Time for a New Swim Suit

I bought a blow up pool from Walmart for the girls to use this summer. It was a great relaxing day with Hannah and Lydia in the water and me tanning on my free lawn chair my friend and I found during our walk the other night in Diamond Hill. I had to put a few pics of Lydia, whose new swim suit seems to be a bit short. Darn! I'm going to have to go shopping at Kohls to exchange it :)

March Update

Well, baseball season has begun and if I wasn't already before, I am now a teacher/coach widow. Baseball season seems to be the most difficult time of the year for us. Josiah has to keep up the baseball field mostly himself during any free time that he has during the day. Which of course leaves no time left to get his tests graded, etc.



Lydia has a cold this week, thus limiting my time at the gym, since she can't go in the childcare area with green boogies. I was able to make it to two classes today, thanks to our surrogate grandmother Miss Shirley. I plan to attend the same two classes again tomorrow, keeping up my four classes a week comittment I made to myself. Lydia is walking like it's no big deal and I'm a bit sad she is growing up so quickly!



Esther had a private lesson at gymnastics on Wednesday and was able to learn two new skills! It was an amazing 1/2 hour!! Her teacher says she will most likely move up to level 3 in April. Bye, bye two a week lessons...3 day weeks are coming...competetions too!



Our newest bit of news is our biggest family addition yet...6 new baby chicks. Don't get too excited now...two of our chicks were hawk food the day after we got them, reducing our numbers to four. It was a somber afternoon after our loss of two family members. I think we were all a bit disappointed. 6 days later we still have the remianing 4 though! We named them after Disney Princesses...Jasmine, Cinderella, Aurora, Belle, Snow White, and Ariel. I'm not sure which one's got eaten, but Esther could tell you. She loves those chicks.



I have been working out in the yard a lot and am so excited that we are getting some landscape curbing and a pathway in our front yard. No more dirty shoes for all of you guests! Well, I guess that's all the new stuff going on these days!

The Finish Line

I just found this picture of me crossing the finish line of my Half-Marathon. I was even more tired as I looked!

1, 2...13.1

Well...here is the scoop on my half-marathon (13.1 miles). I have been training to run for the last six months and my goal was to finish in under 2 hours, 45 minutes and to complete it without stopping. However, I ended up have a little more than the 13.1 miles against me. We had to wake up at 2:45 am to get ready to go...however I was up every 15-20 minutes, all night with digestive issues (to put it nicely) from my nerves. I ended up having to run on an empty stomach, since nothing would stay down, much less go down. I was able to keep down about half an apple...not really the carbs I needed for prolonged energy. I was really nauseas all morning, but once I started running I felt unbelievable energetic...for the first four miles. It was pretty much all downhill from there. I was completely out of gas by mile 5 and had to take little walking breaks to be able to keep going. All in all, my final chip time was 2:45:21...I finished just 21 seconds past my goal! Being a runner with about 17,000 other people was a pretty cool feeling. When I would get tired, I would just look around and there were runners as far as I could see in front and behind me. It was a great experience that I definitely want to try again! Just not one I have to get so early for :) Special shout out of THANKS to our awesome cheerleaders Grace and my wonderfully awesome Hubby!! They were able to watch us run by at miles 3 and 7...I would tear up seeing them in the crowd. It meant the world to me and Joy that you were there!!!

My fun race factoid: I placed 6,421 out of the 13,107 runners that finished!