A for Adventure

Well, tomorrow is the BIG day!!! I will be running in the Pittsburgh Marathon Relay!! Can you tell, I am CRAZY excited?! I am so jittery right now, I cannot even form a good blog about it. So, I’ll just list what I am thinking about.

I have read the handbook over and over again. Met with my team today and we all discussed pace. I am running the last leg, the “glory” leg as I call it. I get all the glory, running down hill and into the finish line.

I am hoping to run an 11 minute mile or less.

I was able to run the mileage on Wednesday this week. Hated every minute of it but I did it.

My knees are feeling ok. Definitely have runners knee but if I ice them and stretch them really well, they feel better.

I have absolutely NO idea what I am doing, but I’m gonna get out there and just go for it.

My plan at least worked. I signed up for this because I needed a running goal before my triathlon.

Who would have ever thought I’d be doing this?

4.7 miles. HERE I COME!

Can I just say that we are COUNTING DOWN THE DAYS!!! 9 more days of school for Dale until Summertime. FINALLY. I will see my husband.

You can’t tell, but we are on a ferris wheel above -at school. AT LEAST at the end of the year, the school has a carnival and we have taken Lindy every year. I like how Lindy is kissing air. We also took some friends, below. They enjoyed carting Ruby around everywhere.

They are such big helpers.

We got Lindy one of those butterfly kits -where they mail you caterpillars and you watch their life cycle as they form cocoons and then turn into butterflies. I had one as a kid and remembering enjoying it so much. It was really really cool. And it just so happens that last week, we traveled to DC to spend a week with my sister and the butterflies started hatching the morning we were to leave, so we just took them with us!

So, we decided to leave for DC on Monday afternoon, hoping to beat traffic as we would have to travel through a tunnel and we know how crazy people are about going slower in tunnels around here. HOURS of traffic just because people slow down. Me and the girls, the dog, the car was packed and Lindy’s stomach hurt. Now, the entire weekend she had diarrhea, some sort of bug, so I attributed the stomach ache to that. But then as we are DRIVING out of town, she is crying uncontrollably and really upset. I have images of appendix bursting and cancer. I decide to stop at an urgent care center on our way out of town. Basically, we paid $10 for Lindy to use the toilet there and be completely ok afterwards. Literally. She cried the whole way into the hospital and then the minute we get to the room, the doctor comes our way and we make our way to the bathroom. She comes out as happy as a clam. SMH. I’m sure the doctor thought I was crazy.

I didn’t get a lot of pictures the week we were in DC, but we enjoyed our time with my sister and Kellyn. Just relaxing. We’d sit in bed at night and watch tv, we cooked a lot of healthy meals, we took turns napping. AND we went on a few runs. Ran 4 miles, 2 days in a row. Luckily, Liz, pushed the 100 extra pounds of girls and stroller. When we got back on the first day, we found out the stroller had a FLAT tire. So, she gets lots of points for pushing that, running -all with a flat tire. We found a bike store and the teenage boy seemed a little too confident in fixing it. I KNEW I should have asked more questions. He fixed a few spokes and aired up the tire. We got home, packed the girls up to run (which takes about 1 hour to get everything ready), when we were all ready, Liz came inside, THE STROLLER WAS FLAT AGAIN. GRRRR. WE UNLOADED the girls, packed them all in the car AGAIN and went to the bike store. The wheel needed an intertube. Ugh. We were determined to get this run in. 3 hours later, we were running.

It was a great trip visiting. So glad they moved closer to us.

And the newest addition to the Harris family – meet Sugar. My friend Jan has had Sugar for years and has asked me to take her for years. I finally caved in. Lindy is absolutely obsessed -like no other animal that we’ve had. She takes Sugar out of her cage every hour to play with her and then puts her back to rest. The dog tries to not make eye contact with the bird and the cats want nothing to do with her -yet. Upon taking Sugar home Lindy said, “We will have a zoo!!!”

Our May Day baskets this year. We enjoyed dropping off 6 baskets to our friends yesterday for May Day. We didn’t get all crafty this year and make baskets, I was too tired.

Sugar even got her own may day basket. Complete with cheerios and crackers.

Sisters trading places.

It is getter harder and harder to take your picture Rubykins.

I’ve decided to write down all the wonderful things I want to remember about you at this age.

I love the way your knees are all red when you get up from your nap. You love to tuck your knees up underneath your belly as you snuggle on your tummy.

I love that no matter how hard my day is or how tired I am -you ALWAYS have a smile for me.

I like the fact that you are a momma’s little girl. Always head butting me when someone says hi to you and curling your head into my neck.

When changing your diaper, it is almost as if I’m changing a diaper on an alligator. You keep trying to roll. It is cute until you have poop going on down there.

Your blues eyes are so beautiful. Just like your daddies. I hope they stay blue.

I don’t even notice your scar anymore -it looks amazing. Feels like such a distant nightmare that we went through.

Most of my pictures would have turned out like this if I had not forced you to sit on the couch!

I lost A LOT of sleep last night due to a couple things, this being one of them and I have to address one blog post to those offenders.

I see that I have reader(s) from Dripping Springs. I researched the IP address and googled the longitude and latitude, I see that YOU two are reading my blog.

In all niceness, stop reading my blog. I can tell every time you read it.

You don’t deserve to read the nitty gritty details of my life. You D have shown multiple times that you do not want to be a part of our life, so stop. I am okay with ANYONE in this world reading my blog but you.

I tried to think of a million ways I could say this nicely…but I just can’t seem to say it any other way.

I was THIS close to password protecting my blog but that would not be fair to all my family and friends that keep up with us and communicate with us regularly and that LOVE me, Dale, and my two amazing girls.

I mean, I totally get it. You want to know what’s going on in my life but YOU chose not to be a part of it when you stopped talking to me in well, let’s see:

Summer of 1996
May 2000
Fall of 2001
Summer of 2002
Winter of 2002
Summer of 2003
Winter of 2006
Winter of 2007
Summer of 2008
Spring of 2009

And well, after that, I got smart and stopped letting you hurt me and my family.

Reading my blog after you have emotionally abandoned me is not cool. Please stop.

Sincerely,

This hammock has been sitting in Dale’s closet since my junior year in college. I got it for him on my first trip to Guatemala. FINALLY put it up and enjoyed swinging in the breeze.

Saturday night after Dale’s show, we decided to go swing dancing -it was vintage night. Come all dressed up. I decided to be as authentic as I could and did a little trick that I used to do in highschool and college. Historical fact #1,592 is that stockings were in such rare shortage that women had to resort to drawing a line up the back of their leg to resemble the seam. I made Dale draw a line (in sharpie) up the back of my leg to look like stockings. It was hysterical. People could not stop talking about it. Of course, almost a week later, the lines are still on the back of my leg, but hey, at least the lines didn’t “run” down my leg while I was dancing.

Lindy looking so grown up. This was her about 10 minutes before her kindergarten testing to get into the private school in the Fall. When the teacher came out of the room from testing her, you would have thought that it was her own grandchild, she was ENAMORED with Lindy and she couldn’t really hide it. ha. She couldn’t stop talking about Lindy and all the things she could do. She had Lindy do a test to determine her “age” and the age range stopped at 6 years, 7 months. She said, Lindy was off the charts…they didn’t have any more ages after that. She is one smart cookie.

LOVE THIS PHOTO taken at Lowe’s. Both girls fit in the car and as you can tell, they were both pretty happy about it.

Don’t worry, all the BAD photos of me cranky, the girls crying, me sleeping, Dale always gone, my loneliness, my dirty house, the kitty box, are not included in this post. I don’t want you to get the idea that life is perfect around here.