Recent Favorites

A few recent favorite photos, just because! 

On our way to pick up Trenton—my first day with my shiny new iphone!

Quinn's first big girl bath! 

The view along one of the small trails near our house. I've been running here weekly lately, and it is beautiful. 

This girl is just too much fun! Seven months. No teeth yet. Still wakes up twice at night, once before midnight and once after. Smiles like crazy for everyone at kindergarten pickup. Happiest thing around. 

Hello handsome husband of mine! And hello squeezable baby girl! 

Our little lady is learning all kinds of new things, and I'd say she's pretty darn pleased with herself! 

Attempting to build a fort, but their sister penetrated the barricade! Chase is under there too. :) 

First rain of the season! Taken right outside of kindergarten. 

Two hours past bedtime and counting...I'm so happy these wild boys have each other.

Nike Women's Half-Marathon in SF

Each time I've trained for a run, in the middle of training I'm always saying things to Ryan like, "Don't let me do this again!" or "I'm not doing another one of these until I am at LEAST 35!" My main reason is that it takes a lot of time to train. But then...

Once it's over, I fall in love. 

And then there's the fact that every Saturday that I did a long run in preparation (8, 10, 12, 12, 10, consecutively), nothing could get me down. 

In the end, Ryan and I always agree that it's a net positive gain. :) And the Nike Women's Half-Marathon in San Francisco? I don't imagine it gets a lot better than that. 

So please excuse my looong narrative, but this is something I definitely want to remember. 

Four friends and I entered the lottery in the spring and were super lucky to get in, technically because of a computer glitch that worked in our favor! 

Kylee and I met at Jamie's house at 5am and took a taxi into the city, so we wouldn't have to worry about parking or traffic. We snuck into Jamie's corral and danced/stretched a bit to some blasting music while we waited for the countdown. (We attempted meeting up with our other two girls, but no such luck. Luckily, some of us did see each other on the course.) Then we were off, along with 30,000 other women, running from Union Square, along the Embarcadero, up the hills of the Presidio, and to the finish line in Golden Gate Park. 

I ran faster than I expected for the first 6 miles (about 9:15-minute miles), but then came the hills. :) I hit the wall around mile 11, probably because the excitement had me running a little faster than I should have been going and because those hills were a little more endless than I was expecting. :) Oh well! The worst was when my Nike+ app was telling me that I had completed the 13.1 miles—but the finish line was not yet in sight! I don't know whether the race calculations were off or my GPS, but that last quarter mile was killer! I ended up finishing after 2 hours, 12 minutes.

The fact that the whole event is geared toward women makes it fun. For one thing, people's signs along the sidelines say things like "Hot firemen ahead!" and "Run like Ryan Gosling is at the finish line!" (Unrelated: The one I wish I had seen said, "Pain is temporary - Finish times are forever!" MAYBE that would have gotten my legs moving a little faster for the last mile!)  For another, after you cross the finish line, SF firemen in tuxes hand you a blue Tiffany's box, with the commemorative Tiffany pendant inside.

Ryan got all three kids up at 6:30am (the start time for my run) and headed into the city so they could meet me at the finish! 

After I crossed the finish line and got my shirt and pendant, I sat down on a curb near the ocean with some chocolate milk and a banana and texted Ryan where I was. I told him to tell the boys to ring their cowbells (which Ryan had gotten just for the occasion) when they got close, and I totally heard their bells once they were in my vicinity! The ringing snapped me out of my exhausted trance, and within seconds I spotted Chase and then the rest of the gang. :) I was over the moon to see my cute cheerleaders! 

Me and my three reasons for running three half-marathons. I love these babies! 

We girls were planning to use the Find My Friends app after the race to find each other, but with about a million people there, the phone towers weren't keeping up. So Jamie is the only friend I saw at the end, but it was SO fun to see my darling little friend and talk about the race. (Thanks for the pic, Jamie!) 

The race was, admittedly :), on a Sunday, but since we all have 1:00 church, we met up at church (walking stiffly, of course!) and got to bond a bit more over the details of the run. :) 

Ryan and the kids walked a couple of miles just to get to the finish line, because there is NO parking on that side of the city, even without thousands of participants and families in the neighborhood! When we walked to the car afterward, I think I was walking even slower than Chase by the end! The above photo is from when we finally made it to the car. :)  I love this mohawk lady. ESPECIALLY in her fuzzy pajamas. 

That's it! We'll probably enter the lottery again next year, so let me know if you want to join us! Doing an event (whether it is a 5k or a full-on marathon) is so empowering, and this particular event has to be one of the best. 

(Please excuse the uncooperative blogger formatting!) 

Halloween 2013

I'm guessing I'll add more pictures to this Halloween collection before the week is over, but here are our festivities so far. After a rough week, I took the kids on a walk/ride over to Piazza's just to look at the pumpkins. It was a sweet hour of our week that just really reminded me what matters. I love these kids more than I can say. 

Next up, the ward Halloween party! The boys were avengers, and Quinn was our Cinderella. Appropriately, Quinn lost one her little silver shoes at the party. True Cinderella style!

Seriously, her cuteness in that outfit was killing me! Thank you, Mom, for giving it to us! I wish she could stay 7 months old forever and wear this year after year! 

The princess and her two heroes! (Chase's picture face is really awesome lately! haha) Happy Halloween! 

A Happy Stage

I have been slacking in my journaling lately since Let Why Lead takes a lot of my brain power and time, but there are just too many precious moments I want to record, so let me try to play catch up. 

First of all, these two just light up my heart! Both of their expressions in this little series just cracked me up. I am continually thanking the Lord that my children love each other so much. 

We got a little heatwave conference weekend (mid-80s), so we headed to the pool. It was unfortunately no longer heated (someone should talk to the managers about that!), but the boys still dared the 68-degree water. They take after their great grandpa Wood! Quinn and I stuck to the grass but were happy for another occasion to wear that cute yellow suit. :)

 

She was a BIG fan of the grass and leaves. Quinn is in the 97th percentile for height (90th for weight), and this picture shows off her length well. 

Chase sometimes falls asleep during the boys' quiet time (basically ipad time), but we usually do our best to keep him awake because he's a bear after a nap and because he'll stay up till all hours playing blocks in his room if naps during the day. But who could resist those buns!?

I think Trenton took this shot. Love my goofballs. 

Trenton's school sends home a new book every day, which we read and send back the next morning in his bookbag. I LOVE the system because we always have something new to read, and most of the books have moral. (As opposed to the construction books the boys have been picking out from the library for YEARS!) 

T is doing great in school. He tells me far and away more about kindergarten than he did about preschool. It helps that he's older and that I've had more practice asking the right questions. (Who did you sit by at snack time? What's your job this week? What'd you do in PE?) 

He went from knowing all the kids in his life (most of the preschool kids were also from church) to not knowing a single kid in his school. It's been hard for my mother heart to watch him try to integrate himself, but I think he's getting there! 

So far, he's already told us that he likes the "cool kids," which he apparently determines largely by what they're wearing. (Although I think it's subconsciously more than that, because he seems to gravitate to the boys who are tall and seem more like leaders in the class.) He also told me the other day, "I have a girlfriend," which made my heart skip a beat until he described the relationship as a girl he ran around with briefly in PE. :) 

He always has a ton of spastic energy right after he gets out. After he's buckled himself into the minivan, he starts making these spastic loud sounds in Quinn's direction. I think he's just got to let off some steam after trying so hard all day to be on task. :) 

Also, I'm proud of myself for making new mom friends! They're all older than me, and most have (expensive) homes nearby. But they've been welcoming, and I'm grateful. 

You likely saw that the Deseret News picked up one of my blog posts! From my initial post, it was shared/liked on facebook about 650 times, which is how a DN editor saw it, and then it was shared another 850 times from the Deseret News. I was overwhelmingly touched by everyone who shared it or left heartfelt comments, etc., during that week. It was NUTS! I feel such a huge sense of honor to be able to uplift women on any scale, and this gave me the chance to reach a lot more people. I would love to keep up the momentum! 

Quinn got up on her hands and knees briefly for the first time this weekend; crawling is in our not-too-distant future! She still has about zero ab strength (who can blame her, with a belly that squeezable?), so no sitting up yet. She has had a series of colds for the last couple of months, which have meant that her sleep isn't as great as it used to be. For the one week where she didn't have a cold, she was only getting up once a night (usually before midnight), so I'm hopeful that once she's all the way over them, she'll improve again. 

The boys and I call her our little goat, because she will put anything in her mouth - particularly fabric or paper, if she can get near it. She has a blue shirt with a couple of long ruffles on it, and any time she works up the coordination, she grabs and ruffle and stuffs it in her mouth. We love our baby goat!