of Olivia's costume. She's going to be Olivia the pig.

A Pause

So after having a successful first week of school, one of my favorite things is Labor Day. I already got over the whole- school will cut down on the amount of time that Nate and Graham fight, and I'm ready for a little break. Last year because of one thing or another, Nate didn't have a full week of school until October. This year his first week was a full week. We do still have 2 more days off in September though, so it's not as full of holes as last year, but it's still a nice easy way to get into the school year.
So after a full week of school we got to take a little pause this weekend. Saturday was a very lazy day for us, which was nice, and Sunday was our first day at the 9am schedule for church. Monday we made plans to go to Jesse's parents house. Originally Nate had really wanted to swim one last time this summer. However, the weather forecast was high in the 70s and 60% chance of rain or more. So we came up with an alternative. After we got to Grammy and Grandad's house, we went out for a little lunch, and then headed over to the Great Country Farm in Bluemont. They had acres and acres of fun activities that we were able to participate in.
The first thing that we did was take a wagon ride over to the pick your own. Right now they had potatoes for pick your own, which we didn't really need, and we really weren't dressed for the mud, but we had fun on the ride anyway.

The man who was working there happened to be the father of one of Jesse's childhood friends, so he let the boys climb up on the tractor during one of the pauses while the other people were out potato digging.

And Nate, Graham and Grandad did go out into one field and pick up a few potatoes.

When we got back we went to play in the farm. They had one of those giant jumping pillows which the boys love so much.

There were also a ton of different animals. Nate actually would pet some of them too!

Nate cheated to get to the top of this maze.

The pedal carts were a big hit as well. They were difficult to get going up the hills, but the boys really enjoyed riding on them.

Jesse an the boys took the easy way back. Grandad, Olivia and I walked the stroller back.

We got back to Grammy and Grandad's house, and the boys were able to get out the Wii and play for a little bit. They always enjoy doing this. Olivia would pick up several different things and pretend that it was a wii-mote, and that she was playing with the big kids. She also loved sitting in these little chairs. She loves to sit in all chairs that are just her size.

After dinner and Wii time, we did end up taking the boys to the pool. Grandad stayed with Olivia, who would have been shivering within the first minute and a half. Ironcially, this was the first time that Graham actually was comfortable in the water on his own. He had his vest on, and would just float there in the water. Before this, he was always insistent on someone holding him, even with the vest on. I guess we'll see how long it takes to get to that point again next summer!